Bad alternatives
Bad alternatives
The Tribune-Herald reports that, following the Public Utility Commission’s (two people!) rejection of NextEra’s bid to purchase HEI, consideration is now being given to either “a community-owned cooperative or utility operated by the county.”
Both of those options represent public control of a highly complex, highly technical $4 billion corporation — one that produces a product essential to island welfare.
Before we jump off that particular cliff, I would ask your readers to reflect on past and present government (public) performance. How are our schools doing? How’s that air-conditioning program working? Are we happy with our parks’ maintenance, our roads’ maintenance? How skillfully did we manage something as simple as a pCard program? The list is breathtakingly endless.
If you want to see the consequences of a bad decision here, take a ride on Google Earth and explore the nighttime satellite photos of North Korea. You’ll see no lights on there, no light in that country at all. Now, think about a dark Big Island and the easily anticipated government/co-op excuses regarding why we are so often without electricity.
Given the existing alternative, HELCO, which does a pretty darn good job in difficult circumstances, we’d have to be nuts to consider either of these other two options.
Why would we want to jump off that cliff?
Skip Sims
Ninole
Don’t stop
It’s been a couple of months since our Pahoa roundabout has been open.
Traffic has been basically smooth, people have slowed down and there seems to be a natural flow. It would be interesting to hear of the statistics to know exactly the positive impact it has been.
And I wonder if there is some place where folks can go to discover the etiquette of driving on a roundabout. It’s good to drive with aloha, but it’s not so if one stops while driving on the roundabout itself to let in someone from an on-ramp, as I experienced.
Maybe the newspaper could print something like this as a public service?
Dawn Hurwitz
Pahoa