i L i n d . n e t

Chief election officer Kevin Cronin’s press release on Tuesday addresses the issue of when House Majority Leader Kirk Caldwell resigned from his House seat in order to run for the city council.

At the outset let me say the good people of our beautiful state and especially all elected public officials ought to respect the law they created before weighing in on the merits and prejudging an election case, or any case, and circumstances before the facts are present to a
court to decide. These cases should not be tried and decided in the newspapers and other media. Isn’t this our democratic system? Shouldn’t it be allowed to work? But because they have chosen to
present snippets to the public and reached a decision including casting aspersions on the Office of Elections whose dedicated staff is working extremely hard to prepare for the 2008 elections under very difficult circumstances, the current atmosphere obliges me to comment before it is necessary under the law.

Cronin says Caldwell’s initial verbal notice of intent to withdraw from the House race was not valid and had to be submitted in writing, which was done the day after the filing deadline.

Okay. But by jumping into the rhetorical battle with a somewhat selective and limited version of “the facts”, isn’t Cronin also in danger of prejudging this set of related cases?

Despite his claim to present “the facts”, Cronin fails to address either the question of the inadequate number of signatures on Caldwell’s nomination papers at the time they were filed or the prohibition on filing nomination papers for more than one office, which Caldwell did when he filed for the council before withdrawing from the House race, if Cronin’s chronology is accurate (Section 12-3 HRS, cited here on Tuesday).

This is certainly a rollicking good start to what promises to be a brief but feisty council campaign!

The probability of finding new and potentially extensive burial sites in the area of the proposed expansion of the Turtle Bay Resort is the latest major roadblock for the project, according to the Defend Oahu Coalition.

The group is pointing to an archaeological report prepared several years ago but quickly withdrawn by the resort’s owners when it prompted serious questions from state historic preservation staff about probably burial sites and culturally sensitive areas. The report was not publicly available until recently, when a copy was obtained through a request under Hawaii’s public records law. [Warning--the report is a very large pdf file, nearly 30 MB, so don't click it unless you've got a fast Internet connection. Here's a link to the draft report as submitted to the State Historic Preservation Office.]

I was extremely sorry to read of the death of planner Robin Foster. We saw Robin a lot back in the early and mid-1970s when we were all active in a variety of peace and justice causes. Among the photos in my collection I could quickly locate Robin picketing for farmworker rights and in support of the United Farm Workers at the old Holiday Mart store, and in a series of photos from a 1972 gathering in support of the Hickam Three protesters who faced federal charges resulting from an anti-Vietnam war protest.

In this photo, behind and to the right of the guitarist (as viewed in the photo) are Chuck Giuli, one of those originally charged in the case, Dolly Foster, and Robin Foster. Here’s another shot of the same lineup, with former UH professor and Hickam Three defendant Jim Douglass closest to the camera, and the late Rev. Bob Mackey, in black, at the far end of the line.

I don’t think Robin ever lost his sense of justice, and he built it into his career as a planner. I’m so sorry that we have lost him.

Meanwhile, we’re just back from a weekend with Meda’s mother and siblings in California. One sister, Margaret, flew in from Maryland and her brother, Bob, flew down from Portland, Oregon. Oh, that’s Ms. Fanny, now an honorary Kaaawa dog, giving Bob a big kiss for the camera.