We just aren’t very good at maintaining and fixing things. The Royal “We” here refers to our state and city governments. This morning, though, I’m grumbling about the city.
Here’s another small example. The photo was taken early this morning along Kamehameha Highway in front of the Kaaawa Fire Station. There’s a pole with a light that, if I’m not mistaken, flashes a warning when Kaaawa’s Engine 21 is leaving the station. Click on the photo to see a larger version.
There’s a control box, and an electrical conduit attached to what appears to be a broken siren dangling on exposed wires, once an integral part of the traffic warning system. You can see the rusted bracket above where it used to be attached.
It’s been like this for a while. Probably a good long while, judging from the visible evidence.
Why does something like this go unprepared for so long? It seems like either fixing it or removing it shouldn’t be such a huge task.
But we live in a city in which deteriorating services in many areas are the result of the “feed the train” bandwagon.
I’m reminded of this every time I get on a bus, and I’ve been doing more bus riding since earning my “senior” bus pass, the first real reward for getting older. “Standing room only” seems to be the order of the day on most buses in town these days. And in just $5 billion or so, we’ll be able to stand on the new train, too! Who says we aren’t making progress?
Speaking of deteriorating services, the Star-Advertiser’s Kokua Line circled around to the issue of city recycling again this week, and it’s a dismal story of another widely used public service being dismantled. What does it feel like to live in a third-world city with inferior services? I think we know.
Here’s an excerpt from Kokua Line:
Nearly six months after the city decided to stop subsidizing the community recycling bins, the result is either overflowing bins or no bins at all in neighborhoods across the island.
And the number of bin locations, which topped 100 early this year, has steadily decreased. They were at 26 at last count, with Punahou no longer listed (see opala.org/solid_waste/community_recycling_centers.html).
The city said residential curbside recycling was more effective, quantitatively, and economical in explaining why it chose to stop subsidizing the community bins and in its suggestion to residents in high-rises to consider setting up their own recycling programs.
Fewer schools are participating because they no longer are getting any money for hosting the bins, and Honolulu Disposal is making fewer pickups — also because it doesn’t make any money doing so.
Peter Carlisle assumes he’ll be remembered for successfully getting the train through the last layers of approvals, but I think the beggaring of these other city services will be his legacy.
this weeks schedule from Civil Beat —
Wednesday, December 12th
5:30 pm—Mayor Carlisle attends the Pasha Hawaii Mahalo Holiday Reception. The Bankers Club.
Thursday, December 13th
5:30 pm—Mayor Carlisle attends a reception in celebration of the birthday of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan. Consulate General of JapanOfficial Residence.
Looks like he is really enjoying the rest of his time at the city. Traffic lights and potholes sound pretty boring compared to all the fun the mayor has been doing.
Haven’t you noticed their? The city does not maintain or take care of their properties and facilities.
They don’t paint or fix on rotation. They allow fixtures and buildings to go to pot and paint to peel. After years of neglect, they submit requests for capital improvements projects for brand new buildings!
Municipal buildings on the mainland last over a hundred years. Honolulu only tear down and build new police and fire stations, it looks like.
We would love to be their favorite contractor and design and planning partners!
Gee whiz, next thing you’ll be complaining that the CTP (“Crazy Train Project”) is causing a reduction in bus services. Oh wait….
Can you imagine how bad the nonupkeep of the supposed train will be???
For a glimpse look no further than the fatal accident on the Washington DC Metrorail line below. a preview of coming attractions?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/red-line-crash/
“We” have never done infrastructure maintenance.
And we don’t finish projects on-time or on-budget.
Which is why I’ve always been opposed to rail. Even if, by some miracle, it gets up and running, it will soon be down “occasionally” for unplanned repairs.
I don’t know if you or your readers are aware of it, but there is an app called Honolulu 311 available for both iPhone and Android. You can take a picture of the problem, add a short description, the phone adds GPS coordinates and you send the report in to the City. Sometimes it is a case of they just don’t know. I have found them to be pretty responsive to the couple of items I have reported. If enough citizens continue to ping the City folks maybe things will improve. You can also track the progress of your report as well as see reports that other people have submitted. I even got a quickie email from a city employee (supervisor?) thanking me for my report.
I wonder if this works for rest rooms in the parks? Could it be the City doesn’t know about the problems?
It might work for restrooms. However, based on recent news coverage of the issue, I am sure that they are well aware, especially since most parks restrooms are visited by a city employee at least once a day. Honolulu 311 is more directed toward broken street lights, abandoned cars, potholes. and the like which the responsible city personnel may not know about until it is reported.
and rail will be the next on the list of ‘unmaintained’. it’s rather childlike behavior to insist upon new toys while not maintaining present ones. but lack of foresight, preparation, and competence has been a hallmark of the governing class in the Islands for more than a century.
For those of you who do not understand the differences between Capital and Operating Budgets, learn about them befor you write another anti-rail diatribe.
Maintenance and waste management issues are addressed through the Operating Budget which is primarily funded through property taxes. Fees & charges also fund the Operating Budget as well as federal grants.
The train system is being partially funded through a one half of one percent increase in the General Excise Tax. That is $50 additional for each $10,000 spent here on O`ahu by everyone who buys something –
including for more than 5,500,000 visitors.
Another HUGE chunk of change is being provided by nearly 310 MILLION citizens of the United States Of America.
The incoming Caldwell Administration will submit its FY2013-2014 Operating and Capital Budgets to the incoming City Council on the first working day in February, 2013.
The Council will start its public budgetary process later that month.
For those of you who do not like how the City is run, get involved directly by working with your Councilmember to address your concerns.
Furthermore, get on board to raise property taxes which are seriously way too low here in Hawai`i0. My brother lives in Orange County two blocks away from the ocean. His townhouse is assessed at $850,000 and he pays over $16,000 in property taxes plus a $4000 public school assessment
On O`ahu, that property tax on $850,00 would be less than $3,000 and the schools would be funded at the state level.
Another action for those of you who think that the proposed rail system is an indicator of bad local government, then draft up a petition to withdraw from the City & County of Honolulu, the State of Hawai`i, and the United States of America.
In fact, the Obama Administration is accepting petitions with at least 25,ooo legal signatures from teapartytypes – primarily in Texas, Oklahoma.
Of course, you may have to go war to get your independence, but at least the money spent on the military will stay in the USofA and the Republic of O`ahu
“The incoming Caldwell Administration will submit its FY2013-2014 Operating and Capital Budgets to the incoming City Council on the first working day in February, 2013. ”
Is this commitment directly from Caldwell? I would love to be able to pick apart the budgets one month before the get put on the agenda. (Recent past budgets have been submitted to council the beginning of March.)
Oahuans, do not feel picked upon. From state schools and parks to county p & r facilities, neglect is all too obvious on Big Island.
So how do we pay to continue to maintain services?
This is nationwide problem and it is the inevitable result of the no-tax-increase-no-matter-what mentality. But I will grant you that it’s important to have a mayor who pays attention, demands action, and blisters okoles when he doesn’t get it. I ran Honolulu’s Information & Complaint Department for eight years under Frank Fasi and was always able to get a fast response to problems such as a broken street light. One phone call to the appropriate department was all it ever took. It was only after several months on the job that I realized the secret to my success: no one wanted to get a second phone call from an angry Sicilian mayor!
The rail is not a cause of the deteriorating infrastructure and urban services you are complaining about; people refusing to pay the cost of their decisions through property taxes and impact fees and choosing to live outside the urban core are the cause.
Regarding infrastructure, the Royal “We” extends beyond the City and County of Honolulu and the State of Hawaii to the United States. As a country, we do not maintain infrastructure well. The American Society for Engineers rates the U.S.’s infrastructure as a “D.” This became a national issue when Minneapolis experienced the bridge collapse a few years ago, though as a nation we still have not addressed the problem. And, note, the fact that we don’t maintain infrastructure well doesn’t mean we don’t need it or that it shouldn’t be built. Those are related, but different questions.
Oahu, much like the rest of the U.S., has unfortunately employed a development model of growth through sprawl for the past 30-50 years. A fundamental method for growing our economy has been through construction – concrete and single-family houses. We continue to build year after year further and further out from the urban core, obligating future tax payers to pay for the maintenance of that infrastructure and provision of urban services to those living there, even as people fight against any tax increases. Not only that, we have a commitment to provide certain standards of living, even to people chose not to live in the city, even if the provision of that infrastructure and services is not efficient or equitable.
cwd is correct to point out that our property taxes are too low to cover the cost of maintaining our infrastructure and services. Property taxes are also uniform across the island, even though the distribution of benefits and costs are not uniform. We consider this to be an equitable approach, but the beneficiaries of this are those who live outside of the urban core.
For example, the cost of a bus servicing the North shore compared to the urban core is higher because of the physical infrastructure and its maintenance needed for that bus to go to the North shore and back; the fewer people who can/do use the route; the time it takes to do the trip; and the gas, labor, and maintenance for that bus. Providing bus service to the North shore drives up the overall cost of the system, in particular because of the labor, which is the highest cost factor of the bus system. On the other hand, rail will be automated and on net eliminate or avoid creating additional labor costs for the overall mass transit system (rail+bus).
Not only is the overall cost higher, the marginal cost of adding a bus to the system to meet service demand is higher for the North shore than for the urban core; similarly, cutting a bus to the North shore makes the overall system more efficient and cost-effective on the margin, though we would think less equitable.
Despite this, the bus rate structure is based on age and student status (what we consider to be equitable), not geography or actual cost to the system, so North shore residents pay the same rate as anyone else on the island. Which is to say, the benefits and costs are not evenly distributed. Urban core residents subsidize North shore users of the bus. If we just provided bus service to the urban core, it would be cheaper and more efficient, but less equitable to island residents as a whole. The same applies to sewer, water, electricity, fire protection, police, medical care, and any other public service you can think of.
This in effect means that the higher costs created by sprawled living, such as those living in Mililani or along the North shore, are subsidized by those of us living in the urban core. This is reflected on the national level, too, where “blue” states subsidize “red” states.
A key solution to breaking this cycle is promoting urban density. Proximity to infrastructure and services creates efficiencies in geographic coverage and scale, thus reducing cost and increasing equity. This is the potential of rail. For more information, please check out Sierra Club’s FAQ on why it supports rail: http://www.sierraclubhawaii.com/railfaq.php.
Instead of railing against rail, please support rail, consider moving to the urban core, or advocate for higher taxes to help cover the cost of providing services and infrastructure to those who don’t live in the urban core. Rail will ameliorate the impacts of Oahu’s past choices to sprawl. With rail, we will be able to go about our business even more efficiently, freeing up tax dollars to support the lifestyle of those who don’t choose to live in the city.
I think people often miss the fact that increasing real property taxes is not the only answer to getting more, or even maintaining, city services. Each year, we lose over $100 million in RPT revenue due to various exemptions. (This is excluding exemptions for other government property and those mandated by state law.) It’s been reported that our historic property exemption is the most generous in the U.S. How do the other exemptions compare with the Mainland? It’s not fair to compare the base tax without looking at these giveaways.
In addition, the city auditor came out with a report earlier this year that recommended the administration restructure departments to reduce management and expand the level of control. If this recommendation were taken to heart, costs could be reduced without reducing services.
Reduce management and expand control to reduce costs? Don’t believe it, Natalie.
Putting more employees under each of the managers insures less attention to detail and decisions and paperwork piling up at the checkpoints.
This is an echo of what Harris claimed would result from his massive reorganization of city government. Rather than doing more with less as claimed, they just did less with less. The reality is that if you want good service and well maintained facilities , you have to pay for it
This is not about putting more employees under managers — it’s about reducing management.
Here’s the auditor’s report. http://www1.honolulu.gov/council/auditor/spanofcontrolfinalreport.pdf.
Hey, Bill – Don’t overlook the time the Mayor has to spend working on his Gangnam Style routine.
Ian, if you had written this a year or two ago, you would have had a hundred comments by now. Perhaps a sense of resignation has taken hold.
hate this to say this, but the real reason:
trying to having a rational normal conversation on blog sites is often pointless, Especially once emotion gets involved on very important issues. everything, including rail, becomes another abortion debate and hard-heads are already made up.
Reading Ian’s writing is fantastic. commenting is a waste of time.
There are only seven countries in the world which score high in terms of creativity, education and democracy.
It’s a very select group (e.g., the Swedes score high in terms of creativity and democracy, but not education; the Israelis score high in terms of education, but not creativity or democracy.)
It’s interesting to see how they rank in terms of their national debt (as a percentage of their national economy):
(The first column estimates are from the US CIA, the second from the IMF.)
The Australians and New Zealanders run a relatively tight ship, in fiscal terms.
This runs counter to an implicit stereotype that underpins a lot of the research on creativity. The research seems to recapitulate the ‘culture war’ that presumably exists between urban ‘blue’ states and rural ‘red’ states in the US. The stereotype is that urban areas are creative but profligate, and that rural societies are less creative but more frugal (e.g., there was no real estate bubble in most places in the US outside of the urbanized coastal areas). Australia is 80% urban, so it fits the pattern in that respect of being an economically advanced society, but it’s fiscally prudent.
California fits the classic stereotype of a certain kind of irresponsible urban society, infamous nationally for its low taxes and relatively high spending.
The following New Yorker article, “Contract City”, is about the privatization of public services in Costa Mesa, California, in the face of perceived high public worker salaries (the medium household income there is $62K, but the median compensation package for city employees there is $130K).
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2011-09-05#folio=034
One of the eye openers in the story (iirc) is that the most generous public employee contracts in the US were actually negotiated by Republican politicians in places like California (Costa Mesa is solidly Republican). In fact, the Republicans who so generously negotiated those contracts seem to be small-government libertarians — which only deepens the mystery.
When asked to explain this ideological anomaly, one of the interviewees smiles and states that this part of California attracts people who are very “creative and enterprising”. Meaning: Californians — even supposedly conservative Californians — are … ‘interesting’ people. Californians are not really either Republican or Democratic. A Californian is a Californian.
This is given credence by the joke told in California that 90% of people in Hollywood are Jewish, gay and/or bipolar, and the other 10% are Scientologists — who are also Jewish, gay and/or bipolar. There’s another telling joke that “Every native Californian is from the Midwest.” Not only are Californians the ultimate un-rooted people, but many of them are ‘unusual’ people escaping from a rooted small-town life. (When President Obama asked the late Steve Jobs what he thought about America’s future, Jobs laughed and said that “America is insanely awesome!” But most of the US is not different from most of other developed Western or Asian countries. What’s insanely awesome is California, and perhaps because it’s a little insane.)
Can one have it both ways? Can a society have the positive aspects of small-town life along with the positive aspects of the city simultaneously? Here I am reminded of the TV show “Northern Exposure”, which I think is a colossal fantasy of community and tolerance combined. To me, it seems unrealistic to expect this possibility in real life. If New Zealanders and Australians seem to combine both urban creativity and small-town common sense, it is because they feel they have to, ‘isolated’ as they are (at least from the rest of the Western and Anglo world). Their success is based on fear, not on some idealized lifestyle.
The more serious question is whether one can have it NEITHER way.
Can one have a society that is neither creative nor sensible?
Can one have a society that, like a small town, is not really socially tolerant and which resists change, but at the same time is as self-indulgent, irresponsible and wasteful as California?
Perhaps Brazil is such a place. The Brazilian economy is booming from their natural resource exports to China, and the Brazilian government is planning on simply giving money to one-third of their populace to raise them up from poverty into middle-class status (iirc). Will middle-class life take hold among those recipients of the Brazilian government’s largess? Perhaps it will among some of them. But the sense I get is that of Brazilians as a laid back small-town folk, not too organized or intense or urbane or tolerant. That money might be wasted on them.
But then again, that’s what they said about the Australians not too long ago. The real question might be whether Brazilians have enough fear, like New Zealanders do.
Got fear?
Some good thoughts there. A cute couple of jokes about Californians and the residents of Hollywood. I think we could come up with some interesting “percentages” for the ranks of Bishop Street, the State Capitol, etc. Thoughts like these require some clarity, however, that can only be created by distance.
I urge people on O`ahu to take their concerns about potholes, city facilities such as park restrooms, and deteriorating city services to their Neighborhood Board for discussion and action. The Board meetings provide a forum for discussion and action on many different kinds of concerns.
I served for a number of years on the Palolo neighborhood Board in the 1990s, and I found that city officials paid attention to the concerns that were raised. Our County Council member, state representative, and state senator frequently attended the meetings, so the Board meetings could be used to raise state issues as well.
I was pleased to discover that the agendas and minutes for all neighborhood board meetings (from 2001 on) are available on the County’s website: http://www1.honolulu.gov/nco/nb6/agendamin.htm Anyone can easily check to see what their neighborhood board has been up to.
I played at Honolulu Hale, yesterday. But no mike. Sound man on vacation. But afterwards, learned it couldn’t be heard. (Even Invited the Mayor, but he was “out”.) City Lights used to be City participating–FREE, with a nice daily program of local stars, choirs, etc (Now, just a few, in the Auditorium. Next door.) No more of the loved toy trains–also donated FREE. Peter has a bigger one he enjoys playing with more, perhaps…
Speaking of the rail project, here’s a little tidbit that has oft been noticed, that debates on transportation modes reflect the cultural conflict between more urban ‘blue’ states that vote Democratic versus more rural ‘red’ states that trend Republican.
http://www.chicagomag.com/core/pagetools.php?url=%2FChicago-Magazine%2FThe-312%2FApril-2012%2FRed-States-Blue-States-Political-Polarization-Rides-the-Rails%2F&mode=print
The author had posted that the ‘Chicago’ accent can actually be found throughout Illinois, but is typically found in places that are industrialized (or de-industrialized) and pro-Democratic. A friend of his sent him these maps of rail patterns overlaid with voting patterns to re-enforce the link between urbanization and liberalism.
Here are some maps of the 2012 elections. Some are expressed as ‘population cartograms’ that show the electoral pattern as expressed in size of population density, not geographic size. (One will also note that in the population cartograms by county-level election returns, population-heavy urban areas in Texas like Austin are Democratic, as are more hispanic border areas.)
Getting back to rail and Hawaii, on the City of Honolulu’s website on the rail project (“honolulutransit”), there were originally links to federal websites touting rail (these links have apparently been removed). But these federal websites did not involve commuter rail, but rather light rail spurs from downtown Central Business Districts to areas a just few miles out, centrally located areas where Transit Oriented Development will work.
Now here’s the kicker:
On the mainland, it is usually urban liberals who are fixated on this kind of urban mass transit. On Oahu, it’s just the opposite, where people who live in town seem most opposed to the (commuter) rail project. And while on the mainland the Republicans who oppose rail are comprised typically of a coalition of established business elites (who live in affluent suburbs) and the rural working class, on Oahu these are the people most in favor of the rail (although they might not actually abandon their big trucks and Mercedes to ride the rail).
Technically, Hawaii is the ‘bluest of blue states’ in terms of its allegiance to the Democratic Party. But the demographic composition of that party locally does not reflect national trends.
Here are the maps that I forgot to include:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/