A couple of stories caught my eye in yesterday’s Advertiser.

Eloise Aguiar had a good one on the lack of maintenance, repair, and replacement of city playground equipment. A lot of playgrounds are in poor or dangerous condition but the city hasn’t had a system for tracking problems.

Dana Takahara-Dias, deputy director for the Department of Parks and Recreation, could not say how many repairs are backed up or give an overall assessment of the condition of the city’s playground equipment.

But don’t worry. They know an inventory system is needed and are getting on it right away. Check back next year and see how much progress has been made on that task.

Hey, that sounds a lot like the situation at UH, where a management system for tracking and responding to maintenance requests has been lacking. Again, lack of money is a problem but the failure of management may be equally or even more important.

And Derrick DePledge caught an informal advisory opinion issued by the State Ethics Commission which found that Rep. Jerry Chang’s business deals got mixed up with his own legislative actions regarding a proposed race track.

Chang apparently still doesn’t get this ethics stuff.

“I still don’t agree with what they came out with, but I have to live with it,” Chang said yesterday. “I think this is a good wake-up call for all of us.”

It was questioning by the Advertiser about Chang’s apparently conflict that kicked up all the fuss in the first place, and they deserve credit for exposing the situation and indirectly pushing it through to this ethics opinion.

And did you catch the PBN story in Friday’s edition reporting the Superferry’s low ridership figures to far?

It prompted a reader to comment:

Shades of Rochester’s Lake Ontario ferry …
As best I recall – the Rochester ferry operators were broke and shutdown in less than a year.
Will the SuperFerry last that long?

Rich Figel, co-founder of Beach Access Hawaii commented on recent stories on 911 signs being placed by the city.

As dutifully reported by the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin (right off the city press releases), the City put up numbered yellow 911 signs on public beach accesses to aid first responders. Good idea — except the press and TV news media failed to note that there are only 86 public rights of way for the entire island of Oahu, which has over a hundred miles of coastline!

More importantly, the need for these 911 signs underscores the public safety issue Beach Access Hawaii has been raising: locked gates on private lanes could mean the difference between life and death in emergencies. Those nice, new 911 signs? Sorry, but they’re nowhere in sight for long stretches of Kailua Beach because some the public accesses are over a half-mile apart!

And look at the photos below of Sign #89A at the access next to Kailuana Loop in Kailua. On the left side you can see the back of the yellow 911 sign… which they put behind bushes, trees and a sand dune, several yards back from the beach. Great job, huh? Don’t they have any common sense?

Note positioning of #89A sign. It’s impossible to see from the beach, which is where an accident victim would mostly be looking for identification markers or signs if calling 911, right? That’s the back of the yellow 911 sign on the left hand side.

And from the beach side, the sign totally disappears, and you can’t really even tell it is a public right of way.

So the press releases don’t really tell the whole story.