More bad news from the Honolulu Advertiser, where Gannett is now seeking significant pay cuts, according to a bargaining update from the Hawaii Newspaper and Printing Trades Council.

Company negotiator John Jaske said Advertiser revenue has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years, causing the company to seek the pay cuts and another $4.5 million in other savings, including benefit and work practice changes.

The result is that Gannett “is seeking drastic new across-the-board pay cuts – up to 31.5 percent.”

“Any agreement will have to include ways to restore pay and benefits once the company returns to profitability”, said Wayne Cahill, Newspaper Guild administrative officer and spokesman for the council.

Meanwhile, Gannett’s stock price dropped below $6 per share this past week, although it closed Friday at $6.32. So a share of Gannett stock, once worth upwards of $80, now goes for less than a movie ticket.

Remember the Attorney General’s opinion that spurred state cable regulators to require a competitive process for new contracts to provide public access services in each county? The opinion was at issue in a Maui court case in which Akaku:Maui Community Television challenged the shift away from the procurement method used by the state since it set up the first access provider in Honolulu back before 1990.

Attorney General Mark Bennett argued the opinion was properly confidential and had refused to make it public for several years, but Judge Joel August ordered the AG to produce the opinion for his review.

It didn’t take August long to determine that there was no reason for the opinion to be confidential. The opinion was turned over to the judge on Friday, November 14, at 2:10 p.m., and August made up public at 10:34 p.m. on the following Tuesday morning.

Akaku’s attorney, Lance Collins, had a brief comment:

The opinion demonstrates tight legal writing but lacks in substance or the law. The opinion is likely to be the basis for further legal action by Akaku.

Also in the procurement file: The Department of Transportation is seeking an additional $414,284 to repair the barge in Kahului Harbor used to dock the Superferry. According to the request for an exemption from procurement requirements, the funds are needed to repair, replace and reinforce “internal frames and various structural components that have been over stressed, bent and damaged from the continuous and accumulated rough contact of the barge with the pier, in addition to the forces generated by tug support pushing onto the outboard side ofthe barge during ferry operations over the past year.”

An attachment to the request describes “fairly significant interior damage to the barge.”

And the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is seeking another $100,000 in legal fees to stave off a constitutional challenge brought by the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation on behalf of several plaintiffs, which alleges the reliance on income from commercial leases violates the state’s constitutional obligation to DHHL.

Thanks to Jim Manke for pointing out that a 1983 book about UH campus buildings by Prof. Vict Kobayashi and others can be downloaded for free. It’s the place to go with questions like the one here the other day about an unidentified Manoa building. So just click here to download “Building a Rainbow”.

This was my introduction to Scholarspace at UH Manoa, a 2-1/2 year old digital archive. The site displays these statistics:

Items Archived 1,783
Bitstream Views 183,741
Item Views 192,874
Collection Views 57,657
Community Views 44,643
User Logins 19,320
Searches Performed 17,625
Licence Rejections 0
OAI Requests 1,112

I meant to post these photos some months back, but apparently never actually shared them, despite good intentions. At least I wasn’t able to locate them when I went looking a couple of days ago. So here we go–a step back in time into a hidden urban garden just a short distance from downtown Honolulu, at the base of Pacific Heights. I’m sure it’s long gone, although I haven’t gone looking any time recently. It’s the kind of space that is probably just way too tempting for a developer. But at least I can remember the way it was.