We’re baaack!
Hopefully.
I’ll be watching closely today to see whether the major computer glitches of the past week have really been solved. Do try to read the comments or leave one of your own and let me know your experience.
In the news. There are going to be a number of office holders doing a careful reading of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday in the challenge to Maui County Councilmember Sol Kahoohalahala’s residency.
The court, in a lengthy 66-page opinion, upheld a ruling by the Maui Board of Registration which determined Kahoohalahala to be a resident of Lahaina and not a resident of Lanai, which he currently represents on the council.
The decision is silent on the implications or remedy, and it is not immediately clear whether Kahoohalahala will have to step down. However, a Maui charter provision requires at least one member to be a resident of Lanai, and the decision means Kahoohalahala was not properly a resident when he registered to vote using a Lanai address and then filed his nomination papers to run for the council seat, again citing his Lanai residency.
House Speaker Calvin Say survived a challenge to his residency status in 2006, but grumbling can continue to be heard. The residency challenge was filed by the husband of Say’s political opponent for the house seat.
And with the game of musical chairs already going strong in advance of next year’s wild and wide-open elections, this opinion is going to get a lot of attention and analysis.
Now available on the State Capitol web site–a joint House-Senate committee report on the impacts of cutting programs in DBEDT, including the state film office.
Did you notice that there is now a Honolulu Police Department blog? That surprised me.
Did you catch the Washington Post story over the weekend on the future of news reporting?
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Did Duke Bainum ever really live his council district, or did he really live in the Kahala mansion? Just asking.
Click on comments – works fine.
Comments using XP and IE8 are working fine this morning. Thanks for all of the hard work – the comments are the icing on the cake!
All seems operational… Mac OS x 10.4
* I think its vital that our represenatives live in the communitites they serve
* I did notice the HPD blog and the new one at your fave org. The Grassroot Institute… allows commenting too. I think its great more vehicals for communuity expression are popping up.
And your’s leads the way!
Aloha
Vista and Firefox have never had a problem
re: comments from here
Good to see comments back, although the link above the text is gone, which was a nice feature.
So much for my throughts of a switch to WordPress- I’d have never figured all this MEGO atuff.
RSS feed back in working order. Good news.
Hawaii’s political history is full of candidates/incumbents running and representing districts where they didn’t reside. The law was changed a few years ago but it’s very easy to evade the law.
But it’s quite murky in its interpretation. For example, Calvin Say asserts that he lives in Palolo temporarily since in mother-in-law is not in good health. Now, some would say it’s a bit odd that he’s been living there for years and not in Palolo but who can definitely discern whether or not Say is evading the law or truly is in a situation where his family concerns trumps the residency law.
After all, if a legislator’s ailing parent lived in, say, Wisconsin and the legislator moved there during the candidate filing deadline, is that illegal?
It’s one of those tricky state-of-mind legal questions.
I think the fixes did the trick. I’m again able to get your feed through Google Reader in Firefox.
-r-
The Hawaii Supreme Court’s decision on Sol Kahoohalala’s VOTER REGISTRATION now will require some effort by a voter at establishing a physical presence in the district where the voter registers to vote — you can’t just locate an address, have some mail go to the address, or leave your slippahs on the door mat. Representing Lanai and Molokai (and Hana to some extent) is tough for a serving Councilmember since the part-time Maui County Council actually meets year round in the County Seat in Wailuku — you likely live on Maui most of the time (the Maui Charter has residency requirements for each of the nine seats but allows all County voters to elect the members — a compromise to make sure that Lanai, Molokai and Hana have representation on the Council). But the issue here was that Sol Kahoohalahala’s wife has had a job in West Maui for many years and Sol himself lived on Maui while serving as Exec Dir of the Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission and even changed his voter registration to Lahaina in 2006. He switched back to Lanai to be eligible to run for the Lanai residency council seat. There is a separate appeal regarding whether Kahoohalahala rightly holds the Lanai seat; this appeal was about his voter registration and whether the Board of Registration moving away from the old intent to return standards should be augmented by requiring some kind of physical presence as well.
The Supreme Court ruled that Kahoohalahala was not a resident for purposes of voting in the Lanai precinct in the 2008 election. But left intact the determination that he was qualified to run for the Lanai seat. The question is, subsequent to whatever date this case hinges on, did he taken the steps they indicated to establish residency? If he did that before the council term started, then this whole thing was an academic exercise by passionate and narrow minded people on Lanai.
Just noticed that comments used to be oldest first – now they are newest first.