Sunday morning browsing…
Over at the city, check the FY 2011 budget forecast, which predicts a 29.5 percent drop in the value of building permits during 2009, a 10% decline in real property tax income, and a total $140 million budget shortfall.
Or the list of settlements in Honolulu real property tax appeals, or an updated list of rail contractors and subcontractors?
Over at the State Capitol web site, there’s relatively current data on Hawaii’s use of federal stimulus money.
Also found there–info on applying for jobs for the upcoming legislative session starting in January. There’s also a potentially useful list of all House members since statehood. But don’t bother with what’s described as “fifty years of legislative history”, which is so general as to be relatively useless. But it does include another list of members of the legislature that includes the Senate as well as the House, so it’s useful in its own way.
And check out this story from the Seattle Times on Washington’s bid for federal education dollars. It’s interesting to see how it looks on that side of the ocean.
Google picked up an ABC News headline that tourism officials must have mixed feelings about:
Get Out Your Grass Skirts, Obama Says: APEC Goes Hawaiian in 2011
And the Dallas Morning News reports that June Jones wants his SMU team to play in the Hawaii Bowl next month. Won’t that be interesting?
Hawaii also a cameo appearance in a couple of other off-beat stories, one from Florida and another from New York.
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Ref: APEC, Obama himself, in announcing that Honolulu would host the 2011 summit, said that “he looks forward to seeing them in flowered shirts and grass skirts.” NYTimes today. Perpetuating stereotypes . . .
Ref: Hawaii Bowl – unlikely (though not impossible) that Hawaii will be in the bowl, so that makes it somewhat less interesting.
If you really want to dig up a can of worms, ask about the subcontractors on the first phase of the rail project won by Kiewit Pacific. They made a mistake and did not list their subcontractors on their bids, as required by state procurement laws.
This makes Kiewit’s bid defective. The admin. is threatening other bidders not to challenge this bid which will slow down the rail project, or else will not get a share of future phases of the rail bids. Let’s see if the mayor succeeds in keeping this hush from critics.
Yep, Kiewit only listed their design subcontractors. State law requires bidders to list ALL licensed subcontractors that are to be used on the job. Kiewit is a general contractor and doesn’t have all the subcontractor licenses required to bid on the work and build the first project phase. Their bid should be thrown out and rebid. This is routinely done for smaller state jobs that have defective bids that don’t list all their licensed subcontractors properly. Somebody should protest this bid even if the other two bidders who lost are being threatened by the city.
Bad news if the city can’t follow standard procurement laws for the rail project and tries
to sweep any problems under the rug and issue threats.
Does the city council know about this?