The Star-Advertiser had a doozie of a blooper yesterday. Its featured story about the Kahekili Highway widening project stretched across the front of the “Local” section, complete with a large color photo filling the page above the fold. The problem was that the story reported a totally incorrect description of the stretch of road involved.

The Department of Transportation’s has announced upcoming public hearings on the proposed Kahekili project.

The agency wants to know whether construction is needed for the two-lane thoroughfare from Haiku Road to Likelike Highway.

Of course, anyone who has driven on Kahekili would immediately recognize that the stretch from Haiku Road to Likelike was previously widened to at least six lanes. Kahekili reverts to two lanes between Haiku Road and the intersection with Kamehameha Highway at the Hygienic Store in Kahaluu.

There’s even a reality distortion field surrounding that large photograph. The picture shows a large six-lane highway with cars flowing in both directions, while the caption describes it as “the two-lane Kahekili Highway.”

It’s the kind of thing that likely stems from a reporter writing a story based largely on a state press release and without visiting the area, where the error would have become apparent.

How embarrassing!

By the way, I’m with those opposing the widening of the highway. Those plans date back to an era where developers envisioned Waiahole and Waikane valleys turning into a new Hawaii Kai, with large-scale urbanization spreading to other areas throughout Koolauloa. Instead, the city’s general plan went in a different direction and has generally defined the area as one of very slow growth, designed to protect its more rural character. “Highway widening” is a thinly-guised pitch for infrastructure to support increased urban and suburban development throughout the region. We don’t need it or want it.

Let’s see. A couple of other Star-Advertiser stories got my goat in the past few days.

There was Sunday’s story on the new law regulating nonjudicial foreclosures. The Star-Advertiser headline appeared to give away its editorial position: “New Law Flounders. Critics of Act 48 say the legislation hurts, rather than helps, the struggling housing market.”

If your goal is to speed the foreclosure process, then the law could be seen as hurting. However, anyone who has followed the news of the past several years should be aware that the bigger problem has been the abuse of the nonjudicial foreclosure process, with published foreclosure notices–could the print be any smaller?–replacing personal service, and many homeowners getting little notice and precious little time to respond before their homes were taken in private, unregulated sales. Often it was mainland lenders, with no local representative, who relied on the nonjudicial process, leaving borrowers trying to get information through distant corporate voicemail systems to forestall the loss of their homes.

But you wouldn’t know about there was a track record of such abuses from Sunday’s S-A story, which was written pretty much from a lender’s point of view.

It wasn’t until the very end of the story that readers learned that the law has apparently pushed lenders to “avoid foreclosures through loan modifications, short sales and accepting deeds in lieu of foreclosure,” all on a voluntary basis but against the backdrop of the state’s highly regulated alternative. If you’re concerned about homeowners’ rights, this would have been very good news.

Then there was Lee Catterall’s story–essentially a lengthy editorial–looking at Gov. Abercrombie’s emergency proclamation to facilitate ordnance cleanup of former military sites.

It hits on a pet peeve of mine, reporting that substitutes contrasting opinions of opposing sources with any attempt to look at the underlying laws or facts.

Buried in Catterall’s story is a significant comment from former State Sen. Gary Hooser, now director of the Office of Environmental Quality Control. Hooser said there was already a process for dealing with emergency situations like this without the governor’s controversial emergency declaration. But Hooser’s comments appear as simply one piece of the “he said, she said” reporting.

It bugs me because I previously tracked down correspondence between OEQC and the state land board documenting this option. Grounding Hooser’s quote with those documents, or a citation to the statute that clearly sets up the process for dealing with these emergencies, would have taken it out of the “he said-she said” realm and provided readers with a more substantive, and less relative, understanding of the situation.

Okay. Now I can go read today’s news.