A few brief items for this morning.

• In a column published in the Maui News this week, and reprinted on the Maui County website, County Council Chair Mike White suggests that Maui’s lobbyist law is not being enforced.

The law, which dates from 1981, requires any person who is compensated for lobbying either the administration or the council must first register with the Board of Ethics “setting forth the name, mailing address, business telephone number, and subject matter of the lobbyist.”

However, White points to a constituent’s experience which suggests the law is not being followed.

In practice, however, the laudable principles laid out in the County Code and the Board of Ethics’ rules are apparently being disregarded, as recently brought to my attention by a member of the public.

This constituent sought to review the current list of lobbyists and was rebuffed by the county administration, until filing a formal request for public records under the Uniform Information Practices Act, the state’s public records law. Once documentation was provided, the list was so short it seemed obvious the registration requirement isn’t being enforced.

It will be interesting to see whether White’s comments, and his position as council chair, will gain any traction on this issue.

• And a reader here raised this question: ” Its weird that you cover the DOE student travel story…and then this ad for one of the companies comes on to your blog. How do the ads worK?”

Well, these ads are served up by Google, which uses some kind of contextual algorithm to “target” ads for the content of the site, and/or the interests of the person visiting the site. At least that’s how I understand the process. It’s not something that I have any direct control over.

• And closer to home, my hosting service notified me on Sunday that I’ve been under attack.

This is a notification that we have been forced to make some changes to your account due to a large volume of continual brute force attempts on your WordPress logins (upwards of 15,000+/day). While we do have security modules in place to block access after a certain volume of failed logins, these brute force attempts have been distributed over hundreds of constantly changing IPs, and the rate is such that the security modules and firewall cannot block all the attempts, leading to poor performance on the server.

So now there’s a two-level log-in procedure, which is being closely watched to see if it discourages these hacking attempts.

• Following Governor Ige’s announcement of the appointment of a “Leadership Team on Homelessness,” Larry Geller (DisappearedNews.com) added some telling comments.

First, he notes the firing of the state’s “homeless czar,” which was not mentioned in the governor’s press release.

Director of the state Department of Human Services Rachel Wong gave homeless czar Colin Kippen four days notice today—his last day at work will be July 31.

Throughout his tenure Kippen was never given a budget to carry out his responsibilities.

And Geller notes that the new “Leadership Team” is “composed entirely of politicians rather than housing or social service experts.”

According to the governor’s press release:

“The underlying issues that lead to homelessness, such as lack of affordable housing, cannot be resolved quickly,” said Gov. Ige. “Meanwhile, we cannot wait for a comprehensive, long-term solution. There are measures we can take and will take, immediately.”

The question is whether, once again, these short-term measures pirate all available resources so that those long term solutions to underlying issues are again ignored?

As Geller notes: “The news release does not mention Housing First, the evidence-based program that has worked so successfully elsewhere on the Mainland. It appears that the focus may be on finding ‘short-term’ solutions, which may mean forcible relocation of individuals and families from Kakaako and other encampments to other temporary locations.”