Your Views for June 28

Support for bill

This letter is in response to Ira Ono’s letter printed June 27 (Tribune-Herald, Your Views).

Where do you think most of the owners of vacation rentals live? Not in Hawaii, that’s for sure. How is that keeping dollars in the local economy? At least the resorts employ island residents.

We don’t need tourists turning our quite neighborhoods into resorts. None of the residents in my neighborhood like having the disruption caused by the vacation rental located in our midst. At least Bill 108 is a start to protecting our neighborhoods from greedy landlords who care nothing for their neighbors’ rights to a quiet and peaceful existence.

Dan Whetstone

Honomu

GET hike unfair

Raising the general excise tax is an unfair burden on the poor and middle class. It is a tax that renters must pay but wealthy homeowners don’t pay for their housing. It also is a tax that the working poor and much of the lower middle class pay on almost every hard-earned dollar they make (because they spend virtually every dollar just to get by). This is not the case for much of the upper middle class and the wealthy.

My County Council member said I should not be concerned because raising the GET by a one-quarter percent would only cost a couple or family spending $50,000 per year an extra $125. But if the $5 million shortfall was divided by Hawaii County’s 200,000 residents it would cost us each only $25.

The fairest way to have made up this shortfall would have been to raise the property tax rate on residential property by a small amount. The property tax is a fair, flat tax, and those having more would have paid more. Even low-income renters pay property tax when their landlords pass on that expense into the rent amount (which they all do).

I don’t understand why this was not explained to county residents and why raising the property tax assessment by a small amount just to cover up the shortfall was not considered or debated in public.

Ron Schoenherr

Na‘alehu