Help lower Puna
Dear Mayor Harry Kim: I want you to know that our community of lower Puna is ready for action. We have had meeting after meeting in regard to our immediate need to begin restoration of Highway 132 in Kapoho.
My 70-year-old neighbor just hiked in again recently to check on her property. My neighbor with a cinder company needs this road back; Hawaiian Shores residents are threatening to block his access. These residents are screaming for their subdivision to return to a safe, residential route.
We as a community have offered so many solutions. We keep offering solutions during this time of the disaster proclamation, knowing the administration has the capability to give the go ahead. The road is cool enough to begin. A local road expert who worked on Chain of Craters said it’s doable.
Please, Mayor Kim, I am begging you for the sake of thousands being impacted by this stagnation. We need action now. You are responsible for this community’s needless suffering.
The road to recovery literally begins with this road. The next meeting hopefully will be with your engineers and contractors, establishing the starting date to proceed.
It will be a blessing. I ask you take this message to heart. We are all counting on you.
Smiley Burrows
Kapoho
‘The people’s work’
Thank you for an opportunity to speak about the hard choices we have to make sometimes doing “the people’s work” — which, as a re-elected state senator, is indeed my responsibility.
Coinciding with the recent state Department of Health hearing on the Hu Honua project, the newly elected state Senate majority caucus — of which I am a member — was summoned to discuss committee chair and member appointments and 2019 legislative priorities. Doing “the people’s work” required my attendance to ensure securing both a key committee chair and membership on priority committees — i.e., not losing these to very eager Oahu senators who would happily grab them. It is extremely important that we neighbor island legislators hold on to our powerful leadership seats.
The Senate committee I will again be chairing on transportation, and my continued membership on Senate Ways and Means, have had a great deal to do with the more than $420 million I was able to bring home for my district over the past four years, ranging from new education, health care and agricultural facilities and services, to roads, bridges, airport and parks improvements, and urgently needed social services.
I am closely following the Hu Honua project, but it rests in the hands of the Department of Health and courts. If it were possible to be in two places at once, I’d have been there to listen to constituents, but I am quite sure I made the right choice for all of my constituents by ensuring their place at the table in terms of the 2019 legislative agenda.
I am also grateful to have been asked to serve as majority whip this next session. This, coupled with being the only neighbor island legislator on the state climate commission, ensures that I can actively, aggressively advocate for the kinds of changes Hawaii must adopt to do our part to slow global warming.
As always, my door is always open. I am honored to have been re-elected and continue to take doing “the people’s work” very seriously.
Sen. Lorraine Inouye
State Senate, District 4