Bright green banners are hanging over the railings at the State Capitol, signaling in no uncertain terms the love our lawmakers feel for their hometown school, the University of Hawaii.

It’s quite a vivid demonstration of the promises legislators have been making this week about placing long-overdue repair and maintenance work for the UH at the very top of their agenda this year.

Good thinking. And long overdue. But why now? Certainly the rundown state of the UH, particularly the Manoa campus, should be old news to legislators by now. True, they have been focusing their energies and dollars on the backlog in the public school system. But make no mistake, UH administrators have been knocking on doors for years, begging for the cash needed to repair leaky roofs, upgrade the infrastructure and generally make things right on campus.

It’s obvious the banners and excitement and promises are primarily the result of one thing: The departure of winning coach June Jones, who left complaining that his athletic facilities, in particularly, were in a lousy state.

“Sorry about that, June,” lawmakers seem to be saying. “We’ll get to that right away and - by the way - we’ll try to take care of the upper campus at the same time.”

The result, at the end of the day, may be just fine. But this adds up to another example of crisis management by the political system, which seems to respond better to big headlines and public outcry than it does to the obvious, but less temporarily heated, needs of the state.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.