So the shutdown of Aloha and ATA airlines has led state officials to throw a caution flag in front of ambitious plans for modernization of Honolulu International Airport.
Yes, prudence is always important. And the disappearance of two airlines will — at least temporarily — cut into the cash flow of fees and rents the airports division uses to pay for improvements.
Let’s hope caution doesn’t trump common sense altogether. A story by Robbie Dingeman on a relatively modest $20 million worth of improvements (restaurants and other customer amenities) shows that the quality of the airport experience is a big deal to traveller. The overall $2.3 billion improvement plan includes a lot for basic infrastructure improvements that might not been seen by passengers, but there is plenty in that plan to make the airport experience more pleasant, efficient and — yes — even inviting.
Airport officials should put themselves in the shoes of passengers, particularly international travellers, before they start trimming improvement plans because of a temporary bump in the airline business.
We have seen too many previous airport improvement plans die for lack of enthusiasm or concerns over the short-term availability of money. In the case of Hawaii’s airports, which surely will be busy for generations to come, it is important to plan and build for tomorrow’s opportunities, not just today’s temporary setbacks.
So there I was talking about how tax credits are an easy path for lawmakers to take, since they generally please the specific while causing little direct pain to the general. For that reason, I said, they are hard to repeal and easy to stick into the tax code.
Well, who would know that lawmakers have — at least on paper — actually made a stab at rationalizing the ever-growing list of exemptions to our excise tax code! A bill, SB2829, “sunsets” or kills off tax credits in batches between now and 2012.
I’ve often written in this spot about the difficulty lawmakers have in writing sensible, foolproof campaign spending laws. They just know too much about the system to make simple, or simplistic decisions. But it’s not just fundraising and spending that tends to tie legislators into knots. Writing strong, fair and useful ethics legislation also puts them into a tizzy of “what-if’s.”Two examples popped up in the last few days: Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann vetoed a bill pushed by Council member Charles Djou that would have banned city workers from making any decisions that impact on their previous private-sector employer until a full year had passed in their new city job.There already is a law that works the other way, in theory preventing former city officials from coming back before their former office in search of favors or decisions. So why not do it the other way around? Hannemann says new city workers can already excuse themselves from decisions when there is a direct conflict. But a mandatory law, he says, would make it tough to entice new people into government service at a time when the job market is already tight. Fair enough. But the point of most ethics laws is not to deal with actual breaches — most people are up-and-up. The point of the law is to tell the public there won’t even be an appearance of conflict. That’s because folks like to engage in dark suspicions. So, when a city office makes a favorable decision for the new boss’s former employer, the appearance remains whether or not the new guy had anything to do with it.The other ethics arm-wrestling was a bill debated in the state House that would prevent a lawmaker from doing any work for state agencies worth more than $10,000 a year. That restriction could hurt any number of legislators who work off-session for state social agencies, the courts, schools or hospitals.In fact, the biggest fuss was put up by Rep. Josh Green, a physician, who works in a state hospital on the Big Island. Green insisted the last-minute addition of the ban was put in by Judiciary Chair Tommy Waters as retribution because Green and Waters have tangled on malpractice reform.That indeed may have been part of the motivation, if the smoke signals are any indication. But the prohibition makes some sense. Again it is the perception thing. It’s not hard to imagine a lawmaker balking at state budget cuts if they are aimed at the place he or she works in the off-season. That’s human nature. If such a prohibition makes it, it will cause trouble for any number of legislators. But at some point, they may have to decide whether their work for the state is more important or valuable than their lawmaking. Tough choice.
Our two Democratic senators, Daniel K. Inouye and Dan Akaka, generally vote along he same lines. While Akaka gets slightly higher ratings from “liberal” groups, there is rarely much difference between the two on big policy matters.
But a story out of Washington by Dennis Camire the other day on proposals for a new GI Bill suggests the two may be on different wavelengths on this important matter.
The proposed bill would boost benefits for currently serving men and women, so more could get into, and finish, college once they complete their service. It is only a matter of fairness says the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Jim Webb.
College costs are soaring while the GI bill payment scheme is stuck in amber.
Inouye, like Webb a combat veteran, is a co-sponsor of the bill.
But Akaka, who served during World War II and actually used the GI Bill to go to the UH, is not so sure.
The extra benefits, he notes, will be very expensive and must be balanced against the military’s need for recruitment and — most importantly — retention.
What this means is that if the GI education benefits are too rich, it might entice people to leave the service just when the military is scratching hard to come up with enough experienced officers and NCOs.
What you see here is two senators serving, in this case, somewhat different masters. Inouye is thinking directly of military veterans and their educational future. Akaka is concerned about that, but as Chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he also has to think about the overall health of the Veterans Administration and the military itself.
It will be interesting to see how this one is worked out.
Now we’ll see whether our elected leaders have what it takes to deal with a nearly impossible situation.
The back-to-back shutdowns by Aloha Airlines and then Mainland carrier ATA is nothing short of a body-blow to the state, its economy and the political process.
The state says the shut-downs could punch a 500,000-person sized hole in the visitor count this year. That would be huge. Now, it is likely that other carriers and other options will step up and the falloff in visitors might not be quite as dramatic as those first estimates.
But for state lawmakers and the governor, just now getting down to the fine work of building a new state budget, this situation has to be treated realistically.
The tax consequences of a 500,000 fall off in visitor arrivals would be catastrophic. Even something far short of that throws existing budget and tax collection projections out the window.
And prudently, lawmakers should use the bigger, and more dire, numbers as they figure out what the state will collect and what it can spend over the next year on schools, services, welfare and the like.
That means many of the “nice-to-have” items that were surviving the budget process may have to drop out. But let’s hope our elected officials go beyond simply cutting the budget back to meet diminished expectations.
This is a time for creativity and fresh ideas for economic ideas that can produce dollars, jobs and some of the taxes those hundreds of thousands of tourists would otherwise have paid.
