Musings: Slates and Blocs

As the election nears, Kauai County Council candidates are taking the unusual step of forming political blocs.

Saturday night's “meet and greet” with the “Super Six” — incumbents Mel Rapozo and Ross Kagawa, newcomers Arryl Kaneshiro, Darryl Perry and Arthur Brun, and former Councilman KipuKai Kualii — marked the first time I can remember a group of candidates banding together to support one another.

Mel and Ross — top vote-getters in the primary, respectively — discussed their family connections with KipuKai, and they both made it clear the divisiveness that is currently stymying Council business will continue unless they are able to form a majority.

Meanwhile, as I reported last week, Councilmen Gary Hooser, Tim Bynum and Mason Chock are linking with hopefuls Felicia Cowden and Tiana Laranio under the “Keep Kauai Alive, Only Vote for 5” bloc — a single issue movement focused on pesticides.

The blocs reflect the exact same dynamics of “North Shore vs the rest of the island” and “locals vs newcomers/haoles” that drove the fight over the pesticide/GMO Bill 2491 (Ordinance 960).

And people — mostly the “red shirts” who pushed Bill 2491 — still love to claim the island isn't polarized and divided. Uh huh. Right.

Lately I've been hearing that westside seed company workers don't feel safe going to the North Shore, just as I've heard that some North Shore folks don't feel comfortable unless they're openly backing mayoral hopeful Dustin Barca.

Why? Because there's a certain thuggishness involved with Barca and his campaign, just as there was with the 2491 movement he led, though many of the supporters are desperately trying to downplay the intimidation, threats and mob action that characterized that ugly episode.

As just one example, one of the “red shirts” made a visit to the restaurant where Mel's teenaged daughter works so he could tell her that her father is an asshole because he didn't support the bill.

How could that ever be considered appropriate?

Interestingly, neither Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura nor Chair Jay Furfaro are included in either bloc. That's largely because they were viewed as fence-straddlers on the 2491 issue, though both voted in favor of the bill and the appeal, and both voted to bring Mason Chock onto the Council to override the mayor's veto of the bill. Their actions failed to appease the bill's supporters, and also alienated many of the bill's opponents.

Still, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see both re-elected, partly because they're viewed as middle-of-the-road. As longtime figures on the Kauai political scene, they also have the advantage of name recognition. In a recent guest editorial in The Garden Island, Jay opined that Kauai was in danger of losing its institutional memory — an oblique way of soliciting votes for Council veterans like himself.

Dustin, meanwhile, remains a non-starter among all but the die-hard 2491 crowd. A case in point was his comment at a recent forum, where he proclaimed that he didn't give a rip about the jobs held by 600 Kauai residents in the seed fields.

He has apparently abandoned even the pretense of trying to find other work for the employees — a phony gambit presented during the 2491 debate — and reinforces the totalitarian mantra that it's the "red shirt" way or the highway. No co-existence will be tolerated or allowed.

But he really showed his superficiality and inability to think things through when he asked Mayor Carvalho, “Is a job worth a life?”

Guess that means he's opposed to tourism, too, because look at how many people have been killed in drownings, helicopter and plane crashes, and rental car wrecks on the island. That's an industry where there actually are bona fide certified fatalities, as opposed to allegations of harm.

But then, Dustin is all about sound bytes, not substance.

Dustin also claims he has no personal gain from going after the chem companies, but that's not true, either. He's milking his anti-GMO stance for all it's worth to promote himself. As a has-been fighter/surfer, he has to remain visible somehow to get the sponsorships that pay his bills, like his recent deal with RVCA.

Still, Dustin is more like an annoying gnat than a serious candidate, and he's going to get duly swatted in the general.

The Council race is where the action is. 

A friend recently sent me an email with a proposed slate of candidates:

Theory: don't give either side too much power.  Mason Chock, Arryl Kaneshiro, JoAnn Yukimura, Ross Kagawa, Jay Furfaro, Mel Rapozo, and I guess Darryl Perry, for lack of another choice. Or even Bynum.

To which I replied:

Bynum? No fucking way. He has got to go.

He responded:

It's still fluid, but I'm roughly in that mode. Almost every one of these folks has negatives of one sort or another, but among these 14 candidates, that's hard to avoid. I certainly don't want either side to have veto override power. And I don't want complete idiots, the character-flawed or true believers running my county.

If you had to pick a slate, where would you go?

Hmmm.... It's a lot easier to be clear on who I for sure don't want — Tim and Gary — than who I do. 

So I'll put it to the readers: What's your slate? And why?