Musings: The Seamy Underbelly

Found another hunting dog this morning, or rather, he found me as Koko and I stood and gazed out at the mountains. He came up to us, all friendly and skinny, with a hunting collar on his neck and a few gashes on his face and legs, so we all walked together to the hunters’ mailbox to see if anybody had posted a missing dog.

No one had, so I left a note in there with his description and was headed back home, with him sharing Koko’s leash, when I ran into my neighbor Andy. Am I doing the right thing? I asked, as it’s always tough to know if you should just leave a hunting dog or call the shelter to come get him.

We agreed he was skinny enough that he looked like he’d been lost a few days, so Andy lent me a leash and I brought him back to my house, fed him and now we’re waiting for the pick up.

Went up to Hanalei last night to pick up my tax returns and got to talking to my accountant about how it didn’t feel so great to be paying taxes so we could kill people in Iraq and he assured my taxes weren’t enough to even buy a big shell, but maybe they’d pay for some Bibles to send over there….

A friend just stopped by to drop off some gardenias and said two undercover cops in a nice new black pick-up truck, unmarked save for county license plates, had dropped a load of riot gear — plexiglass shields and other stuff — at PMRF. Apparently they train in the National Guard building at the base, and also have a firing range on the beach over there, which Bob Sato got some grief for filming.

Anyway, he told me that Mark Begley, the new deputy police chief who had charged that Kauai cops were involved in drug trafficking and was beaten up by two cops a while back, had been in SWAT training and I said, oh, so maybe the cops need the riot gear to protect them from other cops….

Meanwhile, The Garden Island reports today that the Council — or at least, JoAnn Yukimura and Tim Bynum — are continuing to question what Planning Department Ian Costa plans to do with his agency’s proposed $2.48 million budget, seeing as how the department hasn’t been doing much planning.

He [Bynum] noted that few priorities identified in the county’s expensive General Plan, a vision for the entire island, have been implemented since it was completed eight years ago.

JoAnn and Tim also were concerned about possible conflicts of interest within the department after it was revealed that Costa, who is an architect and not a planner, intended to hire a planner who also works for Grove Farm.

Costa said it is never a “conscious decision” to hire planners to work for the county that also work for private developers. 

“To some degree, I rely on professionals being professional,” he said.

Now isn’t that cozy.

While we’re on the topic of Grove Farm, I happened to be talking to a USGS hydrologist yesterday for a story, and he mentioned that GF wants to transport water from the windward side over to Maha`ulepu — you know, the place where they’re doing their “altruisitic ag park.”

He didn’t think it was quite right to start farming at Maha`ulepu at the expense of farmers in Kilauea and Moloaa, which is where the water would come from.

And gee, just think, if the “altruisitic ag park” doesn’t work out, GF will have a water source for resort development in Maha`ulepu. As you may recall, they got approval to use surface water for their Lihue-Hanama`ulu development.

Ah, life on Kauai.