Posted on: Sunday, October 28, 2001

Editorial
School repair backlog first place to spend

While the final outlines of the special session's emergency package of legislation remain unclear, some elements are in place.

Lawmakers have rather soundly rejected Gov. Ben Cayetano's proposal for a massive "big jolt" program of new government construction spending. There will be some new spending, but nothing of the magnitude proposed by Cayetano. The focus, instead, appears to be on tax relief and economic stimulation.

In part, this reflects legislative frustration with the executive branch over its handling of construction projects already on the books. There are easily a billion dollars worth of capital improvements already authorized by the Legislature and perhaps even bonded.

If there is to be big new spending on construction projects, lawmakers feel, it should be on their list of projects. The problem with this is that many of these projects, however worthy, were never going to get funded. The Legislature traditionally sends more of these district-by-district pork-barrel proposals to the governor than he could ever fund or build.

That gives him the luxury of picking and choosing.

There is a way out of this CIP standoff. There is a file full of construction work waiting to go that belongs neither to the governor nor the Legislature. These are the hundreds of millions of dollars of backlogged repair and maintenance work for our public schools.

Two respected University of Hawai'i professors argue in separate articles on the first page of today's Focus section that the immediate need for Hawai'i's troubled economy is a big blast of government spending. If that is so, there is no better place to do that spending than on our public schools.

This would be far more than a matter of creating jobs, maintaining paychecks and keeping money circulating. It would also be a huge (and far too long deferred) investment in the future of education.

Cut the red tape. Identify the projects that can get going right away. Hire the contractors, subcontractors and others who can do the work and get going.

There is no need to wait. Our schools need fixing in a lot of areas. But there's nothing wrong with starting with the basics: the physical plant.