Posted on: Sunday, September 2, 2001
After Deadline
Brainstorming ways to improve our lives
By John Simonds
Advertiser Reader Representative
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| Editorial board guest members are, from left to right, Michael D. Herb, Darilyn Fernandez, Advertiser editorial cartoonist Dick Adair, Richard Marshall, Ted Gibson and Penny Mueh.
The Honolulu Advertiser |
The challenge of Hawai'i leadership and how The Advertiser exercises that role occupied the attention of community members at the newspaper's latest round of editorial board meetings.
The Advertiser's second group of rotating guest members has completed its four-week tour of Wednesday-morning sessions with regular board members at the newspaper. Community members included:
• Michael D. Herb of Hawaii Business Connections, an active small-business consultant with a full plate of interests and a menu of entrepreneurial plans to make Hawai'i a more successful world commerce center.
• Penny Mueh, a rental agent at Ko Olina, who has run her own bookkeeping/secretarial business, was assistant manager for a shopping center, has loaded planes at the airport and crewed on a charter fishing boat. She has lived in Hawai'i 34 years.
• Ted Gibson, a Kailua retiree, formerly an engineering supervisor with Zenith in Chicago; a math teacher and learning motivator (author of "Math to the Max"); active letter writer, Windward community volunteer and humorist with observations based on 28 years in the Islands.
• Richard Marshall, a Navy lieutenant (junior grade) serving with Destroyer Squadron 31 here, a resident of Hawai'i for three years, formerly of northern Ohio.
• Darilyn Fernandez, marketing events manager for The Advertiser, a lifelong Hawai'i resident.
Visiting members shared sweeping and specific suggestions on a variety of issues, ranging from Hawai'i's global growth potential to the gritty matters of schoolchildren with special needs and how to safeguard roads against speeders.
Traffic was a beginning and ending topic, discussed as a congestion problem at the first meeting and the subject of tragedy at the last. Whether an inconvenience to commuters or the cause of death and injury through reckless driving, traffic is a Hawai'i concern that defies snap solutions.
In the end, it proved to be a good discussion example — as did problems of public school adherence to the Felix consent decree — of how a newspaper strives to offer community guidance through editorials that seek intelligent ground between the extremes of hand-wringing desperation and table-pounding bravado.
Members seemed cautious about legislation to seize the vehicles of motorists convicted of racing them on highways. Other suggestions included requiring conspicuous markings on cars or trucks of motorists convicted of traffic offenses.
Tougher enforcement of existing speed laws and visible deterrents — more police officers, cameras, motorcycles and patrol cars with their blue lights glowing — posted near dangerous stretches and intersections are immediately workable possibilities among other possible legal, technical or social solutions. Families of young drivers and marketers of high-speed vehicles also must bear responsibility, members agreed. Thursday's editorial responded to views shared at the session.
Hawai'i's frustration in meeting terms of the Felix consent decree (requiring public schools to teach students with special education and mental health needs, whatever the cost) has prompted a variety of questions and advice for state officials and the schools, as well as the newspaper.
Members suggested exploring "best practices" in other states and modeling programs on successes of private schools for the learning-disabled here. They agreed that delegating the Felix issues to the federal court for a deadline-driven solution (a legal scenario for other tough problems) had become a tempting community option.
Discussion of Hawai'i leadership included linking the "micro-kuleanas" or isolated "silos" of expertise in team strategies, making greater use of talented individuals in university, business and military communities; learning from other cities' economic recovery experiences and pursuing Hawai'i's "Gateway of the Pacific" destiny as a way of growing the state's economy.
How to reflect the cultures and interests of a community, and also serve as a leader of it, was a challenge raised by a visiting member. Questions also surfaced about whether medical and sports tourism, tropical agriculture, international conferences, computer technology or other fields offer the best chances for Hawai'i's future.
Visiting members praised The Advertiser for publishing last Sunday's Focus section article about a paramedic unable to convert his Mainland training and experience into a job here. Several saw it as an example of Hawai'i's shortcomings as a community and as a competitor.
Ideas for overcoming Hawai'i's resistance to change and problems in coping with Mainland time differences included a novel proposal to realign the international dateline, moving it to the east of Hawai'i, so that the 50th state would be a day ahead of the Mainland instead of three to six hours behind.
Though different in interests from the first group, the latest members shared a kindred feeling, mutually expressed, that their participation time passed too quickly. Another group begins its four-week rotation next Wednesday.
Christmas here and there
Earth has several Christmas Islands, as some readers noticed in Tuesday's story about 438 unwanted refugees seeking to land on Australia's Christmas Island, 1,550 miles west of Darwin and 220 miles south of Java. An Advertiser locator map showed a more familiar Christmas Island, due south of Hawai'i and just above the equator, different from the place mentioned in the article. An Associated Press map in Wednesday morning editions identified the correct site. Another — and unrelated — Christmas Island is in Nova Scotia, and a group of islands, Islas Christmas, are in southern Chile near Cape Horn.
John Simonds, Advertiser reader representative, can be reached at jsimonds@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8033.
