Procedure established for land lease rents

Jerome Manis' Oct. 3 commentary, "Leasehold trend hurts small firms," describes the feudal land system that anyone with access to a history textbook can learn.

This does not apply in Hawai'i. Land leases in Hawai'i for commercial and condominium use are typically for a 65-year term with 30 years fixed or known rent. There may be a step up or increase every 10 years within the 30-year fixed term. A 15 to 25 percent increase per 10-year term is typical.

These leases are all long-term leases to allow the lessee to finance his improvements over the fixed term of the lease. After 30 years, the improvements should be paid for.

After the first 30 years, the lease agreement calls for renegotiation or arbitration of the land lease rent for every 10-year period. This rent would be fixed for every 10-year period. If the parties cannot agree, arbitration is used to determine the new land rent.

In arbitration, the landowner selects and pays for an arbitrator, the lessee selects and pays for an arbitrator and both arbitrators select a third arbitrator. The decision of two out of three arbitrators is final. The arbitration procedure is codified in Hawai'i state law and is agreed to by both landowner and lessee in the lease agreement.

It is important to emphasize here that the lessee agreed to the arbitration procedure. The landowner with long-term leases cannot arbitrarily raise rents.

Business owners know about contracts

Jerome G. Manis is like a big baby throwing a tantrum because he didn't get what he wants. Only this "big baby" did some studying in social studies and came up with some convenient archaic excuses to take people's rightful legal legacies away from them. Then he found other disgruntled "big babies" in the playpen to join him to get "their" way.

He should go back to school and learn terms like contracts, leasehold, fee, rent, etc. Instead of playing into this "Prince Valiant" imagination and partial knowledge of history, he should realize that the lessee went into a signed, legal, binding contract with full knowledge of the terms with the lessor. The small-business person should not be in business in the first place if he does not understand simple concepts. Mr. Manis, small-business people are not stupid.

If Manis' legacy was his ancestors' "'aina," I'm sure his hissy fits to make legal contracts unsanctimonious would be different. Would he have his land illegally taken away without a fuss? Mr. Manis, you are an American citizen, not a medieval serf getting hot oil poured on you while you torch some castle that you thought should be yours. It's time for you to sit in the corner for "time out" and get a dictionary, at least. What other misconceptions did you teach at Western Michigan University?

Bainum's campaign started the negativity

I am sick and tired of people accusing Mufi Hannemann of a negative campaign. I distinctly remember that the Bainum campaign started all this negativity.

Has everyone forgotten Duke Bainum's expensive brochure mailer at the beginning of this campaign? This mailer emphasized Mr. Hannemann's supposedly illegal campaign contributions when Mr. Hannemann had already been cleared of all those charges. I wish I had kept that mailer, but I was so angry, I threw it in the garbage where it belonged.

I will support Mufi Hannemann in this election and any future ones he chooses. He is honest, experienced and intelligent — intelligence being a rarity in many of our politicians past and present in this state. I will also encourage everyone I know to do the same.

Rental firm helped salvage our vacation

We were riding in a cab from our hotel to the Pride of Aloha cruise ship on Sept. 26 for a one-week cruise. The cab driver put all our luggage in the trunk and tied it down. When we got to the dock, we found one piece of luggage had fallen out of the trunk.

The cab driver and my husband backtracked the route but found no luggage. We were very upset, as this was my husband's carry-on with medicine, etc., in it. The cab driver said sorry, that this had never happened before. This incident ruined the first day of our trip.

Three hours later I got a call on my cell phone that A Big Kahuna Motorcycle Tours & Rentals found a piece of luggage. After numerous calls back and forth to Big Kahuna and the cab company, the cab company said we would have to pay to have the luggage brought to the ship. To make a long story short, Big Kahuna stayed open till we could get a cab to pick up the luggage. We would like to publicly thank them for their kindness.

When we got off the ship, we called them, and Larry said a mailman found the luggage in the street and didn't know what to do with it so he gave it to Larry. Thank you, Larry.

Spoiled ballots could have made difference

Reading The Advertiser's article on the human errors causing close to 10,000 spoiled ballots in the primary got my attention ("Glitches caused by human errors," Sept. 20).

In my race, I targeted the group of individuals who were not very likely to go out and vote. They would maybe be first-time voters and not as knowledgeable in the voting process.

Your article also stated that these spoiled ballots would not have made a difference in the end results of candidates to be moved on to the general election in November. Correction: I would have been the only candidate that these spoiled ballots could have made a difference for. Those 10,000 votes if earmarked for me would have given me the 10 percent needed to be the first and only nonpartisan ever to be bumped into the general election. Just a thought ... huh?

I am thankful to the 518 citizens who made the effort to pave the way for more choice in upcoming years. I appreciate your support. Congratulations to all the thoroughbred politicians who have won their races.

Cheney represents what is wrong with us

On Monday, I saw a photo on your front page of a young mother, a soldier, kissing her infant goodbye because she was being shipped out to Iraq. I thought, "This is so wrong."

On Tuesday, I watched Dick Cheney, in the debate with John Edwards, act as if he were talking about real issues, real lives and the "real world." I'm sure I'm not the only one who was wondering how we've come to have someone so disingenuous as one of our country's leaders. Clearly, he is the leader behind the scenes. After watching our president in debate with John Kerry, spouting sound bites and slogans, I was convinced. It will be more of the same, corporate greed on a global scale, our children's lives as payment in blood, if these two are re-elected.

We learned on Sept. 11 that all life is precious; we felt compassion on a national scale. We were given the task of examining the true meaning of life and our purpose on this Earth. The true meaning and power of that event have been horrifyingly corrupted. We must go back and find ourselves in the rubble before we do any further damage in the world and in our hearts.

Mayor messing up on streets, Natatorium

What's with this mayor? Your Sept. 29 editorial, "Flood of new cars focuses transit talk," tells it like it is. So what does Mayor Harris do? He makes the streets smaller and more congested — streets like the Ala Wai and Kuhio, for example.

Now he wants to rebuild the Natatorium. What a waste of taxpayers' money. Millions of dollars have already been spent on areas that are now falling apart. What can we do about it?

Political connections

Martha Stewart in jail, Ken Lay on the street. Nice to have W. in your corner.

Vote-count system has withstood the test of time

There is at least one thing that all adult citizens in our country are equally entitled to regardless of gender, ethnicity, natural origin, financial status, etc.: our right to vote.

It is not enough that we exercise our right to vote. We need the certainty that our votes are counted correctly. We need the certainty that whoever is elected to any office was legitimately elected by the people.

Nationwide, there is much controversy over the security of Direct Recording Electronic systems, which quite a few experts claim, like computers, can be hacked or even programmed to produce desired vote-count results. Other experts attest to the security of these systems.

Wherever the truth lies, we feel it is only prudent to err on the side of caution. The vote-count systems industry has the technology to produce systems that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible, and indications are that the demand for such secure systems will make them available in the 2006 elections.

Hawai'i has a system, the optical scan or mark sense system, that has withstood the test of time, even a major recount of all ballots in the 1998 general election under close supervision. It uses paper ballots that can be recounted and even undergo manual auditing of randomly selected precincts and races to compare with the machine count results, a practice the Elections Office has instituted as a regular check in each election.

This year, for the first time, Hawai'i has introduced, in addition to the optical sense system, an electronic system, Hart Intercivic's eSlate Electronic Voting System. This system is of great value to certain handicapped people. It gives them the independence and the privacy that all voters are entitled to. These include the blind, non-English-speaking voters, people who cannot read, etc. It does lack the paper trail to make the ballots recountable.

For the rest of us, we have a choice: try the new, or stick with what we know we can trust, until such time when the state can move to one system, one that will be secure, accurate and recountable with the added feature of assuring accessibility for all. We urge everyone to use the system we know we can trust.

ADA-accessible plan a mistake

The state is spending about $3.2 million on contract work at all (25 plus) of our state boating facilities to meet the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Unfortunately, this work will reduce the total number of toilets, urinals and showers at these boating facility restrooms by roughly 50 percent and will increase the number of restroom users.

Everyone knows that the fixture capacities of our boating facility restrooms need to be increased, not cut back. We support the ADA program to make our state boating program accessible for our disabled people and hasten to point out that the ADA is not responsible for this ridiculous restroom situation. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources (previous administration) imposed this situation on itself by:

• Electing to place all of its boating facilities in their DLNR transition plan, thereby committing all of them to be made ADA accessible and thus incurring costs for making more facilities accessible than the ADA rules and guidelines require.

• Making all of the existing boating facility restrooms ADA accessible without expanding their existing floor space. This is what caused the reduction in the total number of toilets, urinals and showers (e.g., because ADA toilet stalls take up more space, existing urinals, showers and perhaps one of the toilets would be removed, resulting in some men's rooms retaining only the ADA toilet, and women's restrooms would similarly go from two toilets to one, etc.).

The ADA rules do not require the state to make each of its existing facilities accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities. It only requires that the state boating program, "when viewed in its entirety," be made accessible to individuals with disabilities.

We have asked Gov. Linda Lingle to help postpone the ongoing rush to award contracts to start these projects by the end of this year. This would allow time to re-evaluate the requirements of the DLNR transition plan that are causing this problem, and to amend the plan as necessary.

Our recommendations were that only the most suitable boating facilities on each island be selected for alteration contracts to make the state boating program ADA accessible; and that the funds "saved" by reducing the number of contracts awarded be used to further modify the restrooms of the selected facilities to restore (or increase) their original restroom capacities.

You can help by calling the governor's office to ask her to help postpone the awarding of contracts that are implementing the boating facility portion of the DLNR transition plan, and to support the Save Our Toilets effort.