• Updating flood-zone maps and expanding public-education campaigns.

• Installing and maintaining alarm sirens and providing around-the-clock alert staff.

• Constructing additional shelter space.

• Retrofitting public shelters to better protect from flying debris.

• Developing residential safe-room design standards and designs in co-operation with Hawai'i's engineering and building industry.

• Providing 35 percent matching grants for the public's 65 percent investment in residential safe rooms, hurricane clips, window and door protective storm panels, better anchoring, or a higher wind-resistant level of roofing and re-roofing.

By this coming fiscal year, July 1, nearly $50 million the hurricane fund has generated in interest will have been transferred to the General Fund, as required by the law. Not a nickel has been spent on disaster preparedness. The Disaster Emergency Preparedness Act would allocate a small part of that interest for helping to keep you safe.

The resultant economic activity — homeowners would have to spend $8 million under this bill before the state's $4 million would be released — would replace the lost interest from the fund.

The purpose of the HHRF was to lessen the impacts of disasters. But, strangely, that very fact threatens the approval of the bill because the public, many politicians and much of the media have been misled. From the Cayetano years, and continuing to this day, HHRF caretakers have been stonewalling against the greater public good. They themselves voted unanimously for preparedness (mitigation) in 2002, but now spread a half-story that keeping the fund intact, even at the sacrifice of not investing in disaster preparedness, is a good thing — even though the opposite is the truth.

They have led us to think that it is dangerous to touch the fund. But the sad fact is that for the past four years, all the HHRF is being used for is as an interest-generating cash cow for the General Fund.

This year, 66 out of 76 lawmakers have seen through the HHRF smoke screen because it was finally realized that:

• The hurricane fund is not for the next disaster because the HHRF agency is inactive and there are no policyholders.

• Preparedness is mandated by hurricane fund law and has been since its inception in 1993.

In the always tight budget deliberations, legislators determined that a tiny part of the hurricane fund is the highest, best and, in fact, only sensible solution to the problem. We cannot go on with our do-nothing-to-prepare approach. Mitigation never has made the Cayetano or Lingle budget wish lists. Both governors have said that proposals put forth from 2002 to 2004 weren't broad enough, and administration directors testified often this last session against any use of the interest or the fund itself for public safety.

Surely we have not forgotten the devastation of hurricanes 'Iwa and 'Iniki and the scores killed in the 1946 tsunami. Please let the governor know that her signing the Disaster Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005 is critical for our safety.