Let’s look at a few facts about our County Council. We have paid Mike Molina about $180,000 in salary so far. What have we gotten? Well, he has been working on a county outdoor lighting bill. Oct 19, The Maui News quoted him as saying “Some progress could be made by the end of this year.” That’s all, folks. In his four-year tenure, this is Council Member Molina’s only bill, and it still isn’t finished.

With Dain Kane, we have paid $250,000 in salary and he gave us a 17 percent increase in rental property taxes which was passed directly on to the 60 percent of Maui’s people who rent, a 5-cent-a-gallon increase in our gasoline tax while radically decreasing public transit system funding needed to give us a real bus system, and a restaurant smoking ban. Finally, he gave us his forcing of Makena Resort rezoning which took up over 100 hours of the council’s time in the middle of the budget deliberations, and during the worst affordable housing crisis our county has ever seen. He made the decision that it was more important to push through high-end housing and help his campaign donors than to alleviate the problems of Maui County’s citizens by using this huge chunk of time to rewrite the affordable housing laws.

Time for getting our money’s worth with new people? I think so.

Elisabeth Tocata

Kahului