What I Hope To Accomplish For My Community

Mōʻiliʻili is a great place to live and we can make it better. We will make it better. We have to make it better.

Mōʻiliʻili is poised for greatness despite the current conditions we find ourselves in:
1.) currently serving as a dumping group,
2.) excessive amounts of graffiti on both public and private property, and
3.) a rapidly-growing homeless-ness problem.

I recently attended a meeting of a few business leaders in the area. After the meeting was over, and before I left, I was asked, "what do you think we can do to help our businesses? We help our member businesses, but how do you think we can help more Mōʻiliʻili businesses?"

I was excited to have been asked that question and Iʻm equally excited to write about that today in this blog. Unfortunately, I cannot go into too much detail at this time. Itʻs late, and I need to do a few things before going to sleep. In short, I would like see more Mōʻiliʻili businesses thriving. However, I have prioritized what I will contribute to Mōʻiliʻili Matters and what I can contribute will be prioritized in the manner that I described above.

My priorities, in exact order, are to help:
1.) reduce illegal garbage dumping,
2.) effectively, sustainably, and pro-actively address the graffiti issue, and
3.) support and advocate for infrastructural improvement.

I already began working on priority no.# 1, illegal garbage dumping. My contribution to this effort (an effort already embarked upon by several others) is to take several approaches. My first approach was to involve the largest landowner in Mōʻiliʻili, the Kamehameha Schools. This approach can be verified in several ways, perhaps most notably at this time by the September 27, 2009, Honolulu Advertiser article on Mōʻiliʻili Matters. The Kamehameha Schools and I partnered to send out postcards to all Mōʻiliʻili & McCully residents.

Mōʻiliʻili Matters provides additional information that could not fit on the postcard. There are other approaches that need to complement past approaches and the Kamehameha Schools postcard approach.
The next prioritized issue I hope to address is the graffiti that is rampant in our neighborhood. Graffiti, much like our trash issues, is not new to our community. It is unclear to me whether graffiti has been reduced. What I do know is this, through the efforts of concerned neighbors like Ron Lockwood, Greg Cuadra, and a number of others, there is a twice-a-year event that is focused on painting over existing graffiti. This happens in April and November of each year. As we continue to meet twice a year to take back our communities and paint over graffiti, I hope to introduce additional methods for dealing with this.

Assuming I can contribute meaningfully to the litter and graffiti issues, I want to help develop a plan to get the City of Honolulu to take a more active role in improving our infrastructure.

I would love to hear from anyone who might be interested in these same issues. Feel free to send me an e-mail.