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Tuesday, March 1, 2016

To all Kauai County council members, HELP! 'Glenn Mickens' (Special Kauai county edition of dakinetalk blog)

Glenn Mickens has lived on Kauai  with his wife Ruth for the last 26 years. Born July 26, 1930 in Wilmar, California, USA) was a pitcher in Major League Baseball. He pitched in four games (two of which were starts) for the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers. He also played for five years in Japan, from 1959 until 1963 for the Kintetsu Buffaloes. There, he compiled a record of 45–53 with a 2.54 ERA.  Glenn also  served in the Army for 2 years and coached baseball at UCLA for 25 years. 
Last but not least Glenn would really like to see Kauai give the county manager style of Government a chance.

To all Kauai County council members, HELP!


Mr. Mickens is locally known
as one of Kauai county's
political watchdogs.
Mahalos Glenn!
I know I am being repetitive about this North shore, South shore, and East side transit feasibility study however I get no answers from the Kauai  county council  or from the administration. I will continue my quest for answers. 

 I understand that under council rules you cannot answer me directly/  I would  none the less appreciate the courtesy of your possibly answering me or referring to my questions when the meeting is called back to order. 

 I want to know why Kauai county keeps hiring consultants to tell us that bikes, buses, shuttles and walking are the answers to solving our traffic problems? With all due respect to these consultants who are obviously hired to tell the administration what they want to hear they completely fail to give us answers to our major problem--traffic. 


Over and over I repeat that the mass of the people will never abandon their vehicles for any of their so called solutions. They have not been able to show you any municipality such as ours (an island like Kauai with 70 thousand people) that has a system such as they propose that is successfully used. 

You obviously know that the contraflow system some wise engineer put into use years ago works and works well. It is proof that if we had one more lane in that road traffic could be lessened just as it is with the contraflow lanes. By paving and using the cane haul roads all over the island for alternate routes, traffic will never disappear, but congestion might.  Yes, our highways are state controlled but this is one island and we shouldn't have to point the finger at the state and them point the finger at us. We should have coordination with both entities. But where is the leadership? Leadership that a county manager could give us?

Shouldn't long range plans or pilot projects be done that show statistical success rates and not just speculative forecasts with no facts to back it up?

 We did a pilot shuttle project on the North shore and it was a complete failure. Private enterprise tried to make it go and  not enough riders were available to make it profitable. It needed to be subsidized but the hotels. The county when asked said, "no" and thus it folded. I have said many times we also did the pilot program with free bus rides for 1500 county employees and only 50 people used it--another failure. 

So before we spend thousands of more dollars on consultants to tell us fantasy instead of facts lets hire people to factor in what is going to be done for the driving public which is here to stay. With a county manager we could solve problems and not watch them get worse by the day---for locals as well as visitors.




P.S.
Check out Glenn's Wikipedia page;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Mickens

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