Spring 2001 Home   Newsletters

Summer 2001

Fall 2001

President's Message (Maile Bay)
Lunch & Learn the Law
National Action Alert - Voting Rights for D.C. Citizens
Domestic Violence: Dual Arrest (Suzanne Meisenzahl)
Initiative & Referendum Study (Marian Wilkins)
Environment (Maile Bay)
Education (Mary Anne Raywid)
Campaign Finance (Laure Dillon)
Legislative Committee (Jean Aoki)
Nominating Committee
Two New Studies
League Local News - Honolulu (Pearl Johnson)
League Local News - Hawaii County (Marian Wilkins)
League Local News - Kauai (Carol Bain)

Environment

The legislature passed two pieces of legislation this year that have a positive impact on our environment.

1. Net Metering - This empowers people to use other sources of energy, and it permits those sources to reverse our electric meters so that we contribute energy to the system with sources such as wind and solar power.

2. Smart Growth - this law will look at protecting agricultural land and use the water in a comprehensive manner.

The hotel room tax almost helped to support State Parks, but the Legislature failed to pass a measure that would have allotted $4 million dollars annually for the next two years to the Dept. of Land and Natural Resources, Parks Division. This is a loss. DLNR only receives about $30 million in state funds, and another $30 million from other sources, to protect over 2 million acres, oversee our State parks, our archeological resources, our forest and aquatic resources, our trails, and more.

There has been a proliferation of the land trust movement, and we now have over twenty organizations that can privately hold land and conservation easements on land that can preserve, protect, and enhance our natural and cultural resources. This means we can conserve open space that is now fallow agricultural land if the landowner wants to keep it open. A landowner can take a tax deduction for agreeing not to put a second story on a home if it keeps the view plane open. Land trusts on the mainland have conserved over 1.4 million acres.

Maile Bay

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