Taxpayers will pay
for county’s mistake
The County of Hawaii recently opened the bids for the rehabilitation of the Hilo Wastewater Treatment Plant. The three accepted bids were in between $367 million and $444 million.
Nan Inc. is the lowest bidder at $367 million.
The county solicited bids for essentially the same project in 2023. Nan Inc. was the sole bidder at $177 million, but the county mysteriously canceled the solicitation and decided to rebid.
Their decision really grinds my gears. They could’ve done the necessary upgrades to this facility for $190 million less if they decided to proceed with Nan’s original bid.
The county’s decision to rebid has painted themselves into a corner. They have to move forward with this project regardless of the cost or face the looming environmental disaster and subsequent political blowback.
The citizens of Hawaii County will be ultimately footing the bill for the county’s costly mistake.
Aaron Stene
Kailua-Kona
Who will toss Putin
out the window?
Vladimir Putin’s grandiose plan of having his Army prance into Ukraine to be greeted with open arms failed from the beginning and hasn’t amounted to much in the past 2 1/2-plus years, losing upwards of 3,000 troops per month in Ukraine, known affectionately as “the meat grinder.”
Russia has a physical dividing line known as the Ural Mountains, where west is the Russia most think of, the European half. This is where Putin does not want bodies of his fallen army returned, so he tends to recruit mainly east of the Urals, where the economy is low and recruiters promise a large bonus and claim they won’t see the front lines.
From every indication, many of the newly minted troops don’t get to live long enough to see the money, but if they’re lucky, some of their families might get some.
Putin is waging a war of attrition and has no concern for the loss of hundreds of thousands, so long as it eventually places all of Ukraine in the palm of his hand and the Black Sea is his. Vlad just wants to be tsar of Imperial Russia.
Putin has accepted weapons from Iran and North Korea and is grousing about Ukraine using western longer-range weapons against military targets in Russia, but his long range so-called precision strikes have targeted a considerable amount of civilian infrastructure, most uncool.
There have been “illegal” referendums floated in eastern Russia for their region to break away from the European half, as many of the Asiatics do not identify with the Europeans to the west. Putin’s afraid of NATO, but it was formed to protect western Europe from Soviet expansion.
His oligarchs are sanctioned and unhappy. Will they be the ones throw him out of the window?
Dave Kisor
Pahoa
