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Kady Pascual

Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

At least she don’t gotta worry about giving her car a wash!

CatsuMatsu89

<title>Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Morning kine action</title>

Today’s social media find comes from @CatsuMatsu89, with an accidental car wash.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Morning kine action

At least she don’t gotta worry about giving her car a wash!  Make sure you follow @CatsuMatsu89 on Instagram!

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Michael Brestovansky

Crime & Courts

The woman charged with murder after allegedly fatally shooting a man in Kailua last weekend was turned in by her father the day of the event, according to a Honolulu police report.

Hilinaikailimakualopali Keeno, 24, was charged on Sept. 30 with second-degree murder, carrying a firearm in the commission of a felony and improperly keeping a pistol or revolver. She is being held pending a $1 million bail.

An HPD document — which was submitted on Tuesday, Sept. 29, to the Honolulu Circuit Court to establish probable cause to detain Keeno without a warrant — states that Keeno’s father brought her to the Kailua Police Station less than an hour after 

was declared dead of a gunshot wound to the neck in the Kailua Target parking lot.

The report states that HPD special duty officers, who were working security at the Kailua Fall Festival that day, were called to assist with a group of festivalgoers involved in an argument at about 8:26 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Officers escorted the group out of the festival and watched them head toward the Target parking lot, only to hear another altercation begin among the group minutes later.

During this new altercation, a pop resembling a gunshot was heard, and officers saw two men — one of whom was Keeno’s brother — assaulting a third. Both assailants were placed under arrest for disorderly conduct, while officers discovered Malone on the ground, covered in blood.

[{"type":"text","text":"Malone was declared dead at the scene by 8:43 p.m."}]

At 9:39 p.m., Keeno was brought to the Kailua Police Station by her father, who told police she was involved in the incident and wanted to provide a statement in the presence of her attorney.

According to the HPD report, no interview was conducted with Keeno that night. Subsequently, HPD sought photographs and videos from the public to help piece together the event and identify the shooter.

On Sept. 28, another witness identified Keeno as the shooter, and HPD confirmed that Keeno has one firearm registered in her name, a Sig Sauer P365 handgun.

[{"type":"text","text":"Following this, Keeno was placed under arrest."}]

Keeno’s preliminary hearing, when she will plead guilty or not guilty to the charges, will take place Monday, Oct. 5. She remains in custody.

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<title>Woman charged in Kailua shooting turned in by father</title>

Hilinakailimakualopali Keeno faces a $1 million bail for a second-degree murder charge.

Woman charged in Kailua shooting turned in by father

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A. Kam Napier

Columnists

Government & Politics

Aloha State Daily received a press release today from a Mainland-based national interest group, U.S. Term Limits (USTL), letting us know that “2026 Hawai‘i state senate candidate, Wallyn Christian (District 13) has committed support for term limits on Congress by signing the term limits convention pledge.”

Why does this matter to that organization? “(USTL, the leader in the national, non-partisan movement to limit terms for elected officials, is gathering support from state lawmakers across the nation,” the statement says. “Its mission is to get 34 states to apply for an amendment proposal convention specific to term limits on Congress.”

Term-limiting Congress is a popular idea, and USTL cites a 

 that, “An overwhelming majority of adults (87%) favor limiting the number of terms that members of Congress are allowed to serve. This includes a majority 56% who strongly favor this proposal, just 12% are opposed.”

The idea emerges often for local politicians, as well. Civil Beat has found public support for term limits to be as high as 70% in a 2018 poll of likely voters, a stat Honolulu Civil Beat resurfaced 

 of the lawmakers themselves to see where they stand on the idea of limiting their own time in office. “Nearly half of House members and more than a third of senators say they support term limits. There are enough undecideds in both chambers to give it a good shot if they held their position for two years,” CB found.

Respectfully, all of these people are wrong. Well intentioned, but they're aiming term limits at the wrong people.

I mean, I totally understand where the frustration is coming from. We elect people, nationally and locally, then are disappointed in their results. We could end their terms ourselves by simply not reelecting these people and yet obviously a lot of the people who say they want term limits do something very odd: They seem to reelect the lousy politicians they say they want to term limit.

You want to limit someone’s term? You’re just a month away from your next opportunity to vote for someone else!

So we’ve always had the power to fire politicians with every election, but don’t, then remain convinced that what we need is more turnover in government to make it more efficient, effective and responsive. Somebodies’ terms need limiting, but who?

Easy: The workforce. The bureaucrats. See, I want term limits, too, but I want them on the people staffing all the departments and agencies that we’re perpetually frustrated with. 

Consider, to cite just one example, how many different mayors you’ve seen over the past 20 or 30 years promise to reform the departments of planning and permitting in each county. The mayors have term limits. They come and go. Have any of them succeeded at this reform?

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi has done more than any predecessor but there’s a long way still to go.

How many Hawai‘i governors — term-limited governors — have promised Hawai‘i a public education second to none? Which of them succeeded? Who is still in place, immune to reform?

What happens in real life is, candidates make bold promises of reform, we elect them, then they announce bold plans for reform and those plans run headfirst into a culture of unfirable civil servants shielded by union protections. These folks don’t even have to noisily and aggressively oppose the reform, all they have to do is … not do it. And wait. Four years later, or eight years later, their antagonist is gone, the staff remains, with its culture of job security over excellence safely intact.

[{"type":"text","text":"We, the taxpayers and voters, then sit around wondering what happened."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Two Hawai‘i’s"}]

What’s happened is simple: Since statehood, Hawai‘i’s people have steadily split into two camps, those who work for government and everybody else. The appeal of Government Hawai‘i is the security and benefits — lifelong employment, if you want it, totally protected from market forces and competition, with solid benefits like healthcare and retirement, paid for by the rest of us in Real Hawai‘i.

If you think the security and the bennies of government jobs are a trade-off to compensate for low pay, guess again. Government Hawai‘i earns more than Real Hawai‘i.

The annual average wage of a non-government job in Hawai‘i is 

 from the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

The average annual wage in state government? 

What does Real Hawai‘i get in return? One of the highest tax burdens in America for one thing, and then very little to brag about in high-quality government service. (

I would say that that two Hawai‘i’s have hardened into opposing camps, except that’s not exactly true. Government Hawai‘i drives an Us vs Them dynamic, that was never clearer to me than it was during Covid, when Government Hawai‘i showed us that it will shut the rest of down for years at a time given the slightest opportunity. It will also protect itself first, at the expense of the public is supposedly serves, as we see in the lingering effects of the schools closing for so long. That policy made no one safer, but it did mess up the kids. (And have you noticed ever since then, Government Hawai‘i takes the day off for even bad weather like it never did before, while the rest of us soldier on with our work?)

Out here in Real Hawai‘i, we grumble but otherwise settle for apathy (i.e., low voter turnout) or outright flight to states where it feels like a good life is more possible. I don’t know who Government Hawai‘i is going to tax when the last of us moves to Vegas.

With all that in mind, term limits on government service seem like the one revolution we haven’t tried, haven’t even discussed, but should. Say 10, 15 years max, total lifetime employment in government at any level. We want people to stay long enough to learn the ropes and finish things they’ve started, not so long that they just settle in and kill time until retirement.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The upsides:"}]

Breaks up all the pockets of resistance to change. Turnover would occur systemwide, one person at a time, as they age out. Reformers at the top have a chance building support in the workforce among newer staff.

[{"type":"text","text":"Brings in new people and new ideas in government at every level."}]

Opens up more opportunities for Government Hawai‘i and Real Hawai‘i to trade places and live in each other’s worlds. This may be the biggest upside — more of us would get a chance to feel like we had a chance to change the system from the inside and deliver the service we’ve always wanted, while more of them would be forced to realize that Real Hawai‘i is something more than subjects to be ruled and tax cows to be milked.

Forces a revolution in how government hires. Using Mayor Blangiardi again as an example, he’s talked about how it took people six months on average to get hired by the City & County of Honolulu when he assumed office. 

, he had cut that down to three months. Compared to the speed at which the private sector can hire, that’s still an eternity, and that would have to change immediately to deal with the kind of turnover we need.

(To be fair, government is not alone on this front. In my decade at Pacific Business News, I heard executives at Hawai‘i’s larger companies talk endlessly about a labor shortage. At the same time, I knew plenty of talented people who could not land great jobs. Something is seriously broken in the hiring process, and I suspect HR, especially using automated keyword-based filters on resumes, is to blame. Make Direct Hiring by Managers Great Again!)

Loss of expertise, I suppose, but we’ve seen what the accumulated expertise gets us: A chief elections officer who thought a lauhala basket suited the dignity of a Hawai‘i electoral tie-breaker and ended getting his office sued — successfully — and 

. Scott Nago has worked at the Office of Election for nearly 26 years, almost 17 of those years as its chief election officer. As Civil Beat 

, it’s just about the only place he has ever worked in his life. Well, in the private sector, you can lose your job for bungling things so badly you get sued. Under my plan, the private sector is where he would’ve been sent years ago. Had someone else, perhaps with a wider range of life experience, been at the helm, maybe that person would've made better decisions.

[{"type":"text","text":"So, OK, there are no downsides."}]

Term limits on government service. If you like this idea, spread the word. We’d be moving a mountain to make it happen. But that’s got to be better than carrying the mountain of Government Hawai‘i on our shoulders forever.

A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.

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People take time out of their lives to participate in the democratic process by testifying before committee hearings. Too often, the committee isn't there.

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Pipikaula Corner: Invisible Legislators

It's not getting much media attention, but the private diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci have been published online by Sen. Rand Paul in advance of his hearings this week into Fauci and Covid-19. What they reveal across thousands of pages is man in love with the adulation he received, who privately knew that many of things he said publicly about the pandemic were wild exaggerations.

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Pipikaula Corner: Fauci revealed as fear-mongering, fame-loving fraud

<title>Pipikaula Corner: Limiting the wrong terms</title>

It's an election year, and some people are running on the popular idea that legislators and Congress should have term limits to prevent lifers from working the system. ASD Editor in Chief A. Kam Napier argues this is a great idea, with the wrong target. What if it's actually the government workforce itself that needs a term limit?

Pipikaula Corner: Limiting the wrong terms

De Soto 2025

DeSoto Brown

Hawai‘i History

Do you think about gas stations? Probably not much, until you notice that your vehicle’s fuel level is low, and you then stop at one near your home or your work. You vaguely assume gas stations have always been around and always will be. Of course that’s not true - at least that they’re always existed.

Petroleum is a natural substance produced by nature. It comes from ancient organic matter that’s been buried underground, under pressure, for millions of years. It can be burned, making it a fuel source, something that humanity continues to require increasing amounts of. But it wasn’t until the middle 1800s that anyone finally figured out that this could be done to any significant degree with the black stuff that seeped out of the ground in certain places. Gradually petroleum — oil — would come to replace wood, coal and other oils from natural sources as the go-to source to burn for power.

This development happened to conveniently coincide with the invention of the internal-combustion engines that were utilized for the first automobiles as they evolved in Europe and the USA, beginning in the 1880s. And it was gasoline in particular, which is just one of the liquids that can be refined from crude oil, that was the most useful.

The first two autos to be imported to the Hawaiian Islands arrived in 1899, and you would understandably assume that this meant that the suppliers of petroleum-based fuels like kerosene — the most useful at that time — would need to start supplying gasoline soon after. But you’d be wrong, because (perhaps surprisingly) those very early cars didn’t use it. How could that be? Simple - they were electric! That’s not a new technology, as you might think; it’s one of the first that was used for cars.

Obviously, though, it was gasoline power that would soon take over. In those very early days, though, there were no gas stations nor any gas pumps to fill up the tanks of automobiles. Gas was often delivered to retailers in large cans, from which the liquid was poured into smaller containers to eventually end up in cars. This was clearly a slow, cumbersome and inefficient process.

As automobile manufacturing exploded in the United States in the early 1900s, putting it ahead of every other nation’s per capita car ownership, the delivery of gas to individual vehicles was greatly improved with the system we use today: a large tank is installed underground, and electrically-powered pumps pull it up from below ground and then into the machines that use it. With Hawai‘i’s annexation by the USA being finalized in 1900, we naturally followed what was happening throughout the entire country, including automobile ownership and all its related activities.

It might be surprising that the first gas pumps weren’t placed as they are today. Instead, they were placed on sidewalks next to streets, meaning that cars stopped to get gas might be blocking other traffic. It took awhile for the next step to occur, which was to create a dedicated space off the streets for refueling to take place.

By the 1920s in Hawai‘i, the familiar gas station was in use. This was the same as we have today: a space with a building whose roof protects one or two islands on which several gas pumps are installed. The pump hoses and handles can be used for vehicles stopped on either side, which accommodates more cars at one time, and everything is moved safely off the street and away from traffic and pedestrians.

The oil companies that owned the gas stations often wanted two things for their facilities. First, they preferred to use a standardized architectural style that made their brand’s buildings quickly recognizable to motorists, in hopes of creating customer loyalty. This was particularly because, until the 1980s, there were no credit cards that could be used universally for any kind of purchase. Drivers had to carry a different credit card for each specific gas company, making them more likely to seek out a particular brand where they could charge their purchase. And secondly, oil companies also wanted their stations to be somewhat attractive, particularly in residential areas where neighbors might be critical of an industrial-looking structure.

A feature of gas stations for decades were the small colored triangular flags that fluttered from overhead ropes above the properties. In use since at least 1940 for special events, by the 1960s these flags were strung up continuously and were an easy way to spot a station as you approached. 

Into the early 2000s, motorists expected a number of free services to be provided for their cars each time they got gas. First, and most importantly, only employees actually pumped gas. This was partly because the process could be a little grimy and customers did not want to dirty their hands, but also because gasoline was so flammable — and so many people still smoked at that time — that allowing unsupervised handling of the fuel was potentially dangerous. But in addition, windshields were wiped while oil levels were checked under the hood. Tire pressures were confirmed, with air being added if required. As gas prices began to rise abruptly in the 1970s, though, stations began to cut back on such amenities and to gradually shift to self service exclusively.

Possibly the biggest change in the gas station business, however, was the complete abandonment of selling car parts (including batteries and tires) along with actually repairing vehicles. This had been a long-established part of the industry and customers often dropped off their cars for such work at their favorite station. The loss of this service was partly due to the increasing complexity of car engines, but possibly more important was the decision by oil companies to simplify their work - just stick to selling gas and drop all the other stuff. Today, the older station buildings that are still in use have long since repurposed their former service bays into convenience stores, and now gas customers are entirely on their own to fill their own vehicles.

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<title>How Hawai‘i got its gas stations</title>

Strange but true — at one time, horse-drawn carriages delivered supplies of gasoline around O‘ahu, and fuel pumps were often located by the side of the road for motorists running on empty. As gas-powered cars became more common, a new kind of building emerged in the Islands — the gas station. Guess which famous waterman owned one in Waikīkī!

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Morning kine action

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

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Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Morning kine action

Authors

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

More in Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

Enter for a chance to win tickets to see Disney’s live action adaptation of the animated film ‘Moana’

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