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Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"You can't go wrong with puppies and a baby..."}]

Smile 26 6 14

<title>Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026</title>

You can't go wrong with puppies and a baby...

Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

 You can&#039;t go wrong with puppies and a baby...

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Columnists

 in Civil Beat argues against nostalgia for and attachment to Hawaiʻi. 

He says that we’re suffering from a “Stay-Put Syndrome that exaggerates Hawaiʻi as a special place while demeaning and patronizing former islanders who choose to live elsewhere.”

This is a theme Milner’s been milking for a while.

In 2018, he visited Hawaiʻi folks living in a retirement home in 

. The quality of care and lower cost on the Mainland led them to move, though they kept their sentimental “artifacts” and continued to wear aloha attire.

“Sure, the pull of Hawai‘i is strong for kupuna,” he wrote back then. “But stories, song, and political oratory about ‘ohana and home should not conceal the fact that there are good reasons why people who lived their life in Hawai‘i decide to spend their pau hana years somewhere else.”

This is all well and good. We shouldn’t be criticizing people who choose to leave Hawaiʻi. And far be it from me to harangue Boomers as they retire to Oregon.

Perhaps retirees gathered to eat pastries at the Vineyard Zippy’s or sipping coffee at the Liliha McDonald’s really are savage toward their peers who left. But I have not once heard a Millennial express a similar sentiment. I’m happy for my high school classmates who left to raise families or to work careers on the Mainland.

What Milner misses in his analysis is that Hawaiʻi really does suck in a lot of ways. The cost of housing is high. Transit stinks. Homelessness and crime overwhelm many public spaces.

These problems are the result of policy decisions, many of them made long before I was born. If you make it illegal to build the housing people want, prices will rise. If you decide to build a “second city” that’s a 45-minute commute away from the actual city (hello, Kapolei!), you’re going to produce daily traffic. And if you have a habit of letting criminals off with a warning after they shoot heroin or defecate on a playground, your parks won’t be any fun for kids or seniors.

I can understand residents who feel hopeless. The near future doesn’t look promising.

Hawaiʻi’s population declined for eight years, and nobody thinks that tomorrow it will become a natalist paradise. Nor is Hawaiʻi going to build housing at a fever pace, despite Gov. Josh Green’s best efforts. And Hawaiʻi isn’t going to become Silicon Valley, no matter what its technology boosters say.

But arguing these points is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

We really can make life easier for large families. We can build housing. And we can improve on our ranking as the worst state to do business in. Not only can we; we should.

A year after Milner visited his friends in an Oregon retirement home, I was 28 years old, writing for Civil Beat, questioning whether a young person should 

. I recognized that while some chose to leave, others were forced to leave in large part because of the conditions they inherited.

“These people deserve a home which does not expel them,” I wrote. “And our leaders are responsible for maintaining that home.”

There’s nothing wrong with leaving a place and having fond memories of it. Milner thinks these memories are mirages, asserting that “the Stay-Put Syndrome tries to perpetuate a world that no longer exists and that in some ways never really existed at all.”

Nostalgia can be a lie, and memory always distorts. But there really was a better Hawaiʻi — and we can remember, if we choose to.

There were decades when growth in the state of Hawaiʻi outpaced national growth. There were decades when we built much more housing than we do today. And there were decades when families could afford to buy homes and raise lots of children. Those children could then start families of their own, and they could support mom and dad in retirement.

It’s true that this world no longer exists. But it’s wrong for Milner to say that this world never existed at all.

Such willful forgetting lets a whole generation off the hook for their leadership or lack thereof. And such willful forgetting blinds the present generation to the opportunity before them.

Hawaiʻi’s present problems are real, but they are not inevitable. They can be solved.

We can look to the past without nostalgia, but then we should move into the future without fear.

Hawaii flag

<title>The Hawaiʻi that Neal Milner says never existed</title>

Retirees in an Oregon care home keep their aloha shirts, but a Civil Beat columnist says the Hawaiʻi they remember was never real. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on why willful forgetting is the one thing we can’t afford.

The Hawaiʻi that Neal Milner says never existed

Yamachika Tom IMG 1913 Large

Tom Yamachika

Viewpoints

Crime & Courts

, passed by the last legislature and set to go into effect in July 2027, was billed as a workaround of 

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), that would essentially prohibit corporations, LLCs, and other “artificial entities” from spending money or doing anything else, directly or indirectly, to support or oppose any political candidate or ballot measure.

"To apparently work around what is plain in the case, this bill relies on an untested legal theory using an unprecedentedly dangerous mechanism — the 

 revocation of all corporate powers in the state — in defense of a theory that collapses in upon itself upon further examination.

"The operative theory behind this bill is that states have the ability to define corporate powers and can strip certain powers to speak based upon the content of that speech that are otherwise protected by the First Amendment and 

. This approach alone will likely be subject to strict scrutiny as a form of content-based speech restriction under the First Amendment, as this bill removes only speech related to elections and ballot initiatives from a corporation's powers, while permitting a corporation to retain its ability to speak in other contexts."

These comments weren’t from just any old government agency. They were from the Hawaiʻi Department of Attorney General, the folks who defend it in court if it gets challenged. And it did get challenged.

The Act supplies a solution that is much more far-reaching than the problem, which we understand to be copious amounts of money expended in favor of or against political candidates. The solution in the Act is to make all artificial entities within the state powerless to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity.

Yes, the law provides definitions and exceptions. But using a phrase like “directly or indirectly,” as one of the definitions does, is open to quite a bit of interpretation.

Last week, for example, you saw in this space some views on Proposition 2 relating to 

. That is ballot-issue activity unless the Foundation’s action was within the exception for “any bona fide news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of a broadcasting station or of any print, online, or digital newspaper, magazine, blog, or other periodical publication.” If we published that article when Act 11 was in effect, depending on the enforcing agency’s mood, we could be facing a tax exemption revocation, involuntary corporate dissolution (the Tax Foundation of Hawaiʻi is a corporation), or other draconian sanctions.

Here in the United States, we are supposed to have freedom of speech. That means ordinary citizens like us can talk about important issues, and even criticize the government, without being subjected to threats of punishment as we see in some autocratic or totalitarian countries. When citizens get together and form associations or other entities, like corporations, the rules should be similar. Should be. And that is one thing that the 

Earlier in the era of Trump 2.0, I watched in horror as several big law firms were targeted for punishment because of what they said, who they hired, or which clients they represented. I was heartened when the courts started torching the executive orders and vindicating the law firms’ positions. Even then, however, there were a few big firms that made substantial concessions to make the threats go away (at least for a while).

Hopefully, the courts will do the right thing here and give Act 11 the thrashing that it deserves.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Additional coverage on Act 11: "}]

Free Speech

<title>Community Voices: Our right to speak under Act 11</title>

The solution in Act 11, which was passed by the last legislature and set to go into effect in July 2027,  is to make all artificial entities within the state powerless to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity. But some of the phrasing is open to interpretation, writes Tom Yamachika of Tax Foundation of Hawaiʻi.

Community Voices: Our right to speak under Act 11

Christian Shimabuku Headshot

Christian Shimabuku

Sports

[{"type":"text","text":"Better late than never. "}]

In its first ever meeting against Northern Illinois, the University of Hawai‘i football team kept its bowl hopes alive with a dominant 56-21 victory on Saturday, improving to 2-6 overall for the 2026 season and 1-4 in Mountain West Conference. NIU, meanwhile, fell to 0-7 overall and 0-3 in conference games.

Northern Illinois, a new member of the Mountain West Conference, hosted the Rainbow Warriors in DeKalb. The Rainbow Warriors traveled 4,255 miles, the longest road trip for a 

 in college football history. Somewhere along the way, the 'Bows rediscovered the same offensive philosophies that made them successful in 2025. A balanced offensive attack in which it racked up 504 yards and five rushing touchdowns lifted the Rainbow Warriors to victory on Saturday. In recent Hawai‘i losses, a common criticism of the 'Bows was that the team was too reliant on the pass. 

A methodical 12-play, 75-yard opening drive that shaved 5:47 off the clock and ended with a 2-yard 

 rush got the scoring started for the Rainbow Warriors on Saturday. The Rainbow Warriors and Huskies appeared poised to exchange touchdowns when NIU tied the game at 14 with 13:46 in the second quarter on the second score of the day between quarterback Taron Dickens and receiver DeAree Rogers. 

From there, the Rainbow Warriors pulled away with a 35-0 run, a relentless stretch that began in the second quarter and by the time it ended in the fourth quarter, the damage was more than done. In all, the Rainbow Warriors scored eight touchdowns on offense and forced four turnovers on defense, an overpowering performance on both sides of the ball. Even special teams got in on the action with a fumble recovery on a Northern Illinois punt return. 

As a team, the 'Bows ran the ball 42 times, led by Rice's three scores on 12 carries for 71 yards. Meanwhile, Cam Barfield added 58 yards on 16 carries for an additional score. True freshman 

TJ Fo'ilefutu carried the ball four times for 20 yards, including his first career touchdown in the fourth quarter for the game's final score, a touchdown that helped the 'Bows eclipse 50 points for the first time during Timmy Chang's tenure as head coach. UH's 56 points were the most the Rainbow Warriors have scored since a 59-41 victory over Navy on Sept. 1, 2018. 

Hawai‘i's efforts in the run game freed up the team's aerial attack, a return to form for quarterback Micah Alejado, who completed 22 of his 32 passes for 323 yards and three touchdowns. Two of his touchdowns went to Frank Abreu, who added to his team lead of three receiving touchdowns. No other player has hauled in more than one for the Rainbow Warriors in 2026. Additionally, sophomore receiver Josiah Fetui scored his first career touchdown on a 44-yard reception in the third quarter. Alejado threw an interception in the fourth quarter, but by then, the game was well in hand with the 'Bows up 49-14. He was promptly subbed out in favor of backup Bjorn Jurgensen as Chang called off the dogs. 

Defensively, the Rainbow Warriors had fumble recoveries from Elijah Palmer and 

 in addition to interceptions from Jeremiah Hughes and true freshman Kydel Stone. Palmer also finished with a team-high eight tackles. 

Just as the Rainbow Warriors appeared to find their groove, they will be idle next week with a bye. Hawai‘i will next take the field on Nov. 7 for a road contest at UTEP. 

DeVon Rice 102426

<title>Hawai‘i football breaks out of slump with dominant performance at Northern Illinois</title>

The Rainbow Warriors kept their slim bowl hopes alive after scoring eight touchdowns and forcing five turnovers on Saturday.

Hawai‘i football breaks out of slump with dominant performance at Northern Illinois

WEB square crop Hayley Lehman Headshot RGZ1636

Haley Lehman

Government & Politics

Aloha Spirit

When Brandi Saragosa took a job as a driver for Maui Food Bank in 2019, she had no idea she’d be at the helm of the nonprofit seven years later.

She’s served in a multitude of roles over the years, and she told Aloha State Daily that her work has only begun. Maui Food Bank distributed 6.7 million pounds of food during the 2026 fiscal year, according to its

Saragosa said she feels humbled and honored to serve the residents of Maui County, and that the mission is central to her work.

“It means everything that our mission is successful,” she said. “I want to see local families be able to stay here and stay in the home they grew up in.”

Saragosa said that the landscape of food insecurity on Maui is continuously evolving, 

from the Covid-19 pandemic, the Maui wildfires, increased fuel prices, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program increasing administrative costs to the states.

“If anything, that has taught me that you can’t get too comfortable,” she said. “You have to be innovative. You have to be willing to grow and change and fail and make mistakes and get up from them.”

As part of that innovation and growth, Maui Food Bank is in the design phase for a new facility in Central Maui to increase storage capacity and strengthen its disaster response.

“Our commitment is to build resiliency in our infrastructure and in our distribution for [refrigerated food],” Saragosa said.

Maui Food Bank’s operations are currently fragmented across three facilities and Saragosa said it would increase efficiency to combine operations to one facility.

Community members voiced a need for space for a farmers market and a meat processing center at the new campus. Saragosa would like the campus to include a pavilion where hālaus could practice and to bring kūpuna together with keiki.

In 2023, Saragosa quickly learned that what worked for the response to Covid-19 did not work in response to the wildfires.

The food bank was accustomed to distributing staples like milk, bread and eggs alongside other groceries after the Covid-19 pandemic, but families who lost their homes didn’t have stoves to cook on or refrigerators to keep food in.

Mass distributions also didn’t work because agencies that supported Maui Food Bank were impacted in the fires. Ten agencies, including the Salvation Army Family Store & Donation Center and the Lahaina Baptist Church’s building, were destroyed in the fire. Community members stood up distribution sites in their garages and local parks to meet the need.

In response to the wildfires, Maui Food Bank stood up Da Market Lahaina in June 2024, a program that provides fresh food and household items to more than 1,400 families. The market distributed 1 million pounds of groceries to recovering West Maui residents in the 2026 fiscal year, according to the impact report.

“It was the most devastating moment but also very beautiful, because as we went through the streets and we saw the shelters that were popping up and the food hubs, you saw the community rallying together,” she said.

Saragosa said that there were moments following the Lahaina fires that she’ll never forget. She remembered families who ran into the food bank doors without slippers on because they came straight from Lahaina.

Maui Food Bank set up two mobile markets in April 2025 that Saragosa called “refrigerators on wheels.” The trucks initially went to six disaster housing sites for residents impacted by the wildfires and has since expanded to bring food assistance to isolated, rural communities, like Hāna.

“Instead of families having to find our distribution agencies, we’re taking our trucks to underserved communities,” she said. “They’re reaching people we couldn’t reach prior.”

Saragosa grew up in Hāna where she graduated from Hāna High and Elementary School and worked her first job at Aunty Sandy’s Banana Bread on Maui’s Keʻanae Peninsula, she said.

After spending seven years in the business delivery department at Costco, Saragosa gave birth to her son and left Costco to be a stay-at-home mom. Three months in, she realized it wasn’t for her, and she started looking for a new job.

She wanted to do something meaningful in her community and was used to manual labor during her time at Costco, so she applied to work as a driver at Maui Food Bank, where she quickly fell in love with the mission to end hunger in Maui County.

According to Saragosa, drivers report to the warehouse around 6:30 a.m. and spend the day delivering food to partner agencies or picking food donations up from stores. Saragosa remembers seeing kids’ faces light up when she delivered food through the 

 students in need with a backpack containing healthy meals for the weekend when school is not in session.

“I knew that people struggled to make ends meet but I didn’t know the severity,” she said. “When I was picking up and delivering that food, I saw first-hand what that food meant to families.”

Her coworkers encouraged her to apply to other roles that opened at Maui Food Bank, and Saragosa was constantly learning on the job.

As director of operations, Saragosa’s perspective expanded from the “tunnel vision” of driving and the warehouse to include food safety, vendor contracts, transportation, sourcing three million pounds of food per year and standing up new programs, she said.

When Saragosa was promoted to chief operating officer last summer, her scope expanded again to oversee agency distributions, programs and food safety.

“The COO now oversees the entire flow of food from the time we procure it, whether we purchase it or get it donated, all the way to the middle where we store, handle and transport it, all the way to the end which is where our agency partners distribute the food,” she said.

Saragosa became interim CEO in April after Lisa Paulson stepped down. She applied along with 150 other applicants for the permanent position and the board appointed Saragosa to the role of CEO in July.

Saragosa said that her many roles at Maui Food Bank informed her leadership approach and perspective as CEO to keep her team and the community they serve at the forefront of her decisions.

“It’s not about getting results done and changing systems at any cost,” she said. “We’re never going to do something at the expense of our team. We’re going to change systems and we’re going to do it for the better, but never at their expense.”

Brandi Saragosa

<title>From driver to the driver’s seat: Brandi Saragosa reflects on her journey to CEO of Maui…</title>

After seven years at Maui Food Bank, Brandi Saragosa stepped into the role as Chief Executive Officer in July. Aloha State Daily sat down with Saragosa to learn about the lessons she’s learned and her goals for Maui Food Bank’s future.

From driver to the driver’s seat: Brandi Saragosa reflects on her journey to CEO of Maui Food Bank

Carmen Guzman-Simpliciano and her husband, Joseph Simplicano Jr., have seen it all at 

Kūʻīlioloa Heiau in Waiʻanae from a lack of educational signs to 

people taking inappropriate photos, riding dirt bikes around it, littering, feeding a cat colony, starting fires, climbing and 

“To other people, they’re going to think, ‘Oh it’s just stones.’ No,” Guzman-Simpliciano said. “It’s a cultural site.”

Guzman-Simpliciano and Simpliciano are co-founders of the nonprofit 

 and have been stewarding Kūʻīlioloa Heiau located in the Pōkaʻī Bay Beach Park since the nonprofit was created in 2021.

Kūʻīlioloa Heiau is a navigational heiau named after a demigod dog, Ku, that protected travelers. The Royal Order of Kamehameha I, 

, and the Aila ʻohana also steward the site.

Kingdom Pathways aims to demonstrate mauka to makai stewardship through water testing, improving the jetty wall, advocating for amended Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules at Pōkaʻī Bay, supporting community health, among other initiatives. At Pōkaʻī Bay, Kingdom Pathways teach keiki and community members about native plants, protecting the ʻāina and proper protocols for when one enters a heiau. The nonprofit has replanted native species when shrubbery was destroyed and rebuilt a section of the heiau when an individual removed stones. The Waiʻanae community uses the Pōkaʻī Bay Beach Park for community and cultural events like Lā Kūʻokoʻa and Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea.

For Simpliciano, stewarding cultural sites like the Kūʻīlioloa Heiau is crime prevention.

“Having these events and having these places around to be protected for future generations help to keep our community grounded,” he said. “Things like this give the kids and the community purpose." 

Guzman-Simpliciano and Simpliciano noticed what they called a “huge gap in caring for sensitive cultural sites” between cultural sites on state land versus in City and County of Honolulu public parks.

Guzman-Simpliciano said that Kingdom Pathways has been working with the city and state since they got started in 2021. She said it was hard work to get all the necessary city and state departments at a table to discuss cultural stewardship at Pōkaʻī Bay.

“We need like a blueprint,” she said. “There’s other spaces that need protection as well, not just Pōkaʻī Bay.”

She wrote a proposal to Councilmember Andria Tupola to streamline partnerships between groups stewarding cultural sites and the city. Tupola sponsored Bill 31, which passed on Sept. 9 and is headed to the mayor’s desk.

Tupola said at the City Council meeting in July that she introduced the bill in response to I continued vandalism at the site.

“The bill itself is for us to strengthen how we treat these sites in our city and county parks,” Tupola said.

HPD Regional Patrol Bureau Acting Assistant Chief Gail Beckley

 stated in an email Tuesday that HPD has not documented damage-type reports to the heiau at Pōkaʻī Bay between January 2025 to the present, but has responded to damage reports in the bathroom area and to the playground equipment.

Guzman-Simpliciano said she hopes that it saves other organizations the work and time that she put into coordinating with the city and state and makes the process easier.

 adds “stewardship” of cultural sites to the Department of Parks and Recreation public parks program. DPR can approve or deny applications by individuals or groups to help steward a cultural site. People apply with their qualifications and a draft stewardship plan, which can include the boundaries of the cultural site, the identification of allowed and prohibited activities, cultural access protocols, and identification of signage or educational programs to implement. The department and cultural stewards will work with the Oʻahu historic preservation commission, the state historic preservation division, cultural practitioners and appropriate state or city agencies to develop the stewardship plan for the cultural site.

For Guzman-Simpliciano, this was her way to huli, or change, the system.

“My vision was to get in the system and work within that system,” she said. “That’s why we’re called Kingdom Pathways, we’re in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and we as Native Hawaiians to find pathways within the state and find a better way for our people so they don’t have to keep protesting, and finding solutions.”

Simpliciano said that they work with aloha and hope to set an example for the next generation.

Applications to participate in the program should include community stakeholders and the department will review the applicant’s experience with community engagement, according to the bill.

Guzman-Simpliciano said that cultural stewardship includes a whole community, and cultural stewardship plans should be inclusive of that.

“We encourage the council to ensure that stewardship plans reflect a shared community vision, not solely the perspective of one adopter or organization,” she said. “It shouldn’t be one person’s opinion about what that place should look like.”

When there was controversy over the name of the heiau, Kingdom Pathways went to the local neighborhood board parks committee for community input. They landed on Kūʻīlioloa Heiau rather than Kaneʻīlioloa Heiau to reflect the name documented in the Bishop Museum and told in stories by their kūpuna.

Adam Wayson, one of the directors of Malama Rising, got involved at the Mauna Lahilahi Cultural Garden in Waiʻanae in 2020.

He said that the nonprofit’s involvement “came out of the city’s neglect to properly manage its spaces.” There was an encampment of about 100 homeless people, and the community has come together to clean up the area, restore native plants and advocate to improve stewardship of the park alongside the city.

The Mauna Lahilahi Cultural Garden is home to a heiau, petroglyphs, archeological findings and iwi kūpuna, according to Wayson.

Wayson told ASD that the bill aligns with Malama Rising’s mission and he appreciates the effort to include cultural preservation by the city, but he has his reservations. 

“We got into this because the city and county and state neglected to do their jobs,” he said. “As nice as the bill looks on paper, talk is cheap because from my experience, it isn’t until the house is on fire that they aren’t willing to step in and do something.”

He said that the bill’s mandate that groups apply to be cultural stewards when they are already putting the hard work in may come off as insulting to some groups and gives the Department of Parks and Recreation too much power to approve or deny stewardship applications.

, sponsored by Tupola in March, states, “community-led stewardship, while commendable, should not be a substitute for the City’s responsibility to manage, invest in, and activate its public park lands in accordance with adopted plans, environmental approvals, cultural obligations, and established City practices for botanical and cultural gardens under the DPR.”

Kingdom Pathways

<title>Cultural nonprofit spearheads bill to 'huli the system'</title>

Stewards of the Kūʻīlioloa Heiau in Waiʻanae successfully advocated for Bill 31 to establish a framework for stewarding cultural sites around the island.

Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

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Daily Smile: Sunday, June 14, 2026

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