COM Connect App Helps Residents Share Information with Maui County
Wailuku, Maui – The County of Maui announced the availability of a new app which will enable residents to participate in community-based reporting from their cell phones/mobile devices or web.

Powered by SeeClickFix Inc. technology, COM Connect (short for County of Maui Connect) is a place-based reporting platform which allows residents to document neighborhood concerns and improvements alike, ranging from litter and flooding to damaged sidewalks and malfunctioning traffic signals. The app is available for free through most iPhone and Android app stores and is already active.

COM Connect will allow residents also report community issues, as well as view, comment on and vote to fix problems submitted by their neighbors. Citizens can even create their own “watch areas” to receive notifications about all issues reported in their community, enabling them to follow the progress of all service requests – not just the ones they report.

Please call or contact the Office of the Mayor at (808) 270-7855 or Email Mayor's Office with any questions or concerns.

Transit History
 
This week, I’m going to do something a little different.  I’m going to trot out an analysis that was done by one of my predecessors.  Who and when will be revealed later.  (My comments on how they relate to today’s situation are in parentheses.)

“Rapid transit for Honolulu is the most costly single project ever contemplated by either the State or the City.”  (It still is.  And you would cry if you saw the estimated price tag, which will be revealed later as well.)

The City’s transit consultants were trying to figure out how the State and City were going to pay for their portion of the cost, which at the time was 1/3 of the total price with 2/3 to be paid by Uncle Sam.  (Fat chance of the Feds giving us that much now.)

“The consultants’ analysis of the tax sources prompted them to drop 11 of the possible revenue sources from the original list:  personal property tax (which we still don’t have, thank goodness); tax on parking lots (we do have the GET hitting those); tax on office space (we have the GET on rents, which is almost as good); increase in the public utility franchise tax; privilege tax on telephones (these days even a cell phone seems more like a necessity); excise tax on realty transfer (we now have a conveyance tax which is orders of magnitude larger than it was in those days); increase in charges on licenses and permits (happens all the time these days); increase in tobacco tax (seems to happen often); increase in liquor tax (same); employer tax on the number of employees; and a payroll tax (those would be really bad, but we wonder if minimum wage increases are doing the same thing in terms of economic impact).

“THE EIGHT tax sources remaining and listed in the apparent order of priority of the consultants are:  1) increase the passenger vehicle weight tax (we’ve done that); 2) increase the county motor vehicle fuel tax (we’ve done that, and we are bracing for more, as we reported last week); 3) increase the real property tax rate (we’ve done that); 4) levy a special one-time tax on autos (who’s going to bet that it won’t be one-time); 5) impose a hotel room tax (we did that, starting at 5% and now it’s up to 10.25% plus the counties can add on another 3%); 6) levy an additional sales tax on top of the present 4 per cent (attempted often and failed often, but a county surcharge did pass in 2006); 7) impose a surcharge on income tax (when this piece was written, the top income tax rate in Hawaii was 11%; it since went down somewhat but crept back up again, and our top income tax rate in Hawaii is 11% today as well); and 8) abolish the home owner’s exemption of real property valuations (probably political suicide then as well as now; we wonder what the consultants were smoking).

“Also, the consultants’ report states study is going on in the area of a transit taxing district.  They are studying the feasibility of securing revenues from special transit beneficiaries by taxing their gains due to close proximity to transit stations.  (The Board of Education jumped on this one real fast, establishing an ‘impact fee district’ to let them tax developers in the area, as we reported on a while back.)”

For those of you who were wondering, the original article was written by Fred Bennion, former President of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, and it was published in the Honolulu Advertiser and Star-Bulletin on June 25, 1972, nearly fifty years ago.  At that time the total project cost of rail transit was estimated at $700 million.  Yes, with a “M,” not a “B.”  In those fifty years, look how far we’ve come!

Or not.

If You Think Gas Prices Are Bad…
 
Many of us who drive cars now dread the day when we’ve got to go to the gas station. Between COVID-19, Russia vs. Ukraine, and other economic factors, gas prices have already passed the $5 per gallon mark and don’t appear to be falling anytime soon.

What we might not know, however, is that there are a lot of different taxes that go into the price at the pump.  Just looking at those imposed at the state and county levels , we start with the state fuel tax of 16 cents per gallon. Then there is a county fuel tax on top of it. The cheapest county fuel tax is here in Honolulu at 16.5 cents per gallon, and it goes up to 24 cents per gallon on Maui.

Then there is a component called the barrel tax, which is imposed on any imported fuels. Its official name is the environmental response, energy, and food security tax, and it is imposed at $1.05 per barrel. A barrel is 42 gallons so that works out to 2.5 cents per gallon.

And finally, of course, we can’t forget our state GET, the general excise tax, at 4% of the sales price, to which is added another 0.5% in all counties other than Maui. With a $5 per gallon sales price as an example, this adds another 22.5 cents per gallon.

That brings us to about 57.5 cents per gallon, just in state and county taxes, so far.

At our legislature, there is a fair number of people who think that gasoline taxes need to be raised, big time, to combat the environmental threat posed by fossil fuel burning. That’s why in the past few sessions they had proposed a “carbon tax” to pay for the societal costs of pollution, global warming, and so forth. In this past session, the bill was House Bill 2278.  That bill proposed to change the barrel tax for gasoline to $5.27 per barrel initially, increasing in phases to $33.16 when fully phased in. That translates to 12.5 cents a gallon initially and 79 cents a gallon when fully phased in. That would change the state and county tax on a gallon of gas from 57.5 cents to $1.34 a gallon, at least, if adopted and fully phased in.

And, of course, there are those who don’t think an increase of this magnitude is enough.  The carbon tax proposed by House Bill 2278 started off at about $14 per metric ton of CO2 and increased to about $89 per metric ton, using the conversion factor (per the EPA website) of 0.00887 metric tons of CO2 per gallon of gasoline.  Various groups have suggested that a higher tax would be needed to drive compliance with the state’s net zero emissions goal by 2045.

In the meantime, the Department of Transportation hasn’t given up on its proposed Road Usage Charge, a project to distribute the cost of road maintenance more equitably among the users of our state’s highways and byways.  The project has been proceeding under the assumption that the road usage charge would replace the fuel tax.  But a road usage charge bill introduced this session, Senate Bill 3313, proposed the road usage charge on top of the fuel tax for electric vehicles, instead replacing the special $50 motor vehicle registration fee for those vehicles.  That bill died this session, but it or something similar could always be introduced next year.  Road usage charges, unfortunately, represent another possible revenue enhancement (translation:  “higher tax”).

Hmm, that bicycle in the window is looking pretty good right now!