April 11, 2022

To: County of Maui (Maui County Budget, Finance and Economic Development)

As the administrator of a personal care program servicing clients in Maui, including the islands of Molokai and Lana’i, I see first-hand the growing needs of our Kupuna community as well as the growing puka. During the COVID pandemic, the services to help those needs became even more important. I am testifying in support of Lana’i Kina’ole Inc. and its proposal for an Adult Day Care or Day Health Center (BFED Reso 22-80)

Home Care services allow our seniors to be able to live as independently as possible in the comfort of their own homes. Whether providing these services in the home or in a congregate setting, our Kupuna would get not only the services, but the socialization which is just as important. I see so many who continue to live in isolation and who may not even have family or family that live nearby to visit them.

For those who are fortunate to have family members, many times those sons, daughters, grandchildren are working themselves and don’t have much time to be able to provide quality caregiving. Many are balancing work with their own family needs as well.

My office happens to be next to a day care center in Kahului and I see adult children dropping off their parent every day in the morning before they go to work and picking them up in the late afternoon. During the day, I hear the sounds of music, laughter, bingo numbers and singing. I’ve participated in helping select and crown Valentine’s Day king and queen and judged costume contests during Halloween. When I go into the center, I see many talking story and others sitting there, but sitting in a safe and watchful environment.

With the limited services available in Lana’i. I see tremendous value in an ADC/ADH Center and I hope one day I can go to Lana’i when I’m visiting a client and come and see the center.

Reuben Ignacio, Director
Hale Mahaolu Personal Care Program

Best Buddies in Hawaii Maui County Testimony – Week of April 11, 2022
Aloha, my name is Kathy Bettencourt, and I am the Maui-based program manager for Best Buddies in Hawaii. We are honored to be included in the Mayor’s proposed budget at $85,000 for fiscal year 2023. Mahalo for the opportunity to speak with you today.
Best Buddies is a non-profit organization that creates opportunities for one-to-one friendships and leadership development for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or IDD. Best Buddies creates and manages school- and community-based chapters which facilitate and support one-to-one mentoring friendships between participants with IDD and their typical peers, enabling Hawaii youth and adults with IDD to participate in inclusive social activities. Best Buddies is the only organization in Hawaii using this unique peer-to-peer mentoring model that benefits community members with and without IDD.
Best Buddies was established in Maui County in 2008. Since then, we have grown to operate school-based inclusion programs at eight middle schools and high schools and one college on Maui. In 2021, we launched our community-based friendship program for adults with and without IDD.
Our programs are critical to ensuring that youth and adults with IDD have the same opportunities to form social connections and meaningful relationships as their non-disabled peers. There were 1,316 students with intellectual disabilities enrolled in public schools in Hawaii in 2020, and only 14% of these students spent the majority of their day in inclusive settings. This figure indicates that 86% of Hawaii students with intellectual disabilities spend a significant part of their school day separated from their peers.
These last few years have shown us the importance of friendship and community. Studies have shown how critical social relationships are for all people with and without disabilities, with one study concluding that “there is a qualitative difference between being present in a community and having a presence in a community. [The authors] suggest this difference may depend in part on the development of valued relationships and a sense of belonging.”
Best Buddies works to ensure the opportunity for friendship is equal for those with IDD, who experience more isolation and loneliness. Mahalo nui loa for considering our request. Together, we will continue to make Maui a more inclusive place for everyone.
Thank you.

Support Full Funding for Adaptations Dance Theater (ADT)

Aloha!
Please support the full funding of Adaptations Dance Theater’s Bring it Home program.

My name is Katie Istvan.I write in strong support of fully funding Adaptations Dance Theater’s Bring it Home program. I have been a dancer with Adaptations Dance Theater since 2016 and currently direct seasonal community youth programs with the company. I grew up in Wailuku, dancing at Maui Academy of Performing Arts after school, where fellow ADT company member, Ali McKeon Pineo grew up dancing as well. After graduating from Kihei Charter School on Maui, I studied dance at California State University Long Beach where I received my B.A in Dance. Post degree, I continued to work as a dancer and fitness instructor in Los Angeles, California.

Living in LA, I was always torn about the fact that my career kept me on the mainland while my heart wanted to be back home. During my time in LA, ADT started a program called Bring it Home and asked me to be a part of it. Little did I know that a door of possibility was opening for me in my life, as a dancer from Maui.
My first Bring it Home (2016) was one of the best experiences of my life. The environment that ADT established was healthy, friendly, and professional. That was great (and as an artist, sometimes hard to come by) but the icing on the cake was that I was dancing in a project that mirrored professional work in LA and I was HOME! At the time I thought to myself that this project was the best project I could ever be a part of. Continuing to live in LA, I got asked to do another Bring it Home. Fast forward to the day I realized that I could move home due to the mere fact that ADT was providing professional contemporary dance work on Maui.
The mission and action of Bring it Home does exactly as it says. It worked so well in fact that not only did I get to come back for projects, but I ended up moving back as a resident in May 2018.
Being a professional dancer from Maui I am so grateful for the door that ADT has opened for me in my life. I never thought it was possible, especially at the age I was (24 years old and now 28) when I moved back home to Maui, to continue my profession in the way that I wanted to.
Since moving back home, I have not only been part of ADT as a performer in various community projects (i.e. Small Town Big Art collaboration), I have also directed multiple educational programs for young dancers on Maui with ADT (ADT Summer Intensive and Winter Workshop). Curating special workshops and intensives for young and pre-professional dancers on the island is a full circle moment for me. These types of programs are opportunities that in my own youth, growing up here, my parents would have to save up for and send me off island to go attend or they couldn't afford it. It is because of Bring it Home that I moved back to Maui and saw the opportunity to give back to my community.
Because of the inspiration that ADT’s Bring it Home project has given me in moving back home, I have also been able to work with the young dancers of our community in many other ways as well. I have taught as an Alumni at Maui Academy of Performing Arts, taught at Carden Academy, and am currently teaching and am the Competition Director with Momentum Dance Maui (prior ADT dancer Alannah Andersen started this studio).
ADT continues to raise the caliber of contemporary dance on Maui bringing opportunities for professional Maui artists and aspiring youth. Their genuine, uplifting, supportive and active energy expands beyond.
Mahalo for your time reading through this. I greatly appreciate it. Mahalo for considering ADT.
Katie Istvan
MDM Competition Director
ADT Dancer and Summer Intensive/Winter Workshop Director
B.A in Dance California State University Long Beach

Testimonies received from BFED Committee

Please support Molokai Kupuna

Aloha Maui Council Members,

I write to ask for your continued support of the Molokai Kupuna program. It has been an invaluable service and resource for information for so many of us.
I am 67 and my experience with the program has been 3-fold.
1- Getting help to elderly: I attend Kalaiakamamu Hou Congregational church where the majority of our attendees are quite elderly, several living alone without any on-island support. Because I knew about the program, I was able to connect them and others so they could receive needed food and yard cleaning services.
2- Knowledge: I have been a caregiver to elderly parents (passed) twice in the past and the AARP online webinars offered could have really helped me. As an example I now understand how the body responds differently to medication dosages, etc as it ages. I wish I had this knowledge before parents passed but will be aware as my husband and I now age.
3- Personal Health: Throughout my life I have tried to stay active with exercise so thought back, hip, knee pain I have now we’re just part of my aging. After a massage with the program I had no pain which was such a blessing. I felt wonderful! I learned where to stretch regularly and the value of massage for both physical and mental well being.

So appreciate the support in the past and humbly ask for your continued support of Molokai’s Kupuna Program. We need it.

Mahalo,
Crystal Egusa

KCA testimony for Tuesday 4/12/22 9am regarding DPW
Aloha Chair Rawlins-Fernandez and Committee
Mike Moran for the Kihei Community Association
Our testimony concerns Public Works, which we believe you have calendared for this date. We did submit it via ecomments for this date and believe that might have been successful, but failsafe also doing here via email. Apologize if this is just duplication

KCA testimony to Council Budget Committee April 12 2022 9 AM

Dept of Public Works (DPW)

Aloha Committee Chair Rawlins- Fernandez and Committee.
Mike Moran for the Kihei Community Association (KCA)

For the last decade we have been totally frustrated with the lack of action or progress on multimodal transportation infrastructure. In S Maui, by far the leading concern is any progress filling in the missing segments of the No So Collector Road (NSCR). The next segment is to extend between Kulanihakoi and Waipuilani. The past two directors of DPW advised us design work was progressing on this segment, and now we have a new director just approved. As he is coming aboard we learned that an item will be address in the IT committee at some future date, stating:
“ Warren Unemori= Contract C6099-6: LILOA DRIVE EXTENSION (NAMAUU PLACE TO KAONOULU STREET) NORTH SOUTH (NS) COLLECTOR ROAD, DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS, PW ENG JOB NO. 16-23, QBS NO Q-PW-16-30

You maybe aware that Namauu is about 200 yards north of Waipuilani. Thus this contract indicates that after nearly a decade of supposed contracting for design actions on this half mile our expected roadway, 200 yards have been completed.
We are pleased that this contract includes the next half mile as far north as Kaonoulu, but can we expect this will be done in 200 yard increments?

While the lack of any true progress on the NSCR is far & away the major issue, we will point out another example. Back in 2017 KCA walked along SKR with the then DPW director David Goode from the Post Office at Azeka Plaza north bound to Kulanihakoi to demonstrate the need to fill in the missing segments of the sidewalk. SEE https://gokihei.org/environment/walking-and-talking-along-south-kihei-road-friday-morning
The total outcome of that effort after almost 5 years was a single crosswalk painted across SKR.

More recently the Mayor offered a campaign promise as a candidate that one mile of sidewalk in this area would be constructed. In the nearly four years since that commitment not a inch of sidewalk has been constructed.

Of course there are other concerns under DPW kuliana that need attention in our district such as storm water. DPW offered the community the Pre Final Kihei Master Drainage Plan in 2017 by contractor R M Towell, and a more environmentally friendly version of the just the two major rivers by Ecosolutions was finalized in September, 2020 and delivered to DPW, and finally released to the community 14 months later. A month after it was released, Kihei experienced yet another mud flood, to remind our community no mitigation had even begun anywhere, makai to mauka.

But today we are just asking for concern on construction commencement of the NSCR between Waipuilani and Kaonoulu by DPW. We tried regularly for communication with the prior director most of last year, but received no response. We immediately contacted the new director as soon as he was named. He replied he was willing to meet with KCA, but not until he was confirmed and the FY 2023 budget process was completed.

We have unconfirmed data that the department currently has $14. M of the needed $24 for this portion of the NSCR, and waiting until at least 2025 to secure the remaining $10. from the Fed. Yet we see published report quoting Congressman Kahele, “ As part of the federal infrastructure law passed last year, Hawaii is set to receive around $1.2 billion for highway projects and another $339 million to build and repair bridges, Kahele told Maui residents during the meeting last week — a “once in a lifetime pot of resources,” he said.
Has DPW looking at getting the funding there?

We ask the committee if they can get info from the Department before the 2023 budget is finalized.
Mahalo

Mike Moran for the Kihei Community Association

Maui Soil and Water Conservation District testimony

Due to audio issues I was not able to provide testimony requesting your support of funding for the Soil and Water Conservation Districts. I will be submitting a formal written testimony also. Thank you.

Thank you for your ongoing support of the Maui Soil and Water Conservation Districts. My name is Mae Nakahata with the Central Maui SWCD, representing our four districts on the island. Today, I am here requesting your support of the Mayor’s proposal funding the Districts.
The SWCD is a quasi government organization, created in Federal law and represents a true public private partnership tasked with carrying out soil and water conservation stewardship responsibilities on the land. We leverage Federal capacity, State and County funding with volunteer board members who contribute their time reviewing and approving conservation plans resulting in Federal cost share resources, $1.4M in 2020, to Maui farmers and ranchers to offset costs associated with carrying out conservation practices as part of their operations. References to the cost share were mentioned in prior testimonies. We also review and approve grading and grubbing plans providing input to manage erosion during soil disturbing activities.
Our budget this year exceeds the levels of prior years. With climate change, there is increased needs on Maui. The proposed budget increases the capacity of the districts to better deliver services and increase access to Federal funds.
A large part of our budget change is for salary adjustments. Currently the salary of our conservation specialists who prepare conservation plans needed for clients to receive cost share funds are far below salaries paid by the others for equivalent positions. As a result, we have been on a roller coaster, hiring and losing specialists on a regular basis. This budget will allow us to provide salaries equal to others with similar skills and responsibilities. Our current administrative assistant position is largely clerical. To increase the capacity of our districts to increase much needed services, we are creating an Exec Director position to increase our capacity to seek and manage extramural funding. For example, our Upcountry Drought resiliency project places us as a priority for federal grant funding but we need to apply for the grant and then manage and provide reports on the grant.
Maui SWCD respectfully requests your support of this budget item as an investment to our conservation efforts. Thank you.
Thank you,
Mae Nakahata
2819716

The playground in Lahaina desperately needs repairs, the playground and bounce pad need to be redone for the safety of our children. And a shade needs to be added. The park is unusable from the hours of 11-2 because of how hot the structure gets.

Mahalo for your time.

Dear Council Members,

Please KEEP in the budget funding for the design, permitting, and construction of a playground at Eddie Tam in Makawao. Currently, there are no playgrounds in Makawao and none upcountry that are designed for the use of children under 5 years old. The closest playground in Pukalani is heavily used by Pukalani Elementary school every school day morning and Kula school often uses the Kula playground for their pre-K students in the mornings. All the playgrounds upcountry are extremely busy with young children. A playground at Eddie Tam will greatly benefit the children and parents of upcountry. Thank you for KEEPING this in the budget!
Arianna Feinberg
Makawao Resident

Maui Nui Marine is instrumental in monitoring good water quality and reef conditions, preserving one of Maui’s greatest tourist attractions. Please fund this work! Janet Chin, Leilani Kai 201, Kihei