REVEALED: MASSIVE NEW
BIPARTISAN
PROPERTY TAX HIKE FOR RAIL OPERATIONS
Dear Hawaii Republican:
Hawaii's news media and both local parties are
downplaying some pretty urgent news about
a just-revealed, previously secret
property tax increase to keep Oahu taxpayers from rising up.
We already know that Oahu taxpayers will probably need to endure at least
five more years of the punishing, price-increasing 'rail surcharge' of the excise (sales) tax, which costs
$200 per year per taxpayer to cover the skyrocketing construction price tag of building the rail project.
What we didn't know before this week is that the rail transit money pit will require a massive,
permanent increase in property taxes which is nearly ten percent -- just to subsidize the City's round-the-clock operations and maintenance of this money-losing, public works boondoggle, since only 30% of those costs are estimated to covered by farebox collections.
Democrat mayor Kirk Caldwell's
budget flunkie told the City Council:
"Based on broad calculation, if you need to raise $90 million it will be an overall increase of 9 percent in property taxes."
Well you can bet that the ACTUAL property tax increase will be more like 15 to 20 percent, since it was these SAME DEMOCRATS who
deliberately and drastically underestimated or fraudulently "lowballed" the true exploding cost of building the rail project.
Sadly, in 2015 and 2016, this
fleecing of taxpayers
is occurring with the complicity and outright support of Hawaii's top Republicans. At the state legislature last year, GOP house members
Fukumoto (their leader),
Cheape,
McDermott, and
Pouha all jumped aboard the Rail Cartel's gravy train along with eager tax-hiking Democrats. And just this week, over at the City Council, PRP's puppets --
including "Republican" Kym Pine and her greedy colleagues, all of whom pocketed over $100,000 from supporters of Rail and the related Hoopili mega-development in Kapolei -- knowingly supported the excise tax hike
full aware that the massive coming property tax hike was a silent and permanent partner in the arrangement.
That's right, these
elected Republicans are actively pushing for you to
pay a higher excise tax
AND for you to
permanently pay higher property taxes to fund major campaign donor PRP's wasteful, overpriced rail system. In
HIRA's forthcoming 2015 Legislative Scorecard,
the votes of all 76 members of the state legislature on the
Rail Tax Increase,
including Republicans, will be revealed.
You deserve to know where everyone stands.
So, where is the Republican Party? Is the Hawaii GOP fighting back on behalf of Republicans, who like all others were unaware of a nearly 10% hike in property taxes back when Oahu voters cast ballots narrowly in favor of rail back in 2008?? The answer is a very big
NO. Under chairman
Fritz Rohlfing, former chair
Pat Saiki, and top officers
Miriam Hellreich and
Ted Liu, Hawaii's GOP is
officially neutral on Higher Taxes and the Wasteful Rail Project. Your party organization is doing nothing to mobilize against this giant ripoff. Members of the compliant, do-nothing state committee (district chairs from around the state) simply grabbed their ankles and closed their eyes while pretending that stopping terrible public policy had nothing to do the rationale for a political party's existence.
It's deja vu all over again. When liberal Republicans
Gene Ward,
Cynthia Thielen and
Kym Pine
supported Obamacare
and cheered on the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on the local 'Connector' exchange until even local Democrats knew it needed to be shut down, and when
Beth Fukumoto's and her entire RINO GOP caucus
voted to turn Hawaii into a Sanctuary State by unanimously supporting the issuance of driver's licenses to 40,000+ illegal aliens in Hawaii,
our party did absolutely nothing to push the other way.
Over and over,
RINO's at our state party and RINO's in elected office are helping Democrats to stab taxpayers in the back, even though
Republicans elected to office in Hawaii should NOT be voting like Democrats. Democrats are the problem. The GOP is
supposed to be the solution. In the case of the notorious rail project, we
MUST stand up against wasteful spending, the punishing taxes, and the
obvious corruption throughout City government.
But
if Hawaii's Republican Party continues to sit on the sidelines like it has --
refusing to be fiscally conservative and refusing to be socially conservative -- then there's
no reason at all left for island voters to even consider replacing Democrats with Republicans; either by the dozens or even one at a time.
GOP silence and/or complicity equals worthlessness in the minds of voters. That's why every two years, we see the
steady decline in the number of elected Republicans in Hawaii.
MORE BREAKING NEWS:
ARE ROHLFING AND HELLREICH RESIGNING
TOMORROW TO SAVE THE PARTY AND 2016 ???
News broke overnight that
tomorrow's special meeting of the Hawaii GOP's state committee at party headquarters on Kapiolani Blvd.
might involve several resignations of top party officers embroiled in party scandals. In fact, this might be
one reason why
the party has wasted an entire year since the last election doing nothing at all except laying low.
Widespread concerns that
the documented corruption of party chair
Fritz Rohlfing and national committeewoman
Miriam Hellreich (all witnessed firsthand by do-nothing national committeeman Ted Liu) will
kill the political chances for island GOP candidates in 2016 have crescendoed
since incriminating audiotapes surfaced late last year. The recordings clearly reveal an extensive pattern of corruption by party leaders, including revelations that
Hellreich used fraud to deliberately and knowingly solicit party donors, while party chair
Rohlfing stole thousands of dollars behind the back of the party treasurer --
monies used to grease the palms of Mike Lilly, the politically-humiliated former attorney general for George Ariyoshi turned
Democrat union attorney for partisan, anti-Republican labor organizations
in the Hawaii GOP's misguided and unauthorized vendetta against the whistleblowing conservative organization Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA).
We'll wait and see what happens when the deck chairs are rearranged. Either way, the Hawaii GOP's state committee
already adopted a budget for 2015-2016
which guarantees that island Republican candidates don't have a prayer of unseating a single Democrat this year. Not a single penny has been allocated for political advertising, mailings, canvassing, or anything at all which educates and persuades voters to choose R's over D's.
The plan seems to call for
flat-footedness and big losses in 2016, as Rohlfing's party has undertaken
zero voter registration and
zero voter identification and
zero new coalitions in the past 14 months since the 2014 election. In fact, a recent audit of Rohlfing's party budget revealed that
2,500% more money will be spent by the Hawaii Republican Party in 2015-16 hiring ambulance-chasing lawyers
trying to silence the conservatives at HIRA through lawsuits in the courts
than will be spent on a single TV or radio ad in 2016 explaining why Democrats need to be defeated.
With the Hawaii GOP
now worried about the impact of its own widely-publicized and ongoing corruption on the 2016 elections, speculation is running rampant that
top party leaders are finally preparing to resign tomorrow. It would explain why they've dropped the ball and haven't been motivated to organize and publicize the annual precinct caucuses which were supposed to get under way only days from now. On the other hand, RINO's might circle the wagons around embezzler Rohlfing and fraudster Hellreich in an
embarrassing show of orchestrated "unity" that Democrats would love to showcase if they ever needed to.
The
politically fatal combination of corruption and incompetence at Hawaii GOP headquarters
undercuts any hope of Republican candidates finding success in unseating corrupt, incompetent Democrats. In fact, the combined effect of
Rohlfing's embezzlement,
Hellreich's fraud, and
the state committee's brazen inertia plays right into the hands of Democrats by making the 2016 election just
another wasted opportunity for the island GOP; with
nothing done to substantially improve the prospects of Republicans to win less than ten months from now.
You know, it's
damned near impossible to make a case against Democrats
while fraud, embezzlement and corruption by top GOP leaders is ongoing and remains unaddressed. Indeed, noted candidates like the hardworking
Jaci Agustin and her Rohlfing-aligned campaign manager
Jack James (pictured here)
might as well hang it up now if Rohlfing, Hellreich and their defenders are still around by Election Day.
Even the RNC's esteemed chairman Reince Priebus understands that the incompetence of Rohlfing, Hellreich, and Saiki is unacceptable. The Hawaii GOP has no organization and so party leaders will doom our candidates.
BOTTOM LINE: The rumors now swirling about tomorrow's resignations of Hawaii's corrupt, incompetent GOP leaders
really need to be true in order to
save what little hope there is for 2016.
Mahalo,
HAWAII REPUBLICAN ASSEMBLY (HIRA)
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The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA), an affiliated chapter of
is the conservative standard-bearer of the Republican Party of Hawaii
and the leading advocate for conservative solutions in the islands.
We are not an official arm of the Republican Party of Hawaii (RPH).
We are the conservative base of the Republican Party.
Hawaii Republican Assembly
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