07-15-2015, 04:05 PM
No, it's not so much what the construction costs are, it's the leased time and fees collected by the operators or University, who apparently previously leased it to them for a $1 a year. And correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm having to do a lot of reading to catch up.
A few things come to mind, the main being the typical political and financial suck universities have become today, both private and public. I haven't even started to look at what the administrators make, but if it's anything like other states, it's often a racket for students these days that pay ridiculous tuition.
From there, what I've read, little was spent by the university for environmental impacts which was found to be inadequate by a state audit, as well as the enormous amounts of money collected for time, such as $12 Million paid by Yale for 15 days at one of the telescopes. Why not get an agreement to receive a percentage of all the leased time? The public should also get a full accounting on every telescope up there since it is state conservation land.
It also seems that the University is asking for a new lease so they can manage the expected life of the telescopes, extending it to 65 years. I haven't heard how that turned out, but seems like better plan would be to have them finish out the term of the current lease and renegotiate the new lease once their term runs out.
And why be so dismissive of the financial stakes for the owners of that trust? What I'm hearing is that the amount of funds provided for the property is already inadequate, just because Hawaiians find the land sacred has no bearing on extracting fair market value for the land lease.
Finally, this seems problematic to me, as there seems to be intentional holes in the accounting, from an article I read: OMKM has received $6 per visitor from permitted commercial tour operators, totaling about $280,000 per year. Twenty percent of these funds sit in an account to be transferred to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, but no mechanism currently exists to do such.
That's nuts.
A few things come to mind, the main being the typical political and financial suck universities have become today, both private and public. I haven't even started to look at what the administrators make, but if it's anything like other states, it's often a racket for students these days that pay ridiculous tuition.
From there, what I've read, little was spent by the university for environmental impacts which was found to be inadequate by a state audit, as well as the enormous amounts of money collected for time, such as $12 Million paid by Yale for 15 days at one of the telescopes. Why not get an agreement to receive a percentage of all the leased time? The public should also get a full accounting on every telescope up there since it is state conservation land.
It also seems that the University is asking for a new lease so they can manage the expected life of the telescopes, extending it to 65 years. I haven't heard how that turned out, but seems like better plan would be to have them finish out the term of the current lease and renegotiate the new lease once their term runs out.
And why be so dismissive of the financial stakes for the owners of that trust? What I'm hearing is that the amount of funds provided for the property is already inadequate, just because Hawaiians find the land sacred has no bearing on extracting fair market value for the land lease.
Finally, this seems problematic to me, as there seems to be intentional holes in the accounting, from an article I read: OMKM has received $6 per visitor from permitted commercial tour operators, totaling about $280,000 per year. Twenty percent of these funds sit in an account to be transferred to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, but no mechanism currently exists to do such.
That's nuts.