Hawaii’s visitor arrival counts are going up in just about all categories. One exception: our 45-ton winter visitor.

The Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Count saw a dip in numbers this year. The annual census peaked in January, when 172 whales were spotted from 46 shoreline sites during a 15-minute period. Researchers will follow up on the citizen science project, which has been conducted annually since the mid-1990s.

An estimated 12,000 humpbacks migrate to Hawaii waters for a yearly breeding and calving season. Here’s hoping that next year we’ll see more breach acrobatics, tail slaps and dives.

Mayor looks ahead to possible Con Con

It was a brief point made near the end of Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s State of the City address — but not a small one.

The mayor expressed his support for the option, available every 10 years, to hold a state Constitutional Convention. And if the voters agree in this fall’s election to hold one, he said, the Con Con should look at ways to empower the counties to create their own revenue sources, going beyond the property taxes they now assess.

One can’t help but think that the contentiousness over rail financing was a factor in his thinking — having gone through a rough patch with state lawmakers over that very issue.