A win for reusable bags

The campaign against plastic shopping bags heats up on July 1, when a minimum 15-cent fee will be charged for bags at supermarkets and other retailers. It’s an incremental step toward banning plastic bags altogether, although the charge will apply to paper bags as well. The idea — a good one — is to encourage people to bring their own reusable bags to the store.

Cutting back on retail plastic bags has been a struggle, but experience shows it’s really no big deal. Howls of protest accompanied the ban on those ultra-thin, blowing-in-the-wind “T-shirt” bags, but people adapted on Oahu, as they had earlier on the neighbor islands.

The next evolution will be to ban disposable shopping bags altogether. That shouldn’t be too hard, either; Target stores in Hawaii don’t offer those bags at all. Customers don’t seem to mind.

Trying to reduce the proliferation of disposable plastic may appear hopeless. Certainly, it’s an uphill battle. But consumers can drive change. Reusable water bottles have become popular, replacing the plastic ones. The largest supermarket chains in Australia, accounting for 70 percent of the market, on Monday announced plans to significantly reduce plastics in products and packaging in their stores, bowing to customer demand for less waste.

Perhaps the urgency to reduce plastic waste will increase when we see its effects on us directly. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas, contains massive amounts of non-biodegradable plastic, broken down to bite-sized pieces for marine life to eat. Seabirds have been found with bottle caps and other detritus in their stomachs. Nearly 20 pounds of plastic bags and other plastic trash were pulled out of a dead pilot whale in Thailand on Monday. How long before tiny plastic bits turn up in our ahi?

Be ethical on social media

Politics often brews up tempests in teapots — and one needs only look to East Honolulu to find a prime example. Incumbent City Councilman Trevor Ozawa has lodged a city Ethics Commission complaint, alleging that a Caldwell administration appointee used city resources to give rival Tommy Waters a political boost.

Misty Kela‘i, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts (MOCA), had used that agency’s Instagram account, which features the city’s seal, to “like” Instagram posts by Waters, who in 2014 lost to Ozawa by just 41 votes and is among challengers again in this fall’s election. Ozawa said MOCA abused its authority and appeared to support Waters; one photo even fetched this comment: “UDABESS! IMUA Hawaiian.” The comment and “likes” have since been removed.

The mayor’s office called it “a one-time, isolated incident” and said that Kela‘i acknowledged she made an honest mistake and contacted Ozawa’s office to personally apologize.

Apology not accepted, it seems. And it’d be interesting to see what the Ethics Commission says on this matter.

All this political hay does hold a key lesson, though: The rise of social media adds a new wrinkle, but the old rules of ethics should apply, even on this platform. It’s important that state, city and county government workers not engage in any political campaigning during work time, or use government equipment or property for such activities. They are on the clock to do the public’s business, not politicking.

Stealing from the disabled

Just how one employee is able to embezzle an organization out of $7 million simply boggles the mind.

Yet that’s what bookkeeper Lola Jean Amorin, 70, apparently did against her employer of 30 years, The Arc in Hawaii, a nonprofit that provides services to people with developmental disabilities. It was sad indeed to see many of those disabled clients, along with staffers, in court Wednesday as Amorin pleaded no contest to two counts each of first-degree theft and computer fraud, as well as money laundering and 13 tax evasion charges. The long-term theft occurred between 1998 and March 2017. Also pleading no contest to the tax evasion charges was her husband, Albert Amorin, 72.

This deplorable case should serve as a wake-up call — for The Arc, but also for all nonprofits and businesses to review and apply smart accounting practices. Trusting employees is important, certainly, but having multi-person financial checks-and-balances is imperative.

The Arc’s money, instead of helping vulnerable people as intended, was used by the Amorins to buy four homes in Hawaii and one in Nevada, lavish vacations and cars, and for Las Vegas gambling. In August sentencing, she’ll face a minimum 20 years in prison; he’ll be asking to avoid conviction by deferring his no-contest pleas.

Deputy Prosecutor Chris Van Marter, though, plans to oppose the request for deferral: “The amounts are just too high, it went on for too long and involves too egregious of a scheme to get anything other than prison.”

It’s hard to disagree with any of that. Such greed simply boggles the mind, and hurts the heart.