Hawaii is the state that just can’t pull the plug.

Our half-finished projects and never-developed plans block every layer of city and state business.

The results are schemes halted while politicians wait in fear of tipping over someone’s unfilled apple cart.

This past week’s newspapers were filled with stories to make you shout, "Just get on with it!"

First, just in time for the Fourth of July is yet another debate on fireworks.

Councilmembers Ann Kobayashi and Ikaika Anderson introduced a suggested ordinance in January 2014 to relax the laws on fireworks passed in 2012 after decades of debate.

The pair contends, according to Star-Advertiser reporter Gordon Pang’s account, that the "existing fireworks prohibition was too draconian and that sparklers and fountains are a unique part of Hawaii’s cultural heritage."

Playing with sparklers, a cultural heritage? The issue is yet again scheduled for another Council examination.

Also last week came word from the Herald-Scotland, a newspaper in Edinburgh, that the state has given the good folks trying to preserve the Falls of Clyde until Aug. 15 to move the 137-year-old iron-hulled, four-masted sailing ship, now docked in Honolulu Harbor.

Since 2008, the Friends of the Falls of Clyde have waged the valiant fight to save the last non-Hawaiian link to Hawaii’s seafaring past, but fundraising has not worked.

Her sister ship, the Glenlee, was restored and is now at a Scottish museum, and the newspaper reports that there are efforts to bring the ship, built in Glasgow, back to Scotland.

The Hawaii committee has started a crowd-funding campaign at Indiegogo.com to raise some of the needed $1.5 million, but so far it has raised just 1 percent of that. The local committee was not available for comment on what now may be an ignominious end to the old girl.

The saga of the Falls of Clyde, however, is nothing compared to the tortured history of Honolulu’s most famous non-swimming pool, the 88-year-old Waikiki War Memorial and Natatorium, which has been in festering decline since it was padlocked in 1979 because the crumbling walls and decks were too dangerous for swimmers and beach-goers.

In the last two years, there was some realistic hope for progress equaling action. That’s because former Gov. Neil Abercrombie and Mayor Kirk Caldwell were in public agreement that the Natatorium’s gateway arches should be preserved and the big cement tank and bleachers be torn down, with the hopes that a beach could be then created in its place.

That came just six years after former Mayor Mufi Hannemann accepted the report from another in an endless series of study commissions recommending that the Natatorium be torn down.

But then last week, the Star-Advertiser’s Pang also reported that the state tossed new complications into the mix.

"Officials with the State Historic Preservation Division have asked that the city look into inserting into its draft environmental assessment a third possible ‘alternative’," Pang wrote.

The bureaucrats quoted said implementing the new state wishes will add 16-18 months, with another six months tacked on to that before the final environmental impact statement is prepared.

After that, it can be expected that the forces of erosion and global warming will act faster than whatever the city and state can do with the Natatorium.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.