Better to leave now than during a disaster

His job was to see that residents of the islands were prepared for the geological upheaval of an earthquake, the devastating sweep of a hurricane or tsunami, or any other natural disaster that might strike Hawaii.

So it’s interesting to observe what it took to unseat Ed Teixeira, vice director of Hawaii State Civil Defense since 2000, from his emergency-preparedness perch. There were seven federally declared major disasters during his tenure, but most of them could be described as dodged bullets, so it wasn’t mission exhaustion.

Instead it was the garden-variety office shakeup that led to Teixeira’s abrupt resignation on Tuesday: complaints about his management style and discord over a proposed organizational change, he said.

Let’s hope Hawaii’s luck holds until things settle down. Now would not be an optimal time to test how well an unsettled government agency deals with disaster — the natural, not bureaucratic, kind.

Learning from the past so we can repeat it

It’s good to see state officials working to capitalize on some of the brainpower at the University of Hawaii.

The state-run Hawaii Strategic Development Corp. and the University of Hawaii Foundation are each putting up $3 million to help fund four or five companies a year, for up to five years, seeking to commercialize research performed at UH.

Benefits include improving UH’s stature as an innovation center, creating a vibrant venture capital market for smaller startups in Hawaii, encouraging some of the state’s brightest minds to stay in Hawaii, and — perhaps most important in these lean times — generating an independent source of income for UH in the form of research royalties.

The effort builds on the success of an earlier, smaller fund that helped launch a successful company called Protekai Inc., which uses patented protein from jellyfish as a diagnostic tool.

If at first you succeed, keep doing it.