OCCC visits canceled Sunday
The state Department of Public Safety canceled regularly scheduled visitation to the Oahu Community Correctional Center on Sunday.
Such cancellations have been an almost weekly occurrence this year due to ongoing staffing shortages as the department battles chronic absenteeism, especially on weekends, the only time visitation is allowed.
OCCC has canceled visitation 18 times since May 1, when the department began posting the cancellations on social media.
81-mm round is destroyed at Maui range
A bomb squad from Oahu on Sunday safely blew up an 81-mm mortar illumination round discovered by a diver off Kihei, Maui.
Maui police met with the explosive ordnance demolition team at 8:15 a.m. to coordinate the safe removal of the round, formally known as an M301A3.
The team took it to the Ukumehame Firing Range for detonation, police said.
The diver found the round just after 2 p.m. Saturday in the ocean off North Kihei Road at mile marker 2.
He brought it out of the water, placed it on the shoreline and called police, who cordoned off a 100-foot perimeter and closed the beach. The beach reopened at 9:30 a.m. Sunday.
Opposition hits housing plan for Kapaa site
Some Kauai residents objected strenuously Saturday to a planned 769-home community behind Kapaa Middle School.
Traffic congestion is a key concern about the HoKua Place project, the Garden Island newspaper reports.
"I think we all agree that this is the most congested area on the island," Kapaa resident Gabriela Taylor, who has lived on Kauai for 42 years, told the Wailua-Kapaa Neighborhood Association. "This is the wrong place for that development, any way you look at it. The traffic is going to be horrendous."
But project official Greg Allen Jr. said the housing is badly needed.
"If you can get people to stop having kids, if you can get all of the people from the mainland to stop moving here, then we don’t need to do it, but that’s not going to happen," he said.
The 163-acre project is before the state Land Use Commission, which must decide whether 97 acres of state agricultural land should be allowed for urban use.