The Magic King-Dumb
Taxpayer
funding of Pacific BioDiesel raises many questions.
Johnny
Jackson
The unending
support for Bob and Kelly King to operate their biodiesel refinery
with your tax dollars continues unabated.
It appears that the King family has manipulated this Mayor and
the County Council so smoothly that even Ken Lay of Enron would
be impressed.
The Kings have persuaded the County of Maui, with the support
of both the Council and Mayor, to:
1) Require that restaurants deliver their cooking grease to
the King’s refinery with no compensation to the restaurants;
2) Place a refinery on agriculturally zoned land, not M2 (heavy
industrial) zoned land as the code requires;
3) Have Maui’s taxpayers pay to have the cooking grease
refined into biodiesel;
4) Allow the Kings to sell their biodiesel directly to the public
with no compensation to the taxpayers of Maui;
5) Allow the Kings to joint-venture with “Big Oil,”
Chevron to make an 80/20 blend of petroleum diesel and biodiesel
and sell the final product through a service station in Pa‘ia
– again with no compensation to the taxpayers of Maui;
6) Have the County purchase back some of the biodiesel the taxpayers
of Maui already paid the Kings to make.
After all of this, one has to wonder if the Kings are paying
rent for the County land they use? What about their water and
electricity expenses? And what of the waste coming out of the
refinery? Where does it go, what is it, and who’s paying
for its disposal?
But the story of support doesn’t end with these taxpayer-paid
benefits, not by a long shot.
Recently, the Kings announced that the demand for their biodiesel
far exceeded their ability to produce it. In fact, the demand
is so great that the Kings have created a preferred clients’
list servicing only a chosen few.
Why is biodiesel so attractive? The answer: it’s cheaper
than regular petroleum diesel. And why is it cheaper than regular
diesel? The answer lays partially in the massive subsidies mentioned
above, but also in the fact that Mayor Arakawa and the County
Council have forgone the 18-cent-per gallon fuel tax on biodeisel.
Why is it that the users of biodiesel are subsidized at the
expense of all other drivers? Do their SUV’s and trucks
not run on our roads and wear them down? Certainly, a gas burning
compact car causes less wear and tear to our roads than a heavy
biodiesel guzzling SUV or truck. Why is it that these select
individuals don’t need to contribute to our mass transit
system? Certainly, less traffic congestion is something that
all drivers can appreciate, even those using the taxpayer-subsidized
biodiesel.
But why does the Mayor and the Council not apply the road repair
and maintenance tax or the mass transit tax to biodiesel? Maybe
the driving public should ask the Mayor and members of the Council,
but a possible clue to the answer may be found in the unusually
favorable treatment that the Kings have gotten by this administration
all along.
For instance, a couple of years back the Kings brought to the
Energy Committee of the Council, then Chaired by Councilmember
Charmain Tavares, the idea that the County should fund a study
to determine which plants could be grown here to serve as a
source of crude for their refinery. Although most companies
internally fund their own research and development projects,
Tavares deemed that the taxpayers of Maui could again subsidize
Pacific BioDiesel.
To implement this research project, the Chair appropriated $50,000
and the Request for Proposal (RFP) was quietly announced. The
Kings responded with great confidence and prepared a scant document
stating their qualifications and goals.
All was going as planned until it was discovered that a Mainland
company with many years experience in the biodiesel field and
with a strong agricultural background responded to the RFP with
a comprehensive and compelling bid. Due to the far superior
response and vastly greater experience in the biodiesel industry
by the Mainland firm, the County’s analyst recommended
that the Mainland company’s bid be accepted. Chair Tavares,
upon learning that the Mainland firm had been selected, decided
to scrap the entire project.
If this research effort was so important as to warrant the appropriation
of $50,000 of hard-earned and dearly paid taxpayer dollars in
order to provide for the future energy security of Maui, why
did she cancel the project? Was it that the Mainland firm represented
a potentially serious competitive threat to the monopoly her
friends at Pacific BioDiesel have? If that is the case, then
the entire appropriation was ill founded, being little more
than another sleazy scheme to funnel more County tax dollars
into the pockets of Bob and Kelly King and their obscenely profitable
refinery operation.
The fact that Pacific BioDiesel continues to obtain such a broad
array of unusually lucrative taxpayer-financed subsidies indicates
that Maui has truly become Bob and Kelly’s magic King-Dumb.
