Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government help, so business owners and residents on Hawaii’s Kauai island pulled together and completed a $4 million repair job to a state park — for free.
Polihale State Park has been closed since severe flooding destroyed an access road to the park and damaged facilities in December.
The state Department of Land and Natural Resources had estimated that the damage would cost $4 million to fix, money the agency doesn’t have, according to a news release from department Chairwoman Laura Thielen.
“It would not have been open this summer, and it probably wouldn’t be open next summer,” said Bruce Pleas, a local surfer who helped organize the volunteers. “They said it would probably take two years. And with the way they are cutting funds, we felt like they’d never get the money to fix it.”
And if the repairs weren’t made, some business owners faced the possibility of having to shut down.
Ivan Slack, co-owner of Napali Kayak, said his company relies solely on revenue from kayak tours and needs the state park to be open to operate. The company jumped in and donated resources because it knew that without the repairs, Napali Kayak would be in financial trouble.
“If the park is not open, it would be extreme for us, to say the least,” he said. “Bankruptcy would be imminent. How many years can you be expected to continue operating, owning 15-passenger vans, $2 million in insurance and a staff? For us, it was crucial, and our survival was dependent on it. That park is the key to the sheer survival of the business.”
So Slack, other business owners and residents made the decision not to sit on their hands and wait for state money that many expected would never come. Instead, they pulled together machinery and manpower and hit the ground running March 23.
Statists often ask how roads would work in a free market. Here’s a small example. Businesses and private individuals have a need for them and they’d build and maintain them as truly necessary. What we have now is a result of a distortion in the transportation market. Just like government pumped money artificially into the housing market they do so with roads. They’ve put roads where they were unneeded and uneconomic. As with the housing bubble the reversal of socialist and fascist policy will be difficult but an overall positive event.
It’s nice to see the State didn’t try to stop them from doing this. Hopefully Chicago will let KFC do their thing.
http://www.businesspundit.com/…
picked up from http://www.lewrockwell.com/…
I don’t usually associate natural disaster, or any other misfortune for that matter, with, but maybe that’s a mistake. Last week I lived through an ice storm that caused some water damage to my home. As you can imagine I was in a hurry to get everything dry and prevent further impact. When my water damage restoration service provider finally told me the rates for all the magical drying equipment that now filled my home, I uttered the all too familiar:
I’m in the wrong business.
The Rise of Water Damage Restoration
If you’ve got the money to invest, I’m betting water damage restoration is an excellent business to get into. Aside from getting paid in large part by the insurance companies, consider the factors coming together at this particular moment in time to create such a favorable business environment:
- Shoddy Construction
I lived in a sixty year old house in Seattle where it almost never stopped raining. Yeah, we had water in the walls, so what? That place was solid. A bit of wet insulation in today’s construction and half your house melts away.- Global Warming
I don’t know if it’s man made or not, but you can’t deny we have more natural disasters now than fifty years ago. More disaster equals more money for the disaster relief specialists!- Mold Phobia
With a paranoia surrounding mold that borders on hysteria, homeowners and insurance companies companies alike will do almost anything to prevent a potential mold ‘infestation’.- Ignorance & Fear
It’s not that we don’t want to know how our homes are constructed and how to take care of them ourselves, it’s that the world and western society have pushed us away from this knowledge and into more and more complex roles away from home. So when someone tells us our wall is full of water and we have to do this, that, and the other to rescue our largest investment, we take them at face value. What else can we do?
Two problems.
Update:
Economist Joe Stiglitz comments in the Financial Times, criticizing Fannie’s and Freddie’s free lunch, but ultimately takes a middle of the road approach.
The NYTimes claims that the Housing Bill Has Something for Nearly Everyone. (What, the check to pay for this thing? How about renters? If we miss a rent payment, we are liable to be EVICTED. Where is our bailout?)
Bloomberg reports that mortgage writedowns will total $1 trillion. (Article quotes a hair brained scheme where the gov’t buys millions of houses and then blows them up to help brace housing prices. At this point, I’m not sure who’s being sarcastic and who’s not. But seriously, if you wanna to see something really blowup, watch that gross national debt ticker, over on the right, after this bill passes.)
Former Republican House Majority Leader, Dick Armey blasts the Republican party in the Wall Street Journal. He advocates a five year phase out of either GSE should they access credit lines from the Federal Reserve or Treasury.
More to come…
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