You may not support some of the things that the government spends our tax dollars on, but many of the expensive policies and projects that are being put into place have been planned with the purpose of preserving Hawai'i where it's needed, and improving it in places where improvement is warranted. We should not lose sight of those goals.

We are on the right track when it comes to prioritizing the state budget. We need to think about extensive, long-term problems now, as well as deal with short-term consequences of the economy.

Rail has been a controversial issue for years, but if we had been assertive and started the project decades ago when it was first proposed, we would not have the traffic problems that we do now. As Mayor Hannemann says, "The longer we delay, the more we're going to pay." And we're not only paying more monetarily, we're destroying our environment, with greenhouse gases lowering our quality of life as we sit for hours in traffic.

We need to deal with these issues now, so they don't grow to be problems that threaten Hawai'i's sustainability.