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CARES Act food ‘gift from mayor?’

This past week, Mayor Victorino demanded that county employees “volunteer” their time to pack and hand out boxes of food and turkeys to 6,000 Maui residents who had to make a special trip to pick them up at service locations around the island. All had to be staffed and managed for several days.

As a surprise to most everyone, the 6,000 residents also received $125 food vouchers to be used at supermarkets, where they easily could have also gotten the food so many staff and volunteers spent days preparing. Apparently, entire county departments were shut down in order to labor on all this, so county business got put on hold.

Volunteers handing out the $125 food vouchers explained that the mayor’s instructions to them explicitly included telling each recipient that they were receiving “a gift from the mayor.”

Given that the mayor communicated to 6,000 Maui families that the $750,000 distributed in vouchers and probably $250,000 or more in turkeys was “his gift,” is it wrong to demand that the mayor’s re-election fund or the mayor personally reimburse Maui’s CARES Act Fund which in reality paid for all of it?

That 6,000 Maui residents got this benefit is truly great, but we’ve heard from many who really want to know how it is that in the eyes of the public, distributing our community’s CARES Act Fund somehow got turned into “a gift from the mayor.”

Anyone know if we can file a complaint with the Campaign Finance Commission?

Sam Small

Makawao

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