Cafe Cafe MAUI

Few items left for adoption:

bar tables and chairs still need to find homes. They will need to have their tops refreshed.

2 small hard cases

Tons of porcelain plates in various patterns some in full large sets

The items in the individual pix in the comments below

I just sent the following letter to our mayor and his support team:

Team,

I wanted to send a little thank you to the mayor for his conversation with the news media yesterday, August 28, sharing what he sees the recovery situation today is relative to the fires that took our wonderful town of Lahaina.

One thing that he did, which I felt was particularly positive and impactful, was to thank the community for quickly standing up an effort to keep the west side of Maui fed and housed immediately following the fire.

While there have been prior small shoutouts shared in passing, this is the first time I have heard a government leader specifically and broadly share deep and considered thanks for that amazing grass roots effort. I personally donated the entire remaining food stock of my restaurant immediately following the fires and I know many others who stepped up to help our wonderful people.

The mayor also did something very valuable in highlighting the consistent messaging from the county of Maui about how important it is to have a personal water and food supply on hand so that each individual household is OK for the week+ it can take for government assistance to arrive in the case of disaster.

On a different note, and speaking as a small business owner who lost my restaurant and is now both unemployed and unable to pay off large existing business loans due to the loss of my business, offers of additional loans from the small business administration are unsatisfactory. Please stop pretending that is aid in any form. It is not.

It is my hope that government aid in the form of grants and loan payoffs to wipe out existing debt, which cannot be repaid due to the loss of the business, will be soon forthcoming.

Lahaina in particular was a dense tapestry of small businesses and single proprietorships employing thousands. That is gone and will not be coming back within the extended time horizon that it will take to rebuild Lahaina. As a result, loans are not an appropriate tool to combat this massive loss because there will be no mechanism to repay them for years.

Loan forgiveness is squarely on the shoulders of the Maui government at this point, as it looks increasingly like the initial MECO-caused fire, which was announced contained and then left unattended by our fire department, is the likely source of our disaster. In light of the now documented deenergized power lines, the unattended contained fire means MECO is not entirely at fault.

Further, the failure of our entire west side communications systems, which greatly compromised the disaster mitigation effort, is also the result of government-allowed underinvestment in properly securing and hardening our critical infrastructure to the minimum 2012 standards we are still not meeting today.

For example, in front of my house in Napili there is a spalling utility pole with chunks missing and a transformer with arcing damage - long ago reported to MECO - which have been there for years. We have been asking for this infrastructure to be under-grounded both for safety and resilience.

Please require all our critical power and communications infrastructure to be moved underground, where it will be more resistant to fire and hurricane as we move forward.

This disaster has highlighted very starkly that we have allowed underinvestment in non-redundant critical infrastructure to the west side of Maui for many many years.

The west side of the island consistently loses power and communications a few times a year due to random utility pole failures. It’s time to follow the lead of other western states and require all infrastructure move underground. Sewer and water are already there, meaning cost and right of way excuses have no merit. And now that the entire historic city of Lahaina is gone, hiding behind “we can’t change it because it’s historic” as MECO has publicly stated in the past is a non-starter.

For police and fire and other emergency personnel to safely do their work, and not themselves be at horrible risk, communications infrastructure, water, and power must always be operational - especially during emergencies.

This is not optional.

West side has paid its share by supplying an estimated 15% of the tax revenue collected by the state of Hawaii for time immemorial. Due to some unfortunate decisions made by our various first responders grappling with incomplete information and desperate lack of proper resourcing, that golden goose for the state is now dead along with hundreds of humans. Thousands of families have been disrupted and the livelihoods of tens of thousands have been forever setback.

To start anew, we need massive future-looking investment, not more of the same outdated at-risk exposed infrastructure of the sort that has now been immediately adjacent to fires twice since August 8 above Ka’anapali, where MECO is putting in more above ground utility poles.

Exposed critical infrastructure in a hurricane corridor is folly.

In closing, I want to reiterate my thanks to the mayor and the entire emergency response team for considering my comments above. I cannot imagine how challenging this must be for all of you working to bring us a little hope, so I do want to again say thank you for the sustained effort to move us forward. It’s going to take a lot.

I appreciate all of you who are working to help so much,
-Jesse

Today I made a delightful breakfast. It was the very first “new menu item” that we introduced at Cafe Cafe MAUI: The Silas.

A gorgeous double BLT plus a browned butter fried egg, slices of maui sweet onion, and barrel aged sriracha infused mayo.

It was invented by Silas, one of our first baristas, local merman, piano tuner, and all around great guy.

So damned good.