The tragic events on our island of the two female residents who have gone “missing” precipitated a major focus change in last night’s  (2/18/14) general membership meeting. When the meeting was scheduled last October, the plan was an update from the Maui Police Department (MPD) focused on our area, South Maui, to examine crime, traffic, safety and like items. But that became just a minor segment of the meeting .

KCA policy for decades has been we encourage interested guys to become members to support the Association’s mission and our efforts, but our meetings were always open to the public. The policy allows some monthly meeting to have more non members than members. Several days before the meeting we received numerous inquiries if this was the policy for the upcoming MPD meeting, and ultimately the reason was a large segment of population island wide wanted an open discussion with MPD about the two cases, and saw this KCA public meeting as the avenue to achieve this.

Some described this as “hijacking” the meeting from the membership, but we decided to hold to our policy to allow these Maui people the opportunity in their time of dire need. We feel it was a valiant effort by our all volunteer membership to adjust to accommodating well over 100 non-members along with the large contingent of MPD officers from the Chief down, to squeeze as comfortably as possible in the school facility with a contingent of our membership. While a few members did ask some local area questions of the department, the vast majority concerned these two prominent missing person cases.

An indication of the widespread interest beyond our area was the large contingent of media including statewide television reports, a far cry from our long time reliable coverage by the Maui Weekly. This does allow a number of professional reports on the meeting.

The March 18 meeting will feature the Maui Invasive Species Committee (MISC) to inform and educate not only about the newest dreaded invader the “Little Fire Ant,” but others already establishing in South Maui. You’ ll want to learn as much as you can to avoid the scourges on our community.

Meeting video links:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYGpFGYjTZM