More info on the bill, what happened and may happen in the future:

Proposed 200' Kite Ban on Maui Deferred
John Bryja
The Hawaii Senate Committee on Water and Land deferred a proposed bill this afternoon that would have banned windsurfing and kiteboarding within 200 feet of swimmer. According to the bills sponsor, Senator Les Ihara Jr, the move "effectively dismissed it from further consideration" (at THIS TIME).

Continued at: http://www.sbckiteboard.com/News?new...81&uniqid=1015

It looks like Sen Hee is on our side, got this response from him.

To: testimony@capitol.hawawii.gov Thank you for your email. I agree with most of your comments and will ask the members of the committee to not move this measure, introduced by Senator Les Ihara, forward for further consideration.



Thank you again.



Clayton Hee

I got the same one from him, and another one with how find the correct email address for testimony and check for future hearings:

Thank you for your testimony.

This is an automated response to acknowledge receipt of your email. Due to the high volume of testimony that we receive, we are unable to respond individually to requests for acknowledgement of your email submissions. Please do not respond to this message.

Please note that this address, testimony@capitol.hawaii.gov, is to be used only for testimony being directed to Senate committees. Each House committee has a dedicated email address for receipt of testimony. If you have sent testimony for an upcoming House committee hearing, please re-send it to the appropriate House email account. If you are not sure where to send your testimony, please review the following instructions:

To be sure that your testimony is being directed to the correct email address, always check the hearing notice:

1. Go to the legislature’s website at www.capitol.hawaii.gov.

2. Select “Bill Status and Documents.”

3. In the “2007 Interim/2008 Regular Session Hearing Notices” box, click the “Get Current Hearing Notices” button to get a list of all measures scheduled for hearing by Senate and House committees. The list will be in chronological order by hearing date and time. You can access a hearing notice by clicking on the date-and-time hyperlink in the first column.

4. In the bottom portion of the hearing notice, you can find the correct address for submitting email testimony. Other important information, including the deadline for timely submissions and ways to request special assistance or auxiliary aids to help you participate in the legislative process, is also included in this section.

Mahalo,

Hawai'i State Senate

Glad you guys heard back. I didn't receive any confirmatory email except for the last autoresponse. Doesn't matter, seems like enough comments got in to compel them to shelve this action, for now. Thanks for jumping on this!

If we could respond with equal vigor here in keeping guys out of swim zones, we should have clear kiting all over.

We're going to be podcasting with Martin Kirk and Neil Hutchinson on AsNews.net/The Kiteboarder this Thursday. Martin was at the meeting and has the full scoop on how this thing even got to this level and is in the same page as Neil as far as activism starting at the grass roots level to proactively protect our riding spots and foster relations with community/government officials.

Kent M. may join us... working out details Monday....wish we could do a whole forum of key individuals but we don't have our new stuff .....

Great ideas Marina! Looking forward to hearing about Martin's insight on how things went off the rails in Hawaii.

Thank you for having Neil onboard to help give us a good look at reality, not the kind we want either and to talk about the simple things we can do to ease the heat and keep us flying.

Hey Kent, come on down. Haven't heard you on a Podcast yet. Here's your time, looking forward to what you have to say and learn what Cabrinha is doing to encourage sustainable rider behavior. Not a loaded question, I know you have been doing a number of things for a while to keep us free and flying.