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When I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the early 1990s, I was a small part of a large-scale community forum called Price of Paradise 1994, or POP ’94 for short.

The brainchild of UH law professor Randy Roth, POP ’94 was an outgrowth of the two best-selling “The Price of Paradise” books that Roth co-authored and edited in 1992 and 1993.

One book had a red cover, the other a blue cover — like the Beatles’ greatest hits package.

POP ’94 brought together a wide range of local residents and organizations to talk about the issues raised by the books, and to inform the political elections that year.

I’ll not attempt to answer whether the books and the forums made Hawaii a better place to live. (It certainly isn’t any less expensive.)

But I do know that they influenced my personal and professional life and I believe that their legacy continues with “The Value of Hawaii” and Honolulu Civil Beat. I came to understand more clearly how Hawaii works, and to identify the people and organizations who make it work — and sometimes inhibit it from working better.

Some of the same criticism leveled at POP ’94 — that it was comprised of an educated elite, that it was full of itself, that it was preaching to its own choir, that no meaningful change would come from its efforts — has already been said of Civil Beat less than three months after its launch, and of “The Value of Hawaii” before its actual publication.

But, as with my POP ’94 experience, I feel fortunate to be part of the Beat and the book, and to be working together to raise important issues, ask serious questions and suggest possible solutions. I don’t see how those efforts cannot be of some use.

My contribution to the “The Value of Hawaii” is a chapter on state government, specifically, the governor and the Legislature in light of the near dysfunctional relationship between the branches of government in recent years.

I didn’t pick the topic; the suggestion came from Craig Howes and Jon Osorio. But the editors did allow me to write as I chose, and administered only a light edit.

“Can I have some fun?” I asked about my unpaid assignment. “Try something a little different?”

“Sure,” said Howes. “That’s what we want.”

I won’t say too much here about what’s in my chapter, except to say I wrote it from the point of view of an observer, not an insider.

Not a passive observer, mind you; I’ve spent at least 20 years paying attention to Hawaii’s governor and Legislature, half of that time as a journalist. Sit through a couple of marathon committee hearings and press conferences, in addition to countless hours on the telephone and the computer, and a few ideas on how to do things differently are bound to pop up.

A lot of my chapter suggests ways to cut through waste, and to make it easier for people to work together to enact good legislation.

I also offered a caveat — that a lot of lawmakers probably have a few suggestions on how journalists like myself can do a better job, too. “Walk a mile in my shoes, brah,” they might say, “before telling us how to do our da kine job.”

Which brings us to today.

Like POP ’94, ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ and “The Value of Hawaii” came to life in a critical election year where voters would choose a new governor and new Honolulu mayor. In the case of 2010, it also includes a competitive congressional seat.

It’s remarkable how the topics covered in the “Price of Paradise” books parallel events nearly 20 years later: high property and excise taxes, unaffordable housing and rents, government spending and efficiency, higher- and lower-education woes, rapid-transit funding, water policy disputes, the dominance of Democrats, labor union influence, legalized gambling, tourism and jobs, gender equity, changes in media ownership and audiences, the role of the military, energy issues, the fate of agriculture and environmental degradation, race relations, and Native Hawaiian claims and governance.

Many of these issues are addressed in “The Value of Hawaii” (of note: UH professors Sumner La Croix and Neal Milner have chapters in the earlier collection and the new book) and are what we’re covering at Civil Beat.

The value of “The Value of Hawaii,” of “The Price of Paradise” and of media outlets such as ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ is to talk about our problems and help find ways to fix them. As anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

But it also means taking the blinders off and asking the hard questions. Mead’s groundbreaking work in Samoa, it should be remembered, was later criticized for reaching conclusions that may have ignored evidence. The critique of Mead was later critiqued itself.

Which is another way of saying that the value of Samoa for Hawaii, if you will, is that Hawaii must never cease continual self examination in its own coming of age.

A generation from now, I hope to “join the discussion,” as we say in Civil Beat parlance.

Pretty sure I’ll still be working then. There is a price to paradise.