Residents of Honolulu are wondering why we’re about to pay our councilmembers double what any other county does. We will reach a more productive solution if we instead ask why we have a county council that is five to 10 times less representative than any other county in Hawaii.

Our City Council members justify their proposed pay bump by noting that representing their districts while only working part-time is impossible.

And they’re right. They do have an impossible job. But going full-time and collecting a fat pay raise won’t solve the problem. Because the problem isn’t the number of hours worked per week, but the number of people purportedly represented.

Members of the Honolulu City Council are elected from districts of more than 100,000 residents. This is far out of balance with every other legislative body in Hawaii. A glance at the electoral map for Council District IV, the district represented by Council Chairman Tommy Waters, reveals the problem well enough. His single Council district spans the entirety of the 18th, 19th and 20th Hawaii House district and large portions of the 21st, 23rd and 24th House districts, the entirety of the 9th Senate district and portions of the 10th and 25th Senate districts.

It is no wonder then, that at the county level, Waters and company feel unable to represent us when at the state level there are four to five people doing the same job.

There is no justification for this. The problems we face at the county level are no less pressing than those we face across the pae‘aina (islands). Indeed, because of overlapping regulatory authority many of the problems Hawaii is trying to solve require Honolulu to solve them. For example, affordable housing won’t happen in Hawaii until it happens in Honolulu.

The problems Council members complain of are not solved by a pay bump and a few more hours a week. No, the solution requires a deepening of local democracy: more representation, not more pay.

Expanding representation could take many forms. One would be to use multimember districts. This would likely lead to a greater ideological diversity in the City Council. Many community leaders, like that consummate budget hound Natalie Iwasa, would have a better chance at election under such a system.

Another would be to create more districts, which would likely provide a path forward for intractable geographic problems like siting the new dump. Or we could allow neighborhood boards to exercise real authority by, for instance, establishing the norm that the Council would ratify board resolutions on certain topics — rezoning, for instance.

At the heart of the objection to the pay raises was a feeling by constituents that their Council members do not serve the public. This sentiment is as understandable as it is inevitable. One person can neither serve nor represent 100,000-plus. The solution to the problems the Council faces is not an increase in pay, but in representation.

Makana Hicks is an engineer from Pupukea. He is a member of the Hawaiian Civic Clubs and a policy organizer with Democracy Policy Network.