Name on ballot:

Jeanné Kapela

Running for:

State House – District 5

Political party:

Democrat

Campaign website:

www.jeannekapela.com

Current occupation:

State Representative

Age:

29

Previous job history:

I have served as the State Representative for House District 5 since I was first elected in 2020. Previously, I worked as a service provider for survivors of sexual exploitation through a nonprofit I founded called Unite Hawai’i. I have also worked as a professional dance teacher and choreographer.

Previous elected office, if any:

I have served as the State Representative for House District 5 since November of 2020.

Please describe your qualifications to represent the people in your district.

I have been the State Representative for District 5 since November of 2020. I currently serve as the Vice Chair for the House Committee on Higher Education and Technology and as the Chairperson for the Working Families Legislative Caucus.

Ever since I dedicated my life to public service, I have been a champion for working families, education, clean energy, and civil liberties. I fight for working families because I come from one. My family struggled to put food on the table and pay its bills. I understand what it is like to face financial hardship in our state, where the cost of living continues to soar.

I have also served my community as a member of the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival Board of Directors, Kona Coffee Farmers Association Board of Directors, Lions Club of Kona member, and communications chair for Konawaena High School’s 100th Anniversary Committee.

Previously, I served as Executive Director of Unite Hawai’i, an organization devoted to ending sexual exploitation through education. As a victim service provider for survivors of sexual slavery, I strove each day to provide freedom and justice to women and children impacted by sexual violence.

What is the most-pressing issue facing residents in your district and how would you address the problem?

The district I represent is the most rural, remote and high-poverty district in the state. It lacks basic infrastructure compared to more urban areas. Parts of my district even lack access to running water. Thus, the most pressing issue in my community is Hawai’i’s exorbitantly high cost of living.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s most recent Out of Reach report, a minimum wage employee must work 107 hours per week to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment in the islands. We need to link our state’s minimum wage to the cost-of-living index, so that future minimum wage hikes are not derailed by politics.

Additionally, we must establish paid sick and family leave for all workers. It is unconscionable that workers must choose between their health and their paychecks when emergencies occur. Studies show that the annual cost to cover 16 weeks of family leave for an employee earning $48,000 per year would be roughly $58 annually, a little over $1 per week for invaluable financial security.

Finally, we need to build truly affordable housing for those earning no more than 60 percent of area median income, rather than projects that pad developers’ bank accounts.

What would you propose to be done at the state level to help residents cope with Hawaii’s high cost of living?

To begin, we should pass paid sick and family leave programs, so that workers can sustain their financial security when healthcare emergencies arise. Additionally, we should establish a state child tax credit that mirrors the federal child tax credit that was strengthened during the pandemic, which cut the nation’s child poverty rate by almost 50 percent.

Child care is also excessively expensive for our state, costing nearly $13,000 per year. To address this, we need to boost our child care tax credit to fully account for the cost of child services in the islands. Continuing to expand access to universal preschool is also essential in resolving the growing cost of child care and early childhood education, which provide proven benefits to our keiki in their most formative years.

Finally, we need to redefine what “affordable housing” means. Too often, housing policies put developers’ profit margins ahead of what is truly affordable for working families. We should invest in housing that meets the needs of those earning no more than 60-percent of area median income and continue cracking down on the investment property speculators and vacation rental owners who are contributing to our out-of-control housing market.

What can the state Legislature do to help Hawaii home and condo owners with rising property insurance rates?

As the climate crisis gets worse, private insurance companies are reconsidering their risk assessments and, in some cases, increasing rates or pulling out of the market. We have already seen this with the Maui wildfires and, on Hawai’i Island, with recent lava flows.

To address this situation, we need to expand the authority of the markets of last resort, the Hawai’i Property Insurance Association and Hawai’i Hurricane Relief Fund, to stabilize the property insurance market until risks can be redistributed back to the standard insurance market when market conditions improve.

Can Hawaii’s tourism-dependent economy be diversified, and, if so, what can state government do to support the effort?

Diversification is critical to the long-term health of Hawai’i’s economy. We cannot continue to rely on an unsustainable model of tourism and we cannot continue to allow unchecked numbers of tourists to flood our shores at the expense of residents and our aina.

I support the establishment of green fees for visitors to the islands, which can be used to increase funding for Hawai’i’s conservation and sustainability programs. New Zealand, the Galapagos Islands, the Maldives, Cancun and Venice all have green fee programs for visitors ranging from $1 to $100. New Zealand spends $188 per tourist on environmental programs. Hawai’i spends just $9 per tourist. We need to catch up.

Additionally, we need to seriously consider reinstating carrying capacity limits for each island to prevent our visitor industry from damaging our communities and our environment. Finally, we should establish an economic diversification task force to create a plan to diversify our economy through sustainable industries, like regenerative agriculture and clean energy. This would create a strategic framework to guide state policy, as is the case with our state’s sustainability plan.

What would you propose to help increase affordable housing in Hawaii?

To begin, we need to redefine what constitutes affordable housing in state law. Our current legal paradigm is based on giving tax breaks to developers to incentivize the creation of affordable housing. Yet, we have seen that this is a failed strategy, as housing costs have skyrocketed in our state, even during the recent economic crisis. I believe that we should focus on building housing for those earning no more than 60 percent of area median income.

Additionally, I support instituting a social housing model for our islands, in which housing is viewed not as a commodity for the private market or wealthy investors, but as a human right that should be available to all in need. We should pass a rent control program and retaliatory eviction ban for Hawai’i to prevent predatory landlords from taking advantage of their tenants. I believe that we should empower nonprofit developers to create affordable housing for Hawai’i, since they are not driven by shareholder profits.

During my time as a state representative, I have frequently encountered homeless individuals in our community. Moreover, as a former service provider for survivors of sex trafficking, I worked with individuals, including children, who were exploited when they were unsheltered, as well as the “invisible homeless” who were living in storefront brothels or who were forced to find new places to sleep each night.

These experiences helped me to understand that we need to base our approach to homelessness on compassion. Instead of criminalizing our houseless neighbors, we should establish a coordinated continuum of care for unsheltered people that includes mental health and addiction services, a fully funded Housing First program, comprehensive healthcare, access to shelter space and stabilization facilities, transitional housing, and permanent supportive housing. Poverty is not a crime. It is an urgent concern that policymakers have a moral obligation to address.

What can state government do to better support and improve public education in Hawaii?

Our children deserve a prosperous future. Too often, though, our keiki are placed in overcrowded and overheated classrooms, given harmful amounts of standardized testing, and denied the support services they need to thrive. Teachers tirelessly guide our children’s learning without receiving the professional pay that they’ve earned.

To ensure our children receive a quality education, I will sponsor legislation to build community schools that offer arts courses, vocational training, and access to social and healthcare services on campus. I will also work to limit standardized testing and empower teachers to use authentic assessments aligned with real-world learning experiences.

I am committed to raising teacher pay and building teacher housing. While policymakers passed funding to resolve teacher salary compression and extend differential pay increases this year, our state’s educators still earn far less than their colleagues who work in school districts in other states that have a similar cost of living to Hawai’i. To recruit and retain a quality teacher workforce, that must change.

Lastly, I support creating a dedicated funding source for public education that increases school spending by at least $500 million per year.

Should the state continue to pursue building a replacement for Aloha Stadium in Halawa? Please explain.

I believe that a replacement for Aloha Stadium can be beneficial in terms of its economic impact on Hawai’i. That said, I would like to see affordable housing be more fully integrated into the plan for the new development district, which is currently being proposed as a luxury entertainment and resort community. Moreover, neighbor islands and remote communities continue to receive a smaller share of capital improvement funds than O’ahu. That needs to change, so that neighbor island residents receive the services and infrastrcutere they need to improve their quality of life.

Should members of the state Legislature have term limits like Honolulu’s mayor and City Council members?

I don’t believe term limits for state legislators will necessarily lead to better governmental outcomes. At the State Legislature, policymakers are tasked with addressing thousands of issues and making decisions that impact our entire island chain. It often takes years for policy ideas to move forward.

Moreover, lawmakers often need time to become familiar with complex policy items, like the state budget. It is important that we retain the institutional memory of elected officials who genuinely support the public’s interest.

Instead of implementing term limits, we should pass proposals to remove corporate influence and dark money from politics. I support strengthening our state’s public funding program for candidates who agree to limits on private campaign contributions.

I also believe that we should enact commonsense campaign finance regulations, like ending the practice of bundling that allows candidates and political action committees to subvert the spirit of campaign finance laws by combining individual campaign contributions into one large contribution. That’s a practice that we should immediately ban.

What reforms, if any, would you propose to make local government more transparent to the public?

To begin, I am one of the strongest champions of comprehensive public financing in the state House. Too often, our political processes are controlled by wealthy donors, who are often the same corporations and individuals who historically benefited from the colonization of Hawaii.

Passing a clean elections program is not just essential for reclaiming our campaign system for the public interest. It is an essential step in rectifying the suppression of Native Hawaiians and the working class that resulted from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Integrity is essential to good government. I support banning the solicitation of campaign contributions during the legislative session. We must also end the practice of allowing campaign contributions to be bundled together, which undermines our efforts to enforce campaign spending limits and invites corruption into our political process. Furthermore, we should strengthen ethics laws that prevent public officials from making decisions on issues that directly impact their personal financial interests.

We must also take conflict of interest decisions out of the hands of individual legislators. Instead, we should empower the Ethics Commission to make recommendations about potential conflicts of interest after bills are filed, with those recommendations being made available for public review. The Ethics Commission has access to legislators’ financial disclosures and is well positioned to determine when acting on a proposal might provide an unfair financial benefit to a lawmaker.

Finally, we should require registered lobbyists to disclose exactly what pieces of legislation–including budget items and capital improvement projects–they are lobbying for or against, so that the public has clear information about who is influencing our government.

What will be your top priority if elected?

The district I represent, State House District 5, is one of the most economically challenged in Hawai’i. It suffers from inadequate public infrastructure, high poverty, and lack of access to basic services. Yet, it is also home to some of our state’s most iconic treasures, including Kona and Ka’u coffee farms, Volcanoes National Park, historic Miloli’i Village, and more. I believe that everyone should be given a chance at prosperity, no matter where they live, and that we must build a more sustainable future for all.

Accordingly, my top priority is addressing our state’s high cost of living by establishing a green economy that benefits all of Hawai’i’s people and our planet. I am committed to passing paid sick and family leave for all workers. I also believe we must create a fully funded public education system that allows our children to reach their highest potential.

Finally, I am striving to boost our state’s efforts to combat climate change and prepare for natural emergencies by growing green jobs, strengthening climate mitigation and adaptation programs, and expanding our renewable energy goals to include a focus on good-paying jobs that align with our transition to a clean economy.

Is there anything more that you would like voters to know about you?

I believe in a politics based on hope. I am fighting to create a clean economy that grows green jobs and preserves our ‘āina for future generations. I am championing schools that empower all children to reach their full potential.

I am striving to advance economic equity and tax fairness to ensure that the wealthy pay their fair share to support our most vulnerable neighbors. I will call for a healthcare system that makes treatments affordable and available to all in need, including women seeking reproductive care.

I will always uplift civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community, especially in the face of backlash and violence from extremists. I believe that Hawaiian lands should belong to Hawaiian hands, not predatory corporations.

In this year’s election, the choice is clear: we must vote to preserve access to basic rights, human dignity, and our democracy. Hawai’i deserves leadership with aloha. That’s what I am working to deliver each and every day.