Name on ballot:

Anthony Makana Paris

Running for:

State House – District 42

Political party:

Democrat

Campaign website:

www.votemakana.com

Current occupation:

Small Business Owner

Age:

43

Previous job history:

Research Analyst; Hawaii State Senate Judiciary Committee Staffer; Campus Minister; Adjunct Professor; Teacher; Lab Assistant; Farmer

Previous elected office, if any:

Neighborhood Board No.34 Makakilo-Kapolei-Honokai Hale

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

Aloha. My name is Anthony Makana Paris and I seek to serve as the House District 42 Representative, ʻEwa and Kapolei. I grew up fishing and farming in Lualualei valley and along the shores of West O‘ahu, graduated from Nānākuli Elementary, and was raised in the faith community of St. Rita’s on Hawaiian Home Lands. I was also houseless for a time, and I know the struggles of living paycheck-to-paycheck. My mother is a retired janitor and my father is a retired ironworker.

Yet, through community support and hard work, I earned an engineering degree from MIT, a philosophy/theology degree from Graduate Theological Union/Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, and a J.D. from the University of Hawaii – William S. Richardson School of Law. Our communities raised me and prepared me, and now I wish to serve our communities in return. Together, we can leave Hawaii better for future generations.

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

We should leave Hawai‘i better than we found it. Hawai‘i is at a crisis point in our history with high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, record high condominium insurance fees, grueling traffic and long commutes, rising crime, a shortage of good jobs, food insecurity, aging and insufficient infrastructure, increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, rising sea levels, and a public educational system desperately in need of improvement. The foundation for solutions to all of these problems is adequate, affordable housing for Hawaii’s families.

Hawaii should be a place of hope and opportunity for our ‘ohana. With Hawaii’s median home price pushing above $1 million and the cost-of-living pushing kamaaina families out of the state, we need to confront the affordable housing shortage head on.

State government needs to work with the counties to ensure zoning regulations help support development for residential housing. We need to dedicate significant funds to subsidize the cost of infrastructure development for affordable housing developers. We need to identify state lands that make sense for housing our communities. We need to contemplate innovative revenue generation opportunities, including potential green taxes, to create more funding.

When Hawaii’s families are secure in their housing situation, and not struggling every day just to keep a roof over their heads, our communities will have the bandwidth and stable population of diverse ages and demographics necessary to address any other challenge that Hawaii will face, now and in the future.

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

I believe in comprehensive tax reform and using taxpayer dollars wisely. I support a fairer tax code and would explore the following: raising income taxes on the rich; phasing out low tax rates for the rich; raising corporate taxes; making global corporations pay taxes in Hawaii; making Real Estate Investment Trusts pay their fair share; having visitors pay their fair share; charging an “empty-homes” surcharge on vacant properties; collecting taxes on responsible adult-use marijuana; and suspending any General Excise Tax exemptions that have served their purpose.

I support a Tax Reform Task Force to look at a comprehensive tax reform to address taxes and fees at the state and county levels to make Hawaii’s tax code more progressive and worker-friendly to make sure our local families can continue to live, work, and play here in the islands. Part of the tax reform could look at how we can eliminate income tax on the first $100,000 earned (or income tax completely).

I support increasing government efficiencies, including managing state contracts with a more modern, transparent procurement process that is integrated across the various state jurisdictions (like the Department of Education and the University System) and counties. The updated procurement system should address limited in-house experience on contracting within each jurisdiction, decrease timelines for delivery of services, provide performance-based measures and incentives for vendors that use public resources well, provide central resources across all procurement jurisdictions of the state and counties to facilitate cost, speed, quality, and compliance on differing goods and services that would be outside of the local procurement jurisdiction’s expertise, provide a central clearinghouse of vendors and their performance, and provide ongoing educational support for procurement specialists and officers.

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

In the short term, the state legislature can encourage and empower the Insurance Commissioner to address the extreme rise in insurance through administrative processes to address the recent increases that range from 300% to 1,300%. The commissioner could clarify procedures by which the insurance companies must justify such an extreme increase on a short time scale. The legislature could also look at the viability of supporting condominium associations with self-insurance and explore how to appropriately tap into the Hawaii Insurance Guaranty Association, established to safeguard Hawaii homeowners and businesses if insurance companies default.

In the longer term, I would explore the viability of a public option for insurance to bring stability to the market, as the underlying causes of the rise in insurance rates are directly tied to climate change and the increasing frequency and severity of disasters.

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

If we invest in our ʻāina and our people first, everything else will follow.

Economically, we need to improve Hawai‘i through investing in history’s greatest economic drivers – home construction, agriculture, education, and firm and renewable energy. I support creativity and innovation. Our communities have ancestral wisdom and are skilled with formal education and street smarts, ingenuity, and know-how. I can see innovative policies that address food security by supporting vertical farming to maximize growing crops in vertically-stacked layers that conserve water on our scarce landbase as a part of that solution and a potential export of specialty crops using the empty freight hulls of our airplanes.

We need to look at other industries as well that move Hawaii in a positive direction. For example, we need direct and focused investment in industries that build resilient communities while also building economic opportunities. Following our experience during the pandemic, where I was humbled to work with groups feeding our youth and their families, it is clear that we need meaningful investment in agriculture and to move away from importing over 80% of our food. We also need to leverage the federal infrastructure funds to build green jobs for our local people.

However, no amount of improvement in tourism or the economy in Hawaii will be worth it if our kamaaina families are not here to participate. The ability to house our families is at the heart of our responsibility to ensure a basic quality of life for our communities and further improve Hawaii’s tourism industry and economy.

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

One of the greatest challenges our state faces in the next decade is losing our people, especially our younger generations. Hawaii has a housing crisis, with thousands of residents leaving our shores every year because of the high cost of living, especially housing.

Our goal should be truly affordable housing so that our residents can remain here and that we can bring our families that were left back home. Fully funding the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is critical to addressing this crisis. I also support stabilizing the condominium insurance market, smart planning and transit-oriented development, mixed-use zoning for housing, increasing state investment in public housing, especially for long-term rentals, and programs that prioritize residents, including ALOHA Homes.

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

My top three priorities for public education are:

1. Salaries that are commensurate with teacher years of service and experience, including permanent funding of differentials for Special Education, Hawaiian Immersion, and other hard-to-staff posts;
2. Housing assistance for teachers, educators, and civil servants; and
3. Renovations and retrofitting of public school buildings and replacing portables with permanent buildings.

I do not feel that public education is adequately funded. I am willing to explore subsidized public housing in proximity to schools for civil servants — including teachers and support staff — in coordination with the counties. Subsidized housing for teachers and support staff would allow teachers to save on rent and travel. I would consider transferring State-controlled parks and their maintenance to the councils if agreeable. This would free up budget resources and would allow after-school-hour access to the parks — a win-win.

I support repairing and modernizing all our educational facilities, especially to make sure that our educators and our keiki have a safe environment to learn. I would support improving our procurement systems across the state, including for the Department of Education, to make the government more transparent, accountable, and efficient.

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

Yes. The new stadium will bring valuable benefits to our community. It will boost short term construction jobs and create long-term retail jobs. It can also serve as the anchor for an entertainment district that is accessible along the rail line and be the core of a transit-oriented development with public workforce and affordable housing that we so desperately need.

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

No. While I am open to exploring term limits on the higher end as recommended by the Commission to Improve Standards of Conduct, chaired by retired Judge Foley, I would rather focus efforts on appropriate solutions that incentivize legislators to do a better job for the common good and increase civic engagement by the electorate.

According to Professor Anthony Fowler at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago (Democracy Reform Primer Series):

“-Term limits would remove from office high-quality elected officials who the voters like.
-Term limits would reduce the incentives of elected officials to work hard and please the voters.
-Most incumbent success is attributable to the popularity of the candidates, not the institutional advantages of incumbency.
-Empirically, term limits appear to reduce economic growth and increase ideological polarization.
-There still are reasons to support term limits, particularly when our elections and governing institutions do not perform as intended, but there may be better solutions to these problems that do not sacrifice our best elected officials or remove their incentives to do a good job.”

Some “solutions” we ought to consider for Hawaiʻi are (1) making legislators a full-time position; (2) extending the legislative session; (3) increasing the partial public financing for campaigns; (4) ranked choice voting; and (5) increasing civic education and civic participation throughout our educational system.

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

To make the state legislature more accessible and transparent to the public, I would lengthen the legislative session and make legislators a full-time position.

What will be your top priority if elected?

My foremost goal is to prevent residents from being priced out of Hawaiʻi. Immediately, this entails passing legislation to stabilize the condominium insurance market, to protect owners and renters. Looking ahead, our focus should be on constructing more housing units that are genuinely affordable for local residents, including long-term rentals.

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

Mahalo nui loa for considering my candidacy to represent House District 42 – ‘Ewa and Kapolei.

For years, I have worked alongside our communities to address the systemic causes and negative social determinants of our poor health, including the appropriate placement of landfills. Public health studies show that living next to landfills lowers infant birth weights, increases birth defects, and causes headaches, sleepiness, and psychological, central nervous system, and gastrointestinal issues. Residential exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas from landfills is associated with lung cancer, respiratory illnesses, and death. I am proud of the community’s advocacy and significant progress toward ensuring that any new landfills are at least a half-mile away from our homes, hospitals, and schools. West-side lives matter.

My name is Anthony Makana Paris, and I humbly ask for your vote. Together, we can build a place our local families can afford to return to. I will work with all our communities to build a Hawaiʻi where we can thrive.