If it is the Hawaii government, especially its bureaucracy you are waiting on, then Hawaii really knows how to keep it slow.

For example, after decades of talking about a high-speed rail line, it wasn’t until voters approved a ballot question in November of 2008 that the city could start planning the elevated 20-mile system of steel-wheeled trains on steel rails. Yes, 2008. The project is now estimated to be finished in spring of 2031, or 23 years later.

Talk about staying power and persistence, or maybe the inability to get the job done — Honolulu’s unit of measurement for rapid transit is the decade, not the month or the year.

Another public project with much debate and little progress is the planned $2.65 billion Thirty Meter Telescope project on the Big Island, which was blocked by opponents in 2015 and 2019. Polling shows that a majority of Hawaii residents support the telescope, but Native Hawaiians who consider the mountain a sacred place have blocked it for years.

In other measurements of Hawaii historic time periods, Hawaii is both fast and slow.

Global warming, for instance, is a slow process that is changing the Earth’s atmosphere, but in Hawaii global warming is coming way too fast.

A USA Today report last week detailed how Waikiki is going to be unrecognizable.

“In as little as 20 years, roads, condos and resorts located just a few blocks from the water could be flooded as groundwater continues to rise,” the national news report warned.

Ground water is rising, tides are creeping higher each year. Honolulu’s tourist mecca was built on marsh and wetland drained thanks to the construction of the Ala Wai Canal.

Now the water is continuing to rise.

“That’s a huge problem in Waikiki and it’s probably ground zero for this problem,” said Charles “Chip” Fletcher, interim dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, in the news report.

Dolan Eversole, a coastal geologist and the Waikiki Beach Management Coordinator for the Hawaii Sea Grant Program, added to the concerns.

Global warming is expected to add one foot of sea level rise by 2050, and four to six feet by 2100.

“One foot, we can adapt, but four to six can be catastrophic,” said Eversole. “It’s not going to be pretty.”

Plans to deal with high water range from stop-gap measures to the weird. For instance, the news report says flatly, “Waikiki Beach is not going to be the same in the next 50 years.”

This, however, does not just mean more errant waves splashing the sidewalks; it is the disappearance of landmarks.

To address the ocean rise, the report says, there is more discussion about “raising Waikiki’s streets into walkways to allow water to run under or more canals or build a boardwalk.”

Some of those suggestions sound far-fetched, but now is the time for some hard decisions — and probably a lot of public money.

It is clear that slow-poke Hawaii better quickly realize that it will not dog-paddle out of this looming crisis.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.