Oahu’s Neighborhood Board System was founded in 1973 and, though its record of influence is impressive and its role is critical to maintain, it’s long overdue for a renovation, along with an infusion of new energy.
The opportunity for the latter comes around with each election every two years. In the current cycle, residents have until Friday to declare their candidacy for a seat on one of the 33 boards. All the details are rounded up online, including the candidate submission form (www8.honolulu.gov/nco/neighborhood-board-elections/ Opens in a new tab).
The problem is that there’s a deficit in excitement over this opportunity for community engagement. Almost three-quarters of the races in recent years are not races, in fact: That proportion of seats typically go uncontested.
A lot of the veterans are certainly aware of that. An informal group of members met in 2023 to discuss possible changes but, as Robert Armstrong acknowledged this week, so far there’s been little momentum in that direction.
Armstrong, who has served for the past 5 1/2 years as a member of the Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board, said the Neighborhood Board System Planning Group met Aug. 19 that year. But the overseeing Neighborhood Commission had embarked on a mandatory review of the governing Neighborhood Plan.
So, Armstrong added, after some ideas had been generated by the planning group, the consensus was to hold off until the commission had a chance to act.
However, nothing has emerged yet. Kevin Lye, one of Armstrong’s colleagues on the board, said the commission sees revision to the process for handling complaints about the boards as one focal point.
Clearly, the public should have a robust option for voicing complaints and must advocate for that once an update to the Neighborhood Plan is drafted and hearings are scheduled.
There are other fixes that could be made, Armstrong said, including a kind of restructuring of neighborhood boundaries. He’s surely right about that: The growth in some areas — Kakaako and Kapolei come to mind — have certainly changed the demographics for a system that’s now 53 years old.
All of that said, the success of the neighborhood boards can and should be bolstered now, and the engagement of the community in the approaching elections would be a good entry point. In this era of nationalized political debate, the connections to local community issues are being lost. Far too little attention is being paid to backyard concerns.
Neighborhood boards are a venue where these connections are strengthened. For those with political interests, they have become launchpads for members to higher elected offices.
More importantly, neighborhood boards are the intake port enabling local opinions to bubble up to decisionmakers at the Honolulu City Council.
Many topics that ultimately led to action from Honolulu Hale were sparked by complaints. Vacation rentals, street-parking permits in crowded subdivisions and the contentious “monster homes” controversy rank high on that list.
Development conflicts — from high-rises in Kakaako to the accommodation of housing density in older neighborhoods such as Manoa — can come to the surface. It is far better to contend with these clashes at an early stage of planning.
Oahu is the “gathering place” for most of Hawaii’s population, which means that numerous communities as large as some mainland towns lack governance at the grassroots level. Neighborhood boards provide that bridge between the people and the nine Council members who make the final call.
This island needs more of its engaged electorate to run for a board seat, and strengthen that link.
