Honolulu, like cities across the country, is in the midst of a punishing global pandemic that has shuttered businesses, thrown many thousands into unemployment and suppressed tax collections.
And this cataclysm has descended at a time when Oahu leaders already have been shouldering problems with homelessness, a chronic shortage in housing affordable for its workforce, and a rail project with a huge financial hill to climb before completion.
On top of that, there is a new budget that has been approved by the Honolulu City Council in the midst of a cloud surrounding tax revenue projections. This is sure to set up some difficult executive decisions for the man or woman who next takes charge at Honolulu Hale.
Who would want to be mayor at a time like this? Inexplicably, the 2020 race has attracted a dozen candidates who do — with a full range of executive and governmental job histories arrayed on the campaign stage. The Aug. 8 primary election is now less than a month away, and if no one wins more than half of the votes, the Top 2 face off in the November general.
The decisions that voters need to make should be based partly on their sense of which skill sets Honolulu needs most in the next four years, and which hopefuls have the clear ideas about how to deploy those skills.
The proper focus for Oahu residents, and the mayoral candidate aiming to lead them, would be on fulfilling health and safety needs when it comes time to cutting budgets. Besides the imperative to preserve core city functions, homelessness looms large as a crisis requiring a plan that delivers short-term remedies quickly as well as building for more lasting solutions.
This would mean some out-of-the-box innovations that use available properties to create emergency, even pop-up shelters combined with social services. But it also means addressing the need for permanent housing.
In addition to rehabilitating some existing properties the city owns or can acquire, as the current mayor has done, it means leveraging the Honolulu rail project and the city’s transit-oriented development (TOD) rules to develop new affordable rentals.
To be clear, these are units to house those in low-income groups who have trouble finding a place they can afford to rent, as well as workforce housing, always in short supply. The fact is, TOD has long been used as a rationale for building the rail, one of its valuable yields for the public, but so far, the results have been disappointing.
Final decisions on pacts struck with developers involve votes by the Council as well, but the chief executive will help set the tone for this negotiating. TOD has yet to deliver for Honolulu, and the prospective mayor would need to show how he or she can seal the deal on housing.
Speaking of rail: Seeing this stalled, over-budget project to completion is a dilemma impossible to ignore on the campaign trail. While the mayor does not control its construction, the successor to Kirk Caldwell must be an advocate for transparency from the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation on its costs and progress.
More importantly, the candidates must explain how they will get operations of rail’s first half, ending at Aloha Stadium, up and running, with fares, ticketing and rail-bus links that make sense to commuters. The COVID-19 pandemic only makes all this more complicated.
Finally, voters need to consider how successfully the candidates could work with the legislative branch. A healthy degree of contentiousness between the chief executive and the Council is to be expected, even necessary. Ultimately, though, the taxpayers expect results, especially with the brass-tacks functions — roads, police, fire, trash and sewage — that city governments tackle.
And in the post-pandemic Honolulu the new mayor will face, they will demand even more — so much more.
