 And welcome to today's show, the state of the state of Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii's live streaming network series. Think Tech Hawaii broadcasts from our studio and 1164 Bishop Street in the heart of downtown Honolulu, as well as through remote connection and these days mostly remote connection. So I'm your show host, I'm Stephanie Stoll Dalton. In this election year, office seekers are campaigning to replace the current Honolulu mayor Caldwell. This show, the state of the state of Hawaii, is interviewing the mayoral candidates to inform the public about how they will tackle major issues such as rail, crime, climate housing, homelessness, and especially responding to COVID-19, the virus infection. Then there are, of course, many more minor mayoral duties that hugely affect government decisions and certainly budgeting. So how forthcoming are the candidates about their plans for tackling this full list of governing duties, and especially now, how are they thinking about it in the age or certainly the aftermath of COVID-19. Today, my guest is Professor Neil Milner from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he directs the Public Policy Center. His scholarly expertise informs his comments today on politics and governing Honolulu City and County. Welcome, Dr. Milner. Thank you. I just want to say that I'm retired, so I don't direct anything that you reach anymore. So I'm, yeah, but I'm still, to me, a professor there, at least emeritus. Oh, yes. Okay, emeritus professor, certainly. And yes, I'm sure your influence lives on and pressures for change and influence. Well, yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us today and clarifying that status of yours. That's a wonderful connection, and I'm sure that work is good because of your involvement with it. But I'm really pleased to have you today for this interview conversation. So I like to say that Honolulu, as you know, and we're all thinking about and overwhelmed by but Honolulu faces that the aftermath, if not a new age I've been thinking of COVID-19 effects. I wanted to ask, start out talking about what do you see that the mayor must immediately address? And that would be the new mayor once elected. What would that mayor most immediately address on behalf of Citizens Welfare in this community? Well, you know, it's easier to answer a question like that under normal circumstances. You're still guessing, but under normal circumstances, you'd make a list of things that bother people the most or challenge people the most and you put on their homeless, you put on their maybe rail, although the mayor isn't directly involved. But I think the question has to be looked at in a different sort of way now because of the pandemic. And the first question really is, how do you get the message out to the voters about what you would do first. Now, you know, they've had these statements put on about how they were governed, but this is so fluid. And this election is so, what's the word fragile, I guess, that you really hit that the first question is, how are you going to know what they want to do if it's so hard for them to be able to tell you. So that's really the starting point, which is you can't consider this mayoral election without considering the nature of what an election is like under these circumstances. Well, I think that's really an important set of points. And the first one being, how do they get the information out if they're going to do any pivoting from what it is they're already talking about. And certainly it would seem that pivots are due, given the intensity of this aftermath. So, because the pall of reduced revenues from the whatever surviving businesses are left. Won't they dramatically change the mayor's priorities for funding and support. Undoubtedly, you know, you have a property tax issue, you have all kinds of other issues, it certainly is going to change them whether it changes them as much as the state is another question. But for sure, you're not going to be able to proceed with the same kind of openness and originality at least in the usual sort of way you can't just say more for this and more for that. Again, that's such a fluid situation right now that the mayor even our mayor is not talking about that so much right now he's talking about what to do from day to day and from month to month about the Coronavirus. So the answer to your question is, yeah, it's certainly excuse me it's certainly going to make a difference we know more about how it's going to make a difference in the state. But the fact of the matter is that again, this is such a fluid kind of situation, whether we're back at work, whether more people are back at work in the city is going to make a difference, whether the Coronavirus comes back after we start to loosen up a little bit. That's going to make a difference. I think what what it's going to involve is a kind of leadership skill that I'm not really happy that the state has to offer the year, you're going to have to figure out two very different things. One of which is working with the state, which is always an issue for a mayor remember that a city is actually the creation of a state, which means that the state can do a lot of things to tell a mayor what to do. That's one kind of negotiating thing and you see our present mayor having to work with that all the time on the virus which is just a more visible example. But the other thing is, what is it that you can do to convince people to behave in a certain way what is it that you can do to instill hope, or, and what is it you can do to instill realism. We're not loaded with people here who are very good at that and I'm not sure. Yeah, that's getting to the next, the next piece of this but yes I think you're you're showing the way here that people need to start thinking about what they're saying now and what they're going to have to do even to the point of understanding, Well, what, what is a recovery and what is the meaning of recovery for Honolulu in the circumstances that we have. I mean somebody's going to have to define what that is because we're not going to be back to a full up Ilikai hotel situation pink palace down there. I mean, or maybe we are who knows maybe these planes are going to come in and draw up more people than ever. But what do you think about that or not, not unless we figure out how to do it. Well, this is the problem. Right. This is essentially a state of local decision right now for two reasons. One of which is that we're in a federal system which means that these kinds of matters on health matters. It's always a lot about state and local. The second is that nationally. Trump and the National Administration is pretty much forfeited a productive role in playing this now I know there's a big partisan difference on this but so the mayors are caught again in this in this kind of a vacuum here. You're not going to get good guidance from the federal government on how to do this. You're going to get guidance from the health side from the CDC, although a lot of that thing is not very much. We have a state health department here that is very cautious and conservative about how to move, all of which by saying the mayor may very well be out there on a limb where we're not used to having politicians and how they handle that kind of thing. Now, let me just say what, you know, we're not talking about specific candidates here, but it's not without saying, you know, actually I think the overall it's a pretty good list of candidates, but there's certainly nobody on that list that jumps out. With this kind of bully pulpit unifying people together definitive decision making skill that you know that would make a choice so obvious. You mentioned originality. I mean, certainly there's a script, you know that's been going on for decades along with the corruption and all the rest of it but but the origin, the originality, or what it is that they're used to doing is what I think you meant by as leaders because it is a cadre of pretty strong folk that are running. So what is it now that they're doing to move from being able to say a lot of stuff that they could do and worked in the past, not only here and in their other work and in federal work, but don't they have to be innovative. I mean doesn't this get us into an entirely different category of thinking about the political challenges and the governing challenges is what I mean. Yeah, the short answer is yes, innovative in the sense that we've this is an unprecedented precedent that kind of crisis that we have to deal with with a limited kind of guidance, and that we have to make some very subtle guesswork about the right combination between health, a healthy person and a healthy economy. So, so that's for sure. The difficulty for politicians to be innovative and it's true generally, and it's certainly true in this state, that is in times of crisis, you tend to fall back on what you know best, and how you know best to do it. That's what I think the state is really doing right now the lip service otherwise. So, when you say they have to be innovative, you're asking people to essentially move away. I think especially in this situation from a lot of the ways that they think about things sure some of the skills are still there. That's, that's another one of those areas of innovation that that is hard to deal with. A lot of what the mayor has had to do in this city in the last four, maybe eight years is essentially manage failure. You know, the failure of rail to get done on time, the failure of the homelessness issue to get much better and managing failure. Good, good management, bad management, it's very different from what the kind of management is going to have to be in the next four years. Have you heard anything from them, or seen anything on their websites, I mean they just gotten to. Well, until recently you know that they all were kind of saying the same thing same list same priority list, etc, with tweaks but, but as far as innovative as far as you know getting into the recovery from a deep difficulty here. What are you hearing them say anything like that could address this issue of how to think in another zone. Oh, I don't think so yet I think that the more important question is not how I think about it because I'm fairly attuned into politics right I mean that's what I do. That's how the average person what the average person thinks and I don't think the average person the average person may not even be aware that there's going to be a primary election for me or an August that the first thing you have to do. Before you can convince people that you have some good ideas let's say for the coronavirus is to get people even to know one that there's a race and that to who you are. It's very hard so if theoretically someone right now, if your candidate had a really elegant way to deal with the coronavirus I said, hypothetically, who would know about it. I mean, because they can't get the message out very much the newspapers are full of the basically the pandemic coverage. They can't go out there and campaign they can't have people out there ringing doorbells and doing signs. I'm not even sure if they're doing any significant polling, you know, some fairly sophisticated sophisticated kind of ways to the polling on this. Don't know if it's being done they're not going to tell you but it's much harder to do some of these. Some of the polls actually involve follow ups that are door to door. So, so I keep coming back to, man, if I were running for mayor, it's really hard to figure out what to do. It's the Joe Biden problem in lots of ways, where he's got to sit in his, he puts a suit and tie on and sits in where in his basement I don't even know where he sits. I mean, that's why we're here. Yeah. If I were running for mayor, this would not want I would not want this to be the only platform that I could. I don't know who watches and social, you know, I mean social. I don't know who watches. The other thing about mayor's elections, this is a national phenomenon, and it's sort of sad. Local elections have become nationalized that that means two things. People turn out for local elections, like mayors are lower on average across the country. That's the first thing. Secondly, it's much more likely that people make a decision about whom to vote for, for let's say mayor, on the basis of the cues they get from the national party that they this that they agree with. So, so that local issues just to find locally have become less important over time. So all of that plays into how difficult it is to get across the idea that I'm different. And most of the time when you see ads for whatever candidates, they're kind of platitudinous in the sense of, as you said, describing general things in general. And that's okay, because you usually have a way of following up. That's different. I don't know enough about their social media campaigns specifically the nuts and bolts to know if they're getting the hits that they want. Who's watching are they tracing it do they even have the capacity to look at those sorts of things. Well, there you go. That's that's expensive. And I mean, they, they do pump up their websites but whether they have those other services. I don't know but if somebody really wants it, you would think some of these people are pretty experienced and they would know to do that and since it is a strong group. I mean, I think you do have the talent and the capacity there to do some of this kind of thinking in fact some of them may find it a pleasant challenge to the ordinary campaign routine. I mean, I'm just speculating that. I mean, if you don't know how to do it, you don't know to get other people to do it, and you don't realize how limited the alternatives are and you can't afford it. That puts you way down on the on the list in terms of the odds in your favor of getting election. So the first thing you look at is who's got, you know, who's got money and who's got capacity but I can't imagine under any circumstances now running any kind of campaign without a strong social media presence. But certainly in this kind of situation you got nothing. I mean you got nothing else already going to stand at Safeway six feet apart with a mask on and say well I'd be pressing the flesh, if I could touch your hand. Yeah, well, I mean they are still going out. I mean, why is note noted for for doing that. But I mean, to get down to to then back to the crisis and the and the and the press of the revenue shortfall. How are they going to. I mean, why aren't they wanting to talk about how they're going to maintain this, the, well they're going to resist the urge to increase taxation. And that that's that's something that is lying right out there for everybody ought to be absolutely quivering over this, you know with the property taxes coming up and all that but I mean what what are, what are they going to do like you say who's going to give me and taxation is the usual way to get the revenue. Only other thing might be, do you think the hotel industry and like key key I mean these are mostly big, big brother things from the mainland so I mean why can't they kick in a little later any potential and what do you see about the revenue picture. You start with the simple thing if you need, if you're, if you have a revenue deficit compared to where you were, you either have to make cuts, or you have to raise taxes you have to do a combination of both candidates don't like to talk about that things and that sort of way not it's not just in this campaign but generally campaign though, if governing or campaigning is easier than governing there's the old phrase, campaigning is poetry governing is pros. What that means is that it's a really dangerous time for a politician to come up with a precise plan, and not just because not just because they're chicken. It's not that so much. You can say at this, at this time, I don't know, I mean, I don't really know how much the, how much the private capital is willing to help us how much the, the, it's mainly the other way around what can government do for for tourism. Look, the whole tourism thing is is a huge elephant in the room because any other kind of transformation and there could be lots of changes as a result of that. I don't think anything will happen along those lines unless we figure out what to do about about the tourism and I don't think any candidate right now is going to be all that comfortable saying this is what we should do. Frankly, because if they say this is what we should do. I wouldn't believe him because that's a kind to me that's a sort of false confidence. And I mean, I've been around political campaigns enough to know you always have to appear confident. But there's a difference between confidence and what what's the word fun thing, you know, kind of making stuff up as you go along. And that's that to me is the real what's the word the real knob of how hard it's going to be to be mayor, because you've got to get. There's gonna be a lot of bad news. I mean, and they're into a lot of destiny, a lot of hard things. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of misrepresentation. Yeah. So, um, what now with why key key, I have to admit, I, I haven't ever done anything but assume that that was a big golden duck or chicken or the golden egg, the goose, the golden goose, right. The golden goose for Honolulu. I mean, you don't hear much about it. They do get their pampering. I think Calico was a little bit better shape and coheal than, than Kabilani, but what what do you know about how that works. Well, it is starting to get a whole lot of attention. The, the, all of these kind of task forces that are forming the primary question is what do we do about it. The golden goose thing is an interesting metaphor here because on the one hand, it's, it drives this pandemic for sure. And that's, that it, and that's a problem. On the other hand, the golden goose has produced so many tourists here per day that there is at least a count there's always been complaining about that but a kind of counter movement saying, we can't go any further, but at this time it would be nice to figure out a way to, to change the tourist volume. So you start hearing stuff that's coming up right now that to try to cater to a smaller clientele that spends more money. But again, the first thing about tourism that people have to figure out and the mayors are a little bit involved in this decision but we're reading right now is what makes it safe enough to allow tourists back into this back into Hawaii, the combination of testing and contact tracing and there's some, there's some big differences in how the state level people are thinking about this but the more important thing is that it's, it's an answer that I think is going to be pretty dramatic and pretty drastic for, you know, for anybody to say, because we depend on we're not a diversified economy and that's not going to go away and the mayors can't make that go away and the mayors will become players if not victims in that. Well, you know, I mean business is the, is the other deep pockets right you have the government and then you've got business who has comparably well probably not totally but comparable big pockets and one of the problems with these more tourists coming in and whatever regulations or rules that they're going to try and lay on. I put the entire Honolulu police force down there to make sure that Joe Smith from Arkansas stays in his room for X whatever's quarantine. So I mean there's another point about the cooperation of, you know, the hotels with some of the duties that Honolulu is going to have imposed upon it to keep people alive here. So I mean I'm just wondering is there any, do you believe there can be any character in these any moral compulsion among these people to keep this place from just becoming a, you know, it could be one of those islands with nothing but empty buildings. Well, there is the response to this virus in this town has shown a great deal of what I guess I would call moral strength in lots of ways in terms of cooperation and so on. But moral strength, if moral strength was all you needed to run a society, you wouldn't need laws right so we see right now this kind of reliance on moose surveillance, when people come in, and some kind of moral strength is only working in a kind of cathartic sort of way and you can't rely on that for the masses. So the real question, the real question is not, well I guess he'd come back to that same question again. What makes, what will make it safe to bring back tourism under any circumstances. People can have their, people can have their ideas about whether there's ways to cut it back to make it more sustainable all those things. But the first thing is, when can you open it. And how do you open it before you can even start making definitive decisions about whether you want to make it smaller. And there are other places in the country that are wrestling with this. You know New York City, for example, which is as better as it is there is still a huge the pandemic is still huge there. They're now starting to do long range discussions about what do you do about tourism in New York. One is a big New York City is a big tourist place and to isolate it's not like we, we got lucky here because we're an island. Well, yeah, and we didn't, we didn't capitalize on that. We should have that shark net out there that nothing could get through. Well, that's right. We, it turns out we did. We were either luckier than we thought or we did better than we thought. So did you think that car Lulu will remain prosperous in the short term, or is our prosperity, which I think there's a rather general opinion that it is prosperous. Do you think that's off in the future again and we're going to go through a period of time where we're not. Well, I don't consider how a little prosperous and here's why 50% of the people in in on the island on the island of Oahu are one paycheck away from having no money at all. This is before the pandemic. That people have no savings people are one check away. When you get older it's very expensive. So the word I like to use is that Honolulu is surviving and it survives because of the kind of people who are here. And because a lot of them are willing to put up with with economic sacrifices because they want to live here, smaller houses more crowding and so on. Honolulu is certainly going to be less of all of the even whatever you call it. And that's what I just called it. There's no reason to think in the short run that that's going to get any better people get their jobs back, but their jobs that paid the average salary here. The average hourly wage is about 15 bucks an hour, the average market apartment two bedroom apartment rents for $35 an hour. And that's not going to change in any kind of dramatic way in the short run and the state has been talking for years about me, you know, basically changing that which I've always been skeptical about, but never mind it's it's a it's a good it's a good aspiration. So we're going to we're a we're a fragile place. I'm not fragile I have a nice pension I'm retired I'm doing fine. But for most people for half the people for sure and probably more. This is a fragile place. That's going to be more fragile. Well, this is interesting. I was I was my last question had to do with what was going to be the, what was going to become the notion for an ideal Honolulu City County County Mayor, and playing around with that would be really maybe we can do it again. But you know, we have so much experience coming through in this group of competitive of campaigners that you know, and I think they're perfectly capable, hopefully agree that they could actually make. It's a pretty good list. It's a very diverse and an interesting and pretty good list of mayoral candidates to put our hopes in. Well, we're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up and I'm 70 so Dalton and this is the state of the state of Hawaii on the think tech Hawaii live streaming network series. We've been talking remotely with Dr Neil Milner about what leadership role current mayor candidates must offer voters to competently serve as mayor in the aftermath of COVID-19. There's more to talk about with this and I will see you all again in two weeks on the next state of the state of Hawaii. Mahalo and Aloha everybody.