 Hi, I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkDex, the first show of our week. And we are so happy to meet Rebecca, Rebecca Villa. Say your last name for me. Villegas. Villegas, thank you very, Villegas. Thank you very much. Running for County Council on the Big Island. And we are so happy to have her here because we want to cover politics. And especially this race, this is a very interesting race demonstrating some very interesting trends in Hawaii, trends that you should be aware of. Okay, Rebecca, tell us who you are and what you are and what you're running for. Great. My name is Rebecca Villegas. I am a woman and I was born and raised here on the Big Island. I'm actually fifth generation in the islands. Super, super grateful to have born in the old Hilo hospital and raised here on the Kona side. I'm a graduate of Konoaina High School. My mom is a graduate of Konoaina High School. I grew up in coffee shacks with water catchment and baking our own bread and hanging our laundry, not just because it was environmentally friendly, but because that's what we had the money for. And it taught me a lot about how to live in a resilient fashion, how to participate in a community and how to contribute. From a very young age, I participated in activist activities. And some of my great role models are Angel Pelago and Karen Eoff and Miley David, who were the primary leaders of the Protect Kohani Ikiohana, which went all the way to the National Supreme Court and established Native Hawaiian gathering rights, also established surfing as a cultural practice. So from the time of my teenage years and through into just until I came into office, I was directly helping to make sure that the park at Kohani Ikiohana, at Kohani Iki had been built and there was a collaborative work done between the developer, the county, and then my position was to represent the community. In my adult life, let's see, I was a single mom for quite a while and very grateful to be married now to a wonderful man. I have two grown daughters. I have a grandson who's one and a half. We live in a multi-generational home. So I get to have a little fellow running around in the morning and it's just a real joy. He is definitely one of the inspirations for me to continue fighting the good fight and enduring the politics in order to be able to contribute in my role as public servant, representing District 7 here on the Big Island, which includes North and South Kona. So it's kind of Kona-centric. I worked for Kona Brewing Company for 14 years. I helped build that company from when it was a small brand, very family-oriented. Got to create our brand pillars and our marketing strategies and work collaboratively throughout the islands and on this island, supporting organizations and groups focused on community, resilience, sustainability, culture, sports activities. So that was really, it was a beer brand, but we had such connection and supported it in so many capacities. My favorite part of that job was serving my community and the relationship building. When my predecessor decided to run for state senator, I was approached by some of my mentors and asked if I would consider stepping into and running for office, which I felt really it's one of the, I think one of the pillars of our host culture is that we don't self-promote, right? We get invited to step into a position of leadership. So we pass around. That's the Hawaii way, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And why did you say yes? Why did you say yes, Rebecca? What motivated you to say yes? I love this place. This is my home. This is like where I'm from. This is where my roots are. We have such an opportunity. We continue to have an opportunity to be a model for the rest of the world. We also have a responsibility and I feel it's part of my responsibility to give back. My great, great, great grandparents came to this place. Some of the things they did weren't so great, but I'm so grateful to have been able to be born and raised here and I recognize it's part of my responsibility. Once again, returning to the wisdom of our host culture. It's not my privilege. I don't like, I can't demand, I have an obligation to give back and participate. On a technical level, what are your qualifications for running now? I mean, you have one term in the county council. I guess I should ask, what did you do in that term that qualifies you for a second term? Okay, actually I'm told I took on a lot in my first term and to me that just felt natural because once you have the opportunity to be in this position, to not take advantage of that and bring forth things that people have been begging, pleading, asking for. One of the big things I did was bring the herbicide legislation back up and we actually got it passed through the county council before it was vetoed at the last minute by the mayor. We almost got the veto overridden. Unfortunately that didn't happen, but we had hundreds upon hundreds of testimony. So we're on the environmental side of the equation? It would be fair to say that I am a progressive and therefore I will never put business over environment or humans or species. And at this point, we're at a tipping point as a planet to like negate somebody or think poo poo that they're an environmentalist. We are part of our environment. We are a small portion of it and we have to pay attention to how, what we do, when we do it, where we do it and how we do it affects our environment. The term environment doesn't mean it's so relevant right now. It's so necessary, especially in this time of the coronavirus, especially with climate change litigation. I had the honor of being nominated to go to the United Nations Climate Week and Global Assembly last September and represent the Big Island at a Climate Strong Islands Dialogue and sit in the room with people from all over the world, island nations, republics, different places that are looking at how to be resilient, how to recuperate, how to take progressive steps to counter what we're facing with climate change and global warming. And that was incredible to me because this pervasive theme that came through thousands of people from all over the world was that the solutions for what we're facing as a society now reside within the wisdom of our host cultures and how blessed are we in Hawaii to have the wisdom of our host cultures alive and well and relevant and ready and being activated now in our local politics with the Aina Aloha agreements. What did I miss in your first term? What other achievements you want to point to? Let's see. Some of the things that I didn't, I'm learning with this job, getting something done in government can be really challenging. Sometimes stopping things becomes more relevant. But some of the things I did do was really, I was told when running for office this first time homelessness and our housing crisis is one of the biggest issues here in Kona. So I've worked hand in hand with the county and other nonprofits. We built 18 tiny homes about six weeks ago to move people off the street during coronavirus. I worked side by side with the West Hawaii Community Health Center doing outreach programs. We did a security guard pilot project at Holly Hollowly Park, providing security during the day so the park facilities were safe and healthy for people that come down for programs there. I've also worked hand in hand with our community policing and they developed an honor program. So I went down once a month and painted garbage cans with our people experiencing homelessness and houselessness and picking up garbage and really having experiences where you connect and build trust in order to then be able to serve them better and get our vulnerable population off the streets. I also helped, we're finishing a sewer improvement district. We put in a stoplight and a crosswalk from a beach park. We've, we're finishing a culvert replacement project. I'm really, I've been really working with DPW. One of the great challenges we've had a little less now with COVID is traffic and our street lights were not timed to run together. And there's technology now that all of our street lights could be running on an algorithm that they communicate. And so therefore we have more succinct traffic and we have electrical engineers in our DPW department who are now doing that, which I think is really cool. When you're done with them, would you send them to Oahu? And then, oh, something really exciting. I get really excited about this because it just passed this week, escrow closed, 13 acres on a lead drive, ocean front just was purchased by our open space land fund. So this piece of property will become an open space park. The portion along the water is this rich, rich treasure of cultural heritage and archeological sites that are now will be protected in perpetuity and we'll get started working with the stakeholders, but this is, this is the largest purchase from the 2% land fund in the history of our county. And that just closed this week. So I'm super excited about that. And then let's see, we put basketball hoops in our gym, we, our pool broke in this last year and it took a lot to get it fixed, but we got our county pool back up and running. And then I volunteered and I've been working closely with a friend of mine who has been extremely, extremely active in getting one of the first drive-through COVID test sites here on the west side of the Big Island. So we helped get PPE for her, we went down and set it up, we've taken it down, volunteered, whatever needed to be done, just the sweat equity. Like walking side by side, hand in hand with people as we navigate this, you know, we're so blessed with zero cases right now in the Big Island. It sounds like you've learned about and participated in a lot of community issues and, you know, positive improvements, but I'd like to know, is this a full-time job for you in the county council? Have you been, you know, active on the council? What I mean is, have you been influential on the council? Are you down there leading them? What's your sense of your relationship with the council in general? I think I pushed the envelope. I think I've been, you know, I've got kind of, and I was like, no, wait a minute. I've been asking a lot of questions that other people won't ask, haven't asked. I'm not in this to be a career politician. I'm in this to be a public servant. I don't like the term politics. I'm especially repulsed by this consistent disclaimer that if people act and behave abhorrently or they don't speak with integrity or just that things can be done and then go, oh, well, that's just politics as if this is like some justification or validation for poor behavior. No, this is public service. This is a full-time job for me. It's supposed to be part-time. You're supposed to be able to work something else. No way could I do that. This is full-time, all in. We are past a day and an era when people in elected offices could just kind of sit and do the status quo. Oh, you're so right about that, Rebecca. You know, I'm reading a book now called On Tourney by a fellow named Timothy Snyder. It's best seller. It's only 150 pages long, but wow. And he's talking, he's a Yale professor of history. He's trying to deal with what's happening in the country. He makes interesting parallels between what's happening in the country and what happened in Europe in the 30s. And you're right on the money with him. You would get along with Timothy Snyder very well and with me for that matter. So, okay, so what's your program for the next time? You know, you want to run again, you want to do the same thing, but what do you want to achieve in term number two, Rebecca? Okay, so, you know, I have Bill 101 has been edited and some changes have been made that rectify some of the issues that were pointed out with it. I would really like to get that passed. And I, you know, depending on how the primary goes, that's a really good possibility. It's for the health and wellbeing. I mean, people are tired of going to the park and not knowing it was just sprayed with Roundup and the billions of dollars of lawsuits related to that in the herbicide industry. It's time. We brought solutions. We brought a weed steamer and showed them how to use it. We're providing pro bono support for four years from a professional organization to help us transition. So that's a big goal of mine. I also would really like to, you know, we got to work collaboratively. Our economy is suffering. Our people are suffering. The conversations about transitioning from so much reliance on tourism as our primary economic resource, like we have to change it now. It's not just about like maybe or ideally, we have to change it. But what's really cool is we have the opportunity to do that, the progress being made. I mean, every day, the articles I'm printing out about, you know, growing food and how we can work in the energy fields and civilian conservation course and rebuilding our economy on a Hawaii grown infrastructure and creating this model of resilience and a circular economy where the money here stays here, circulates here and we aren't as reliant on external resources. We will always be and we don't ever want to lose our connectivity because that's part of the world today. It's also being healthy. But I really, really am excited to get to participate and connect with those. I by no means have all the answers. However, what I really feel this job is, is listening to the people in my district especially but the whole island in general. And identifying what the concerns are and then also identifying where are those people because they're here who are working on solutions for that and bringing them together and identifying the resources, identifying the humans and the capital to work on those and then working collaboratively to really put some of these things that have otherwise been outside options. They're already coming to fruition. Look at Mao Farms and why and I, look at the amount of food that they grow and how they tied that into education. I want to say, I think the big island is the best suited of all the islands to do this, to become self-reliant, to go back to diversified agriculture. It is to some extent already but it can be a lot more diversified and it can be a lot more agriculture. And for that matter, clean energy. I mean, big island is a laboratory in those things and it sounds like what you want to do is develop those things so that the big island is an example, if you will, a global example of how you become sustainable in the time of COVID. Am I right? Yes. Yes, we have, we got to turn these challenges into opportunities and crisis is often that pivotal opportunity and it's a change in the way that we think and embracing, leaning in, falling forward, figuring it out and not falling backwards and going back, people like just to get back to normal. Normal wasn't working for a lot of people here. They had to work three jobs, make zero money, like commute for hours a day. Yeah, so maybe this is a great time, a great pivot time for the big island. And there was an article in this morning's Star Advertiser about how Josh Green feels that we may have to go back to lockdown and that would be statewide, of course, and that's gonna have an effect on every island, including of course, the big islands. And so the County Council has to work with the state, the County Council has to follow the lead and implement that plan however difficult it may be. And so you would be in the County Council at the time of COVID, you would be applying these progressive ideas, these diversification ideas, agriculture, clean energy and so forth and to advance the initiatives that we need to have to deal with COVID. This is a crisis time, requires very special steps. I had a rough childhood, okay? I've been through a lot of tragedy and trauma and even some of my early adult life. And the things that make that worth it are that I feel blessed on the one hand for all of that because it's built within me the resilience and the ability to identify opportunities and solutions and to know how we can get through this and to recognize the responsibility to continue to work together, to continue if all we have control over right now is how we think about this and how we personally behave. That right there re-empowers us to participate and play a part in the solution as opposed to being victimized or conspiracy theory or whatever else, it allows us. And I'm grateful for the trials and tribulations of life and the choices that I get to in our community continues to get to make about how to overcome. Well, it sounds like you're more than committed to just doing it. You relish the possibility of the creativity that we call it the legislative creativity that will be necessary and that's just suited for that. But I wanna go to another topic here. We have a few minutes left, Rebecca. And that is, you can hardly miss the fact that there have been articles all over the local media and some mainland media about how money, PAC money is finding its way into Hawaii politics, including remarkably, including even county council races like yours. And you have not only the unions, which in my view have too much money, money they should be spending on their constituents rather than on politics. And the unions spend a ton of money on politics to control things. And that's the way Hawaii is, but I really wish it wouldn't be that way. And then you have, now this is a new adventure. We have PACs coming from the mainland who have very little contact with Hawaii. And yet they wanna affect Hawaii public opinion and they wanna affect races like yours. And they wanna affect legislative actions like the county council, county council, not only the legislature, but the county and they're giving tons, hundreds of thousands of dollars to races, which should be at a much lower funding level. So I wanna know about your thoughts about funding. I wanna know about your own funding. I wanna know what's happening with you. I wanna know about this this contention you're having with your adversary, Jane Clement, about money flowing in from both the unions and these mainland PACs, which trouble me greatly. I talk about it, wouldn't you? You know, even if I take myself out of the equation of all of this, and it wasn't me in the role having an opponent who's been, who's just had like basically an obscene amount of money spent on their campaign, if it was somebody else I would still be gravely concerned because the implications of ulterior motives and agenda are all so obvious. I, you know, we've seen it nationally and even on a statewide, basically, when campaigns get purchased for people, right? A role in a position gets purchased because then the person is there and then they're, you know, they might say they're not, but they're gonna be beholden to whoever put that 100,000- Absolutely, that is the way it works. Absolutely. How they vote or what they do or don't do. I'm really proud and extremely grateful for the $10 contributions that came into my campaign for the grassroots support. You know, I pulled papers right before COVID landed and no, I wasn't campaigning in March and April or even May because we were all in lockdown trying to figure out what to do. I was calling cruise ship companies and just trying to talk to somebody and say, please do not come here. We cannot handle this. I was harping on our mayor, holding up testimonies. I was focused on other things. So it was a surprise. Shame on me for thinking I would, I kind of chuckle, have the opportunity to run unopposed. So when somebody who I'd actually worked closely with filed papers to run against me the day before the deadline and hadn't told me about it, that was really hard. And all of a sudden it was go time. And I really struggled kind of emotionally. Did I do something wrong? Who did I make? What happened? And as all this information has come out, it's actually, one friend of mine said, where it is a badge of honor, Rebecca, you have somehow inspired those that think they are the powers that be and think they are the king makers and think they control how people vote and what they do to put a ton of money behind somebody else because you're shaking a hornet's nest. And I wanna be peaceful and collaborative and cohesive. But once again, we're at a place as a humanity and society and this community and this county and this state where we've gotta speak up. And if it means I lose an endorsement because no burning trees for energy that will cost more, no and uses millions of gallons of clean water a day and then injects it back into the earth right by a coastline. No, that's not smart. No, that's not the best use of our resources. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay to say that. And yeah, I forgot what the question was at this point. Sorry. Well, I wanna know how it plays you. You're in a very interesting spot because County Council is usually not an expensive campaign. It's not a campaign where mainland organizations come here and find last-minute candidates like that and then pump all kinds of money in there. And really the average person would see this happening and say, what's going on here? Why is this mainland organization pumping all this money in? What are they trying to get at? Well, that's what we're doing. How are they trying to affect public opinion? How are they trying to affect the decisions of the legislative body in general? And you're in the middle of that. You found yourself in the crosshairs and this is a big public policy issue, huge, big public policy issue. If I'm out of you, we cannot tolerate this because it steals the state away from us. It lets people on the mainland dictate how we behave and what our legislators, legislative organizations do. That's why I say you're in the crosshairs. How does it feel? Well, beyond even being from the mainland, this has to do with big corporate money. And from all these articles that I've been reading that have been coming out and some of the information coming through them is that it's no secret. Strategies 360 is behind a lot of this. And they're quoted as saying they're coming after Hawaii because we have a goal as a state to be off of fossil fuels by 2045. And they work and they've been tied to for decades to major oil and coal companies. Now, also not a secret, my opponent's last boss was Strategies 360 and she's still listed on their website as a PR consultant for the Big Island. So it doesn't take a whole lot of connecting the dots to see this. You know, it's, yeah, I'm in some crosshairs but you know what, I've been through worse. And if this is the stand that I get to take for our community, for our people, for the future of this island and this county, then this is where I will stand and I will hold ground. And I will, you know, I've been accused of negative campaigning, which I'm like, I didn't write any of these articles. These all came from other people. This is stuff that's been exposed. I'm just gonna continue to do my job, serve these people, you know, stand on the side of the road, hand make my shakas, see I hand made them. I put this on the back, sign wave, it's like a bigger, it's way more fun. And that's what I can do, be authentically me. I'm grateful to have been born and raised here to know a lot of people, you know, people know that I'm- You stand, you know, just integrating all of this, you stand for something beside those community projects that you talked about in those principles of Hawaii. You stand for the notion of let's keep it local. Let's not have money flow in this way and try to turn us on our heads and determine policy in this, what I considered insidious fashion of having big money come in, money that isn't really identified very well, money from organizations that, you know, that have agendas maybe that they don't show and that they're designated candidates don't show, but ultimately which are, you know, toxic to our future. You talked about a future of diversification of environment, you talked about a future of people, you know, working together and all this and doing the right thing, the Pono thing. I don't think that PACs carry that kind of conscience. No, it's all about the dollar. And I just get to be this small part of this broader kind of like realignment. We have this opportunity for realignment, reconnection and, you know, a rejuvenation and a resilient recovery. And I like to put that all with Rebecca, right? Rebecca, that's terrific. Okay, well, we have a minute left, Sarah, Becca, and I wonder if you could, you know, look into the eye of the camera, so to speak and talk to the people out there and leave them the message, you know, the connection message that you wanna leave them with. What would you like them to think about you when they go to the polls as near as what August 8th? What do you want to think about? First of all, I wanna thank them for the opportunity to have served for these first two years. What a first term in office, huh? TMT, global pandemic, sex trafficking issues, hurricane. It's been an adventure to say the least and there are more adventures to come and there are more struggles to come. I would be deeply honored. I continue to be humbled by the opportunity to serve our community and serve the people here and to play this part that we all, and you know, we all have roles in finding the solutions and I would like to encourage everybody to really recognize their opportunities to contribute and how we can work together. I'm a wife, I'm a mom, I'm a grandma, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm an auntie. I'm another woman in this community who wants to work hard side by side with you, hand in hand, even if we must wear gloves and a mask to continue to support the resilience of our economy, of our agricultural industry, of our energy. You know, we're gonna be recovering from this for a long time, but I firmly believe that together we can do it and I commit to you, there's a saying that I found years ago that I hold close to my heart and it's, hey, Ike ana ia i capono to see the right thing to do and do it. And I believe that my style of leadership with Aloha in the last two years has been a reflection of that belief system. I have the courage to make tough decisions, ask hard questions and be around and listen for answers so we can collaboratively find solutions to the challenges we're facing now. And with that, I would just really hope that people would continue to vote Villegas for Hawaii County Council District 7. Villegas, Rebecca Villegas, thank you so much for joining us and sharing and responding to my questions. I wish you well and I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. It's been a joy. It's been a joy. Take care, Jay. Take care, Aloha. Aloha.