 It's Winston Welch. I'm your host of Out and About, a show here on Think Tech where every other week or so we explore a variety of people, events, and organizations who are interesting and interested in fuel our life here in Honolulu. As a disclaimer, this show is not affiliated with any group that I might be affiliated with. That said, I am especially delighted to have Mayoral Candidate Kimberly Marcos Pine with me today. Council Member Pine is an experienced politician who is now seeking our top elected office here in Honolulu and we are delighted she will be sharing why she's running for mayor and some of her ideas and issues with dealing for the concerns of Honolulu residences. So thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me Winston. You know, we've worked together over a number of years and I've been able to see your passion and dedication for the community. You've been representing essentially the leeward coast and how where does your boundary exist you right now? It's half of the beach and then it goes to Kapolei, Makakilo, and all through the Waimai Coast to Makaha. And you've been representing that for the last, is it eight years now? Almost eight years now, yes. Okay. So you've become intimately familiar with a whole bunch of issues of everything that goes on in this island. After eight years of sitting there, tell us why are you seeking the office of mayor and what do you think you can do for the people of Honolulu? Well, I'll be honest with you. I was supposed to retire and finally be that good military wife that I have failed to be for quite some time, you know, while my husband also served his country. But a lot of decisions and things have happened during my term at the city council, like trying to redevelop all along the beach park by hiring mainland consultants to tell local people how all Moana should be redesigned, even though it's pretty much perfect, we just need regular things fixed. And bulldozing Sherwood Forest, a lot of things really disturbed me in leadership. But also seeing that I could do more. We've passed sweeping legislation for affordable housing, we built 4000 units. I'm so happy to give keys to a single mom who's living in a domestic violent shelter for 500 bucks. We gave her a home, not too far from my house. And it was one of the many thousands of projects that I held built for people who just really needed affordable place to live in Hawaii, have 4000 more units that are going to be built because of sweeping legislation that I passed that people said that I could never pass because the divisions were so high between developers and nonprofits that want affordable housing to be built. And I just see how I'm the kind of person that can start on day one to as mayor to make your housing more affordable, Hawaii more affordable, making this a clean safe efficient ethical city. I fought corruption at City Hall, you know, we made sure Chief K. Aloha and his wife went to jail. And of course, we're investigating heart in the real project. I believe a lot of corruption has taken place. But most importantly, in the last two years before COVID even happened, I know it was going to happen. But I already declared that we are in a very bad situation where we are over dependent on one particular economy. And if something happened, the whole Hawaii is going to collapse. And sadly, I was right. But luckily, we've already been working on new economies in specialized agriculture, specialized high tech, military contracting and other new inventions for renewable energy and clean energy and green energy, which I believe we can start with in six months because we had been working on this for so long. So the last number of years have left you wanting more and seeing that there's a lot of unfinished business here and projects that you feel you could really contribute positively to. Obviously, now, and how have you changed in the last eight years? What have you learned and how have you grown and have you shifted in ways that you didn't imagine that you might have? Or now that surprise you looking back? I think I've surprisingly, and I was kind of I communicate with Gary Hoosier a lot. Now I was like, Gary, I think I'm a progressive now. And of course, I had joined the Republican Party many years ago when a lot of Democrats were joining the Republican Party. That was when Daniel Noyes said that Democrats have lost their way. Democrats were going to jail. They're cozying up with corporations and making money illegally. And so, you know, I was raised under the plantation Democrats, my family are Filipino immigrants and my mom married a cool white guy from California who thought the world was going to end during Vietnam War and came to Hawaii and came to hippie. And now he's a distinguished college professor. And so I've had this, I say I have this fortune and people said, Well, you don't know what you want. I'm like, no, I believe this is a blessing for me. I'm running for a nonpartisan race. You couldn't think of the perfect candidate that understands the mindset of people with different beliefs. You know, Mahapa Howley girl. I've been a member of both parties because of either corruption or things that went wrong. And of course, I left through Republican Party when our current president was elected because civil rights and equal rights for women and respect for women in the workplace is a core part of my beliefs. And so it's nothing against anyone that's still in the party. There's some things that they believe in like Abraham Lincoln was one of the help to found the parties. He fought against slavery and flee this freed the slaves and women who were in the Republican Party many years ago fought for women's rights and the women's right to vote. So there's some really good history in that party. And there's really good history in Democrat Party. And what I see now is the divisions are so great thanks to the internet, we can find people who believe the same things, we don't have to mingle with people that don't believe the same things anymore. So we get really stuck in our beliefs. If you just hang out on the internet, you don't have to see people in person. So unfortunately, with that, it's created a society where we're no longer forced to work with people that aren't like minded. And so I come from this interesting background of where conflict clashed constantly even at the dinner table where you had my my hippie college professor dad right with this conservative Filipino family can imagine those conversations that were had you know at the dinner table and but my dad taught us to welcome conflict and to make it your goal to end conflict through talking and finding that one thing that unites us first and then you start the conversation there and you just throughout all the things that you know you're not going to convince each other on. And that's how I've been able to pass sweeping affordable housing legislation when I was zoning sure I was the first zoning share to force developers building 10 units or more to give us affordable housing for free. And at first they hated it. They said we're going to build in Texas came we're leaving Hawaii. And I said okay, well, let's figure out how to get you to build what we need. And then we found a way to do it where they could still make their profit. But give these housing units for free because what I saw was that we were spending $130,000 to $180,000 per affordable housing unit. And with this formulation that I put together, we're getting it for free. And then for the ones that government was building, we went from that $180,000 and I have these new Kauhale village units that are tiny homes that are only going to cost 12 to $20,000. So you can imagine, I want to be mayor because I come up with all of these solutions. But I need to be the mayor to actually build these units and to bring a safer Oahu resilient economy that I've been working on. The mayor has tremendous ability to get stuff done. That's why we're not we're not get stuff done. Yes. Right. Right. And so but it's important that the mayor have a really great strong relationship with that with council members and the entire community. And it's it's a tough job. I mean, being a politician, you're you're elected to you know, kind of listen to all the sides and some people are very spicy, I guess, and passionate about their positions, which may be the exact opposite of the next person that you listen to. It's hard. I respect those who seek public office and public service because it is a calling. It's not it's not for everybody. And, you know, one of there's there's some things that you got to make hard decisions on and that are difficult and that really do affect people's lives. But here in Hawaii, we're a unique we're in a unique space and we all got to get along. There's nowhere else to go. You know, we're one island, we're just we have to stay together, which is why I think we're we're special in so many ways here. And lucky we live Hawaii, as we said, like, yesterday, I just saw everybody preparing so well for the hurricane. And fortunately, it didn't hit us. We have some divine protection, obviously, but for a lot of people that are seeking about the homeless and the difficulty of that, it routinely ranks as one of the top concerns of residents here. Now, you worked for the US vets, Hawaii office, which, which deals with some, you know, a lot of hard, hard cases. And so you're familiar with that. What plans do you have for that particular particular group of folks who, you know, are broken? They need our help in whatever ways. How do we how do we best serve them and the wider community in doing so? These are the one of the issues that I changed over time in terms of my perspective of the homeless issue. Of course, I came from a Filipino immigrant family who came here with like $12. And my grandparents, when they finally passed away, they had several houses and they never flaunted their success. It was really because they saved a lot and they worked three and even sometimes four jobs. My grandpa was in the Coast Guard. And then one day in the afternoon, he'd go and sell cars. And then another day, he was cleaning someone's houses after work. And then on the weekends, my grandparents went and did farming in the North Shore. And then they sold everything at Thomas Street Market. And their success was very hard success. And so I thought, they never became homeless. They, you know, so these people must be lazy, right? And so I wanted to solve the problem. And of course, I had certain thoughts and beliefs about the problem and how to solve it. And so I started working at US. That's why I was still working in the house or represented that was a part time job. So I could do that when we weren't in session. And wow, did my mindset change? I was mentoring a veteran who was this great salesperson, I was in charge of bringing awareness to different businesses about the homeless veterans, a shelter and affordable housing connect to it. We needed to get toilet paper from hotels, you know, that didn't want to use, you know, use, you know, the smaller roles that were left and we had soaps and all kinds of things and old towels. So I was training him how to talk to people and he was so fantastic. And so the first day we did so great getting all these donations from all these businesses and things they were going to get rid of anyway. And then the next day, I was so excited to work with him again. And then he called the same people the next day as if you never talked to them before with the same excitement that he had the day before and then I started realize, yeah, he probably can't work at a regular job. But if I first met him, I'm off, you're just lazy. Why are you homeless? And so I this is one of those blessing things that have happened to me where it didn't even change my own mindset. And so when I see the homeless problem, ever since when I was in house or representatives, I've always pushed, you've got to go all in on mental illness, help, you have to go all in on providing drug addition help because it kind of go together actually. And I would say 80% of the cases that I've worked with in homeless issues. And then there's the third that just gosh, get hard times and they just need a place to stay until they can get back on their feet. But it's one paycheck away from homelessness. Yeah, which is a lot of people right now. And so my solution, again, I put in the budget, you know, money is for even though this is the state responsibility to deal with mental health issues and drug addiction, I just, you know, if they're not going to do it, let's do it. And so I put money in the budget for that. And then of course, my, my next solution, we went from the affordable housing legislation that I passed that if you had 10 units or more, you have to provide affordable housing, then the monster homes were being built next to grandma's house and Makiki and Manoa. And so I had to talk to those people that were building and they said, Well, Kim, you know, we're building it here because the zoning code says we can. And I said, Well, why don't you just go to the apartment zone and I found, and they said that we can't. And I said, What do you need? Can't. Well, due to things that happened over time, just politicians do this, I found that just over time, they add a tweak here and tweak them, when you put the lot together, it prevents people from doing good things. And so if you had a lot 20 square foot, 20,000 square foot or less, you really couldn't build an apartment because they added all these setbacks, the rules and regulations, you can really just build a three foot, very tall, a three foot wide apartment. And that's just not realistic. So we fix that. But in exchange for giving them these better zonings, they're going to give working us free working class affordable housing and we put construction formulas and financial formulas together to show each developer how they can afford these rental rates. And so now I'm working on the homeless issue. So what it is, the reason I'm telling you this whole story is, you can't open units for the homeless, if you don't get the working class out of these lower income units in the first place, you got to empty them out, then you have to build more units for homeless. And that's why the lowest lowest income is the area that government has to pay for, you can't get public private partnerships really for those one that's very hard to do. So that's why I focused on the amount going from the $180,000 unit that government pays to 12,000 to 20,000 unit in the tiny homes. And so we're really hoping to have these Calhalla village concepts and these are very similar to what Twinkle and the Waianae area was working on themselves. And at the same time, I was working on this tiny home concept. And so I really like how they, they use ag land, but they actually use ag land to grow things. There's a lot of ag land that's just not even being used anymore. And so you go back to this concept of the plantation days, the native Hawaiian village concept, where you have this community where you're growing all the food around you and you're eating it. And then you also have your little store to do your trade or your sales for. And so I want to bring that kind of agriculture back, where you're not just growing farmers, but not just growing the plants, but you're growing the farmers too. And you're, you're starting a whole new culture of sustainability. And so I've been looking at the legislation for that's a little bit more complicated. We have to work, of course, the Sierra Club and all the people think, oh, you're developing farmland. I'm like, no, we're doing farmland the way it used to be when we had farmers in the old days, we allowed them to have these tiny homes for their workers. And the biggest complaint I'm getting from the big time farmers, Kim, I have to get immigrants to come, you know, and then they pile up in these apartments, and we don't pay them that well. And then their families still live back in their countries. We want to recruit your local people, give them an affordable place to live. And you say, okay, at this time, you wake up and you help us to farm the land. And you practically have an almost free place to live. Or if you want to buy your unit, we can sell it to you. Can you imagine that mortgage on $12,000? And when you're creating a sense of community and connection and a place where, where you can feel connected to the land, rather, I mean, it's, I would agree that there's some great solutions out there. And that concept, along with others, last time I checked, we've got about 20,000 empty hotel rooms in Waikiki right now, maybe we could convert some of those over, at least temporarily, because this, this situation is obviously going to become a lot worse than better right now, because COVID, yes, COVID is not going anywhere in the near future. So can you talk a minute about that? And what, what you've been thinking, this has just sort of been thrust as this emergent issue that I think we were kind of all hoping would go away by, you know, a couple months, and then we'll be free. But it's the case. What do you have to deal? What would you do? How would you deal with that? And all the ramifications coming down from there economically and homelessness and tourism and all the whole ball of wax? Well, if I were a mayor, I would do some things a little differently. Of course, I don't criticize the mayor or the governor or any of the other mayors of the other islands. No one's went to class for something like this. No one has training for something like this. This all kind of caught everybody off guard. We had SARS happen in China and then spread to some of the Asian countries, but then it stopped. And that was it. And so when this first started, everyone thought, ah, this is just going to be like SARS. And then they found that was highly contagious. And that's what's different about this particular virus. But I think what we could do better with the COVID funds that we do have, I of course, and I propose this to the administration, they can listen to me or not. Half would go to survival, making sure that the people know that we're going to make sure you have enough food to eat, that we're going to make sure you had a roof over your head. So it's eliminate that stress from you right now. But instead, we're doing these mass food giveaways that is so stressful and making everyone on the island go to this one location. I'm glad the mayor stopped that because that caused a lot of stress for a lot of people. So now, my proposal was, we already have networks because I've been doing this since I was in the House of Representatives, I've places all across my district. On Monday, there's food here on Tuesday, there's food here, you know, so you already have groups already doing this throughout the island. So I had suggested a long time ago when they first started doing the mass things to just go back to the distribution points that they've already had throughout the island. And I'm glad to see that they're doing that now where we're just giving them money straight to the food bank, or Aloha Harvest, and then they distribute to their partners. And that's been very helpful. So half would go to survival, the next quarter would go to fighting the virus, improving our testing tracking and tracing programs, partnering with the state to do that for Oahu, partnering with hospitals to beat up our medical care system. I believe that we should use some of that money to buy some of these hotels for isolation hotels for isolation, to convert them to apartments. I studied South Korea and I spoke to their leaders when this first started about how they were responding, because when I analyze what people were doing around the world, they had some of the best results. They have a population of about 55 million people. And they have deaths of just under 300. The last time that I checked, but they had their first case of COVID the same week that America did. And they, and they still had this very small number of deaths because they took this very seriously from the beginning. They of course were negatively affected by SARS. So they already had a system that adjusted for that. But they knew right away that was highly contagious and different from SARS. So they just went all in. They bought the hotels, turned them into isolation areas. The reason why we're having these spikes is coming from clusters, family clusters, because of poverty, they live in these small tiny spaces together. I know how I had 11 people in one house at grandma's house. I love it as a kid because I had lots of cousins to play with and uncles and aunties, you know, to get stuff from. But it was a very close living situation where people were living on floors and couches. And so that's why you're getting even toddler is getting COVID within these family structures. So what South Korea did and what I would like to do is immediately move the infected family members, or even suspected ones to the different areas where they can isolate from the healthy people, isolate from these housing areas where people are in close clusters. Anyway, they may not live together, but right next door and very close. And they have areas that they have to share like laundry rooms where they're giving it to each other. And so that's one thing that I would add to our response. And then of course, support the state for their testing, tracking and tracing the hospitals as well. And the next quarter, the last quarter, I would have used that for aiding new economies. For the last two years, I've been working with these different economy economies. I just had a show talking with people trying to train people to get these military, federal and corporate contracts. There are certain certifications that these small contractors and small companies can get within this system, where there's billions of dollars available to get contracts right now. So we don't have to wait six months. We just train all of these small businesses to get these large contracts and then we can get money back into our economy. Let me just give you, I know I'm really long-winded, but I've worked on a lot of this stuff. So it's really important to understand. So Whole Foods has three locations, but they also have contracts they're required by their corporation to give to small business. But you have to go through the certification process. So a simple contract but is very lucrative for a small business to clean all the Whole Foods stores, right, on Oahu. Gifts have got that contract. A lady from Arizona, and she hired a bunch of, you know, she brought some of her cousins come over and living large here, right. And then you have military and federal contracts and you have to go through a certification process. And one company told me that they went from a million a year in income. And once they got this certification, they went to 60 million the next year. Can you imagine the money coming into Hawaii staying here? And we don't have to create a new economy that's already there. So we're focusing on getting people trained now sort of like now. And the other larger kind, it's a little more difficult, but this is what Outdoor Circle and Siraclea have been promoting, is the new agricultural economy. We already have infrastructure from our plantation days to do this. Been working with Dr. Tusi Avigalio from the University of Hawaii Business School, Polynesian section, who has been working with farmers across Polynesia. And he's a he's about to sign with 80,000 farmers across Polynesia to bring the breadfruit here, where we can corner the world market. And another candidate teased me and has been telling corporate CEOs, Kim, things we can save the economy with breadfruit. Of course, you just can't have one thing save the economy. But breadfruit has been found to have different types of inventions to heal your skin, your face, your body, gluten free products and medical products that you can be used. And so very exciting stuff or can be a $25 billion economy. And I see that we only have a few minutes left. So I wish we had a lot longer, but these are just the kind of. Always that way. You know, and the breadfruit idea, it's one tiny piece of it, but it's a it's an important piece. It's also food security. I mean, having treat everybody used to have trees with fruit in their yards. And so these these are important ideas. And we need to keep them coming. I mean, they're, as you said, we are. It's amazing how fast a half an hour goes. But you you you talked about on your website, you have and tell us what is your website so people can go there for more information since we won't have hours. It's a vote pine.com. And you'll be able to see lots of videos and we talking about these things. You can also go to councilmember pine.com that also has different videos and all of our Facebook pages with their campaign or not. Talk about new economies, vote pine.com or councilmember pine.com. I know you have other articles on it and position points about environmental protection, leadership with integrity and transparency, anti-corruption ideas, restoring our parks and taking care of the land. Obviously, heart is a huge issue that we won't have time to go into. But I think you're you want this to be accountable to people, which is what we need when it's just this massive thing. Yeah, that question. So you went to you went to Berkeley and and majored in English, which is awesome. I never always tell young people get a liberal arts degree so you can communicate well and think well. So obviously you you did that. And I thought an interesting thing is that you are you're kind of a jock of sorts and and have done the rough water rough water swim and also paddled the Molokai to Oahu race and canoe. You know, I was wondering who is a historical person or maybe someone alive that you respect that you admire? Does anybody pop to your mind? Surprisingly, I really like Oprah. Yeah, I wanted to beat her. That's why major in English and journalism and kind of sidetracked in the politics. But she's a naughty woman like myself who's overcome a lot of struggles to help a lot of people. And so that's what I want to do. I think that's a that's a great place to to end this interview. And I'm so sorry we are out of time. But but please for folks that are watching us go to vote pine.com or council council member pine.com. Anyway, thank you so much for being our guest today, Kim. And I wish you all the best. And OK, folks, it's your duty now get out. Actually, you don't even have to get out and vote. It's in your mailbox. You pick it up. Just open it up and vote. Anyway, we'll see everybody here for more of the story in a couple of weeks. Aloha.