 Yeah, we're back, we're live to 10 o'clock block here on a given Monday, I'm Jay Fidel. This is sync tech and more specifically, this is community matters. And even more specifically than that, we're having a visit with Keith. I'm a mayor candidate for mayor this morning. Welcome to the show, Keith. Nice to have you here. Good morning, Jay and Stephanie. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, that's Stephanie Dalton. She joins me as co-host this morning. So Keith, let's talk about you. Let's talk about why in the world you would run for mayor. You know, it's not a happy time, nor is it a happy job. Why would you do that? Well, I'm running for mayor because we need change. We need new leadership. We need a fresh perspective. We need to restore trust in government. I'm running because I care about our communities and I want to create a better future for all of us, including our younger generations. I'm a first time candidate as you may know, but I have a lot of executive leadership experience in the public sector, private sector, and the nonprofit sector. I was born and raised on Oahu and have lived here for most of my life. And when I was about 10 years old, my parents got divorced and I was shuttled from family member to family member. And in high school, I was honoured or adopted, as they say, by my best friend's family. And the reason I'm mentioning all of this is because that was a very pivotal moment in my life. They were not my blood relatives, but they took me in. In fact, Jamie, you may have heard of him, Attorney Bert Kobayashi from the Kobayashi Sugita Go-da law firm. His son Bruce and my and I were best friends. Our parents, our fathers went to Hastings College of Law. And as you know, Jay, in the 60s, there was no Richardson School of Law here. So a lot of the Hawaii folks who wanted to go to law school went to Hastings in San Francisco. So that's where my father and Bert met. And so I was taken in by Bert and his wife, lovely wife at the Harriet Kobayashi and their four children. And so what I learned from them was love, compassion, respect, service over self and giving back to the community, giving back to others and giving people a second chance. And I feel, I learned a lot from that. I learned the power of giving back and the power of appreciation. And so that's a big reason why I'm running for mayor. Another big reason is I'm known by a lot of people for my tenure, well, I'm an attorney by trade as well as you may know, and some of your audience may not know. I was a litigation attorney. I served as an attorney, litigation attorney, primarily business and construction for about seven years. And then I was tapped to head the Hawaii High School Athletic Association. That's the organization that runs high school sports across the state of Hawaii. I oversaw the athletic programs of 95 high schools, public and private, statewide and 33,000 student athletes. And in that job, I had the opportunity to travel across the state, visit every community in the state, especially on Oahu, many times over and I got to meet a lot of people in those communities, especially working class families. And that was another pivotal moment in my life because I had a pretty good life as a young attorney, decent, good income, living a very comfortable existence, but I was kind of stuck in my downtown Honolulu bubble and the high school sports job expanded my horizon. Then what really surprised me, if not shocked me was how many working class people across the state across Oahu were struggling just to make ends meet. And fast forward 20-something years later, they're still struggling and with COVID-19, they're struggling even more. And it was through those relationships and friendships I developed with these families that made me wanna help them even more. I felt good about public service. It's become a passion of mine. It's a core of my life and important part of my life. And so this is an extension of giving back to the communities and continuing my public service on a city-wide scale. You said government and I understand you were on the staff of Senator Brian Schatzra. Can you talk about that? Okay, so I was his finance chair. I wasn't officially on the staff, but in terms of government experience, and I'm glad you brought that up. So I worked at the University of Hawaii in an administrative level. When I was running high school sports, I had to interface with the federal, state, and city government quite a bit, including a lot of the unions. And then I served in government-type boards and other organizations, whether it's the Aloha Stadium Authority, which I'm currently a member or the Hawaii State Board of Education. So as a mayor, I think that's important to have that kind of experience that you understand government. To be sure, I've been in the private sector. I've been an executive in the private sector. I've worked with private business. That's important as well, but unless and until you've worked with government and unions among other government-related entities, it's different, it's a challenge. And I have the background and experience to work with all sectors of the community. And that will serve me well as mayor. Well, let me dwell on that for a minute. There was an article in Civil Beat a few days ago about the funding you've received from, I guess it's a union pack. And I wanna say about $100,000. That's a lot of bread. And the question is raised as to whether those unions will have influence, perhaps too much influence with you for their contribution. Can you tell me what that relationship is and why they would not be turning your key, so to speak, if you're in office? Well, I've been lucky. I've had financial support from all cross-sectors of the community, the business community, the unions, as you pointed out, but a lot of individuals as well. So I feel my campaign, I like to say it's a community-based campaign. And when you go back to unions, they represent many working-class families. So like my whole career, it's been based on collaboration, commitment, getting people from diverse groups to work together. And I plan to continue that as mayor. Oh yeah, I watched your ad and I wanna pursue one thing about your ads. And there have been several in your, you're really all over the media. What about rail? You mentioned COVID. You mentioned the fact that, a lot of people are having a lot of trouble and that includes the economy in general. Economy of the state is in the tank. It's not gonna change in the near term, maybe the intermediate term. And as mayor, you're gonna be saddled with huge fiscal issues. So I'm wondering, what are you gonna do about rail? That's multi-billion dollars. And it could be a big burden on any mayor and on this city. How are you gonna deal with that? Well, we all know rails been quite a mess up to this point from the pre-planning stages through the construction stages. And we need to make sure moving forward that the same problems that saddled rail don't happen again, whether it's mismanagement or lack of oversight as mayor, I'll make sure that the city government and the mayor's office and myself be much, much more on top of it. The challenge with rail is, yes, it's expensive. It's been way more expensive than we thought at this point, but we're fairly close to completion already. It's an important part of a multimodal transportation network that any diverse, large city needs. We can't just be reliant on cars. We need to give people options. We have too many cars on the road. So we need to complete it as best we can to Alamoana. We also can't afford to possibly have to give back $800 million in federal subsidies that we've already been provided. So those are a lot of reasons why we wanna continue the rail project. The other important part, and you mentioned COVID and the difficulty that it's caused our economy, rail is an important stimulus in terms of transit-oriented development. Jay and Stephanie, you probably had the opportunity to visit other cities with successful transportation systems, rail systems, whether it's Singapore, Vancouver, Japan and elsewhere, transit-oriented development is an important part of the economy initially, but also in terms of helping build cities within cities where you create walkable destinations, you create more housing, you address the lack of affordable housing that we have here on Oahu. So yes, rail is expensive, it's been frustrating, but we need to be creative and see what we can do to continue it. In terms of paying for it, which I think you want me to get to, we need to look at possible federal stimulus money. I know there's talk about infrastructure funding for projects like rail from the federal government to keep our economy going, and hopefully we will get that kind of funding and we'll also just have to be creative and be real strict about how we watch the finances of the city. Part of that creativity, part of getting funding from the federal government is the relationship of the city with the federal government. And I'm very concerned that our president, I don't want to make any comments about him right here right now, but our president sees Hawaii and the city as a Democrat city in a Democrat state, and he doesn't necessarily sympathize with us or want to do us any favors. So let me ask you sort of the interlinear, what are your feelings about the federal government these days and what are your feelings about the relationship of the state and the Trump administration? I have many more questions about that, but in general, what do you feel about that? Well, it's unfortunate that the federal government has not been the leader that it should be in many situations and that's forced mayors of many major cities to take a greater leadership role because of the lack of proper federal oversight of the country in general and of their cities. So it's even more important who we select as the Honolulu Mayor because that person will, well, like you, we shouldn't talk too much about the current president, but we may have a new president come January. So... Knock wood, knock wood, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, frankly, I would want to live and say, hopefully we have a new president, but until then, it's important for mayors to take an even greater leadership role because as you pointed out, we are not getting that leadership from our president and the federal government as it is right now. Stephanie, you have questions, this is your time. Yes, yes, yes, I thank you, Keith, for sharing. I'm a tennis coach from Bradford High School, a long time ago, so I've had a little taste of your world and how wonderful those organizations are. So I'm glad to know also about your other background and I think the audience is interested too because that's not completely available in every single article that pops up there. So thank you for that. I'm really interested in your comments about RAIL and the ways that you're talking about working better with the federal government. I've noticed that in your presentations, you're talking about working in areas that are somewhat the state's domain, so to speak, I mean mental health and something like substance abuse and that sort of thing, who knows why these things are in which pot, but the point of it is, and I think I see comments that are responsive to that, that you're willing to work across the border, so to speak, okay? And that would also include the federal situation, especially when it comes to RAIL, which ties in with how to manage those costs, which you've made a strong point about needing to do and how those contracts and all their modifications and all their cost overruns have to be really looked at and monitored. Is that how you're thinking about it? Could you tell us a little bit more about how you see yourself and that kind of a change role of looking through these other windows and trying to work through them for the best that we can have in the future in Honolulu? Because it's gonna be pretty bleak, otherwise if the mayor can't do that. Right, so with respect to your comments about RAIL, one of, some of the biggest problems about the RAIL project was it was rushed at the beginning. The contracts weren't properly vetted and there was a haste to build RAIL as soon as possible for, some will say political reasons or otherwise and we have to make sure that doesn't happen. We need to be careful, we need to review the contracts and not allow for these massive change orders that have been a regular occurrence throughout the history of RAIL up to this point. So that's one thing that would be a huge difference from the past is not rush things and be very careful about the diligence that's used in terms of reviewing real contracts moving forward. In terms of your point about, what's the city's role versus the state? Yes, you're right that the mental health and substance abuse issues are more state issues but the way I look at it is, Hawaii is still a fairly small state compared to other states around the country. And when we have the benefit of everyone kind of knowing each other, that's good and bad I suppose. And so we have no excuse that in terms of working together on all levels, federal, state and city. Again, it's still small townish, although we are a city of about a million people. There's very few places in the country where you can pick up the phone and reach the mayor or the governor pretty easily. And so one of my skill sets or strengths is to get people from different cross, from different sectors to work together and I'm gonna utilize that as mayor. And because we're a smaller state, it's incumbent more than ever that would be efficient and that we don't work on separate parallel tracks, federal doing one thing, state doing another, city doing another. I think it's really important that we pool our resources and be efficient. The other point I'll make about substance abuse and mental health issues is, yes, I mentioned earlier they're state issues but to me, it's such a big problem. Let's stop, we in the past, government tends to point fingers and say, well, it's not my issue with yours or no, it's, you know, they point the finger back at me. Let's stop finger pointing and just come up with solutions already. And the issues are too big to waste time about who should be taking care of the problem. Let's just all work together and get stuff done. That's why people are tired of politics and politicians and- One of the wild cards here, and you've both touched on it, is the confidence of the people in government, you know, and what's happening in Washington and the country, you know, has demonstrated that people are not confident in government. And I would say that our polls, our think tech polls also suggest that people are not confident in government. And, you know, the mayor's office, the city has been the subject of so much corruption investigation over the past few years and prosecutions and what have you. The prosecutor's office and chief of police, all that. And I think any mayor has the burden somehow of, you know, making it clear to the public that that mayor is not going to tolerate any corruption. That mayor is gonna, you know, clean it up. And some of your, you know, co-contenders, you know, have been involved in situations where that issue has been raised. And regrettably, what is it? Your cousin Roy is now in the press about, it's a cousin, I don't know, involved in some kind of a federal thing investigation. So Keith, you know, actually have an advantage of coming at it from a non-governmental point of view. But I wonder if you can speak about the need to keep it clean and the need to avoid even the most remote appearance of corruption. Right, I mean, that's without trust in government, you have nothing. So that's one of my priorities is to restore trust in government. When it comes to my cousin Roy, you know, he is working in the current administration, but he's made it clear that, you know, he's gonna retire at the end of his term and he has no interest in continuing to serve. Should I be elected? And, you know, I had no interest in retaining him. So, you know, that's the first thing I wanted to point out. And in terms of my reputation, I view it as something that's very sacred to me and that trust and integrity are two of the hallmarks that I try to live by. And if you ask people whether I was an attorney or running high school sports or in the private sector that I always have led and will continue to lead with trust and integrity. Right now, there seems to be some kind of communication gap between government and the public. Like you pointed out, Jay, whether it's the federal, state or city level. And throughout my career, I always thought it was important to communicate and always inform the public about what's going on. You can never really over communicate. Even now with COVID-19, you know, sometimes myself as a citizen, I'm not entirely sure what the restrictions are or, you know, what's gonna be open, what's not. And that kind of uncertainty and mistrust, you know, harms government ability to work as efficiently as possible. You know, that actually takes us to the thing about the economy. Although, you know, I remember the first time I heard that the city had an office of economic and economic encouragement of some kind and probably still does have that office. That's really not within police, fire, water, all those infrastructure kind of missions that cities have. But that being the case, it nevertheless falls on the city to try to rebuild the economy. And I'd like to know, you know, your view of that because we agree that the economy is in the tank, it's gonna stay in the tank for a while. COVID is not gonna be solved right away. We know that people are walking the streets with no money and they may be more and more unhappy and that will create contention on the streets and who knows in terms of, you know, crime and what have you. So how can you as the mayor fix the economy, fix the fact that people aren't getting enough? Congress for my money is not doing its job. Congress is gonna leave us in the lurch. It has left us in the lurch. What can the city and county of Honolulu do to keep things in balance, to keep people, you know, eating, to keep people reasonably, your sign fell down? Yeah. It's okay. We saw it, we definitely saw it. You know, what can we do? What can you do? This is a hard one. Yeah. Well, the city has a very important role in revitalizing the economy because the city and county of Honolulu is the biggest county and Oahu represents approximately 70 to 75% of the population in the state. So it's important that the city, as we talked about earlier, works with the state and federal governments to do what we can to get the economy going. The city can help by, for example, making sure the construction industry keeps on moving forward. Tourism is gonna take a while to bounce back. And so whether it's rail or the need to build a lot more affordable housing, the city plays a major role in that regard. The other important role the city plays right now in this day and age of COVID-19 is to do what it can to curb the spread of COVID-19 because until we do that, we can't fully reopen the economy. And it seems like in the last week or two, we're going backwards and we're in danger of another stay-at-home order like we had in mid-March. And when you talk about going backwards and having our economy fall even greater into greater depths, that would be devastating if we have to impose another stay-at-home order. And so far be it for me to be an armchair quarterback. I'm not the mayor yet, but what government can do collectively is to emphasize to people the importance of social distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large gatherings because until we curb the spread of COVID, we're gonna be in an economic funk. But the other areas the mayor can help is by diversifying the economy. And we've talked about this for decades, Jay, probably from when you first moved here that we need, we're over-relying on tourism and we need to diversify the economy. Well, if there's a time- How can you do that, Keith? It's not easy. How can you do that? It's not easy, but we have to start. And three areas I feel we as a state and as a city need to look at are agriculture, aquaculture and renewable energy. Those are three areas that are natural strengths of ours in an island state that we haven't looked at. And now to be sure it's not gonna replace tourism and I'm not saying we eliminate tourism but we were over-reliant on tourism. And yes, Jay, it's gonna take a while. We're not gonna build farms and aquaculture farms and renewable energy, industry jobs overnight but we need to start and we can't keep making excuses. So we need to get that going. The city can also help in terms of workforce development. The city has a workforce development office. Let's start retraining because realistically a lot of the people who work in tourism they're not gonna get their jobs back right away or they may not get their jobs back. We're not gonna have 10 million tourists come to Hawaii like we did pre-COVID, we don't want to. And so people who are waiting to get called back to their jobs at the hotels, for example, that call may not come for a while. Hale Kulani, for example, as you folks may know has already announced, they're not gonna reopen till summer of a year from now. So if you're working at the Hale Kulani you can't just say, well, I'll wait until next year and I'll get my job back. You need income for the next year. They need to start thinking about, well, maybe I shouldn't work in the tourism industry. And so this isn't a solution for everybody but right now the city has 1,700 vacant positions. So that's not insignificant. Let's pivot people out of tourism and other places where the restaurant industry, for example where a lot of people are out of work or the retail and get them working in the city in these vacant positions. Yes, and your idea about retraining, that's really good. If you retrain a workforce then you will attract capital. I mean, who's to say which one you start with but if you have a trained workforce it really begs for capital investment and therefore new businesses. You know, I want to establish a new show called Hawaii Loves Business. I think we have to incentivize new businesses as much as we possibly possibly can and make every business entrepreneur a huge 10 foot hero. That's what I think. Anyway, so Stephanie, there's not a lot of time left. I hope that you're going to ask Keith about homelessness. Well, I was going to ask him about what seems to have some traction in the comments is that he's offered an office of community engagement. And I thought that that kind of ties into opening up the windows across government to community. And so I was going to just give you a chance to talk to us more about that and how that integrates with some of these other issues like homelessness certainly too. Well, I'm glad you asked that. But real quick, Jay, let's talk another time about entrepreneurship. One of the areas I want to invest in is to create a small business innovation fund run by the city to kickstart programs. I mean, let's just not count on the private sector to do it. Why can't the city do that? You know, and be a partner with small businesses and help them get kickstarted off the ground. I mean, I don't know why more governments don't do that and be a partner with small businesses and entrepreneurs. The Office of Community Engagement, that's another important part of my platform and my policies and my first 100 days as mayor. I said it before, communication is lacking between government and the general public. That Office of Community Engagement's job will be to go out to the communities and talk to them well before a wind farm is proposed in Kahuku or a baseball field in Waimanalo is in Sherwood Forest is proposed and or a playground in Alamoana Park. For whatever reason, the public feels that even though some of these projects have been approved as there was more of a going through the motions or they weren't fully informed about it. You know, people are busy. They don't have time to look at the neighborhood board agenda every week to see what's on the docket. We need to be more proactive as government and engage and remember why we're here. Government is to work with the people and for the people and but yet sometimes the perception or oftentimes nowadays is government is an adversary and that needs to change. Government should be a partner with the community and work for the community. So that Office of Community Engagement will go a long way in improving relations between the city and the public. I wanna add on that note. Let's embrace technology. Jay, you're a big proponent of technology. Zoom has exploded because of COVID. Why can't we shouldn't force everyday citizens to have to leave their job early, find traffic, find parking, sit in the gallery at a city council hearing and wait for hours on end to testify and then they may not be able to testify because they're number 110 on the list and then they have to go and pick up their kid after school and they can't testify. Why can't we testify via Zoom or on our phones through FaceTime or other means? Let's use that. Let's use straw polls in Waimanalo about Sherwood Forest and people can just opine online about a proposed project. Now that poll shouldn't be binding but it gives you a general idea of what the community feels about certain issues. We need to embrace technology at the city much, much, much more. We need to create more apps for the city when it's paying your real property tax or renewing your driver's license or whatever other interface you have between government and the public. I really, really wanna utilize technology more as mayor. That's great, great to hear. So Stephanie, you wanted to ask Keith about homelessness. I know you did. I know I did, but I also wanted to ask and I heard and that was kind of alluded to with the mental health substance abuse issues that need to be across these corridors of power. But the other question, if we have any time left at all or maybe afterwards, but if not, as I've talked with Colin Moore and some of these other commentators and policy people at the university, we have this golden goose, right? Called Waikiki. And I just, I don't hear much about how to engage, talk about community engagement. How about that business engagement? What are they doing to come back at the city to be a full-fledged member that doesn't just consume here and learn and earn but also puts back into the city? Have you had any thoughts about that? Because they're mostly multinationals and it's not like Joe Jones is down there running his own hotel for Honolulu. It's multinationals. So can you comment briefly on that? Yes, I think it's important for the mayor to engage with these multinational or international conglomerates that there needs to be a healthy balance that they can't just try to maximize profit at the expense of the local workers and the local residents that they need to give back to the community. And as we all know from decades past, we didn't have as severe an issue where there was a disconnect between us and these mainland based hotel chains. We had the benefit of the Albreger resorts, and then the Kelly family who were very good about balancing the need for profit and taking care of the workers and being sensitive to the needs of the local community. Even the Aston chain to an extent was like that, where there are at least local ties. So I agree with you, Stephanie. It's more important than ever to make clear to these owners that, hey, yes, you're entitled to try to make a profit, but you need to also have a balance and make sure that the needs of the local community is considered as well. Well, it's a source for the rare box that are gonna come into your life if you're the mayor, because what are we down, Jay, with the budget in City County? I mean, it's billions. So there's gonna be very little revenue. And we can only pay so much in property taxes. Come on, remember that. You said you would watch out for that. Yeah, and you know, the city is not getting the TAT right now. The ledge is keeping it. So you're gonna, as mayor, you're gonna have to deal with that. It's a lot of money there. So remember the golden goose. I think that we should be getting some more relationship with them in terms of revenue for the city. Is it time for homelessness now? Sure. Basically, yeah, we're looking forward to hearing some breakthrough stuff here. Well, as I mentioned, it's clearly one of the major issues. It's mentioned by a lot of people. And homelessness is especially important to me because of the tie. One of the commercials I talked about my mom and her mental illness issues, and the fact that she was almost homeless several times because of that condition. And many people on the streets suffer from mental illness and or substance abuse issues as well. So in terms of homelessness, well, first and foremost, we need to build more affordable housing. A lot of the homeless or houseless people can't afford a place to rent. They're not as prominent, but they're there. They're living in their cars. They're living in tents on the beaches. They're living in the mountains, literally. And so I've crafted a housing for all plan that seeks to address the 22,000 shortage of units here on Oahu. And the focus is on building housing for Oahu residents and not out of state residents, curbing the activities that raise the cost of housing, including illegal vacation rentals. There's still about 8,000 illegal vacation rentals out there that should be utilized for local residents whether to rent or to purchase. And third, the city can encourage more development of housing in the urban core by creating more infrastructure like sewer and water and accelerating the approval of building permits. That's a sore spot with developers and home builders. And we need to just process the permits faster. It shouldn't take two years or more in some instances to get approval for a project in place. The city can also emphasize or build more affordable rentals. A lot of people who are on the precipice of being homeless, their years or decades away from even thinking about buying a home, they just need a roof under their heads. So let's provide more affordable rentals and that's where the city can help as well. So housing is a big component of addressing the houses this issue, but of course more mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities as well. Because I know firsthand from my mom and others that it's clearly lacking and we can do much, much more to address those people who have those issues. Stephanie, we're out of time. Why don't you take a moment and thank Keith for coming around. Love to thank you, Keith. Appreciate you're taking the time at this crucial juncture in the campaign. I'm sure these are busy, busy days running up to the primary. And I think you've got other things you could be attending to. Now you can go do it in about three minutes. But before you leave us, Keith, can you take a moment and leave your message with those who are watching? Tell them why they should vote for you. Tell them what you offer. Well, first I wanna thank you again for this opportunity. It's important and I don't really have better things to do. I mean, this is just as important as any other campaign activity to talk to both of you and your audience and talk about myself and the message and why I wanna be mayor. And this is an important election. It's a pivotal time in our city's history, especially with this pandemic and the voters have a choice. They have a choice between the status quo or they have a choice to bring meaningful change to Honolulu Halle. I represent that change. I will represent the people and not special interests. And I will do whatever I can to improve the quality of life here on Oahu for everyone, including our younger generations. I have a college sophomore age son. My wife and I do and I worry about his future. I wanna build a better future for him and his friends and the generations after him so that they can enjoy the Honolulu that the three of us enjoyed for the past several decades. So that's why I'm running for mayor. The voters have a choice and it's important that they get their vote out. It's all mail-in ballot and time is running out to fill out your ballot and turn it in. So if you haven't already, please go out and vote and make your voice heard. Thank you. Thank you. Keith, I'm a mayor. Thank you so much. And Stephanie Toulton, thank you so much. I love how you guys. All right, thank you. See you. Bye.