 And welcome to the show, The State of the State of Hawaii. I'm your host, Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Our topic today is survey findings from Hawaii residents about their views and preferences for the state's economic combat from the COVID-19 pandemic. To discuss these surveys, particularly the most recent one, we have guest Dr. Colin Moore, who's director of the University of Hawaii and know as Public Policy Center. Welcome to the show, Colin. Thanks, happy to be here, Stephanie. You're coming. Well, two weeks ago about the Honolulu Star Advertiser reported findings from a survey they did on residents' views for how best the state economy can recover from COVID. So last year, you conducted a survey on associated similar topics and it was from the residents' point of view as well. So would you tell us some background for your survey and how it anticipated the current Star Advertiser Survey of I believe it was February 9th, if anybody wants to look it up, the February 9th Star Advertiser. Sure, absolutely. So we did an earlier survey, we did a few during COVID about people's reactions to COVID and about how they anticipated the economy would come back. And the most recent one we did was a pretty comprehensive survey about tourism and that was in the field in late April and early May. So now that's quite a while ago and we wanted to get a sense of how people thought the state might better manage tourism, how they envision tourism coming back. And so a whole assortment of questions related to that. This was a time when people really had had this break from tourism and surprisingly attitudes towards tourism became much more critical as a result of that. I mean, you might have guessed maybe that because this is our number one industry, people would have been desperate for it to come back but that really wasn't the case. I think this gave people an opportunity to reflect on what was working and what wasn't working in tourism after they saw really the island with almost no tourists for several months. So the Star Advertiser did a relatively recent and fairly comprehensive survey about a lot of different questions, political questions but they snuck in some tourism and economic recovery questions as well. Yeah, well, did, okay, I see. So it, and lots and lots they took time to report lots and lots of data of different categories and that article too if anybody's interested to go look at it's kind of interesting you may bring up some points or not but I did wanna make one comment that I just heard this morning that Australia is opening up again for tourism and it turns out that in 2019 they had 10 million visitors or almost 10 million visitors and that's what was reported in that survey that Hawaii had 10 million visitors. Right. So that's a, which we're slowly climbing back to but we're at four or five now, right? Well, yeah, so what I want and that's a part of the issue of the survey but we can get back to that later but did that, did this latest survey validate for you or strengthen your positions out of your surveys several times? I think so. I mean, actually to me what was interesting is I don't think attitudes have really changed much between the survey we took in early May of last year and what the Star Advertiser showed in February which is interesting, I mean, right? Sometimes survey findings are interesting because you do see this radical change and sometimes they're interesting because there's been very little change despite the fact that the underlying circumstances have changed and in this case, you know, the change in COVID I think states thinking about approaching this as an endemic disease rather than a pandemic. And so what the Star Advertiser poll around tourism said is that the question was do you support or oppose efforts to reduce or limit the number of tourists who visit Hawaii each year? And their survey found that 48% were interested in some sort of limits and 46% opposed. So basically evenly divided. This was a little bit different than what we found in our earlier survey but I think that's largely driven by the fact that the questions were asked in a different way. So we asked, you know, if it were possible would you be interested in capping the number of tourists? And a slight majority at that point said yes. So one way to think about this although I said there hasn't been a lot of change I do think that attitudes towards tourism have softened a bit. In other words, people are a little bit more supportive than they were when we took this survey back in May because we were actually talking about capping tourism which of course is basically impossible constitutionally but we wanted to get a sense of how people thought about that. And the Star Advertiser poll was a little more open. They just talked about reducing or limiting the number of tourists which kind of leaves it vague. You can imagine each respondent could imagine how they might wanna do that. And it had a bare majority of or rather a plurality of the respondents supporting that at 48% but 46% were opposed. So if there's been any shift which probably isn't surprising it's that people have softened their attitudes about tourism restriction. And this, I mean, who knows exactly what this is due to but I think still back in May people really were responding to both a frustration with the industry and it's overcrowding potentially and their fear. Now I think that fear has gone away to a certain degree and maybe they're a little bit more open. So it's hard to read too much into that. I mean, I think that their findings are in line with ours where people on the neighbor islands are likely more interested in limiting tourism. Native Hawaiians are likely more interested in limiting tourism. So not a radical shift but if anything a little more supportive of the industry when they were back in May which is not too surprising. But would you say they're still divided, right? Oh, I think people are very divided. I mean, you know, this is still a pretty shocking finding because this is an economy that is with, you know really dependent on tourism. In fact, we're very critical of the two industries right now we're most dependent on the military and tourism both for understandable reasons. I don't wanna say people are shouldn't be critical because there are huge problems with both of those industries but there's a huge number of people who are opposed to them or would like to see them changed in pretty serious ways. So that to me has overall been the surprising finding. And in our survey, we found that that holds largely even for people who work in the industry who are dependent on the industry are fairly critical of it. Well, okay, so that would be small business. Is this, Bobby? So we couldn't really disentangle that. Our question was, do you or a member of your household work for the industry or you're dependent on the industry in some way? So it could be everything from, you know a lay shop to people who actually work for a hotel. So a wide variety of things. But what we didn't find is that those people were necessarily more supportive. So this criticism really cuts across all groups. And you know, that's interesting. I mean, if anything, our hope was this survey could give policymakers some tools to help reshape the industry because I know there's a lot of talk about economic diversification. We need to work towards more economic diversification but that's easier said than done. Tourism will continue to be a major part of the state's economy for the decades to come. There's just no way you can pivot so quickly to different industries. And also I don't really think that tourism is a terrible industry to begin with. But I do think it needs to be managed better. And there's a lot of room to improve the management of tourism. So it's more tolerable for residents. Well, yeah. I think that we have a question from a viewer that would be interesting to discuss at this point, Colin. It's on how are the state legislators using this data from these surveys for managing tourism and assigning appropriate charges and just the other big issue about whether to charge them more while they're here. That's a great question. Of course, I don't know the exact answer to that question. State legislators have clearly picked up on the message that people are really frustrated with tourism as an industry. I don't think that frustration has always been used to move in constructive or productive directions. I think the Hawaii Tourism Authority, which as most people probably know was created as kind of a central marketing agency for the state is funded or was funded until recently through tourism tax dollars, the transient accommodation tax or hotel tax dollars. And it was supposed to market Hawaii to international destinations to domestic visitors. And a lot of legislators have been very critical of its role, particularly its role in some complicated ways that it continued some marketing contracts in international markets, even when those were shut down. But long story short really is that they have borne the brunt of a lot of people's frustration. They have a new director, John DeFries, and I think that they have really tried to pivot away from just tourism marketing to what's called destination management, which is kind of a more holistic approach to tourism. That it doesn't mean marketing isn't part of that, but it means trying to manage the destination in a way that works for residents, that tries to target visitor markets that are the most desirable. And we've had, I mean, there's been a lot of discussion in Hawaii about trying to get visitors who are sort of more respectful, more culturally interested and tend to be high spending visitors. And there's a role for marketing there as well. So a lot of the legislature's work, I think has been devoted to attacking HTA, which I don't think is a very productive way. HTA probably needs to be reformed to a true destination management organization. But getting rid of it or giving all of its responsibilities over to the counties I don't, I don't think is a way to move forward productively. So what are people thinking about? I mean, one way and something that I supported, I testified in favor of it is a true comprehensive study for destination management in Hawaii. Now, of course, I'm a professor, we always wanna study things. But I think this, before we start changing things in radical ways, we need to understand how to do it better. The legislature, I think there's often just a, there are often knee-jerk reactions to problems. And they start changing things without fully understanding what it is that's going to replace it. And I think for the industry to work and for people to live with it, we need a stronger and better destination management organization. Because tourism often is a very difficult industry to manage. You have to manage it across different jurisdictions. There's different state agencies, DLNR controls trails. You know, different agencies do different things and it's tough to coordinate these responses. So this study was supposed to look internationally, look domestically and try to come up with some proposals for us to develop perhaps a new HTA that would do this better. There is a second thing that has gotten a lot of attention though. And that is a green fee. And that's something we did ask about in our survey. And a green fee is, you can create it in different ways, but it's essentially a tax on visitors to use our beaches, our parks and a variety of different natural resources that we have, as opposed to a parking fee or a reservation fee or something that we have. And the idea is that the money would go back to caring for those parks and those natural resources. That's a bill moving through the legislature. There's a lot of support for it, but it's also gonna be tricky because legally you have to construct that bill in a very particular way. So the money is being used to care for those specific sites. You can't just charge people more because they're tourists. International destinations can do that, but domestic destinations have to do that in a very careful way. And that's something we've succeeded in doing in Hanama Bay. So we do have a model for it. Oh, that's really, that's true. And you've mentioned the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the, which we refer to as the HTA and recommended that it reform. Sure, everybody can get behind that maybe. Anyway, but I also wanted to know, does it relate to or is it, that's not tantamount too, but how does it parallel with the State Department of Business Economic Development Tourism? So is this that, that's our agency then for? Right, so there was a change made to the HTA in the last legislative session and the tourism research part of the HTA is now a part of D-bed. And so there were some bureaucratic changes that some people would say sort of eroded some of HTA's independence or autonomy as a separate, separately funded agency. Probably the biggest difference is that HTA no longer, to my understanding, HTA no longer has this dedicated stream of funding from the tourism tax. It has to go to the legislature like any other agency and ask for money. So it lost in a big way, this last legislative session is probably the easiest way to answer that question. It has less autonomy than it used to. And what do you foresee for that? Is that in a good direction or what? I don't think so. I mean, I think that there's real value in having an independent agency with its own dedicated stream of funding to manage this complicated industry. I don't think HTA is perfect. It probably needs to be reformed. It was created at a very different time. And that's not the fault of the people who worked there, who I think are excellent actually. I think that the HTA mission though is marketing. That was its mission. That's its statutory mission to market Hawaii as a destination. So beating it up for doing that has always seemed unfair to me. And HTA's tried to pivot to more of these destination management, destination management priorities but it's been limited a bit because that's actually not what it was designed to do. So it's trying to do that. It's trying to move in that general direction. And there actually is another bill in the legislature that would redefine it. So it would remove marketing and replace that with destination management to give it a little more leeway to do those sorts of things that go beyond marketing, supporting cultural events, not just marketing Hawaii as a destination. And I think that's a really positive development actually. Well, you know, another agency or actually this is in the legislature but you saw in the article of the star advertiser that state Senator Glenn Wukai who's chair of the Senate Energy Economic Tourism and Technical Committee. Okay, so I don't, that's a part of the government, right? So part of the legislature on the ledge side instead of the, which is on the Senate side. So he says, tourism, quote unquote, tourism is the golden goose of Hawaii's economy. And would you, I was often thinking of it as Waikiki is but tourism that pervades throughout all the islands, Waikiki is making it way too narrow, right? Would you agree with that statement? I think that's fair. I mean, it's, Hawaii made a conscious choice to embrace tourism. I mean, the history of this is actually somewhat interesting because Hawaii switched from being an agricultural economy almost exclusively, tourism was presented as the second industry, a new industry, a way to diversify our economy ironically back in the fifties and sixties. And the state invested a lot of resources in developing these destinations. Waikiki was the first and that was the early tourism destination but on the neighbor islands most of the tourism centers were developed with state funds to encourage that development to lay in the infrastructure. So it is the golden goose. I mean, it and it has been an industry that has produced a lot of wealth for this state and a lot of problems. So I think the way to preserve it and I think Senator Wakai is trying to do this as well. You know, the way to preserve it as an industry is to make it work for residents too. I mean, if you lose that sense of Aloha which this state is so famous for one of the reasons why it's such a good place to visit is people do feel welcome in Hawaii. If residents are really resentful of some of the behavior of tourists or just feel overwhelmed and that's gonna stop. My point is that the state hasn't done as good of a job in the last decades about building the infrastructure to manage tourism. There's residents understandably are angry when people, you know, their neighborhoods are turned into resorts or the roads are so crowded that they can't, you know the North Shore is a constant traffic jam. You know, the places they like to visit are overrun but there are ways to manage it through green fees through some reservation system. I mean, these things can work and they can make it a much more tolerable place for residents and tourists. So I think that's really what we need to work on rather than trying to blame a certain government agency or try to set an arbitrary limit to the number of visitors because that's not really what people are frustrated about. They're frustrated about this sense that there are just too many people in too small of a place. Oh, I like that you clarified that. I mean, that was one of my questions was whether you saw from your point of view in this study, the study and the dissemination that you've done of that if there is a sweet spot for the visitors coming to Hawaii. I mean, I was a bit I mentioned that Australia is getting the same number of visitors for that. It's a huge country, yes. And we're heading right back to Dan Bowsley, right? So from nights, I think we're supposed to get there by 26 or something to get back. I think it's fair to say, yeah. Is that desirable? No, I mean, well, look, I think that the number of visitors isn't dependent necessarily on the size of the place. I mean, it's dependent on the infrastructure and what it can accommodate. And so probably 10 million is too many with our current infrastructure and the current way we manage tourism, especially here on Oahu, but on Maui too, which has been heavily affected by this and Kauai where people have the most negative attitudes to tourism, partly because they don't have the infrastructure to support that many visitors. So I think the sweet spot is, what you can support with residents still having a high quality of life with the place not seeming overrun. And that really is dependent on the infrastructure you build. So I'm not necessarily advocating for more visitors. I think that's just a conversation we need to have about how many we can accommodate given the way we manage the current visitors. But I think what a lot of people react to is a feeling like it's out of control. People rarely complain about visitors in Waikiki because that's a resort area where visitors are supposed to go. People expect it to be crowded. They expect, it's a resort area. The complaints come from visitors going places where they haven't been before and where we don't have the infrastructure to manage them. Then they start parking people's driveways in Lanikai or just jaywalking and slowing down traffic on the North Shore. Those are the problem areas and those are where I think we need to focus and fix things. I think the conversation may change a little bit if we improve those, what are sometimes called hotspots, places where people really have a problem with visitors and that may involve increasing prices to visit those places. I mean, charging people is a easy way to limit the number of people who visit. And it's a way for the state to get the revenue it needs. So that's another way to think about it. But I never believed that there's some sort of arbitrary limit out there, that 10 million or 8 million or 6 million, that there's some sort of magic number. I don't think that exists. Who's responsible then of all of these, of the agencies, of the HTA and of the legislature and the Senate and the bills coming through? Who's responsible for applying what we know now, you know now, you can recommend now? Well, I think this is, so Stephanie, I think this is the big part of the problem is really nobody or a bunch of different agencies, a bunch of different entities. No one is ultimately responsible for tourism management in Hawaii. The HTA is responsible for tourism marketing. The state and the house are responsible for creating rules and regulations. The city and county of Honolulu, the other counties are responsible for pieces of it. The DLNR is responsible for pieces of it. It's all spread across different jurisdictions and different agencies. And there's no opportunity to get together and think of this as, you know, a single problem that needs collaboration. I think one of the easiest things that I would recommend is just to create some sort of position that would be elevated to the governor's cabinet level. And I don't know what you'd wanna call it, some kind of tourism director. You know, we don't have that position. It doesn't exist, but something, so you can force some of these agencies to work together on these management problems because that's what you need is it's a coordinated approach if we're gonna have any success. That's interesting. So something like a czar, drug czar. Potentially I don't like to use that word. I've used that word in the past and people have gotten angry with me about that because that's probably a little too forceful. But yes, something where this problem of tourism and the management of tourism would be elevated to the highest level of the state. And someone who could say, you know, this is a problem. These agencies need to work together on it or we need funding to solve this problem because different agencies have different missions. They're focused on their own little mission and you can't manage an industry that touches so many different parts of our state like tourism with that approach. It's just not possible. That's not that the people are incompetent or they're bad actors or anything like that, there's just no coordinating council and government agencies as you probably know don't always play well together. And so sometimes you need someone who has the authority of the governor to say, you need to focus on this and solve this problem and work together until it's solved. And I'm not really all that interested in the different reasons why you don't wanna do this or work with this agency or you need more funding. Let's focus on solving this particular problem. Well, I mean, we have had the governor involved in it and so he does have a role to play. All of the leadership has a role to play and especially in consideration of is this correct? The small businesses, as I understand the small business has really taken the hit from this pandemic and lots of number coming back because they got wiped out. But so how do they get their voices in and how do they get their consideration? I think that's kind of alluded to in the question that we have. So you're absolutely right. Small businesses have been hurt the most during this pandemic. I do think that the legislature is pretty attuned to their concerns and their interests and a lot of them are dependent on the tourism industry but it will be rebuilding this industry too in a way that works for residents. So Hawaii continues to be an attractive destination for visitors as well. In terms of tourism, Governor E. Gaye has been pretty supportive of the industry and has pushed back on some of the hostility from the legislature in regards to HTA. I mean, part of that's due to his interest in supporting small businesses. But these small businesses as you say, a lot of them have grown up to serve different parts of the industry. And some of this is tension between residents and these small businesses. One of the biggest points of contention were tour groups who use parks and beaches to conduct commercial enterprises, which is illegal. And so you do see a lot of conflict between residents and small businesses which is probably why we need, again, I'm gonna put in a plug for some kind of central authority places where these groups can come together and talk about these problems which they have done. I mean, some of the HTA's efforts to develop the destination management strategy involved all of these folks coming together to talk. But there's no real way to enforce that right now. Well, how is the Hanama Bay project going? I assume that it's well. But, and you refer to it as a model for destination management development framework to be more present and active here in Hawaii. But is it going well? I think it's going very well. It has required tourists to make reservations. It has increased the fee to visit Hanama Bay. I think of it as a model because it's done two things. It's made Hanama Bay environmentally better. It's more of a special place to visit. So yes, tourists are gonna have to pay more. But when they go, it's magical in a way it was in the old days as opposed to being overrun. So it's worth it. And that's a way to think of managing tourism here in a larger way, which is that yes, there may be more restrictions. Yes, there may be more expenses. But when you get the opportunity to come, it's really going to be extraordinary. And that will help the brand and it's better for the state overall. So we, in a lot of ways, we've been giving probably too many things away for too cheaply for too long. And people are very supportive of increasing the price for parks, a green fee, where people would have to pay to access beaches. But tourists are likely willing to pay that too. If it means that they won't have to be there with 5,000 other people. They'll be there with a restricted number of people and really get to enjoy the place on the day they get to go. Well, that's very interesting. I think such a good point you make, Colleen, with the time that we have remaining, do you want to say anything else about your survey and its impact potentially for policymaking in this area? I mean, at this point, it's whatever impact it's going to make, it's probably made it. But one last point I'll make is that we were interested in whether people thought the state really should play a major role in managing tourism as an industry as opposed to other industries should tourism be treated differently? In other words, and the answer was yes, people very much favor regulating that more direct state management of the industry. And so there's no, I don't think there's any sort of public opposition to creating some sort of a bureaucratic or state entity that does more effectively manage the industry. They're going to have to perform though. People are going to have to see the results relatively quickly or else they'll think of this as just another kind of state boondoggle that's ineffective. Well, okay, I think we've learned a new term to destination management. That is the term that you've been talking about, right? Right, that's a new one. And so we need to get more familiar with what that means and how it benefits our state. So thank you so much, we're out of time. I'm your host, Stephanie Stone-Dalton for this show, The State of the State of Hawaii. I'll see you again in two weeks. And thank you very much for your viewership. Aloha.