 Tech Hawaii show, the state of the state of Hawaii. Welcome to you in the viewing audience and thanks for joining us. I'm your host Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Our topic today is serious and it's about Hawaii's safety and solvency. And given the impending COVID-19 lockdown we're likely to have and the unrelenting economic distress across all sectors that we're all facing in one way or another. I think we all have questions about what leadership is enacting and what it needs to enact. So we'll talk about our current leaders with knowledgeable guests to illuminate us in this conversation. And knowing that we have new leadership soon and shortly to come to Honolulu Holi and to the White House. So now we know the cast of the leaders and who would be leaders possibly. And so we need to think about and express views on how do we select leaders? We still have some voting to do. And we need to know how we select leaders we know can make Hawaii safe and solvent again. So I'm pleased to welcome two guests today to comment on Hawaii's conditions, learning opportunities in the crisis and our prospects for recovery and hopefully returning to norm. But both of them know a lot about Hawaii and have worked here for a very long time and they work and think and write about Hawaii's issues and are knowledgeable about the community's needs. So I welcome to the show Reverend David Gerlach. He's the rector at St. Elizabeth's Episcopal Church in Paloma. And he tirelessly works to the benefit of Hawaii's neediest communities like the homeless prison population and Pacific Islanders and so on. So welcome, Father David. So glad you could come. And Dr. Neil Milner is here too. He's a meritous UH professor of political science and a political commentator and writer. And I think you can see him often in civil beat. So welcome to you, Dr. Neil Milner. Thank you. Glad you both could come. Well, on this topic, I wanted to just express one view of what might be happening here in Hawaii over the course of this experience. And my question is, do you think Hawaii and its leadership understand that Hawaii is as vulnerable to a global crisis as any other nation on the planet is? So my question is really about, has Hawaii's leadership been arrogant about what it takes to keep Hawaii safe? Is there something about the ocean around us that's gonna make us saved? So maybe your comments on that related to that would help us understand how this has come to be so serious. Well, I can start. I don't think the arrogant is the problem. I mean, frankly, whether you're arrogant or not arrogant, the pandemic was gonna get here. And in fact, maybe the one good thing we did, partially out of luck, was to isolate ourselves as much as possible by cutting off the tourist industry early on. I think everything we've done after that gets a D. And it's not about arrogance. It's about a kind of a sense of basically incompetence and not telling people the truth about how we were building a capacity to deal with this at the next level when things would get more serious. And so that's what I've been more concerned about. You caught me at a good time because I have a column in civil beat tomorrow about that. But, you know. Thanks very much. Yeah, well, what do you mean? Did they have a plan? Are you saying that there was a plan? They just didn't tell us about it at the quote, next level? I don't think there was a plan. I don't think there's a, I mean, here's the evidence that I would go by. And this is not all the fault of the planners. It's the fault of the resources available. We still don't know how to bring back tourists. And I don't think we're any closer to that than we were a few months ago. That's one thing. The second thing, and to me much more scandalously, is it turns out that when it comes to testing, when it comes to contact tracing, excuse me, we got nothing, basically. It's been a kind of Potemkin village that the Department of Health was claiming we had and that we didn't need anymore. And all of a sudden that turns out not to be true. So moving to the next level, which is a level we're at now, which is where there's been a spike, I don't think that we don't have the leadership capacity that has demonstrated that they can handle what is now happening. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that I very much agree with Neil's analysis of this. Just today I was talking with Josie Howard, who's the CEO of We Are Oceania. They are one of the one-stop drop-in places for folks from the marshals in Micronesia to get help on all kinds of things. And one of the things they've been working very hard on is trying to get their population tested. Because as we know, among that population, this disease is running rampant, primarily because of poverty. People live too close to each other, too many in a home. And even culturally, it's very, very difficult for folks not to gather. And they've been turned away for testing. So just today we're trying to set up a situation where we can have a drive-through testing at St. Elizabeth's for free for that population. But why is this happening in August? This should have been happening in at least April and May. And the other side of that is, in terms of our education, we're talking about schools opening up. I've got grandchildren who are going into preschool and elementary school, older kids at the university level. It is astounding to me, the lack of preparation that's happened. The superintendent of schools was on NPR last week and people were calling in about ideas and suggestions like we've air conditioned all of our schools. How are we gonna have the free flow of air with air conditioned roams? And we've sealed up windows. And instead of hearing the response that said, well, yes, and we considered that back in March and this is what we're going to do, the response was, well, that's a really good point. We'll have to think about that. There's been a lot of criticism of the governor and other leadership for the COVID-19 spread even. And certainly the health department's contact tracing fiasco that we've had going on before we even knew it. And the needy community's vulnerability. I mean, it's not like we didn't know these things. So I mean, the question is, do they deserve criticism for this? Just somewhat. They deserve to lose their jobs. Actually, that's my opinion. The governor can't lose it as easily as anybody else can. That the example of contact tracing, and here's one other point I wanna make. I've been thinking about this a lot and I no longer view this as an exceptional example of government ineptitude. It's very much indicative of the way state government generally operates around here. The lack of transparency, the bad planning, all of those things are essentially part of the state institutional political culture. And we are so used to that, that we just assume that that's how things are gonna go, but this is gonna be different and things are gonna be turned around. I'm just astonished at how much people here are behaving leadership the way they usually behave in a kind of mediocre manner. This has greater consequences because for obvious reasons, but that's another frightening thing. And later on, if you wanna talk about how we recover from that, that becomes a factor that's very much a part of it. Well, yes, we wanna say that. We wanna cover that. Yes, Father David, were you gonna say something? Well, I would like to say that the one bright spot, I think in our state government's response to all of this has frankly been in our judiciary. They have been exceptional in getting out clear information to people that when there is a spike in cases, courts are shut down immediately and alternate arrangements are made so that the business of the courts can be done. But they have been from day one, from the Chief Justice on down, made sure that people are understanding what the situation is and they have operated in a way that has been truly exceptional. And in a way that I wish they would be talking to the governor and some of these other department heads to say here is a template you can follow to not only inform, but to safeguard. Well, I think that we had a little preamble to this or premonition or remember when the rocket from Korea was supposed to be here, I don't need to chuckle at all. It was horrifying. But remember, there was absolutely no preparation at all either. And when they went to try and blow any sirens or anything, the system that was set up for that kind of warning had not been touched since 1943 or something like that after the attack. So I mean, we already had this huge warning about how unattentive, inattentive the government is to really important issues about things that aren't ever supposed to happen, but they happen. And so... So if you go ahead, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think a better example was the 30-meter telescope. We heard all kinds of things about how that was gonna be handled hypothetically, right? And all it took was people protesting and occupying a strategic place and everything fell apart. This is not about whether you're for telescope or against the telescope. My own feeling was over time, I came increasingly against it because I could see how badly it was being handled, but it turned out that the governor had nothing. All of the promises that had been made, all of the people who had supported it had nothing. All of the promises that they had made to the public or they talked about the majority of the people wanted, it turns out there was nothing there. And if anybody thought that there wasn't gonna be a protest and if anybody couldn't figure out that if you protest in a strategic place that you're gonna have to make some very important decisions about what you do there, they were naive. And it turns out that a lot of people were naive. Well, my entity is not a qualification for these leadership positions. So I wanted to ask you, Father David, and you may have something to say after Neil has just said that, but I mean, I wanted to ask, will the new leadership we have chosen for Honolulu Holly, for the mayor, are they going to be better at finding ways or preparing ways and resources to avoid and solve problems? That's our citizen question, yeah. Well, I'm gonna back into that by just mentioning one other thing though. I mean, yes, the nuclear missile test was a fiasco. Yes, TMT is a fiasco, but the fact that a pandemic is something that was expected and the fact that we haven't prepared for it. I say January or March, we should have been moving, but the fact is our Department of Health should have had a plan in place for years because this is something we've known was coming. It's happened before, we've been very lucky that it's had a relatively minimal impact in the past ones, but we knew something bad was coming. So it's frankly just inexcusable because that's what we trust government to do is to have the foresight and the technical ability to protect the people that they're serving. And this has really been a Keystone's cops operation. Well, I think in addition to that, Bill Gates was talking about this a long while ago and a couple of years ago, and I was looking at, there's one of these pharmaceuticals that's prepping up a vaccine and they were donated to by the Gates like two years ago. I think it was 2015. So that was when this huge load of money to make it happen. And that was long before there was, I shouldn't say that there was no sign because people have been predicting this, those who have been in the know. And I think that kind of gets back to the arrogance, that these people are just so arrogant and they're on such airheads and they're out there with the ideas and we've got to get on with the business of governing. But this is the business of governing. Is he people safe and from dying unnecessarily, which is what we don't have now. Yeah, so what about the new leadership that we're gonna have coming on? Do you guys see that we've made choices that are perhaps suggestive of an appreciation of skill that these people are gonna have? I mean, like in our mayor, we're now down to two people who have no government experience. So is that gonna lead us into some other competence that will have a better effect on Hawaii's health? And that can work both ways. I mean, I'd start by saying at best, it's a work in progress. There's simply no way to evaluate these two candidates with any kind of extreme confidence because they're so new to the process and because the problem was such an evolving problem. The job is changing because of pandemic. But I think that the other thing that both candidates have to be careful of, it's an advantage being an outsider and it's also disadvantage is that you're going into the same kind of organizational culture that has existed here forever basically. And so you have to, if you wanna be a change agent, you have to be able to do that. And it's very hard. I think the nature of the job, one of the things that's happening with big city mayors whose importance has been increasingly under-emphasized because people become more interested in national politics. But one of the things that's happening is that mayors are starting to make contact with other mayors around the world to share information on how the heck you deal with the pandemic, what's your city doing? And that's a kind of a different job than it was before. So it's not just the fiscal challenges, it's the nature of the work and it's the nature of being able to talk to people in ways that can be candid with them and that can reassure them, which our governor is not very good at. Our mayor called well as better at it. I wouldn't rate him as high as some of the other mayors elsewhere in the state, but he's okay. So that's the hedge answer. Because everything is changing so fast, who knows how good they're gonna be? Yeah, Father David, what do you think about that? I mean, we've got essentially two guys with business backgrounds and I guess that the cheap shot would be is that we've tried a guy with a business background, but that's really not fair to people with a business background. I know both of them, my own sense is that either of them will probably be a fine mayor. I know they're both real smart and I know they're both very linked into a lot of places in the community where they can get help. And my sense is that no matter which one is elected, they will be sure to do that. I was kind of happy to see that we didn't get a rerun of an old timer. And we shall see. I don't know that it can get much worse. I mean, I agree Mayor Caldwell has done a pretty good job, but we shall see. Well, I did see something. I think it was in civil beat about how all of those experienced ones were candidates were tainted by rail and in one way or another. Is that? So unfair. Is that fair? Are you smirking? Or is that something that makes sense to you? Father David. Yes, absolutely. It makes sense. You know, Mayor Hanuman started this. The other, most of, you know, Kim Pine was on the council right along. Colleen sat on the board. So they're all kind of very intimately connected with it some more than others. And it has been a boon to our construction industry. It's probably something that's too bad we didn't do during the 90s when we were in that deep funk, but it's really been an economic disaster from just about every point of view. Well, it seems like it is a very big chunk for Honolulu to have taken on. And evidently they took on the hard part of it to do instead of starting with an easy part. But on the other hand, having a Washington DC experience and the horror show of the 70s while they were Jack Hammer and down all the streets to get that Metro in, Honolulu has not had a chance to have the experience of what it means to have this kind of a facility here. The Metro went underground partly and that makes it harder. But we haven't had the section that we've done is a walk in the park compared to the section that they have to finish both technologically and politically. Technologically because you got a whole lot of stuff that you have to figure out how to do with relocation and so on politically because you're interrupting the lives of a lot more people including people who drive down Tillingham Boulevard. So I mean, that's gonna be, well, if we get the money that's still gonna be very, very hard. Well, you're supposed to get the money. I mean, the federal government is mostly paying for it, isn't it? It's a matter of managing it. Well, you haven't given us the money yet. I mean, the good news money-wise is that they're in the business, the feds on this, they're in the business of giving this money away. This is not about them trying to hold back on the money. It's about using it to build public transportation. The bad news is that they quite rightly have refused actually to release that huge amount of money because until they see that the plan is in operation and it took the state, it took the city and county and hard forever to develop a plan that got provisional approval. It was like, I didn't do my homework and then I did my homework and okay, you're approved the provisionally but they have not actually written the check and I think they're waiting to see how this next stage is gonna be financed. The one that we're supposed to hear about very soon. Well, I think that your description of the expansion of the mayor's responsibilities and duties is that really interesting because it relates to one of the questions I was gonna ask which is, is government supposed to be able to do all this? I mean, is it that the government can or cannot do it? In other words, what you all do in bringing the community's awareness up and doing this, like what you're doing for tomorrow in the media and getting people to understand what's happening and then Father David with his work with all of his special needs communities and other responsibilities that are contributing to Hawaii and Lulu, but maybe something else has to happen in the way of these businessmen coming on and knowing they can't have the expertise and the deep insights that you all do that they'll put something together. I think one of them has a community of expert citizens or something like that to advise him because without the information coming into them, we kind of get in the situation we are in nationally, right? We've got somebody that's not take, there's no input. It's just output. I think it's pretty well known that there's not much advice and resource that can get through or that's desired and therefore things are happening in ways that are not informed or according to advisors. But maybe that's something that we have to think about that we're expecting too much of government. Are we expecting too much of government? That's the old liberal conservative argument. Let me talk about in the personal standpoint. Although I'm pretty far to the left on a lot of these kinds of questions, I'm fairly conservative. I don't believe, I'm always skeptical about big general plans or blue ribbon commissions that experts develop or when I see the word transformation, I begin to worry because they tend to look too far into the future without thinking about the mechanisms that you did. And I think a lot of people, and I think you're starting to see that with people's response to how we recover from this. So, but you know, this is not, I don't wanna dignify the state's response here by saying if we need something all that new. I mean, there are changes you can make primarily in the political culture actually. But this is, I mean, you have to give people information. You have to keep them safe. You have to follow up with certain things and you have to be whatever it means, some kind of fiscal responsibility. You have to know the kinds of resources you need and so on. So I don't even wanna talk about this kind of state. If the two mayoral candidates wanna set up committees of experts, that's fine. You get some good ideas. I spent my life working with committees of experts. They're called faculty departments. It has its good side and it has its bad side. But that's good. But that really doesn't, I don't wanna dignify the kind of basics or politics by thinking that it has to operate out at that level. You need honesty. You need certain kind of sets of limits on what you can do. And there's basic things that you have to do. And there has to be things. Go ahead. One of the things that we just seem to lack here locally in too many offices starting with the governor is a lack of imagination and just a lack of a willingness to take a stand without worrying things to death. That's what's been so troubling. And I think that's why we're in this mess that we're in. I don't understand why we weren't putting bracelets on people getting off of our planes. And if we saw them on a beach, they get arrested and they'd have to put a $1,000 deposit down when they get their bracelet. And in 14 days, they can show up and get that refunded. There's just all these kinds of simple ideas that we could have used to help keep track of folks who are coming here from the mainland who are probably the initial spreaders. And also, why did we go from zero to 90 with respect to opening and then closing our parks when people began to congregate impermissibly? Why not institute months ago with HPD just instituted, which was roving bands of cops to go break up these groups and arrest people and cite people? Why did that just start in July? Why didn't that start in March? These are the kinds of things that I don't understand why our government leadership isn't seeing and putting into action. It's not rocket science. And not only isn't it rocket science, but it's the nuts and bolts, particularly of city government. One of the hard things about being a mayor is that you can't always talk about being judged in terms of abstractions. Is the garbage collected, did they set up a decent system for picking up the big items or the cops behaving in a certain kind of way? And here was one like that. I think it was partly a lack of political will that they, and partly a kind of sympathy, right? These people are back out there, but yeah, I had the same experience. Driving through Waikiki the last few weeks, you had big gatherings on the beach of people look like family gatherings. We're not talking about rock concerts here. Well, but I mean, it is, they add up. And so I had the same experience going over to Waimanalo all the way over around the diamond head was, it was just mobbed early in the morning. Everybody was out, no masks or anything. That was two weeks ago. But I think that what next question is, has to do with the cost, okay? So whatever you do anywhere is expensive. So we know that the state's credit rating has been downgraded by Moody's investor service. It's gone from, it's been downgraded already from stable to negative. So the impact on our economy is undeniable at every level as I said in the beginning across every sector. But these efforts are expensive to operate. I mean, the roving bands of cops through Waikiki, they're supposed to rope through all our parks and they're supposed to be monitoring for all of this. I mean, I like Father David's idea about the bracelets and all of us promising to give people stink eye if they don't have their mask on. I mean, we need all of that kind of thing. But what we're not seeing deployed are of course the expensive things. That's my surmise that they didn't do that because it was so expensive. So I have the question about the resources that can be brought to make this happen. And I keep wanting to know why the, as I've mentioned before I think to you, Dr. Milder, the golden goose of Waikiki, those hotels are not putting some money in the piggy bank here because they or also enacting the roles that they need to have there. I mean, they need to be monitoring any quarantined people and they need to be the ones to keeping them inside and making sure that they're not breaking the law. I mean, so what are our resources given that we're, I know there's lots of federal money from the acts that have already been passed that's come into the state. I don't know how that's being deployed but we do know that we're in trouble in the budgets at the state level and also at the city and county. So what do you see as how we're going to manage to get things to happen that need to be happening even common sense-wise things? Well, I mean, there are two things here, kind of resources that you need to get through the pandemic in the short run. Some of that is a money problem. Some of it is simply a supply chain or lack of will to get them. So we know, and I don't think those are huge expenses compared to what I'm going to say next. If testing becomes more available, if we figure out a way to do more contact tracing, that's not really a big amount of money. The serious thing is the incredible depression that we're going to face here. The estimate I heard today was that the tourist industry would not come back, would not come back to where it was before the pandemic until 2025. And the fact that a lot of people are going to be unemployed and the area where David and I live, which is not usually associated with economic vulnerability, you're going to see people from East Oahu who are going to be out of housing. They're going to be, it's going to be a new population of housing. That's the serious economic problem. What a mayor faces is that there aren't many revenues. I mean, everybody faces this. You've got a significant problem. They're calling for more money from government, but it isn't like we can tap into and exist a larger revenue source unless they would really raise taxes. And that raises other kinds of complications. So, and that's part of what the leadership is going to have to be like, making hard decisions, knowing when to encourage and when to be realistic and say, you have to cut back. That to me is really scary. One other thing that's scary to me is that we've been saying that we're an insufficiently diversified economy for years. And we've also been saying we haven't had enough affordable housing for years. Why do people think that all of a sudden that's going to change? I mean, the problem is worse now. And when you try to figure out how do you get out of this, how do you diversify the economy? Well, I think there are ways you can do it, but this is not exactly going to happen the day after tomorrow. So the next couple of years are really going to be tough for a lot of people. Well, I noticed that you said that the tourism isn't going to come back. I mean, I did read that the economic recoveries is certainly three to five years out. It's going to be a struggle all the way there. But I didn't, I don't understand why you say the tourists are not coming back. Are they already beaten down the doors to get out here? No, they're not. They're not beaten down the doors to get out here. And I think, I think you can't, I think the tourists are not going to come back that quickly. And I think it's, and so we rely on it, on it so much. I understand they urge to open up tourism because it's down to basically zero, but you're not going to get that huge recovery. People aren't going to want to travel. If they travel, they're not going to have money. And if they have money, that doesn't mean they're going to have, they're going to want to use it here. So I think that there's going to be a demand issue for a while. And the hook that we were using is that this is the safest place on earth. Well, that's what I'm thinking. Well, yeah. The ocean, of course. Well, yeah, that's, I mean, this is not the British empire back in the day when an island nation was really protected. So I think that I'm kind of, I really am very curious, doesn't do it, but I'm waiting to see what our, what our moves to recovery are going to be like. Well, I think so. And I was just, I was recalling that I did disagree with you while we were still rather low in our spread numbers and in our rates of infection per cases, we're up now, we're getting up there to 10% of positive COVID cases in the testing. Now, this weekend showed us that we're really in the dire stretch here. But before that, people did want out because they were thinking it was safer. So Father David, do you have any comments on that? No, not really. I wish the hotels were doing more to help quarantine people. I wish they were doing more to help house those who are unsheltered. I know there is some of that going on and I'm very grateful for that. But, you know, these are mostly multinational corporations that have very deep pockets. And I think they could be doing a heck of a lot more than they're doing now. Well, tell me what is happening with the, and we're probably gonna have to wrap up in a little bit, but I would like to know, could you share about what they're doing for houselessness? I would really like to know if anybody's doing anything that's been in my head with those empty rooms. Yeah, I don't know that anything's really being done with houselessness per se, but I do know that folks who are testing positive who are houseless are being allowed, some of the hotels are opening up to let them be in basically a quarantine situation. So IHS has some deals with some hotels to provide that service, but it's basically a relatively minor role that they're playing. And as Neil says, once this, you know, I feel like we're still like the coyote that just ran off the cliff chasing the road runner and our feet are still going wildly in the air, but we're gonna fall. And when we do, I think there's gonna be an awful lot of people who are hurt very, very badly. And that's the question of if our leadership can't even do contact tracing, if they can't even tell us the truth about how many people they've got for something like that, how on earth are we gonna deal with this coming catastrophe? That's what worries me. I think that is absolutely the question. Do you have another comment? I was just gonna say when California really first got back the San Francisco City Council, and I'm not sure about Los Angeles, of course, very hard to get more hotels to do what David had just described here as, and that's a very complicated venture because there's certain kind of people you can't isolate because they don't do well alone and so on, but there was the mayor and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had big arguments because they wanted to put more into that than the mayor did, but the point is it became a significant political issue that did a lot more about it there again. If we kick up, if our rigs kick up, then that could be another more pressure. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's very interesting and it is someplace to go with some inquiry and maybe new leadership can have a fresh approach to looking at what all is already here that we could start tapping in some way, but I know it's complicated and we'll see how it goes and I appreciate both of you being here and your comments have been so informative and you all are so insightful. Thank you very much. This is the think tech Hawaii's state of the state of Hawaii show and I'm Stephanie Stull Dalton and I'll see you again in two weeks and certainly appreciate your attention and Aloha and Mahalo.