 Aloha and welcome to the State of the State of Hawaii on the Think Tech Hawaii live streaming network series. Think Tech Hawaii broadcasts from our downtown studio at 1164 Bishop Street in the core of Honolulu's district. I'm your host Stephanie Stull Dalton and I have a special guest to bring to our interview today. As you know the election season is upon us and in the state of Hawaii as it is nationally. And my special guest today to tell us more about how she is making her case on the campaign trail one of Hawaii's high executive offices. I'm pleased to introduce council member Kimberly Pine who is remotely connected to Think Tech Hawaii to talk about her campaign for the office of mayor of the city and county of Honolulu. Council member Pine is an experienced campaigner and has shown herself to be a winner. She now serves as a member of the Honolulu City Council from district one and she's in her second four year term. Her experience includes serving as vice chair of the city council and chair of the council committee on zoning and housing. Previously she served four terms in the Hawaii State House of Representatives for the communities of district one like Ewa Beach, Urquay Point, Kapolei and Pula Loa and others on the Leeward Coast. In the house her colleagues selected her to be House Minority Floor Leader. In these roles council member Pine has achieved a record of numerous outcomes directly benefiting Hawaii citizens quality of life as well as tourist quality of visit to Hawaii. So welcome council member Pine and thank you for joining us today for this interview conversation. Hello, hi Stephanie and to all of your viewers. Oh good to see you. Very glad you could join us and we have some questions to stimulate our conversation over what you're experiencing now and we'd love to know a lot more about your goals and your process for achieving them. So clearly as an elected official you have succeeded many times on the campaign trail but this is your first mayoral run and it may be that you are fulfilling your long held aspiration or you've had an epiphany but would you share some about what made you decide to become the mayor to go for being mayor of the city and county of Honolulu? Well I guess I would say that I've had a numerous epiphanies because I never dreamed that I'd be a politician or run for office. I like how you call it you say it's an epiphany because when I first ran for the House of Representatives it really was seeing my community being neglected and not being taken care of with it last in terms of having traffic relief funding or last in the state for having school funding, last in the state for having our police funded and other things that are just needed for success in daily life and so that's when I ran for office in the House of Representatives because I was supposed to be a news broadcaster that's my training and we weren't supposed to win, I ran against a powerful incumbent who was also president of a very powerful union and had a beach at the time and so we just really ran to make a statement to get people involved in their government and to push the incumbent to work harder for the people and stop hanging out at the Capitol and really look at the problems of the community and so when we ran in 2004 for the House of Representatives we were very surprised to not just win but we won by a landslide and it had never been done before to an incumbent like that and then of course I guess you could say had a epiphany again as you say when I ran for city council in 2012 it's because the incumbent at the time was also not taking care of our district he was arguing a lot with a lot of people that we needed help from he didn't accomplish much at the time and so I ran again to get him back and you know you need to start working for the people and we were very surprised that we won by a landslide on that election also and I really truly was going to retire the city council was going to be my last thing to do and because I have been a horrible military spouse my poor husband you know I don't show up to all the things I'm supposed to and he's been so lovely and wonderful and I don't follow him when he is stationed somewhere else because of my service but I really felt that I could do a better job you know as mayor as people who are talking about running as a lot of old names just we have to another position I felt that these last seven years that there's been a lot of introduction of all these projects that were beautiful wonderful nice to have things when a lot of the necessary things that people needed like more police officers a safer streets a better streets better parks and beaches more more lifeguards all these basic things that you need to have a good city was being neglected and so that's why I decided to run in my family and I talked and they agree they agree that there's so many problems that can be fixed if someone has the heart to listen to the people and understand their suffering well let's talk about the campaign a little bit you've your service seems directed to to the felt the scene needs of the community and you you seem to you you're looking at that as your resource for guiding yet your work I you've you've referred to your campaign as an aggressive grassroots campaign so it I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about what that means to those of us who haven't campaigned or helped in campaign sorry about that but but I'd really like to know more about what that that means an aggressive grassroots campaign how does that work and how is that different from an ordinary campaign well I think an ordinary campaign what I've discovered in in my position and running for this position as well is there is a core group of very powerful people here in the state of Hawaii they're the group that that smokes the cigars in the back room and drinks their whiskey and says okay who are you going to put in the mayor's office who are you going to put in the governor's office and and they may get all their fundraisers together and their people together in their extended business next works together and and say okay we're going to help this person and I've never been that candidate I've always been the one that no one can understand because I don't run in those groups I I come from a working class background and I hang out with working class people just regular people and so what I mean by an aggressive grassroots campaign it's like I've always done and that is you first put your power base in the people because they're your boss you need to listen to the people and recruit people that will help you in your mission to get people that put people you know at the top of their list and they're used first back into government and so that's what I mean by an aggressive grassroots campaign is we believe that the number one place at the top is really towards the bottom and so we're very excited to have 500 volunteers that are ready to go and people wanted to sign wave six months ago and I said no we've got to pace ourselves and so what people are doing is they're registering friends and family they're making sure people vote in this election we have people all over that are putting signs everywhere at this moment we're just very very blessed to have that kind of campaign going on right now well it sounds like you've been practicing this in your in your campaigns and probably in your service as well and so you you've learned a lot about how that works and I it sounds like you're really ramping that up in in this aggressive grassroots campaign but I also want to know if the campaigning now this time for the mayor or the mayor's office is that um does that become a category of its own and present a daunting challenge that's different from the other offices you've run for how does how is that all working for you now with what you already know and do well obviously and succeed with and now you're looking at this this high executive office third highest in the state so what what do you do about thinking with that it really is the core of of the campaign it's just like my my smallest campaign and the house representatives the core is always the same you just need more people and more money and more media time and that's the only difference I would say in this campaign everything's just bigger and harder and you have to work longer hours but the core of a good campaign comes from that grassroots level where you really listen to the people and you inspire the people to bring change to government what do you think that this is unnoticed do you think that those um as you described them cigar smokers in the back room which is a very big tradition in traditional politics right do they notice this and do and do people notice that this is different is that what your experience they're certainly noticing it um they saw that we were able to raise just as much money as their guy but uh we didn't do it all one time you know I don't have a millionaire friends and I'm not a millionaire but we competed with the best and we're my team is very proud of that it's a lot of hard work I think they were very surprised that we actually raised more money than them and uh but it's a great inspiration to the people in my team where they can see that you can compete with people that are very powerful if you have the heart and you truly believe in what you're doing you love what you're doing so to my team we're very inspired by what we're seeing and I have the blessing uh to be the leader of this movement but my goal is that we have more candidates out there and I'm encouraging more candidates to run that also want to change the system and end the system we're just a few people that make a lot of money get thrown in power so they can make more money we have to stop that system well then how does this and and you're not the mayor or have been the mayor um yet but how does this work forecast what your work will look like in the mayor's office so if when you make the lead when you win the election and you go into this powerful position with many other affordances then maybe you we even know now but also with impediments and constraints but have you what is it going to look like how how is what you're doing now forecasting what that's going to look like knowing that you're in a different context or are you anyway could you talk a little bit about that I think that shows because we're doing so well it shows that it is possible to elect a mayor or a politician at a very high level that is going to be putting the people first and listening to the people I think we've seen a lot of things happening make sure we're the forest for example of government not listening to the people who live in that area who should know that district better than anything else I think it's an example of what I would have done on the olawai issue where you had seven neighborhood boards protesting tearing down their neighborhoods to put up six foot walls to prevent flooding in the olawai when they had engineers and architects step forward with a totally different plan than governments in Washington DC had that had the same effect to prevent flooding I would not be a mayor that would say I'm sorry you're just the little people you don't know what you're doing so we're going to do what these big contractors say I think this shows the kind of mayor that I would be and listening to the people and believing in the people in their own talent and not a wealthy contractors and people in power who are really just making decisions for their own pocket book not for the benefit of the people and and a helpful change but when you get into the bigger picture I was going to ask now what are what are your strategies going to be like to manage these daunting goals in your portfolio you haven't been shy about setting up your list of priorities it's the hard complicated homeless and you know and government transparency and crime and roads and beaches and beautification all of those really important issues so when you get into that situation where you have the affordances of a mayor ship then what are you going to do about having to to shift priorities and what how are you going to manage to guide your your strategies for implementing what you want given the the more complicated and numerous forces that are going to be at work on you if that makes any sense at all but anyway in that in that arena how do you see what you've already done and what you're doing play out and how is that going to help you with us the strategic nature of that responsibility there well we certainly have a lot of goals and things that want to get done we shouldn't be 300 police officers short in the state of Hawaii and having grandmas getting robbed at bus stops that's just unacceptable and that's not the city that we should be living in a lot of these things of course that you were saying earlier does cost money but i've proposed numerous things that would allow us to increase our revenue without raising taxes it took me two years to pass the city sponsorship bill with with now a bill that could be supported by people that care about the environment and what that did was other cities across the nation across the world are teeming up with nonprofits teeming up with donors endowment to fix up parks and beaches for example and all that we were going to give them is a small little sponsorship recognition and then blended into the environment wasn't neon flashing it was very respectable some of it would be in you know and maybe plaques or things like that along roads it took me two years to pass that because there was some opposition to commercializing Honolulu but i think the final bill showed that we can blend that recognition into the environment that it would be in but it's been two years since its past and the administration hasn't implemented the bill yet i have so many people that want to help and give money without raising taxes on the rest of the population some cities are raising as much as 300 million dollars which is far more money that we need for many things in the city the other thing that i've proposed recently was how we deal with homeless right now we're spending 10 to 15 to 20 million dollars a year and handling the homeless issue the administration proposed to sit live bill legislation and i was against that from the very beginning because what that i predicted at the time and that was six years ago seven years ago was that we're just moving people from one street to the next street so how does that solve the homeless problem and so unfortunately six years um you know into it they realized that i was right that we were spending so much time really just cleaning up people's trash and then moving them from one town to the next town and causing major havoc in the next town and then we'd spend even more money and more money and more money to handle the increased negative psychological behavior that that caused people that already had some mental health issues called the stress of having them lose their stuff and then move them around so all that money from 15 to 20 million dollars that we have spent you know a year we could have used to put affordable housing in in certain places or partnering up with other organizations to rapidly build affordable housing and we would have had a better result and actually ended their homelessness by having wraparound services in terms of helping with them with their mental health issues their drug addictions other things so yes i do have a lot of goals but i've already showed that you can pay for things we passed in the tod areas housing developments that i required to have a very high number of affordable housing in it and i didn't let anything go through my committee unless it had high affordable housing numbers but each of those buildings brought in five to ten million dollars in property tax revenue a year in addition to what we already had and so we passed about 10 of those buildings so that brings in another hundred million dollars to the city so there's ways that you can raise funds for the city and be more efficient with your funding without raising taxes and so there's a few ideas that i had there's many more but i know we only have a half an hour well i'm i i'm pleased you brought that up because that seems to be our life and that's that there's never enough money to do the things even when we know and have the will and the political will to do them there's just never enough money so talking about the but your budget in that way managing it so that you're using it to leverage more funds and in a project something like your involvement with the kaha wiki village where i noted that there was what you briefly referred to was a partnering of the state the city and county and the foundation aio and i wondered if that was something you would tell us a little more about because as you're saying it you're using the funds to leverage more funds because no matter how big your budget and hamlet was budget budget as i understand it is big it's over a billion but there's never enough so how is it that you can how is that an example or not or suggesting other things that you're thinking about doing that can make that difference and it's a great example of a public-private partnership that helped to solve the homeless problem for certain income populations and especially for families and it didn't take too much city money but it did take resources and it did take state resources and it took private investment and donations and we're doing a two similar projects i'm for the the small tiny house program in villages and we're going to have two one in winy with twinkles of they're the homeless encounter at the winy boat harbor and we're also going to have one kailua next to the us that shelter and how we're putting that together is also public-private partnerships where we have private companies donating the materials for the tiny houses we're going to have the city donating portable showers and and hygiene centers so that once the the nonprofits getting enough money for the infrastructure we can go to the next encampment and help them and so really a lot of partnership is really the solution to a successful government government can't do things alone you just don't have a tax base to do it alone that's uh the important point and and i show i'm i'm sure you'll be learning more about that going forward um so i i understand from the reports that one of the issues of houselessness that might that's part of the cause is that there isn't affordable housing permanent affordable housing so you're going at that piece of it that seems to be um one remedy area to to work on so um in the city council actually seven years ago i said we must focus on affordable housing in a very big way we need to have city-state private sector partnership and you know what some people totally in politics they said kim it's not on a poll no one's saying that it's important to them on a poll we see i represent some of the poorest residents on oahu so we see things first and i saw every week new family either moving to vegas or becoming homeless living in their cars people you never thought that would happen to but they were living so at a tight paycheck paycheck that just one accident one family member getting ill they were homeless and so now what is everyone talking about affordable housing and so this is why i started this many many years ago and we put the first affordable housing legislation together we're now for the first time in history if you're going to build on a wahu if you have 10 units and more you have to include affordable housing in your project and the city will help you to do that by helping you have a little bit more density so that you can sell off some units to pay for the affordable housing we'll give you less fed back when you build affordable housing we'll give you waivers on on fees if you build affordable housing so we really finally got that right formula for that both the builders and and they for affordable housing community were was advocating for it first they were very divided the original bill actually was going to destroy our economy and then we were able to fix it and negotiate with all these different stakeholders to find legislation that they actually believe would actually build affordable housing so we have about three to four thousand units that we know that are going to come up very soon and you're talking here about the big guns you're talking about anyone who's building on a wahu yes correct including kaka a go in 10 units or more yes that was a really big muscle in kaka a go is they use state money hundreds of millions of dollars to put in the infrastructure and they didn't demand enough affordable housing it's a really sad thing really tough yeah well i um i think that um there's another resource in hawaii but in my night editing i and maybe and my research has not been very deep on it but lots of the homeless population are um have other agencies that support them for other things and i'm just wondering if other entities nonprofits or or uh trust are they putting in enough to represent the portion of that population that that really is in their kuleana so to speak so where these other big huts of money are they uh paying their reasonable part contributing to it i i think the government is government and perhaps me the private sector too is not doing enough to help in the mental health area in the drug addiction area in the mental health arena we have fallen far behind where we were in the 80s where i believe there was enough investment from the government sector to ensure we had enough hospitals to ensure we had enough psychiatrist and mental health professionals uh i can definitely tell you that's mixed with drug addiction and god forbid if you're a construction worker which i'm finding a lot of people right now who got injured on the job and have teens and mental health issues most likely they're homeless uh we don't have until recently we're been working with josh green and dr miscovitz he's the first doctor that believes he finally come have come up with a medical formula to help those people who have both pain drug addiction and mental health issues by giving a there's a new pain drug and i'm forgetting the name right now that does not make you addictive oxy cotton is what hold on or was pushed on a lot of these people yeah construction workers so hawaii's that is fair share yeah that's really very very sad and also what's the problem with this is um the state has not spent enough money on our inspection inspection that supports oh and you can see that on new year's eve of almost every illegal firework was like every other house so imagine if that's getting in that's how the drugs are getting in so we have a lot of weaknesses in certain areas well cammy it sounds like you're more aware of those you acknowledge them and you're obviously aware of them and we'll be thinking about how to approach that issue and make things better in that area but we're just about out of time and so we'll have to wrap it up so i'm stephanie stoll dalton this is the state of the state of hawaii on the think take live streaming network series we've been talking remotely with council member kimberley pine about making her case to be honolulu city and county mayor i'll see you again in two weeks on the next state of the state of hawaii mahalo for your attention everyone