 And welcome to Crossroads in Learning. I am your host, Keisha King. We have conversations here that are real and relevant. Today is no different. The guest we have is running for office at a time when we are facing unprecedented lows in our tourism, high numbers in our cases of COVID-19, and we are doing mail-in ballots. This is all very unusual. And yet, he chose to run his first time right now. Welcome with me, Adrienne Tam. Aloha, Adrienne. Aloha, thank you for having me. It's totally my pleasure. I want to ask you, tell us a little bit about your background and why have you chosen to enter this in politics and this way at this time? Well, a little bit about myself. I am born and raised in Hawaii. I graduated from our public schools. I got the opportunity to go to Penn State University and I got job offers after I graduated, but ultimately wanted to come back to take care of my grandmother and work for my mom's small business. When I became a licensed realtor with my mom and her small business, I wasn't getting enough clients. And I was working with first-time homebuyers, so I took on a second job at the state legislature, working as a session aide and ultimately as a office manager. And I'm one of the many people in Hawaii that are struggling and have a second job. A lot has been talked about my age and I'm more than happy to bring it up, but we're at a time where people who look like me, who have the same resume like me, are leaving the state and are being separated from their families. And as we move forward into post-pandemic Hawaii, where we diversify our economy, we need people in leadership, in charge, who have experience, who has a stake in the decisions they make to lead the way. And that's why I'm running and I believe that I'll be a great fit for the House of Representatives. Thank you so much. The numbers for COVID-19 are spiking daily. And right now we have a total of 207 new cases today. Government officials have mandated the shutdown of bars for the next three weeks and we once again have to limit our group size to 10 or less when meeting in public. How has this process of handling the pandemic affected you? And how do you imagine that if you could, you would do it differently or would you allow it to remain the same? Well, when we launched the campaign, it was under the assumption that there wasn't going to be a pandemic, but we had to rewrite everything. And it has affected me in a way where my grandmother, who's the 80 years old right now, we try to distance ourselves. We don't want to get her sick and we take all kinds of precautions necessary to protect her. In terms of our handling, I don't know what's best for Hawaii right now. I'm going to leave that up to the many experts that we have. I think that's what you should be asking for in our leaders, which is to put aside their egos and to listen to the experts on what's best to move forward. Well, you mentioned moving forward. Just how do you imagine we will do that? Thinking about tourism and shutdown, so many businesses, maybe even your family's business, was affected by this whole process. How do you imagine we move forward? Well, I believe that we can move forward by putting the safety measures in place and it's going to take a lot of discipline. We've done really great at the very beginning when we were very scared, but we become way more lax and complacent with getting the freedoms back. And the last thing I would like to see is for another shutdown, it hurt a lot of businesses and a lot of people, but if that's what it's going to take, maybe a shutdown is what we need. Businesses will always be there, but your family and your relatives they could lose their lives if they were to contract this disease and they weren't asymptomatic. Yeah. Well, District 22 is often called the Concrete Jungle. You have Waikiki and Alamoana where they're heavily dependent upon tourism and now it's almost non-existent. Do you think this is a time for us to diversify our economy? And if so, how? You know, this conversation about diversifying our economy has been going on for a very long time already. It's just that we haven't had the willpower or a muster to basically do it. And I'm hoping that this pandemic serves as a wake-up call for us to do it. The plan that I'm proposing is investments into green technology. We can invest money into the University of Hawaii to research green technology. That means smart grids, hydropower, green architecture, et cetera, and make that research and technology available for any business or entity that wants to use it as long as they meet certain conditions of operating and putting their business headquarters in Hawaii and hiring a 50% quota of the local workforce. Through those investments, we're going to invest heavily in STEM in our public schools so that our kids are ready for those jobs when they leave. And at the same time, it helps create jobs here and meets our clean energy goals. The issue that I want to bring up is that many think that diversifying our economy means eliminating tourism, but that's certainly not the case. Sturgeon will always be there. It's unfair to ask thousands of workers to learn a new skill. But when we talk about diversifying our economy into this new sector, we're talking about building something so that when something like this happens, we have something to fall back on. It's called being sustainable. And whereas to how much money we can invest in, it's going to be up to how much our leaders want to invest in. We can put $200 million over the course of several years into the University of Hawaii, or we can put $1 million into one year. I hate to say it, but it's you pay for what you get for. And I'm hoping that when this proposal is up and running, we could invest heavily into it because you're talking about the future of Hawaii. And that's the key. This is something that affects our future greatly. So Waikiki and all of District 22 does rely heavily on tourism, but we also have some other major local issues, such as poverty and justice. When we are talking about human sex trafficking, the struggle with opioids, houselessness, how will you address those issues? Well, I support heavily funding mental health treatments for our houseless community and our chronically homeless. And in addition to that, we need to think innovatively on how we approach this because for too long now, we've just been putting a Band-Aid over a gaping room and it just isn't preparing itself. My way of thinking is that we invest heavily into housing first. That would mean rapid rehousing, sectionate expansions, affordable housing developments, and hiring more social workers because our social workers aren't getting paid enough and they're not getting the proper training. And not many people are willing to work those kinds of jobs. Again, you pay for what you get for, yet what you pay for. Yeah. In addition to that, I am also very supportive of a new idea that Senator Josh Green at the time in 2017 proposed, which was allowing doctors to prescribe Medicare for rent. If you think about it, an emergency room usually costs about $150 to $3,000 a night. Whereas if you spend $1,000 for one month's rent that saves a lot of money, what people don't understand is that 61% of Hawaii's $2 billion Medicaid budget is spent on 3.6% of Hawaii's Medicare recipient. And a majority of that is basically spent on the chronically homeless. So while right now, Medicaid dollars cannot be used for paying people's rent, we certainly can tap into the CMSs 1,115 waivers and grants. And ultimately, this could save us $300 million in the long run. That's incredible. That's incredible. It's a wonderful amount for savings. Now, with providing for the houseless, especially in the capacity of mental health, we also have to think about police. And police reform nationwide and globally. There's been such unrest. And in many ways, a lack of accountability. We have discussions about defunding the police. And we're also questioning whether or not we need to address the issue regarding the mandatory disclosure of misconduct records for law enforcement. Can you talk to us about those varied subjects? Well, right now, there's a lot of mistrust and a lack of transparency at all levels of the government. And the first thing we can do to gain some of that trust back from the public is by passing a mandatory disclosure for misconduct in our law enforcement. The public has the right to know who is protecting them and what is going on. In terms of our police department, I am very supportive of our brave men and women in blue. However, I do understand that they have a lot on their plate. They're the first ones we call when we are, you know, when something's going wrong, we see a homeless person outside of a store or something. And, you know, those things can be handled if we were to increase our capacity of social workers. I just think that right now, our police forces have way too much responsibility. And taking some of that responsibility off of their hands and into the hands of other areas of our government would be the best way forward for our police officers because our police officers are mostly there to maintain the peace. They're not there to, you know, fix your tires or they're not there to, you know, get you mental health treatments or counseling because you're homeless. I think that's the best way forward. Yeah, yeah, I agree. They have a specific job to do and they can only specialize in what they are good at and we need to leave the mental health capacity to those who specialize in that arena. However, where will that money come from? If we have more counselors and therapists who are answering the call that typically would go to the police, how are we paying them? Where's that money coming from? Well, some of the money can come from the money that we spend in our police department. And I'm a big fan of finding ways that we can generate revenue for our state and city without regressively taxing our people. One of the things that I am proposing is the idea of a visitor's fee. A visitor's fee of five dollars. Five dollars a person can bring in 50.4 million dollars when we reach our high peak tourism capacity again. And if you think about it, you know, that 50 million dollars can invest into mobile clinics, expanding section eight. It could even go to raising teacher pay. It could, you know, fix some of our infrastructure and even after spending all of that, it's still probably have a couple million dollars left over. Okay. So now that's my first time ever hearing of a visitor's fee. Yeah. So I'm definitely looking into that as we speak. I'm thinking, is this something that is new to Hawaii? Many say that it isn't a bad thing to have because our numbers are usually high. But what if we, it takes a long time for us to reach that high capacity again? Then what, still charge it? Yes. Do you think that would deter tourists from visiting? I don't think that a visitor's fee would deter visiting. You think about it, the visitor's fee that I'm proposing is only five dollars. You spend $500 on a round trip ticket to Hawaii. You spend $1,200 on a hotel room for seven days. And that's like conservative levels. You spend $7 a day on a rental car. You spend $300 on your entire vacation on activities. You spend $40 a day on food. $5 shouldn't deter someone from coming to Hawaii. And if it does, they probably aren't coming to Hawaii anyways. Right. You're exactly right. Okay. So well, thank you for that. I do see where this is that has been a part of the discussion. So I just looked it up on Google. So for those who have not, look into a visitor's fee. It's one way to help us take care of our financial shortages. Now, let's talk a little bit about the next buzz, big thing that's going on. And that is our schools reopening. We've touched a little bit about the bars and the limited amount of people for gathering. However, just last week, the BOE Board of Education and the Department of Education made a decision not to reopen our schools to students until August 17th. We were scheduled to have our schools open August 4th, which is tomorrow. What do you think about this as it pertains to your district, our state, and parents and teachers as a whole? From every parent and teacher that I talked to, they all want to send their kids back to school, but it cannot come at the cost of their health or anyone's health. I am glad that the Department of Education and the BOE are taking the recommendations from HSTA and HGEA and postponing that reopening date. And this is something that I just spoke, touched about earlier, which is listening to the experts, who better than to listen to than the ones that are on the ground, our principals, our custodians, our teachers, and our parents. So ultimately, it should be up to them and the people on the ground. I don't think that a Board of bureaucrats should be making those decisions. Okay. Well, we certainly appreciate that. I can tell you that that has been the topic of major discussion in households everywhere across the island and across the state. Please share with us your vision for District 22 and why people should vote for you. Well, for my vision of District 20, I picture a more community for our district. District 22 is very dense, like you mentioned, it's the concrete jungle of Hawaii. And many of our residents live in condominiums, and these condominiums are like vertical villages. So everyone's basically congregating up on themselves. They can't really go up and knock on a neighbor's door unless you're on the same floor. But, you know, when we have an active representative who is willing to step out to the plate and bring people out of their condominiums and to build a community, then we bring us closer together. Because District 22 is not just a tourism-centered district, it's a neighborhood. People live there, you know. And I'm hoping that as a next representative, I can improve on that, whether it's building a new community garden or hosting a fair at Jefferson Elementary School for Waikiki residents. My vision for the district is to bring us closer together, stronger together, and to finally build a community. Excellent. Well, that pretty much describes the aloha spirit that is here. It's all about community. We thank you so much. You know, one question off the cuff. How has it been for you campaigning during a pandemic? Typically, we can see a politician shaking hands and kissing babies. And now we have six feet of distance between us that we need to keep. How's it been for you? You know, when we lost this campaign, we were thinking about, you know, hosting coffee hours in each condominium, shaking hands, and meeting people outside. But we had to rewrite everything. And the thing that we focused on is making phone calls. So I just sat down. I made phone calls. I called, I called, I called, left a lot of messages, had a lot of anger responses, and made some really good intimate conversations with people in the district. I listened to their hopes, their dreams, their visions, and their struggles. And all I can say is that I'm going to fight for them to make sure that they have a place in Hawaii. And, you know, in a way, we still connect it. We were able to launch social media. And it was a truly a grassroots campaign. We had contacts in each condominium, and that person were to tell their neighbors, and their neighbors were to tell their neighbors, and the world would just spread for our district. Additionally, I sat down and I wrote letters to people in the district. And I hand wrote these letters and stuff them into envelopes and hand wrote the addresses so they don't throw it away. They have to open. But, and I told them, you know, call me anytime and I gave my cell phone to everyone. And I've been getting a lot of calls. And now we're continuing to have that conversation. And many of them called me and told me that they've never had a politician reach out to them in this way because they're always used to living in their condominium. And that goes back to my vision for District 22, which is a more close-knit community. Excellent. It's very interesting. I can't remember the last time I received a handwritten letter. And I certainly have never gotten one from a politician. So that is very personal, very personable. Well, we wish you luck. We want to thank you for being here today. We know we have deadlines coming up. I believe August 8th is a deadline for primary. Yeah. And so go ahead and give them your final hoo-ha for getting out there to vote for you and mailing in that ballot. You can go ahead and... Thank you so much for having me today. It's been a pleasure to be here on Think Tech Hawaii. I mean, yeah, I think Tech Hawaii. I thought I mixed the words up for a bit. But, you know, we're in a challenging time and these new problems that are coming out of this pandemic is going to take new leadership. And it's going to take new perspectives. Perspectives from people who witness firsthand the struggles of what's going on in Hawaii. Prior to this pandemic, things weren't working. People were working two or three jobs. And people were struggling with the cost of living. I'm trying... I'm running to fix that. And I'm going to try really hard to do that. That means diversifying economy to green tech. That means fixing our budget without regressively taxing our people. And no matter what, even if you're going to vote for me or you're not going to vote for me, please go out there and vote. It's why you have same-day voter registration. So even if you didn't drop your ballot in the mailbox or you didn't get a ballot, you can always head down to Honolulu Halle with a valid ID or a utility bill, a valid Hawaii State ID or a valid ID and a utility bill proving your address. And you can vote right then and there. That's what I'm grateful about Hawaii is that we have same-day voter registration and all mail-in ballots. Everyone should go out there and exercise their right to vote. Thank you so much. Thank you, Adrienne. Thank you for being a guest today. Good luck to you. And hopefully one day we'll see you again at the Crossroads. Thank you all for watching and for joining us at Crossroads in Learning where we have conversations that are real and relevant and we hope to hear more from you. Have a fantastic day. Aloha.