 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's a one o'clock block. It's Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech here in Honolulu, Hawaii. And also in, where are you, Bob? This is Bob Fishman on the other side. And he's on the sky. All right. Not a bad thing. And Bob and I saw each other twice last week. It was kind of remarkable. And the second one kind of reinforced the first one. The first was a chance meeting at Pioneer Plaza. And the second one was more important in a sense. That was the, we were on both on this program called Finding Common Ground in a Polarized World, which was presented at, gee, at the East West Center and also at the Law School last week by Accord 3.0, Peter Adler and Keith Mattson. It was quite something. And Bob, in fact, Bob, in fact, is a founding member, a charter member of Accord 3.0. He's going to tell us more about it. But, you know, I think it's important that you know who Bob is. He was a Colonel in the United States Army, retired here in Honolulu, had time running the Aloha Stadium. He was the, he was, wait, I can't read my own handwriting. He was the city manager, former city manager of the city and county of Honolulu. He ran the convention center authority. He was the chief of staff at one point for George Ariyoshi, Governor George Ariyoshi. He was the CEO of the White Tourism Authority. And to say nothing about his endeavors in the private industry world. I may not have put that in the right sequence, Bob. What would you correct me on there? Oh, no, that's fine. I'm not comfortable talking about me. So, you're fine. Yeah, that's us. And he knows tons of stuff about the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of Hawaii and government in Hawaii. And it's really wonderful to have him on the show. So I can ask him a lot of questions about that kind of stuff. Nice to hear. Yeah. So, first, let's talk about, you know, last week, let's talk about, you know, the finding common ground in a polarized world and the Accord 3.0 program at the East West Center and at the law school. What's the problem that conference was intended to resolve? Well, this is the second time that Accord 3.0 has gone forward with an East West Center conference in Jefferson Hall there. And it is a meaningful thing to do in the modern world, the modern world of tribalism and the instincts on the part of free citizens in America and in Hawaii, especially to assert themselves and assert their point of view in a way that they can make the maximum amount of noise or the maximum amount of effect occur. The casual observer today of issues management in America and in Hawaii will immediately come to the conclusion that there's less desire in the part of people to come together than there is a desire to assert a point of view which, an average, the citizen would consider to be correct and moral. That's a result of the fact that we have collectively lost confidence in many of our institutions and some of our leaders. We found a lesser quality of leader than what we expected when we came out of statehood. When we came out of statehood, I started in the state legislature and in the fifth legislature in 1969, working for Vincent Yanov. George Ariosi was the majority floor leader. David McClung was the president of the Senate. We had an array of doctors and lawyers and business executives who had achieved some success in life and were giving back to the new state, to the baby, the embryo phase of growing Hawaii and building confidence and helping people to believe that they can achieve their dreams. We're not there now. We're at a point where we manage our resources aggressively. We elect different types of people to the legislature who represent our respective points of view and far fewer of them really have a commitment to getting everyone together. The way that it was when I first started working for Governor Burns in 1969, Burns's theme was getting people together for the benefit of all of Hawaii. And that is less a theme today. If you look at the rainbow of issues and points of views in the public arena today, very, very seldom will you hear someone stand up and say, listen, don't you believe we all ought to get together for the benefit of our entire state, for the benefit of our entire society? But that is not the priority message today. And we're at a point now where tribalism, which is being reinforced by social media, by the ability to bring people together who agree with you, isolating those who don't. The tribalism has moved forward in how we conduct their public affairs. And with that in mind, Peter and the group who are really dedicated to getting people together or at least finding a common ground such that a resolution of an issue provides a platform on which most people can live with the other point of view. That's one of Peter's great skills. That's one of the core group's great skills. And we have people in a core 3.0 in Scotland and New Zealand and Australia and all over America. There's about a couple of dozen of us here and there. Some of us are much more active. Some of us have really accomplished, I'm not one of them, but some of us have really accomplished some wonderful things with Native Hawaiian and environmental affairs where the points of view are really, really, really separate and are really divergent. And that's really where we need more of that, more people today. And so I'm really happy to be part of that group. Yeah. And I learned a lot of that conference. It's not just about Kumbaya. It's about the mechanics of dealing with the polarized group discussion of which we have plenty in Hawaii. And I wasn't there for the whole time. Maybe you were there longer. I was there for most of the one day, but it went on into the second day. And I wonder if you could help me understand what the bottom line was. There were several panels, some very smart guys, including you, to talk about the tools you need to rely on, the techniques you need to bring into play in a group meeting, which is otherwise polarized. What came up? What are the takeaways that we can think about after the conference? Well, I think, first of all, the conference started with a broad overview. Peter provided a good launch of the various types of issues that we are wrestling with today, some of which we never saw a generation ago. He had former congressmen at Case up there and a number of folks who really had respected positions in their own areas of advocacy. Some were attorneys, some were not. In fact, some of the most effective advocates were not attorneys. And you'd think that wouldn't be the case, but some of the most passionate and the most effective advocates for their points of view are not attorneys in Hawaii, especially. Then we went into some of the techniques that were used. We talked about certain circumstances and events. Each one of the panelists brought to the table a particular perspective that he or she had. We were probably evenly represented ladies and gentlemen on the panels and as was the audience. In fact, the audience might have had more ladies in the audience than men, which is I consider to be a very good sign because you're starting to see an increased number of professional women in the area of advocacy and in the area of the various respective issues that they're pointing, that they're dealing with. Then we went through the morning. We had a break in the afternoon. We talked about some of the skills that needed to be polished by meat theaters and by facilitators. We need to speak in clearer English, sometimes devoid of emotional arguments. We need to stop bearing ourselves in legalisms. We need to make sure that everybody in the room at least shows a modicum of respect for civility and the idea that everybody should have some input to it. I'm a little more suspicious of public meetings than most because I've said on both sides, most people who come to public meetings come with a good heart and an optimistic idea that they'll come out of it with some resolution and some understanding of all points of view. But some people come to meetings in order to prevail, in order to assert themselves to the exclusion of others. It's a very expensive and very complicated challenge to get some of these folks to promise to be civil, and that isn't the purpose. Also, attending meetings today is a favorite pursuit of professionals who believe that one of the ways of prevailing for their purpose or for themselves, one of the ways of prevailing is indeed to go to a meeting and assert oneself to the exclusion of others. You saw that with the various meetings that we had all over Oahu in preparation for the Honolulu Rail project. And whether you like the rail project or not, you didn't have to come to more than one or two meetings to know that the same people were there with the same arguments, only with louder volume, and with the idea in mind that they would give the impression that they represented the majority of thinking. I'm sort of suspicious, having been city managing director, and especially when I was head of tourism, I'm sort of suspicious that a lot of people have really the idea that they want to get their own points of view across to the exclusion of others. And those who really make an effective effort to lobby and to affect policy don't come to the meetings to do that. They do it in advance by going to policymakers and decision makers and folks in and out of government to help them work toward their point of view. So public meetings right now are largely overrated as a way of coming to resolution. I said that when they asked me for my comments. They asked me, why don't more people come forward and attempt to work together, particularly people in politics? And my response was a little blunt. And I said, well, that's because that's not on their agenda. A lot of people don't want to have resolution of issues because the issues themselves create a place for them in the political cosmos. Why should they bring a resolution to something that's giving them mileage as a political advocate? So to keep the issue alive is something very much in the interest of policymakers who are seeking public approval from their respective crowds. And they had a panel which I was very impressed with about certain case studies, certain projects, certain initiatives, and the two that stick in my head. One was the TMT, 30-meter telescope in Mauna Kea. And then the other was the Dairy, Piero Mediars, Luponu Dairy on Kauai. And I got the feeling, I did have, I still do have the feeling that the meeting is almost, it's a tool for those who want to raise their objections. They're never going to change their minds. They're going to keep on fighting and appealing and fighting and doing everything they can possibly do. And there's no convincing them that the other side has any merit whatsoever. They're on a mission to beat the other side. This is that polarization that was an essential element of the discussion and tried to wrap around it. And I really wonder at the end of the day, Bob, is there anything we can do about this? I know Accord 3.0 spends plenty of time trying to figure it out. But what do you come away with? What can we do to avoid the kind of process we saw in TMT, still seeing in TMT, and for that matter, the kind of process we have seen in the dairy in Kauai and other projects, just the same way? Well, that's a really good question, Jay. First, people come to these meetings. You have to find out and satisfy in your mind why people come to these meetings. They come, first of all, to speak to peace. They come to reinforce their leadership of their respective tribe, their tribes, the people that follow them and are cheering for them and are looking for them to be the champion of their point of view. Some come to the meeting for a resolution of the issue, but a minority of people who come to those meetings really are looking for a resolution of the issue. They're looking to re-assert their leadership in their tribe and they're looking to prevail over those people who would say, we don't want you to prevail. I think there's another dimension, and that has to do with the level of respect for the authority, the moral authority at the very least, but certainly the authority, the legal authority of the convener of the meeting. And one of the problems you have where you have meetings that blow up into smithereens is that there's no respect for the moral or legal authority of the convener. The convener is doing something because the law requires it to happen, but the people in the room don't look at that person as any type of Moses or any type of decider that they're going to follow. And if the ruling goes against them as a result of the meeting, then they are going to continue to fight about it because they believe that's what they should be doing. So one of the problems is that we need to do something to reinforce the respect that our broad community, but especially some of the more discreet groups within the community have for the institution of state government, state leadership at the state level, we're a long way away from doing this on a national basis. We're closer on the Hawaii level, but some way to do that. Now there are several things that have been talked about over the years. One of them is for us is to do a constitutional convention or some equivalent of a con con. I'm not advocating it. There's lots of pros and cons on that because some of the stakeholders have done a fairly good job of reinforcing their stakes. And they see great danger in a constitutional convention, but some type of recalibration of the compact that exists between voters and individuals, groups within our society and the government. I think one of the real problems we have today in Hawaii, especially, is that we've lost a perspective of what it is that we expect our government to do for us. There's a fundamental disagreement about not only what we expect government to do, but how much it should be involved in our lives and how much we should pay for to do that. You describe the whole process going forward. You describe a process back from John Burns on forward and the way things have shifted in government, but also in the community. And I suggest to you that it's a two-way, it's a two-edge sword because I think that people in the community do not understand their obligations as citizens. You talked about the social compact, you know, the basis of all government, in fact, all society. And if the people in the street don't respect government and don't feel they have any obligation to be in a partnership with government, then the whole thing begins to decline. And I think we see signs of that here. And on the mainland, I think we see signs of people who don't feel any obligation to reach a conclusion, who don't feel any obligation to find a consensus, a common solution, but only to advance their own interests. And this is a profound problem, Bob. This is a problem which you have to go back to school for and study civics, you know, from when you were a young child in the early grades, don't you think? How do we change that? Well, I think it gets down to the nature of leadership that we see. I'm not making a qualitative judgment, but I certainly am making a judgment about the type of leadership that we see. I saw it evolve over the decades in Hawaii. I remember, although Governor Burns, Governor John Burns, was not an orator. He was not a good speaker. He was a cop. He was grumpy most of the time. His demeanor was grumpy. But when he walked into the room, whether it was the back of a butcher shop or a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, or it was a political meeting, people they hushed and they stood up out of respect for the fact he was the first citizen of Hawaii when he was governor. Okay. The leadership that Burns was able to share was described as transformational leadership. Okay. Whether you liked a lot of the details of what he'd wanted or not, whether you were a lot of guys anti-union. He was very pro-union. A lot of people didn't like some of his approach toward planning, land planning, and some of the things that he advocated. They respected him for his leadership as the first citizen of Hawaii, and he stood for a moral principle or moral profile, at least, that people respected. Today's leadership is more transactional. It's not transformational. The leader doesn't transform the followers to believe in some of the values that the leader has. The leader has the value of keeping everybody together and getting everybody to work and compromising on a give and take basis. Today we're in a transactional mode. If I do something for you, you do something for me. If I support you, you will support me. If I give you money for your campaign, you will reciprocate in some fashion because either through access or other types of legal ways of giving favor to people who support you and help you to get an office. This transactional behavior is pronounced very, very loud and distinctly at the national level today. That's one of the real problems we have with national politics today is that it's entirely transactional. You have legislators who are voting for things that are obviously not in their best interest, but because they're doing it because they're completing a transaction with the people who have helped them in the past. That's one of the real problems we have with democracy today. We've forgotten that we are not a pure democracy. We are a republic. We vote for people to represent our interests, and we hope that those people will represent our interests with a high set of ethics and morality that we can look to our families and our children and our friends and say, we're proud of those guys. We're happy that person has been selected for a time being. Leadership in democracy should not be a permanent assignment, and yet we've gone over the deep end in that area. There's a lot of fine tuning that needs to be done right now, but we're at a point where we've got to take a look and see what we've done with our democracy and how to make it work for what we originally hoped it would be. Now, what's the connection? We find this process is happening, polarization, let's call it that for now, and that undermines the ability of a meeting or a government to get things done in a way that serves the common good, and then exactly the same kind of thing is happening, maybe a different degree on the mainland in Congress. Why is this happening in both places? Is there a connection? Is there something in the air, the water? What has happened to us, not only as a state, but as a country that makes us slide down this slope? It's not just a coincidence that it's happening in Hawaii and it's happening in Washington, no? No, it isn't. I think there's some realities that guide us there. First is government is very, very expensive. Government is costing everyone more money, and one of the reasons it costs so much money is that stakeholders have done a very good job of watching out for the interests of those who participate in the process. Environmental advocates have done a wonderful job of establishing the public's expectations to protect our environment, but people forget you have to pay for that. The public employee labor unions protect employees of the government from earning lower middle class or substandard wages and losing their self-respect and not giving their families an opportunity to grow and thrive. Deep down in all this is that we are seeing the middle class in Hawaii shrinking very fast, and social mobility is the key to all these issues. We had social mobility in the 1960s and 1970s in Hawaii, and although you had to go to the mainland to get a medical degree and a mainland to get a law degree, we fixed that, and we provided opportunities for our kids. When I went to the University of Hawaii, the tuition was $116 a semester, and now you have families that are working two jobs, two and a half jobs, who are impoverishing themselves so that their kids can go to the University of Hawaii. There's an issue there of social mobility, and we took some of the money out of our home and took a second mortgage out of our home so that our kids could go to school, and I could pay tuition for them. That isn't available today for people who can't get into the housing market because you need $200,000 for a down payment. The fact is that our middle class is shrinking in Hawaii, and social mobility is being thwarted, and what's really happening is we're becoming part of another economy outside of Hawaii, and we're part of a larger civilization, either in Japan or outside of Hawaii or whatever. All I know is that we have to get back to the point of understanding that we have something to gain by working together and by cooperating to the extent possible, and for that we need to build respect in our institutions. Sounds like it gets more difficult as we go forward. Just an hour ago, we had a show with the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. We talked about the tax counts, the tax commission, the tax planning commission that's in session right now, and there are consultants who suggest all kinds of ways to raise taxes in Hawaii and pay for the huge unfunded liabilities that we have achieved. We're not in good shape. Our fiscal policies have led us to a place where we're sort of a debtor state where we don't have sufficient income and mean state income to pay the state bills, and that means we're going to have to have tax increases, and tax increases are, gee, they're dangerous to the middle class, they're dangerous to everybody, but over time tax increases could actually accelerate the very process you're describing, and I guess my question is, is it possible to have the nirvana of a balanced approach toward leadership, toward government, toward the relation and the social compact between the citizen and government, and also pay the bills, and also deal in this new and more difficult economy as our infrastructure, you know, degrades? How can we do that? It sounds like we're on a path to a worse place, but we have to fix it so that we can achieve not only a balance in the current status, but a balance in a more difficult economy. That's true. I think a lot of this gets down to those people that we elect to public office who appoint senior professionals being candid with us about what it costs to do what we, the public, expect them to do. You can't get up there and say, I'm going to do all everything that you promise to do, and don't worry about it, you don't have to pay for it. I mean, Jeremy Harrison and I are good friends and I respect him deeply, but one of the things that I just couldn't get, I couldn't understand is when he got up there and said, we got to do more with less. What do you mean we got to do more than with less? You know, we're doing what we believe the public expects us to do in the city, in the charter of the city and county of Honolulu, and this is what it costs given the environment that we have. So a leader who gets up there and says, don't worry about it, I'm going to cut all this fat, you know, and we're going to make it easier for you and we're going to lower your taxes, and we're going to still do everything for you that we promise that would be done. Somebody ought to say, okay, take me through this. How do you know what it is that I expect government to do? It's more than just money. It has to do with how do we want government to get in our lives? Do we want them to tell us how to live? Do we want them to tell us what the time we get up in the morning? When you talk about the traffic on H1 in the morning, you are basically telling the people who live in Mililani town and in the ever plain, this is what time you have to get up in the morning in order to come to work in Honolulu, or to come to come to practice law or go to the university or go to school or whatever it is. Do we want government to do that? Or do we want government to do less and make it more affordable for us? We have to get down to some kind of a revisiting of the social compact that we have with government so that we can trust them more. We don't trust government today because of a lot of phony promises that were being made, and that is all being exacerbated by national leadership right now. One last question, Bob. They'll go away and the people who criticize you will just assault them, and I think that that erodes their confidence in institutions. Yes, I agree absolutely. I keep thinking of advice that was given to my firm one time by a close friend of my firm. He said the most important thing is to take care of each other and to feel the old kind of aloha back in the Bernstays of taking care of each other. We're all in the same boat sort of thing. We lose that something. But I wanted to ask you one last question, Bob, and that is wrapping up all that we've discussed here today and all the great ideas and points that you've made. Where does the election, say the gubernatorial election here in Hawaii, where does that fit? Where does that play going forward? How central is that to the solution? I'd like to believe that we elect the best of the people who stand for reelection. I've always encouraged good people to run for office. It's a role that is the cost, the personal cost is very high. There's a lot of precipitous challenges that could cause you pain and your family issues. And I think that we need to make sure that the governor is the first citizen of Hawaii and that we can respect him or her as the first citizen. We need to look at the leader of the city and county of Halu for what we expect that leader to do. We need to look at the representatives that we have in Congress and the U.S. Senate for what we hope them to do. Sometimes we want fighters. Sometimes we want mediators. Sometimes we want people to cause us all to believe in each other. We have to be honest with ourselves. We can't look at the electorate as a bunch of stupid people who are going to be herded from one side to another. I'll never forget what Chubby Kalpua, who was the head of the Plumbers and Pipe Footers Union, told me. He says, my union, he says, you look at who they are. They're all middle class and up above and rising. Their kids go to college. He says, they have new blazers in their driveway. They don't listen to me, the union boss, when I tell them who to vote for. They have their own minds. They make up their own minds about what government ought to be and who their leaders ought to be. We're a labor organization, and we have a point of view, and we get as much as much consensus among our rank and file as we can, but I don't control votes. And I think that a lot of that has happened since the times when we were all struggling for self-respect in Hawaii and we were trying to get out of the old neighborhoods and into upwardly based, upwardly mobile social roles. Now, the more of these, of this upward mobility that we can encourage, the more optimism that we're going to have toward political leadership in Hawaii. Back to your question about the governorship. I don't know who to call to get the answer to that. I think that Governor Ige has some very strong suits. He's a gentleman. He takes his job extremely seriously, and his administration has been devoid of any scandal that I'm aware of. And yet, there's a lot of people who believe that he needed, if he needs to bring other attributes. I think the election is going to be a referendum on David Ige's leadership is what I think it's, you don't have to be political genius to know that. And there's at least one or two people who are already on the horizon who believe that they, that either one of them or more are going to be able to provide better leadership than what the Democrat David Ige can do. You also have somebody seeking a congressional seat, you know, that we're looking for what type of congressional representatives that we want to take the Congressman Hanabusa seat. The real question is what type of leader are we looking for? And we have to have the ability to make up our own minds and discern between those who are wannabes and those who are capable of leading us and keeping us motivated with some transformational leadership, as opposed to some of the fairly stark, you do this for me and I'll do that for you, which we call special interest leadership. Well, Bob Fishman, wonderful to talk to you, Bob. Thank you so much for joining us on Skype here on a given Tuesday here on Community Matters. I hope we can do this again because it sounds to me like we've got a lot of work to do to get where we need to go right now. Oh, we do. We absolutely do. That's for sure, you know. Bob Fishman, former city manager and so many other things. Thanks for joining us today.