 Welcome to American Issues, Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. And today, you know, coming up August 13th, the State of Hawaii will be holding its party's primary elections. And giving that, it's my esteem pleasure to announce our distinguished guest on today's show, gubernatorial candidate, Vicky Cayetano. And today we're gonna discuss four national issues that will impact the State of Hawaii. And those issues are, climate change, the economy, which of course we have to include inflation. Roe v. Wade, the law reversal by the Supreme Court. And last but not least, the January 6th House Committee hearings. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our guests. Today I have with my co-host, Jay Fidel. As mentioned, our distinguished guest, Vicky Cayetano, and as always, our valued contributor, Cynthia Lee Sinclair. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, too. Aloha. Good to see everyone. Jay, to you, actually in the paper today, Mayor Blangiardi mentioned his housing announcement, but we also had information about climate change. And that is a major concern here on the North Shore where houses are slipping into the water. And Molakai is experiencing extreme climate change. What is Hawaii to do with these items? What are we to do with that? Are you asking me? Cause I like to ask Vicky, but my preparatory remarks on it are this. A lot of people say, what can we do in Hawaii? We're so small, we're so tiny. We're in the middle of the ocean, if we have solar on our roof or not, that's not going to affect global climate change. And so that argument has some punch to it. And we have to get around that. We have to actually commit to a global effort at solving climate change, not only because our houses are slipping off and we're having sea level rise and all that, but because we have to collaborate in an international or global effort, we have to feel like we're part of the world. And so a lot of people in Hawaii that are into the mode of backwater, we don't know, we don't care, we bury our head in the sand. But this issue affects everyone on the planet and ultimately it's life and death for a lot of people on the planet. And therefore the people in Hawaii have to take it very seriously, not only to protect their houses slipping into the ocean, which we can do something about, but also to contribute to the global effort against climate change. But Vicki, let me ask you, you're running for governor. Part of the governor is to look over the water, to look to the mainland US, to look to Asia, Latin America, Europe, everywhere, and be part of a global community. And some people don't agree with that. I wonder how you feel about it and what you feel we can do affirmatively to deal with climate change here as it affects us by sea level rise and also by extreme weather, which is coming, and also to participate in the global challenge of dealing with an existential threat to humanity. What do you think? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. And what you said is absolutely correct. I feel that sometimes, just because we're here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we live in a bubble and we're not as tuned in to what's happening around the world that does affect Hawaii. And we are part of an international community, part of the United States. We cannot just be sheltered here and think that nothing's going to affect us. Climate change impacts us, as you said, not so much in terms of how we affect the rest of the world, but what's happening to us. We need to build climate resiliency. You see it in the North Shore, on the North Shore already, the homes going down. And it seems to me that leadership just doesn't seem to tackle it with the kind of urgency that it needs and how important it is. So one example, I don't know if you just read today in Civil Beat, I find it just incredible that we are the only state in this country that has not tapped into a decades-old FEMA program designed to help relocate people in flood zones. And yet, here we are, the facts are there. We are impacted by threatened, threatened up by 6,500 structures are at risk, 20, almost 26,000 acres of land, 38 miles of major roads, 550 cultural sites, and at least 19 billion in assets. Those are the facts. And yet Hawaii is the only state not even participating in FEMA's buyout program that's geared at relocating people out of these communities. I mean, does that make sense? So to me as governor, one of the most important things is to not only identify the needs with urgency, but to be resourceful, to be able to prioritize and to support what needs to get done. It's easy to say we're going to address climate change, but how? The details. And so climate resilience that impact our residents. That's one of the first things I think we need to have those challenging conversations about, but put in place a plan to relocate those homes and talk to those communities that are going to be impacted. And granted, there will be people who absolutely come out opposing it, but this has to get done. And to also look at how we relocate the highways around those areas. Vicki, I read that article as well. It was a fascinating article. And one of the things they did cite was that Hawaii does not have the same national building code standards, specifically the Building Code Effectiveness Grading Schedule. How effective do you think the state would be if you were governor to work cooperatively with the city and county of Honolulu to basically unify those building codes so that FEMA could help out Hawaii a lot easier if we're all on the same page as far as building codes? Exactly. On every island, but in particular, of course, Oahu, I would work with the mayors in the county because it makes all the sense in the world to unify and to simplify and be consistent in what we do. Fortunate that Mayor Rick Blanchiardi and I have a very strong relationship. You may know that I supported him, was his co-chair. He's 10 years older than me. So we always joke that for us, both our jobs, this is not a stepping stone for another position. This is it. And so we want to leave a legacy of significance, of having made a difference. So we would work together to tackle exactly what you just said. And I think I know it can be done. Okay, great. Cynthia. Okay, well, we've talked a lot about the climate change. And so the sort of kind of leads into economy too. So I don't want to step the wrong way, but tourism has a big impact on our climate, ability to, I mean, we have just more people. We're using more water. And yet it's such an integral part of our economy too. So how, do you have any ideas on how we might be able to thread that needle a little bit better and encourage the tourism industry to encourage our awareness and respect for all of these notes. So quickly going away things. And so climate is really making its way known here. So how would you, I guess, involve the tourists that come here when they first get here to maybe raise their awareness on how they can help also? So I'm a big believer in, as you say, participation. No one person, no government can be successful without getting others involved. And whether it's eight or nine million tourists, we need to manage the tourists coming into Hawaii. I think that one, what we can do is look at raising some revenue for conservation efforts by looking at the places they go to, whether it's Anama Bay, whether it's any of the parks. We can look at doing that. I know that some people have talked about a green fee that comes in, but we really have to look at the constitutionality of being able to impose that. But you can do it by the attractions or the visitor places that they go to. I do think we need to work with the hotel industry to hold more accountability in terms of the precious resources that they use. Right now there is no mechanism whatsoever for how we track the usage. And these are major users, consumers, in large of all these resources, whether it's utility, water, wastewater. So I believe, if I'm the next governor, as I want to be, you're as your governor, I would convene with the visitor industry to start putting in place mechanisms where we can track the utilization of these precious resources so that they'll be a partner to all this in working with the visitors that come through. Tim, can I jump in and connect up two of the things we've been talking about? One is environment and climate change and the other is the economy. You know, we had a relatively good year and it was burning a hole in the legislature's pocket as a matter of fact. We may not have a good year every year and hospitality may not carry us through on this sort of thing. And when you talk about these various priorities, including especially priorities that people don't think of all the time, like climate change, you are talking about money, you are talking about which one goes to the top of the heap and the bottom of the heap in terms of spending the money. If you only have a limited amount of money in a given year, you have hard priority choices. And it opens the question of diversification. The state could be, in my view, more profitable. There could be more money that the citizens of the state earn that the economy has flowing through it and thus more tax money going to the state government. What are your thoughts about diversifying into, for example, technology or anything else in order to improve our economy so we can handle these costly priorities? You know, I feel that one of the best traits I bring as governor is the fact that I started as an entrepreneur. So entrepreneurs look for opportunities, create them. You know, I was reading the book by Howard Schultz of Starbucks. And when he started, everybody was like laughing, who's gonna pay that kind of money for coffee? But what he said was, it's not the coffee, it's the experience, that's the vision. And so there are opportunities for us, but I think one of the first things we have to do is create an environment that attracts businesses either organically here to grow or to bring them from elsewhere. When you have a government that almost creates obstacles for you, challenges to even start a business in Hawaii, what kind of incentive is there? But there really is. Our healthcare industry, for example, especially on the neighbor island, it's already at a crisis mode. You know, why can't Hawaii be the healthcare of the Pacific? Why do people from Japan fly over us to go to UCLA or Stanford for medical treatment? Why can't Hawaii Island be a holistic center? Many opportunities, but we need to have that vision and the ability to collaborate with the legislature, with the private sector to create, to make these things happen. And we've got to tackle the regulatory process that makes it so difficult for businesses to even start in Hawaii. That's the business environment that we're known for, the reputation we have. And it's really not conducive to bringing any kind of business. So you wanna diversify, talk first about being attractive for business people to come. Yeah, thank you. I like to stay on the economy point, looking at a macro economy, looking at supply and demand issues. It just seems to me that Hawaii is the place where there's an endless stream of demand. Everyone in the world would love to live in Hawaii. And how do we balance that demand with the finite resources Hawaii has to offer? At what point does the demand, and I think we're already there, exceed supply of housing, exceed the environment, exceed all sorts of accommodations for tourists. Where's the balance point for the demand versus our infinite supply of resources? For me, governing life is all about balance. Success is about bringing that balance together. And right now our government is not balanced. The power structure serves is designed to cater to special interests and big business. Small business as an example is always an afterthought. There's no support for small business. They struggle every day just to make it. And you read every day how many are closing. Just imagine a Hawaii where it's strictly corporate retail, corporate business. That's not the Hawaii we know. So one of the things I would do as governor is really work to bring that balance to support small business with a lower tax structure than big businesses and to create a small business office to help them navigate through the myriad of permits and requirements so that they can thrive and grow to a certain level so that they can be more sustainable. The economy is going to have a downturn. It's not if, it's just when because everything's in cycles. And you have to support them to a point where they can sustain those kinds of downturns. And that brings balance when you have both, you know. Yeah, let me just echo what you said. We're here to examine gubernatorial thinking about issues on the mainland. And one of the issues on the mainland for sure is all these prognostications about how we may be into a recession or we will be having a recession. And who knows what kind of telekiya they will have on the mainland that will affect Hawaii. I mean, how worried are you that if the economy in the mainland goes down, terrorism will go down and therefore our economy will go down. And what can be done? You kind of answered this already. What can be done to make us more resilient against either a national or global recession? We know what we have to do long-term. The biggest challenge is going to be what we do in the short-term to immediately mitigate the impact of a looming recession. You know, I don't think a lot of people realize or talk about it, but when federal funding dries up, Hawaii is gonna be in a much more precarious position. And that is what I'm concerned about towards the end of 2023, 2024. So we need to one, not put all our eggs in the basket of tourism, which is what we're currently doing. We need to wean ourselves off that, create more diversity in our economy so that we're not just looking at one. This is why COVID hit us so badly. Of all the states in the country, we're probably the first or second state most impacted negatively because we had everything into tourism. So we must learn from that and start building the path to having more diversification. But that's not gonna happen overnight but we've got to start. Agriculture, look at all the resources here. And, you know, 28 years ago, the government formed, the state government formed agribusiness development corp designed to help farmers transition from pineapple sugar to new crops. 28 years later, millions of dollars spent. Where are we? What has that agency done? And now I hear this year that they're going to move it from Department of Ag, which is what they're supposed to serve, into Department of Business Economic Development Tourism. Maybe a good move, but as governor, I would ask why. I certainly hope it's not because a ineffective agency is just being tossed around like a hot potato. We need to tackle the problems. So government spends a lot of money, but in my mind, there's not enough transparency, accountability, and collaboration to really make it effective. But agriculture, film industry, digital media, IT, anything IT can be done anywhere in the world. This is the kind of stuff that Hawaii should be optimizing on. You know, I don't think we'll ever do manufacturing just because of the location of Hawaii. The shipping, look at Kings Bakery. They move to the mainland. You know, when you grow big, you move. So, but we can invest in these that also provide higher paying jobs that the next generation is more interested in than just doing service industry. Okay. Cynthia, question on the economy. So in both the economy is housing issues here in Hawaii that are so bad. And the number one thing that's happening is no people are coming from the mainland. They're buying up stuff and selling it for more and just pricing all of us out of even being able to afford it, especially renters are really having issues with that. And do you have any plans and ideas on how you could help with that issue? Because so many of our local families are having to leave because they can't afford to live here anymore. And housing is a big part of that. How, I know you've talked about that a lot. So what are some of your specific things that you would like to do to try to address that issue? So Cynthia, that's a good question because while in my affordable housing plan, my three components of rent to own designated workforce housing for teachers, healthcare personnel, first responders. And the third is affordable rental. The big question, like you said, is how do we designate them for locals? Even if we're, and I'm actually working with some folks who specialize in that kind of law, but even if we can do that, knowing how people are, they can easily get a local person to put their name on it. And this is the challenge we have because at the end of the day, if we don't make sure that this program is targeted for locals to keep them here and to bring them back here, then we failed. But I will say that I think one of the most important things is to address Department of Hawaiian Homelands, the promise to the homesteaders waiting for decades. I applaud the legislature for allocating 600 million, but how are they gonna spend it? I wanna make sure one, there's three years to do it. If you don't tackle some of the underlying bureaucracy, I question whether they'll be able to really get it done. Two, whenever there's a lot of money, there's also people who look to profit from it. You read about the affordable housing, the four people indicted on the big island for a corruption on that. So we need to put in place systems of accountability and transparency. Otherwise, I'm not sure that all 600 million is gonna be spent for the right reasons. I'd like to stay on that. If I may have one sort of follow-up question for that, if that's okay. In regards to real estate and the laws governing some of the real estate issues, I know a long time ago, it used to be that if you bought a house, you couldn't sell it right away. And a lot of I think the issues that are happening are all this house flipping stuff, right? I think that's our biggest problem. Do you see any ideas or have any ideas on how to address, trying to put a cap on some of that house flipping stuff that happens and is part of why we have that unaffordability that's happening here? That's a very good point. Makes a lot of sense. And I certainly think that is something that we should look at to see if we can do that legally. I'd like to tag on to Cynthia's last question. That is nationwide inventory of housing is, it's short, it's tight. And therefore housing prices are going up, rents are going up. And it looks like a lot of jurisdictions either in their legislature or in their city hall committees, they've passed a lot of laws that were well-meaning to help renters. But in effect, what they've done is they've alienated landlords to the point where landlords are either selling their properties or they're just not renting them out, thereby reducing the inventory of rentals for residents. You see that as an example, or they have the first knock-law or whoever knocks on the door first is guaranteed that rental, no matter who they are. Or secondly, no credit background or criminal background checks. Those are laws that have been passed. And as a result, landlords have got up, they're small business owners, they've gotten very upset and most of them have just sold off their inventory. And now it's increased the problem for those jurisdictions. How would you work or how would you balance what's passed in the legislature to make sure that we don't have that type of effect where we're meaning to help renters, but in the end we've heard them because the inventory has dried up. So many of these, as you say, well-intentioned ideas come about as a response to a problem. But what a lot of lawmakers fail to realize is that making this decision here impacts another decision there. And it's all connected together. One of the things I think that legislators do well is they have new ideas and I applaud them for that. What they don't do well is they fail to realize the impact of one decision to the rest of the picture. You know, I'm told that if I have the privilege of being the next governor, I'm the first governor that comes with a business background. And I think that brings a lot of experience and understanding organizationally how everything works. I think that's really important. So I was just talking to someone in DLNR and they were talking about the protection for whole noobs, which is great, you know, I'm a big animal lover. However, what's happening is they've now become so, have grown so much in abundance that they're eating all of the lemus off the reefs, which is now hindering other fisheries to thrive. And so it's like one thing impacts another. So well-intentioned ideas, but we need the experience and the wisdom of a leader who understands how it's all connected together. But what you just brought up is an example of something that would not work. And to extreme, I would argue, we need to bring everything to a little bit more into the center. Okay, thank you. Tim, I'd like to move to some of the more troublesome issues on the mainland politically. We have the Supreme Court that has ruled against Roe v. Wade, a lot of criticism against them, but that decision dobs it was. And at the same time, in a very similar fashion, they have ruled against gun control. Now, it's not like everybody in Hawaii is a Democrat. That's not really true. There are some Republicans here and then there are some Republicans who would like to go to the legislature and stop efforts to protect abortion, to protect gay marriage, and to protect our laws on gun control, which are obviously in flux on the mainland in many states that a day doesn't go by when we don't hear about some state turning red, so to speak, on these issues. As governor, you have a certain amount of bully pulpit on that. What are your thoughts about preventing these negative decisions from having effect to undermine the erstwhile liberal approach that Hawaii has taken since and even before a statehood? So I believe with the Roe v. Wade, now that that has been turned over to the states, a state like Hawaii, where really I believe the majority of the people still believe in the right that a woman has to choose, the reproductive right. With that said, I think that something I would consider working with the legislature on is to have a constitutional amendment so that it's written into the constitution. While, yes, right now the way the makeup is of our public servants, the majority of them favor it, but that can change, right? Look at this, 50 years later, did we ever think the United States Supreme Court would overturn this? So that to me is something we should look at doing. And the other thing I think we need to have the foresight to do is also to protect the healthcare personnel who provide services to women who come from states where they prohibit abortions because who knows what they're going to do in terms of trying to sue the states that provide these services. So we want to protect our healthcare personnel as they perform these services. But I think the other thing we need to take care of in our own backyard is having access because while you may have the right, if you don't have access, especially in certain areas in the neighbor islands and rural areas and almost always it's those who are underserved, those women, we need to make sure that they have access as well as the right to make their choices. Otherwise, it's meaningless. And I go to one other point to Tim before we run out of time, and that is the insurrection. And when I say insurrection, I mean the most profound threat to democracy in our lifetimes, in fact, in the history of the country. And that is, at an inflection point, there are people in this country that would like to take steps that would completely undermine our democracy, our notion of representative government, even as we speak. Do you think about that? And what, if anything, can you do as governor to preserve our democracy, to preserve the, may I say, the union, the country itself from some of the things that are happening on the mainland? So I feel very strongly in the word accountability. And to me, everything that I've seen as to what happened January 6th, frankly, the former president was involved. And to me, doesn't matter what title you hold, if you're guilty of insurrection, you need to be charged accordingly. I also think as governor, so accountability to me is a very important thing that we should impose on people, but especially on leaders. One diplomat also said about America, that this is now two different worlds coexisting, but they're not talking to each other. And as governor, to me, that's really important that we need to have these conversations. I will not shy away from the challenging conversation about the 30 meter telescope, okay? Or about managing tourism. We need to have those conversations. And we need to stop labeling people by party that red is bad, blue is good, or vice versa. We all want what's best for Hawaii. We may have differences in how we think we get there, but we need to talk about it together and believe that we will work through this, but not avoid those difficult conversations. I'm a unifier, not a divider. Alrighty. Very important in our time, very important. Very much so. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. And so, like all shows, there's just not enough time. But I would like to thank our distinguished guest, gubernatorial candidate, Vicky Cayetano, for joining us and sharing her thoughts. And I wish you well on August 13th. I'd like to thank my co-host, Jay Fidel, and as always, Cynthia, Lisa and Claire. Thank you for attending and joining us on American Issues Take One. Join us next week. And until then, I'm Tim Apichel, your host. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.