 Politics in Hawaii, with Dennis Isaki on Think That Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with Keith Tamehimea, candidate for office of Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii. He is with the Central Pacific Bank Foundation. He was on the Hawaii High School Atlantic Association. Police commission, work for the UH Board of Regents, was on the Board of Education. And on the lower stadium authority board. Keith, welcome to Think That Hawaii. And thank you for taking time to speak with us. Thank you for having me, Dennis. Yeah, thanks. Let's start off. Please tell us how you grew up as an IK with your friends, parents who help you. Sure. Well, I just want to start off with again, thanking you for the opportunity, Dennis. And just explaining why I'm running for Lieutenant Governor. I'm learning for Lieutenant Governor because we need change. I'm running for Lieutenant Governor because I care about our communities. I'm concerned about the direction our state is headed. And I want to create a better future for all of us, especially our younger generations. In terms of my priorities as Lieutenant Governor, I want to work side by side with our next governor to tackle some of the most critical issues facing our state, whether it be creating more affordable housing, diversifying our economy, improving public education, or providing more support to the neighbor islands. That's a big point of emphasis for me that we're too Oahu-centric at times and we need to be more statewide thinking in terms of decisions that we make. My career has been based on community service, working with communities, bringing people together to solve complex problems. I'm not a career politician and I'll therefore bring a fresh perspective and new ideas to the office of the Lieutenant Governor. In terms of my background, you were right, Dennis, that in my high school years, I was honoured or adopted by my best friend's family, the Kobayashi family. That was a big turning point in my life where they brought me in when my regular family, so to speak, was having a set of challenges and I learned a lot of values from my Hanai family, both my Hanai uncle and aunt and my Hanai brothers and sister. I learned a lot of values, especially hard work, perseverance, working together and always doing what you can for the greater good of the community. It's great to hear that they're pulling data on but you still have to work. They didn't just hand you money and say, here, go to college, right? That's correct. So they provided me a great foundation. They taught me lifelong lessons and values that I hold near and dear to my heart all the way through today. But once I finished high school, they told me I was on my own that I'm gonna have to figure things out by myself and that it would be the best thing for me in the long run and they were right, but it was a struggle. So because I had no money, I went to the University of Hawaii because the tuition was much lower than going to a mainland college or university. I held multiple jobs, I took out loans, I got financial aid and I worked my way through the University of Hawaii, Manoa and got eventually a degree in finance from the College of Business. I then went on to the William S. Richardson School of Law for three years and worked my way through law school as well and finished with a degree from that institution. I then began my career as a litigation attorney for seven years and then transitioned to the job a lot of people know me best for and that was the, as the executive director of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association for 12 years. Yeah, it's pretty commendable and shows us your dedication and hard work and you went on with a silver spoon in your mouth. Tell us the interesting story about how you met your wife, Bonnie. Yeah, I met my wife, Bonnie when I was an attorney and she was, we were involved in the same litigation matter. She was working for one of the parties in the case. She was the chief financial officer for one of the parties in the case and it was a protracted litigation. There were a lot of meetings, there were a lot of court proceedings and that's where I got to know her really well. Eventually we started dating and we hit it off from the start and within a year of meeting we got married. I think within seven months of our first date or so we got married and nearly 26 years later we're still together and we have a son Chris who's a junior in college at Claremont McKenna College in California, east of Los Angeles. And I owe a lot to my wife. She's the foundation of our family. She's a extremely bright woman, successful in her own right. And like my Hanai family, she's taught me many, many important values that I carry with me through this day. Yeah, talking about Hanai families, I understand you've been kind of following the tradition and helping other young kids also, right? Yes, I was so appreciative of the opportunity that my Hanai family gave me. It made a huge difference in my life for the better. And so my wife and I thought it would be great to pay it forward if you will and help others that were younger than us. The way I was helped when I was growing up. So we've had younger people live with us, stay with us, especially from the neighbor islands. We've had student athletes from Kauai, from Maui and the most famous, so to speak, Hanai daughter we like to call her, Kale Adolfo is from Molokai and she was a basketball track and volleyball star at Molokai High School. She was all stayed in all three sports and she continued her career at the University of Hawaii where she played for the Wahini volleyball team and the Wahini basketball team. And those of you who know sports know that it's hard enough to compete successfully in just one Division I sport, but Kale was so talented that she participated in both volleyball and basketball on the Division I level. She's now back on her home island of Molokai. She's a PE teacher and she's also the head boys basketball coach for her alma mater and she's giving back and very happy and she just got married. So we're excited for her and we're really proud of the young woman that she's become and I wanna make clear that she has a very strong traditional family, six brothers and sisters, a loving mother and father and they deserve the lion's share of the credit in terms of raising her. We helped in the sense that Kale stayed with us on Oahu in the summers and during holiday breaks in school while she was at Molokai High so that she could train with volleyball and basketball teams here on Oahu because obviously there's much more competition. There's more people, more opportunities to compete in basketball and volleyball on Oahu as opposed to her home island of Molokai. Yeah, that's very commendable of you. Many of us know you, we got to know you when you're with Hawaii High School Athletic Association. I think I got to know you Dan. You did a lot of things. Tell us some of the things you did over there. Sure, well, one of the first things I did was when I started running the Hawaii High School Athletic Association and for those that don't know, that's the organization that oversees high school sports across the state. There's approximately 100 public and private high schools across the state. There's approximately 36,000 high school student athletes in a given year across the state. That job gave me a really good grasp of the issues facing working class families across the state. It gave me the opportunity to visit every single community across the state many times over. I'm lucky that I've had that opportunity. Not many people have had that opportunity and I think it would really serve me well as Lieutenant Governor because I have been into every community. I've gotten to know every community very well. When it comes to the neighbor islands, I mentioned earlier, that's gonna be a priority of mine. If I'm fortunate enough to be elected Lieutenant Governor is to make sure that the neighbor islands and their issues and concerns are addressed and taken care of just as much as Oahu issues are taken care of. Most of the growth across the state is taking place on the neighbor islands. I know firsthand that even from an athlete's standpoint and a sports team standpoint, it's always harder to come from the neighbor islands and be competitive. Most of the competitions around Oahu, there's more costs involved. There's more travel and time involved when you're competing from a neighbor island school. So what I try to do was get more funding to the neighbor islands in terms of travel costs and other costs because it's, as you know Dennis, just more expensive to live on a neighbor island as opposed to Oahu. I tried to bring more state tournaments to the neighbor islands and not just have them held in Oahu. I also introduced and got past the concept of division two state tournaments so that we have two classifications of high school state championships across the state. I felt it was important to give more schools a meaningful opportunity to compete for state championships, more participation in state championships. And I think you know firsthand Dennis, the benefit of having division two state tournaments for high schools like Kapa'a, Waimea and Kauai High School. I mean, just recently Kapa'a won the division two state title in very convincing fashion here on Oahu in December when they beat Kamehameha Maui. Kapa'a is a well-coached team, they're huge. And you have some big football players that you've grown on Kauai, especially on that side of the island and they're very impressive. I think the last thing I'll mention and then let you ask more questions is that I really value the relationships and friendships I developed while I was running high school sports across the state, especially or including the neighbor islands. I mean, I've met amazing people like Bill Aracaki, John Kobayashi, Tommy Rita, Mike Tressler, Ross Kagawa, you know, Charlene Mrs. Q, Charlene Quinones. You know, the list goes on, Greg Gonzales, the current AD at Kapa'a High School and they're still my friends today. And that's one of the most rewarding parts of being the head of the HHSAA for so long. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for mentioning. Congratulations to Kapa'a School and the coach, Mike Tressler. Speaking of high school sports, would you have handled high school sports differently with COVID if you were in charge? You know, it's easy. I learned running high school sports, there's a lot of critics with opinions out there and it's kind of like being a politician or running for office and you have to have thick skin and not everyone's gonna agree with your decision. So I'll preface what I'm about to say that it's easy to give opinions after the fact and in hindsight, but I think overall the high schools and the administrators and the athletic directors did the best they could under these unprecedented times. What made the pandemic really difficult, Dennis, as we all know is that we've never experienced this at least in our lifetime. I mean, the last pandemic in the country was a hundred years ago. And so we didn't have a playbook or a template from which to go off of. So I'd say overall the high schools did as best as they could in dealing with the pandemic crisis. I mean, it's a balance of wanting our student athletes to participate, the parents to be able to watch their children play counterbalance with keeping the community safe from COVID. Yeah, thanks. Okay, yeah, thanks for mentioning your focus on the neighbor island still being that I'm from Kauai. Other than that, what do you say sets you apart from other candidates who are highly qualified also in their own way? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I'm not a career politician. I've not held elective office for years or decades, but I've been out in the community, I think more so than any of the candidates in the Lieutenant Governor's race. I've been in the communities and I've dedicated my life to public service for basically my entire career. Again, I've gone to every community, I've worked with every community on Kauai, on Maui, on Morokai, Lanai, Hawaii Island, Oahu and everything else in between. Not many people have that opportunity like me to be familiar with the communities. And I'd like to think that my track record speaks for itself. I welcome people to ask those that have worked with me throughout my career, including in the high school athletics realm, whether I was able to bring communities together, whether I was able to provide complex solutions to complex issues across the state. Yeah, okay, thanks. Let's move on to housing or particularly affording housing. We'll talk about affordable housing into certain categories, but does it really mean it's affordable? What do you think about housing or any plans for ideas? Well, we need to build a lot more affordable housing. That to me is the single biggest crisis facing our state today, especially our younger generations. The cost of housing is astronomical. It's more or less the median price across the state is about a million dollars. And who can afford that? I mean, what working class husband and wife with one or two children or more can ever save up enough to buy a home in Hawaii? It's unsustainable. It's a reason that we have more people leaving the state than coming into the state. And you can't really blame younger families for moving away because they just can't make ends meet. So we need to have a focused effort on building as much housing as possible across the state and affordable housing, not just housing for mainland transplants or people who want a second, third or fourth home in Hawaii or to purchase something as an investment. Too many local families are suffering. They don't have a place to stay. They're forced to live two, three, sometimes four generations in one household, multiple families in one household, one family in a studio or one bedroom apartment. And it's really impacting our quality of life. So we have to make a concerted effort to build much more affordable housing across the state. Yeah, you're right on that. A big question or thought about housing people have avoided. A lot of those profiting largely because of the high price of homes and land. You know what he said? He said anything good about that? Yeah, well, again, the emphasis and focus needs to be on working class families. And I'm less concerned about people who buy a house for investment reasons or to flip it to make a profit. In fact, we need to pass regulations to curb that if we need to. We need to set aside houses for local families that need it. They're much more important to me than investment speculators. One way to increase the housing inventory much faster than building houses from scratch. No question we need to do that as well. But is curb the amount of vacation rentals, especially those that are located in non-resort areas. Too many communities on Oahu and I suspect on Kauai that are not intended to house tourists are places for vacation rentals, whether they're legal or illegal in many cases. We need to enforce the vacation rental laws that are in the books and restore the inventory of houses for working class and local families. But we also need to impose vacancy taxes on homes that are bought as a second, third, or fourth investment property or vacation property that just sit unused for 9, 10, 11 months out of the year. Again, we have a pretty good inventory of homes that are used for vacation properties for people that sit unused for most of the year. We need to make those homes available for people, local families to use, or we need to assess a tax so that we can use that money to build more housing for working class families. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, some people have said houses are treated as a commodity instead of a home nowadays to some people. Yeah, and I think you're right. Okay, recently we got the influx of federal money, so the state has money. Well, what do you think about the economy now? Well, hopefully we're nearing the end of the pandemic. And that no new strains of COVID-19 infiltrate our communities and cause a setback in terms of opening up. But it looks promising at this point. And we're getting a lot of federal dollars, billions of dollars in federal money. And the state is more or less awash in money. So now is the time to kickstart our economy. Now is the time to build more affordable housing to improve our public education system, to pay our teachers and other public workers the just or a fair amount of pay that they deserve and that they haven't been able to receive. But at the same time, we can't keep doing the same thing that we've been doing for decades. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was going well, Dennis, we talked about the fact that we were over-reliant on tourism. Now is the time to do something about it. Let's work hard on finding ways to diversify the economy. We can diversify the economy in many ways. We can look at high technology. COVID-19 has proven that you can function and work pretty much anywhere in the world because of the use of technology. You don't even have to go to the office anymore to get your work done. So let's embrace high technology and create more higher paying, high technology jobs. Let's also diversify agriculture. There's a lot of high-end agricultural product crops that can be grown here on Oahu and on the neighbor islands as well. And let's also put a full-court press on renewable energy. Let's get to 100% renewable energy. Let's create renewable energy jobs. We are one of the best places in the world to utilize renewable energy. And I don't see why we can't be the experts in renewable energy and create high-paying jobs in that space and share our knowledge with the rest of the world. Yeah, you're still sticking with the economy. The governor said, you know, he's gonna give out a couple hundred bucks to everybody. Free money is good, but a lot of companies cannot find workers nowadays. Restaurants are a good example. They have to close certain days and close early because they kind of find workers. Truckers can find truck drivers too. What do you say about that? Well, that's another unfortunate byproduct of the COVID-19 crisis. And so hopefully with the turning the corner of this pandemic and the reopening of the economy, fully reopening the economy jobs where workers will return to the workforce, you know, in those jobs where companies are suffering really. I mean, I know like you, many small business owners that are having to do it all, you know, the, you know, my good friend is the owner of Pipeline Bake Shop on Waila Avenue in Kamauke. She serves pastries, ice creams and fresh malasadas. And she has to be the cashier. She has to be the cook. She has to be the custodian. She has to run the counter. It's exhausting. And pretty soon, you know, small business owners are gonna get burnt out and throw their hands up and quit. And that's not good for the economy. So it's my hope that when the economy reopens and businesses start doing better, tourism reopens, maybe not to the levels we saw before COVID-19, but at a higher level than it is now with higher value, higher paying tourists, the job market will improve. Yeah, as you know, renewable energy. Koi leads a nation in renewable energy in the recently. We've been doing a lot and so has HECOR right now. They're doing, having great strides on agriculture. You know, everybody talk about agriculture. But when I go to the farmers market here, they mostly, I'm not saying that they're bad, but most of them are immigrants, they're great farmers, but where the local guys seem like they don't want to farm or cannot or something, got any insight on that? Yeah, I've noticed that on Oahu too as well Dennis, but you know, there is an emerging younger generation of farmers that I'm noticing as well here on Oahu and hopefully that same scenario will play out on the neighbor islands. And this younger generation is tired of working in an office, a nine to five job, they wanna get out in the outdoors and get their hands dirty. But also the younger generation is interested in farming Dennis because of the technology. You know, farming can actually create some pretty high paying jobs out there because farming has become very sophisticated. You know, whether it's the irrigation system, whether it's the type of nutrients or fertilizer that you need to feed your crops and plants. There's actually a lot of different jobs and actual farming that can be part of a new and improved agricultural economy here in Hawaii. Yeah, we got the not much time left when I get a couple of fast questions on some of the issues. What's your stand on legalized gambling in Hawaii? You know, I haven't studied that in detail, but as a general concept for now, unless I see data otherwise and statistics and impact on society, I'm against legalized gambling. If anything, perhaps we should go slowly in that direction and maybe look at a lottery that will benefit education, for example, like what other states have done, but the societal costs of gambling are pretty severe. And so I'm concerned about opening that Pandora's box. And I'd like to look at other ways to improve our economy than legalizing gambling here in Hawaii. Okay, thanks. Okay, one last question. On the lower state, if you were on the board before, they're talking about, you know, rebuilding the stadium and using a lot of the surrounding properties for housing and other things. What's your top on that? I'm supportive of the concept of, well, first of all, we need the state, not just O'ahu, the state needs a new stadium, you know, Kauai teams have benefited from playing in the Aloha Stadium before it was basically condemned. We need a large purpose, large multi-purpose stadium here in Hawaii, but we also have a huge opportunity to help our economy to improve the quality of life of residents on O'ahu in particular by building a multi-use complex around the stadium, whether it's housing, retail, commercial development, businesses, hotels. I'm very supportive of creating an Aloha Stadium district, but of course we need to learn the lessons of rail and not repeat it when it comes to rebuilding the stadium and the surrounding development. Okay, I was gonna go into rail, but we were running out of time. You got any closing thoughts? Well, my closing thoughts are that, you know, I'm not a career politician, but my career has been dedicated to public service. I have the depth and breadth of experience of being out in the communities, working with people, finding solutions to complex issues. And I'll take that knowledge and experience and relationships across the state, not just on O'ahu, but on the neighbor islands to bring people together and make a better Hawaii for everyone, especially our younger generations. Okay, thanks. Thank you. We've been speaking with Keith Amemiya, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii. Thank you for watching Politics in Hawaii on Think Tech Hawaii for the great staff and volunteers. If you like the show, please share it with your friends and consider a donation to Think Tech Hawaii, a non-profit corporation. I'm Dennis Isaki, aloha, ahoy, 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.