 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kaley Ikeena, President of the Grassroot Institute and Trustee at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. However, I need to make it clear in this disclaimer at the start that the views you hear from me and my guests on this program are purely our own as private citizens and do not necessarily represent any institution. With that said, today we're going to take a look at Washington DC or at least what's going on up there that can affect Hawaii and that's important. This is called a DC update and I have as my guest today the Policy Director of the Grassroot Institute, Malia Blomhill. She'll be joining us from right outside Washington DC where she is our eyes and ears as well as legs and sometimes mouthpiece as needed to be. Malia, Aloha, welcome to the program. Hello, thank you for having me. What's the temperature right now up there? Yes, I'm coming to you from 40 degree weather and cold and flu season. Oh my goodness and that's not with the wind chill factor is it? It's not great. Well, I hope that's not the weather inside of your home where I've caught you late this evening but thank you for joining us today. I appreciate it very much. You know, right at the outset you've been with Grassroot, whether Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, our non-profit or Grassroot Action which is our 501c4. You've been with us for how many years now? Oh goodness, probably about five years at this point, maybe a little bit more. Okay and you were active with the people involved prior to that as well but what exactly is the need to have an independent voice from Hawaii right there in Washington DC? Well, I think really it comes down to the fact that historically speaking Hawaii, it gets overlooked. I mean you know it's far away and I'll be honest especially in the middle of winter it's easy to feel like no one in Hawaii has any right to complain about anything ever and that's why Hawaii needs a voice in DC. To quote a popular figure we are a small island in the Pacific. Exactly and you know some of the issues that we deal with here in Hawaii which are near and dear to the people of Hawaii are like fighting for a lower cost of living, lower housing costs, better shipping prices, transportation solutions. A lot of them we're frustrated in because we can't do everything that's needed from the islands. These are issues that require congressional or presidential intervention so what does that mean in terms of having a voice there up in Washington DC fighting for the people? Well it is very important to kind of make these connections in these networking, being able to get Hawaii's voice in because you know Hawaii politics is more nuanced and sophisticated than maybe people realize from outside but from outside it's just your voice is only as good as the party that you have representing you and there's very little variance in Hawaii as to what party comes to Washington so when the other party has control what would be an opportunity to get you know certain changes is frustrated by the fact that you don't have anyone speaking for that. We can see that you know when opportunity comes when an issue all of a sudden that would affect Hawaii because very much in the news Hawaii doesn't necessarily have the people in place in DC that are willing or interested in advocating for that particular issue. Jones Act regulations things like that and that's why grassroots does have a presence in DC to be a voice for Hawaii on these issues that are important that do affect us that are you know federal issues things like the rail the Jones Act regulations economic issues they all flow from Washington to Honolulu and you know it's these are all things that we care about that affect our lives. Hawaii does need someone representing those issues in DC and not just the people that we elect from to Congress but also people who represent different points of view the interest of other Hawaiians the interest of businesses of entrepreneurs of the free market. Well I'm glad you mentioned party politics because that's important and although grassroots institute is nonpartisan and we're actively engaged both with Democrats and Republicans as well as independence and Libertarians it's important to recognize the bipartisan nature of Washington DC and I think you're absolutely right Malia if there's only one side of the picture coming from Hawaii we have fewer resources at the very least we don't network as well in terms of solving problems in Hawaii that really require bipartisan solutions and the need to cross the aisle and that's why it's important for a group like grassroots institute which is not embedded within one party voice to be able to do some of the work up there in Washington DC. Now in a few moments I want to talk with you about some of the issues that you've been active in helping us with particularly the shipping laws known as the Jones Act and even the Honolulu Rail people might be surprised that we've been a voice for sanity about the Honolulu Rail in Washington DC but but first let's talk about the Trump administration I'm always amused to see the extent to which President Trump is featured in the local news and on the local talk shows in Hawaii as much as he is vilified here and that's no secret he seems to be the subject of a lot of interest. I read a recent article that was quite interesting that said that behind all of the vehement opposition to President Trump and his policies from Hawaii he really has a great many fans who are secret fans of his in Hawaii what do you think the reason for that might be how is it that people who vilify him publicly might actually be appreciative of some of his policy work you know that is a that is a question that I think people struggle with not just in Hawaii but through the whole country I can tell you that regardless of how you may react to his even method of politics or his personal style or any other number of things the fact is that things are happening things that people who are in favor of limited government people who support that free market have been pushing for for a very long time the one that really jumps out at me is the regulation rollback it's estimated that under Obama there was about 100 billion dollars worth of regulations put in under President Bush the second it was about 68 million so President Trump's determination to roll back regulation number one is one of the reasons you see so many headlines because it's just constant you've probably seen something about net neutrality about waiters pooling tips about changing the size of monuments about banking reform and even people who you would think would you know each each regulation that's rolled back has its supporters but it also has people who are saying hey you know what this is helpful this is something that you know got passed without really thought of being thought about how to do it and so it's a much more complicated issue than you'll see from headlines and talking about the regulations and the monument the rollbacks one of those is monument rollback we've seen the environmental response but that may actually end up affecting Hawaii fishermen who have been pushing to open up areas for them to for long line fishermen to catch up tuna and other fish stocks that's one of those regulations that's just part of this massive constant list of considerations of regulations that are being rolled back of rules that are being reexamined well you know what's happening that's right i'm going to let you continue in just a moment i'm going to interject something along the lines of what you've just said i've had a lot of people contact me in my capacity as a trustee at oha as well as president of grassroot and again i'm not speaking in that capacity now i'm just sharing i've had a lot of people contact me who are hunters fishermen farmers who were native Hawaiian activists and and clearly not necessarily your rank and file of the republican party at all who are quite pleased with some of the rollback of some of the regulation taking place whether it has to deal with the regulations that are on farmers and agriculture or regulation in terms of fishing and many of them actually were very dismayed by the expansion of government regulation even something that was purportedly done for the sake of native Hawaiians the expansion of our national marina papahanao mokuakea region there were many many Hawaiians who felt you know that's putting too much government control into the islands and so i wanted just to reflect i'm hearing what you're saying it's a very complicated issue federal regulation doesn't divide on democrat versus republican and maybe that's the reason that trump is gaining some popularity amongst those who'd like to see less regulation exactly and you know i said i think i gave the figure 100 it was 100 million it's actually over 120 billion that were additional regulatory burdens under the obama administration and some of that is just a question of should these regulations be passed without the clear guidance of congress so i mean really what we're talking about in some ways is just getting back to legislative intent on making legislators responsible for laws not executive expansion of executive powers and those are things that in terms of voters and ordinary citizens who want to be able to have a government that's responsive to us that we should generally be in favor of you know executive agencies just do not have the same kind of responsiveness as a legislature does and that's why people who have favor limited government have been really pushing back at this idea of just incredible expansion of regulation and when it comes to the monument yes uh and i'm going to i'm i always always messed up the newest money and papa oh darn it that's well that's close to papa hanao mokua kea thank you papa hanao mokua kea but they haven't they haven't uh actually addressed that but they are it is possible that that will be one of the monuments that the interior reconsiders as they've been reconsidering other monuments and it would be to the benefit of fisheries in hawaii well you know and that's an interesting point as well and most of the correspondence i receive urging me to use my voice and use grassroot institutes voice to call upon president trump to roll back some of papa hanao mokua kea federalization comes from native hawaiians native hawaiians who at the very least uh don't like what the federal government represents and who speak of something called home rule so this is not so much to assert any position from my point of view or any organizations but just to point out that you're absolutely right this is a complicated issue and because of its complexity trump is operating in an arena in which he may pick up followers that he wouldn't pick up based upon party line exactly i think it's an example of how you know you tend not to realize that you like small government until big government moves into an area you never expected them to be well when we come back from a short break i want to dive into some issues that you've been working on and one in particular might surprise people and that is the uh honolulu rapid well the the mass transit system of honolulu which has been iconically the rail uh some people might be surprised that we're actually talking to people in washington dc about that so let us know about grassroots work in terms of testimony uh as well as some investigation that has resulted in some headlines recently when we come back from a break so don't go away or and don't go outside and play in the snow right now all right we have this crazy thing going on today i was just walking by and all these dj's and producers are set up all around the city i just walked by and i said what's happening guys they told me they were making music playing the head no musical talent and then sat down and kind of i'll sew it do it welcome back to hawaii together we're here every other week on the think tech hawaii broadcast network i'm keely akina and i want to say that i'm just so grateful to jay fidel carol munley and the entire crew at think tech hawaii many volunteers as well as some of the as well as the entire working staff what a great system of getting words out uh getting ideas across they've created and and you know what i like about it is that think tech hawaii empowers people like myself who are not necessarily broadcast professionals but who have some area of interest or expertise it empowers us to have a platform that goes worldwide and influences not only hawaii but places well beyond today we're talking with malia blomhill the policy director of grassroot institute and we're covering some of the issues that grassroot is working on in washington dc one of the things that is so very important in dc i think acutely so but most definitely in hawaii is the ability to work together across the aisle i love to say a hana kako it's like the hawaiian expression a pool a kako which means let's pray together kako means let's do it together a hana kako means let's work kako let's work together because if we don't work together we get nothing done let's work together to build a better economy government society and that's the nature of the work of the grassroot institute i'm so proud that malia blomhill is one of the tremendous workers who does policy work she's a graduate of law school but chooses to work in the public policy arena rather than in actual litigation or legal work because she believes it's important to craft ideas and bring them to public officials so that they can run our country a little bit better back to malia now malia do you want to come on in at this time from the cold the 40 degree weather up there in washington dc do you have you on the other side yes thank you wish i could be there in person well you know what in the world are we going to washington dc and talking about honolulu rail system four uh isn't that just a local issue a state issue and most of all a county issue for honolulu and unfortunately also for every other county well how interesting it would have been if it had been but of course it's a federally funded project and uh that's one of the reasons that we took the issues to the uh house transportation and infrastructure committee earlier this year they had a hearing about challenges with a passenger rail service and we took the opportunity to submit testimony about the problems that have dogged the honolulu rail project and more significantly for the need uh for a forensic audit uh specifically an audit that focused on the problem of fraud waste and abuse uh in fact we felt that we actually uh began to talk about auditing this at the federal level before we launched a campaign locally to to bring that to local leaders exactly in in doing so we're really just reflecting what i would call the public mood um in a sense well the various rail rail people might not agree i would say that in a sense it's an attempt to restore uh some level of public trust in the project because the public trust in the honolulu rail project has been thinking and thinking when we launched our campaign for an audit the response itself was you know everything that you needed to know about where the people of hawaii are feel where they're stand now on the rail and it's just a complete a conviction that money has been wasted that there are questions that no one really trusts where it's going uh and we originally brought these questions to the department of transportation uh which itself has had questions um which is part of the whole knotted twisted story of the rail and the and one of the reasons why uh the legislature had to meet this uh summer in order to guarantee funding because the department of transportation had its own questions about the ability of the project well that's the its obligation that's right and that's a good segue to point out that some of the influence that you and our team had with grassroot came back to hawaii not only do we see members of our congressional delegation calling for an audit we eventually saw thousands of people in hawaii responding to our petition drive and in addition to that their political leader is also calling for an audit unfortunately we may not get right away the kind of audit for fraud waste and abuse that is needed because there has been a tendency now that funding has been approved for the next leg of the rail uh to downplay the audit a bit but you know the issues won't go away and one of the reasons the issues won't go away is something that you and the team found out you you were monitoring the claims that were being made by local officials by our city particularly by our mayor about what the federal government was actually saying it was necessary for their participation and their funding and one of them seemed a little bit fishy you want to tell us about that absolutely well if you recall the summer when the legislature was dealing with the whole question of you know how are we gonna what are we going to pass what kind of taxes are we going to endorse to help fund the rail there was a question about could there be a plan B some other less expensive option in order to make the rail feasible and Mayor Caldwell basically told the legislature that funding had to be adequate to fully fund the project all the way to Alamoana Center and he said claimed that the federal transit administration wouldn't allow a plan B or anything less than the project going to Alamoana. This was arguably made a big impact on the legislature because you know we basically say you know no half measures nothing that would be anything less than fully funding this is part of the questions that the legislators had had to begin with but we had been looking at a grassroots we had been looking at some of the communications that we had access to and followed up with a FOIA request to the FTA which eventually got back to us and told us that they never made a determination one way or the other about a plan B what had happened was a back and forth between the city and the FTA that ended with the city taking up the possibility of a plan B off the table before the FTA ever made a determination as to whether or not they'd be accepted to begin with. So I think the kindest way to interpret it would be to say that Mayor Caldwell was fancy with the facts about plan B. Well we won't use metaphors like some have used and we won't use some of the popular phrasing such as fake news and so forth but we will point out that what you discovered on behalf of grassroots became breaking news and we're at a cliffhanger now and the question is when the legislature resumes its new session are they going to deal with the fact that they were told something that wasn't factual and use that as the basis for their decision to continue funding the rail and that will be very interesting to see what comes of that. Now let's switch to the Jones Act which we've been working on for many many years and rather than take the moment to sum up what the Jones Act is all about let's just dive in and recognize that the Jones Act does cause prices to go higher than they would be otherwise but we saw something happen with the recent hurricanes in Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico and that was a short-term pullback of one of some of the provisions of the Jones Act. Tell us a bit about that and what that implies for any change in the Jones Act. Mother Nature essentially exposes the problems with the Jones Act, the fact that it limits our ability to respond to emergencies, that it limits American shipping, that it makes things more expensive, that it puts people in cutoff areas like islands at a disadvantage when it comes to obtaining goods, that it restricts the flow of vital supplies to areas that when the hurricanes happen to Texas and Puerto Rico and Florida one of the very first things the government does is spend the Jones Act so that we can quickly move necessary supplies to the affected areas without having to worry about whether they're on Jones Act ships and so on and so forth and it's one of the ways to keep fuel costs from spiraling to get much needed supplies to the area quickly. The funny thing is that, you know, while I would say an emergency demonstrates that the Jones Act is a hindrance, Jones Act supporters try to say well when there's an emergency we can take it away. I don't find that a very persuasive point of argument. This is always a problem when things are very serious, we can get rid of it. If it's always a problem, why not get rid of it, period? And that's what the people of Puerto Rico started to say because Puerto Rico in particular has been in, we'll say, escalating difficulties. Well, you know, our years in the hurricane really brought that up. Right. We had grassroots have been in regular touch with many people from Puerto Rico, our policy brothers and sisters over there, members of the government and so forth. And frankly Puerto Ricans are feeling hoodwinked by the government. They cried out that the Jones Act needed to be lifted in order for them to get supplies, should they be short of supplies. So the Jones Act was lifted as traditionally it has been by the federal government for 10 days and then it came right back into place. But during that time they didn't need to have the Jones Act lifted. Their devastation was so monumental at that time that they couldn't get anything from dock to inland. But now that time has passed and they're recovering, they now desperately need supplies that they can't get and there are supplies stacking up on foreign ports that can't get to Puerto Rico. And we see the problem here of the capriciousness of the argument that says, well, we can always lift the Jones Act in times of emergency, but we see that that is a politically determined solution. And so it's not a long-term solution. The long-term solution would be lift part of the Jones Act permanently so that an island like, I mean, an island state like Hawaii won't be left to capricious politics at a time of real devastation. Exactly. The question about creating an exemption to the Jones Act for Puerto Rico, which has been raised in recent weeks, is not about the emergency. It's about helping the Puerto Rico economy in the long term. It's about saying, hey, you know, this costs Puerto Rico. One study put it at about $500 million per year. And this affects the Puerto Rico economy constantly. And in an ex-fragile economy, that's enough. Why let this very old desperately in need of modernization law act as a constant anchor on Puerto Rico when even the smallest thing can help? And I would say, and not just Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the U.S. as a whole, why allow a constant drag on the economy? Because on the argument that, hey, if there's an emergency, we can lift it. Well, what about the constant drag? That's right. There are things that we can do to modernize the Jones Act, to update it, to bring it into the 21st century, and help places like Puerto Rico, help places like Hawaii, help other places in the United States, because it's not just Puerto Rico and Hawaii that are affected by the act, and help us economically. That's right. And while we're pleased that the Trump administration lifted the Jones Act for a short period of time, we'd hope that it could last much longer and to be something permanent. Then there is something else that the Trump administration did that let us take advantage of an opportunity. And that was Trump's order to the small business administration hold hearings to look at ways of reducing government regulation. And you helped me to get there in Washington, D.C., and present some testimony before several agencies, about 20 agencies and representatives of the Cabinet, in which we made the case that Jones Act is a form of regulation and it needs to be updated and modified. So thanks a lot for letting us do that. That was a significant opportunity. It was, because I think the Hurricanes brought the Jones Act into the national conversation. And that's something that badly needs to be done, because what we call the Jones Act is, yes, it's the maritime law from 1920, but it's also a whole slew of other laws and regulations that have grown up to support it. And when we talk about reforming the Jones Act, what we're talking about are very small changes that really will open up economic advantages for places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. So it is a form of regulation. It is a form of economic protectionism. And it's not a question of an all or nothing reforming the Jones Act doesn't mean leaving American workers high and dry. It doesn't mean leaving American seamen victims of unscrupulous environments or working conditions or anything like that. Well, we'll pick up on that in a future episode. For now, we've come to the conclusion of our time together. And I want to thank you for all the good work you're doing, Malia. And keep it up. Hawaii needs an independent voice, fighting for freer markets, greater liberty and opportunities that allow our economy to grow. Thank you very much, Malia. Have a nice Christmas. Thank you. Well, my guest today, Malia Blomhill, policy director of the Grassroot Institute, gave us some updated insights into how Grassroot is fighting on behalf of the people of Hawaii in Washington, D.C. Until next time, I'm Keeley Akeena. This is Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Aloha.