 We're back, we're live, it's five o'clock rock here on Think Tech on Community Matters. We love the First Amendment and we love mayoral candidates. We have a mayoral candidate with us today, his name is Lawrence Friedman, and he's running for the mayor of the City and County of Honolulu. Welcome to the show, Lawrence. Thank you, Jay. Thank you very much for having me here. So let's, we have 28 minutes to find out what you're doing and what you're thinking and what you will do if you are elected. So let's begin with some of the issues. First, identify yourself. My name is Lawrence Friedman. I am married to my wonderful wife, Rebecca. We have a Japanese spitzbella. We live downtown and just like any other taxpayer here that's been watching what's been going on, I am time for a change and we need to make some tremendous political changes, which is why I've decided to run for office as mayor of the City and County of Honolulu. You were in telecommunications for a career? That's correct. That's where my career comes from and that's where I feel I have experience in some of these engineering issues, even though it's construction related. I have an engineering background and that should do well while understanding what's going on with rail. And quite honestly, what you listen in here to doesn't take much intelligence to figure out that we've got huge problems going on and have since its inception. So you're mad as hell, you're not going to take it anymore? I am not going to take it anymore, which is why I've thrown my hat into the proverbial ring here to try to impact positive change for all of us that are tax-paying citizens and the people who live here and just make it better for all of us because I don't like the view downstream. Are you think you're capable of doing this? It's a dangerous thing to be elected official in the state of Hawaii? Yes, I come from the East Coast where it's also a dangerous thing to be an elected official but I have to stress I have no political experience except for business experience, which I think will play well into how to handle these decisions that need to be made. Part of the problem that we have here is that we have politicians in office, the incumbent politicians, which by the way, the three, as they call them, main candidates, happen to be all incumbent politicians and lawyers. So is it any surprise that we're in this mess we are in today? You're not speaking against lawyers, are you, Lawrence? No, no, I'm not speaking against lawyers, I'm speaking against politicians and lawyers. Okay, we'll leave that where it is. Thank you. What about your platform specifically? You alluded to RAIL, what's your position on RAIL? Well, my position on RAIL is we just can't stop it at Middle Street, okay? Last week we spent our last penny on the $875 billion finish up to Middle Street, which I'll get to in a moment, I have a huge issue with the timing on that. My position is that if we stop there, we are just going to be totally absorbed in the operating costs because it's not going to do what it needs to do. The operating costs, which we don't know what they'll be anyway, are a big secondary concern I have, but I feel we have to get it all the way to Alamoana. I don't believe we need four or five stations along the way at $300 million apiece. We really can only afford maybe two and then we have to look at where we would cut those back, have one come down into the Chinatown downtown area and then maybe one all the way to Alamoana, but it's got to go the whole length or we're just not going to have a proper design. Have you always opposed rail? Have I always, excuse me? Opposed rail. I came here after rail was started, so my view of rail is that it was not the proper solution for the island. I recognize that people from the east, excuse me, west side want to get here better and faster, and I understand that coming from some pretty traffic-y areas in the east coast, I feel for that. There's a lot of reasons why I want to see this done properly. I feel for that and for the $10 billion, I'll say it, maybe $12 that we're going to pay on this rail, we have a linear line where people can't decide to get off and maybe visit their mother or pick up their kid from a friend's house, then you're going to have to keep driving. There are studies out there that have said you're going to still have a 21% increase in traffic, but quite honestly, all of these numbers and all of these studies, I'm not sure what I believe anymore because everything turns out to be wrong, except for the fact that everything's going up. I mean, the price. The price is going up, and they say we have a high-speed rail system. We have one two-mile stretch of rail that it may be able to hit 55 miles an hour, and it's high-speed. I really feel that looking back in time, somehow the special interests took over this, and we're able to sell people on rail as the solution to come in here, dynamic busing, higher-quality buses. We could have done so much with that money, and then people could have used it much more efficiently. Say we have an event at the Aloha Stadium, okay? You can't take the train through there, but if you had busing, you could have different staging areas. The buses could come in there. Oh, great. Now we have the Eddie I. Cow on the North Shore. Now we can use buses to help get the people up over there. So I really feel that an elaborate busing improvement, considering that the bus system, which was created by Frank Bossy, has turned out to be a pretty good solution for the island overall. And to that end, though, they do talk about reducing emissions. Well, you can have some electric buses in downtown, and rail is just going to be linear in, and its benefits remain to be seen overall. So I make you mayor. Let's assume you're mayor on day one. What do you do about rail? What do I do about rail? Well, I have a good question, because I'm ready to call this right now. I personally feel that based upon the way the rail project's going, it is time that the board remove the executive director. I'll be the first candidate out there to say that. And my campaign manager has been trying to get me to not talk about having somebody lose a job, because that's not the Aloha spirit. Well, you know what? It's not the Aloha spirit either when the executive director spends $875 million on the final segment. And the next day, a letter comes from the FTA that says, hold off doing anything else, because you really need to look at all your different options. And I find that to be just unethical. So what would you do in lieu of the executive director? In lieu of the executive director, well, I'd rehire that position. I would look to make the board more responsible to the city council and not as autonomous as it is, because they seem to be making decisions without care to the citizens of the island. So I would look to work with the city council, because that's another area I feel the current administration is failing. He doesn't seem to work with the city council. You don't see him there or the governor. And I would look to have rail continued out. But how would we afford this? We'd have to look at how much would it cost to do it, to finish it out. And what that cost is right now, we don't know. There's a lot of things that we just don't know because we're not getting straight answers from heart. Without the financial plan in place, which hasn't been in place for a year, it's very difficult to say what we would do. I would say we need to go all the way down to Alamoana, potentially two stations in the interim, maybe look at designing it so that we could consider adding a station along the way. And it's not gonna be popular, but no matter what any other politician says, I can't imagine any other funding mechanism except digging into our own pockets to complete it. I was gonna cost more than we had anticipated originally and which we anticipate now, it'll be more. So how will you cover the shortfalls and increase in real property tax? Well, that's not a popular way to go here, but I'm not sure there isn't any other solution. Otherwise, if we stop at Middle Street, we may take a $100 million a year operating expense that's forecasted for the entire rail. But since we stop at Middle Street and less people are using it, that may go to 200, 300. Who knows? Because there's no financial plan in place to tell us. So we need to look at the finances of this before that decision can be made. Because if we pay $300 million a year to try to make a quick math and stopping at Middle Street for the maintenance and operation, if we go all the way to Alamoana and it goes to 100 million, well, then our payback is going to be $200 million a year for 10 years in sort of savings because we're still going to have to pay operating expenses, which I don't think a lot of people are aware of. There's going to be maintenance and operating costs that are going to be very heavy on our budget. You talk about financial plan and certainly a financial plan wouldn't be limited to one item like rail. There are other expensive items that we have to attend to here in the city, for example, affordable housing. So can you talk about what the principal problems are in developing this financial plan? What would you wrap into it? Well, I would say that if we don't focus on rail immediately and I'll get into the plan, if we don't focus on rail immediately, we're not going to be doing anything, but cutting back city services, cutting back emergency services, we're just going to have to. So I would like to wrap a much larger plan into this to encompass a better layout for affordable housing, as well as a much larger and much more robust temporary housing to help the homeless get off the street. I feel we need to look at that as they say, a multi-pronged approach. We have a number that are mentally ill. We have a number that are just homeless and they want to get off the streets. And then we also have a certain criminal element that needs to be dressed individually. I think that a lot of the individuals on the street would prefer to get off the street and become tax-paying members of society, which would help us to be able to afford this by having them support themselves with the dignity of an honest day's work and an honest job, and we would help them get to that point. So we'd have to look at the two big items, our homelessness, rail, yes, infrastructure comes into play because we have a lot of building going up. Well, let's get to that in a minute, but homelessness, so specifically how would you address homelessness? Granted, in fact, let me ask you this, how significant a problem is it? How worried should I be? How worried should all of us be about homelessness in Hawaii, in Honolulu? We should be very worried, and that's an easy answer to say because if we don't, if we have to raise property taxes or keep it taxing people, those people are going to then wind up in the homeless ranks. So we may wind up with more people before we even get a handle on it. I like that. Why should we worry about it though? I mean, why do we have to do anything? The homeless need to be assisted because they should... Why, humanitarian? Why? Humanitarian, absolutely. We shouldn't have people... Would there be a secondary effect on the community if we doubled or tripled our number of homeless? Crime would increase, and it's just gonna, I feel it's just going to be a snowball effect as more people become homeless. Who's gonna wanna come to Hawaii to visit us and go to Waikiki Beach? I mean, as it is now, when you come into downtown, you see people living on the sides of the roads, and I think that that needs to be changed. We need to take the people who need help, get them help, and lower the homeless number because we're just not going to have a viable city if we let it continue to grow. How do you fix it? Now, that's the next question. How do you fix it? What do you do? I make you mayor, day one. You have to address this. We all agree it's a big issue. What do you do? Well, what I would look to do is deal with the criminal element first. First and foremost, we have a lot of laws on the books that can be enforced rather stringently, okay? Like what? I'll give you a good example, and I'll go backwards on that, that there was a city council resolution recently where they wanted to make it a penalty for the supermarkets to have their shopping carts stolen. So why don't we look at it in the proper way and view that as stolen property instead of blaming the supermarkets for not securing their property correctly? I don't think they want their carts stolen, and for decades, it hasn't been necessary to put a Wi-Fi on it so that the wheels don't work, and now they want us to come up with some retrofit so that they can't be stolen. Well, that bill was defeated, which is a good thing. So there's like where I talk about looking at some of these basic laws to get the lawbreakers to stop doing that, and there's a term called broken windows policy that when you stop all of these little crimes, the bigger crimes go away. That's what happened in New York. That was Giuliani's contribution to crime in New York. Giuliani, and to a greater extent, the police commissioner, his name, Bill Bratton, his name escapes my mind, but he's done some wonderful things in regards to that, and he's a compassionate individual. He's working in a democratic organization over there, and I'm talking compassion, but if you're gonna break the law, we have to enforce the law from a law-abiding society. So I feel that we need to start from the bottom up and move that element out. Okay, what's next after that to deal with homelessness? I feel, I don't like the term where I come from, and now I'm here, so I'm a citizen of Honolulu. I want to be clear that I'm here. I'm sorry, you'll have to repeat the question. What's next? What do you do after you deal with the criminal aspect of it? Well, then the term, that's where I was going, they use the term plantation housing here, and where I come from, that would probably get me viewed as not a popular person for using that term. However, here it's a popular term, and since it's a cultural phenomenon here, I think we need to go back to that. We're in that environment for the people who are on the streets and the sidewalks, the mentally ill can get their mental health care there, the criminal element, the people who are stealing food, they need to be directed into that organization, because I don't really feel they want to be criminal, and then for people who need life skills, so that all of those groups can be helped and made viable members of society. Where would you get the money to build the housing for them? Well, if you look at Joe Arpaio, it may not be popular, Tent City. Right now they're living in tents. I'm not looking to make that a lifetime for them, but set up something like Tent City, set up something like the Creets that they have going up on Sand Island. These are very affordable ways to do it. I'm not looking to move them out into the country. Let's be clear on that. It needs to be in more of the city area so that they can be addressed locally. Okay, we'll take a short break. This is Lawrence Friedman. He's a candidate for mayor. The city and county of Honolulu here on Community Matters. If you're running for mayor, let us know. You can come down too, okay? And we'll be right back after this short break when we talk about other things like unfunded liabilities, like the roadways, like sea level rise, and infrastructure, and ultimately property tax. We'll talk about that too. We'll be right back. Hi, my name is Aaron Wills. You are watching thinktechhawaii.com. I am the host of the show Rehabilitation Coming Soon. You can catch us live on thinktechhawaii.com at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays. I will see you there. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart, Turner, host of Sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching thinktech this summer. We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance, and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii. They're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September, and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday. Hi, I'm Stephen Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Hawaii, and I'm the host of Shrink Wrap Hawaii, which is on Tuesdays at three o'clock. Have a great summer, take care of your mental health. We're back, we're live, we're here on Community Matters with Lawrence Friedman, a candidate for mayor of the city and county of Honolulu. We're talking about his positions on various things. So let's go to the roads. What do you think about the roads? You know, the current mayor has had a campaign, a war on bottles and the like, sort of the previous mayor and the mayor before him. But the roads aren't so good, and they're not being rebuilt very well either. What's the situation with the roads? How do we get here? We're gonna do about it. Well, let's take the collapsing road up in Kaa Aba that collapsed again for the third time in the last few months, and you'd have to look at the design that's being done to actually fix this. I mean, that's just one element of a problem. But overall, the roads definitely need to be repaved, they need to be readjusted for smoother transportation. And again, that's going to cost us more money. Yeah, lots more money. Everything is... We haven't really kept up with it. And it's sort of a, it's an escaping target. I mean, it's a moving target. We can't do this fast enough to catch up with the deterioration. So as mayor, what would you do? Well, again, going back to rail, we need to mitigate those expenses because if we could have only mitigated those $100 million overruns and billion-dollar overruns, we'd have a lot more money to deal with now. I know you're asking me what I would do, and I'm going to tell you about that. What I'm going to have to look at is, we're gonna have to do something tax-wise. There's just no way we can continue without going into our pockets. And we can thank our previous incumbent politicians on this, which is why I'm running, because I don't hear any of them saying that. They all come up with these grandiose ideas. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. And now we're left to pay the bill. The bill has come due. As we were discussing offline, I'll go right into those unfunded liabilities. We got $8 billion in unfunded liabilities that a lot of people are not aware of. This is for the city and county. For the city and county, let alone the state's unfunded liabilities. What's an unfunded liability? What's included in there? Very good, because I can answer that question. Thank you, Jay. That would be like the pensions for the city workers, the emergency service personnel, the... These are debts we know we have, but we haven't paid them and we don't know where we're gonna get the money to pay them. Exactly. And again, if you keep seeing this, we keep running into areas where we need more money. We need billions more. We're not talking 150. We're talking, we need $8 billion plus an unfunded liabilities. We have another $3 to $5 billion to finish the rail. Who knows what that will be if we get a financial plan we can look at it. So you're looking at $10 billion, like it's monopoly money to these guys, but I'll have to say it. We're gonna have to seriously consider some type of tax increase. Nobody wants the property taxes to increase. Trust me, I don't either, but I'll say this to anybody, including the incumbent politicians who all happen to be lawyers. What are your guys' suggestions to come up with $10 billion real quick? I don't hear you talking about a tax increase. I don't want that, but you're the ones who've put us in this mess and that may be something we have to do. We extend the GET tax. Oh, that's not a tax increase. Yes, it is. It's more money out of the people's pockets. I don't wanna say I'm going to increase your taxes. That would just, we're not gonna vote for Lawrence Friedman for mayor. But what else are we gonna do? Doesn't a tax increase have a detrimental effect on the economy? In other words, people have less disposable income and the money's not running through the system, so things get soft in the economy, isn't that true? That is true. And more importantly, we need to address it sooner rather than later because if we keep allowing that blank check to go up, that means that's that much more we have to pay. We need to get a handle on the unfunded liabilities and basically make sure that we're not increasing that number from time and put in the money. And this isn't the only place that this is happening. This is happening in a lot of cities and states throughout the country. Well, let me be the devil's advocate and ask you, what happens if we don't pay the unfunded? Will anything terrible happen? What will happen if we don't pay them? Well, if we don't pay them, then we're not going to be able to pay our EMS and our police, their pensions that they've worked hard for and risked their lives for out, like Sunday night in the rain and with the criminal element, that's, those are the people who are entitled to those, okay? They've put into that, that's a promise that was made to them. And then the mayor would have to say, you know, I'm sorry, we're going to have to scale back your promise by 75, not 75% but 25% or something. It's not going to go all the way there to the lowest end but it's just not a good picture, no matter how you look at it. And I don't see any of the other candidates willing to address it. It's not popular, it's not good, but we have a huge financial problem in this town. Isn't it a question of degree though? I mean, you can pick some potholes but not others. You can fix some roads that are really in serious trouble but maybe not the others and make a plan to go forward sort of to establish a sequence of fixing if you will on these various roads. Isn't there a middle ground on dealing with this problem? Well, there is, there is a middle ground that certainly you would look at the roads that are most damaged and repair those immediately and look at how much it would cost to do that, look at some of the roads that are in okay shape and how much longer can they last. But let's jump over from the roads into the infrastructure in general and all the building that's going up in Kakaako, yet are we increasing our sewage infrastructure to help mitigate that in the next rain? So it flows out of there. We had sewage popping up in overflow and brown water advisory. We had people in Kalei who are now flooded out of their homes and those are the people who can afford that the least. Yeah. What about Kakaako? I mean, there's been a lot of controversy about Kakaako, about the city plan for allowing it to be developed the way it's being developed and not necessarily doing any infrastructure or improvements in the infrastructure to account for, accommodate all these new housing units. What would you do about that? I mean, it's a state agency of course, it's HCDA, but it is part of the city and it is, I mean, would you try to make HCDA and Kakaako part of the city in order to have city jurisdiction there? Would you take some affirmative action on behalf of the city to have an effect, a planning effect or some kind of corrective effect on the process that's happening in Kakaako? We're all in this together, as I say, okay? And as mayor of the city, whether the land is Kakaako, whether the land is HCDA managed, I have to represent that to those different organizations. I don't see the mayor standing with the HCDA or the city council or the governor's office to try to mitigate these problems. So how we wind up with 42 story a million dollar, multi-million dollar apartments built in this area with no consideration to how are we going to deal with the necessary sewerage system? Just take the sewage alone. It's just poor planning. Poor planning prevents piss poor performances, something along those lines, I'm just stuttering it out here. Well, going back to the Mufi Hanuman administration, there was an issue about some $5 billion worth of sewerage work that had to be done in Waikiki, which is the engine of our economy, it hasn't been done, the EPA is watching on that one too. What would you do about that $5 billion? Well, did you bring up another area where we need to fix it? Because that is our economic engine. We've got small businesses and a couple other little areas that provide income, but that's our golden jewel. And so that needs to be focused on rather rapidly as well, so that we don't wind up with more brown water advisories, okay? You come into Waikiki, you come into this town to have a vacation this week and what do you have? Brown water advisories and you have people living on the side of the street. How much longer can that continue before people go, you know what, I've been there once or twice and I'm just going to start telling my friends, I don't love it like I used to. It needs to be addressed immediately and again, $5 billion more. So we got $5 billion on rail, we got $8 billion on unfunded liabilities, we got $5 billion in Waikiki, let alone what needs to be done in Kakaako. I don't think anybody has a solution to that other than more tax. We know that climate change is coming. We know that sea level rises, it's already rising. We know that again, the engine of our economy is our beaches and our ocean coastline. In 20, 30 years and of course, the mayor is only gonna last for X years, but not 20 or 30, but the mayor's gotta look, I think the mayor's gotta look forward and try to be part of a process that deals with these issues after his time or her time. So, Querrie, what would you do about sea level rise? In other cities, for example, New York City, they have public works going on to protect Manhattan Island from sea level rise. So what would you do here? Well, there's nothing so far has been done. Well, I recognize that and I'd have to look at that much deeper in terms of what that would cost us. And I do wanna be a mayor who looks at five, 10, 20, 30 years out because I am here and I want people to go, wow, he really helped the city. He had his mind in and he came up with some good ideas. Global warming is affecting everybody and we need to be on committees to see what we can do to help mitigate global warming and what we can do here to try to prevent that from happening. But with three feet sea level, five feet sea level, it's a very precarious situation we're in and short of raising up Waikiki Beach another 10 feet, it provides us with very limited choices. So here you are, retired telecommunications worker or executive, whatever it is. And living in Hawaii, see these problems and feel that you need to want to or capable of addressing them as mayor. But in these United States and especially in Hawaii, you have to have special interest groups who fund your campaign. You have to have special interest group that will help you get things done when you're in office. It's a complicated array of spider web, if you will, of relationships and you don't have those existing relationships the way the incumbents have or might not have but who might have those relationships. How are you gonna deal with that? How are you gonna deal with a system, a city council, a city that is all built on special interests and that affect the mayor and the mayor's ability to do his job, how you can do that? Well, I wish I had another 30 minutes to go into that topic because I feel that we need to make some tremendous ethical changes here and the special interest from what you can see are some of the largest donors to the mayor's campaign and what have we gotten ourselves into with that? We've gotten ourselves into problems, we've got ourselves into unfunded liabilities and an overpriced rail system. I can work with people. In my career, I've gone up through the ranks, I've been a union employee and I've moved up through sales executive so I've been there and I've moved through the ranks, I work with people, I've had to work with disparate groups that didn't report to me in my capacity to motivate them and I wanna do what's right for the city and I will work with people who wanna do what's right for the city. If I come across special interests, I'm not going to be taking thousands of dollars from them as I find to be unacceptable in terms of the amount of money and yeah, it's tough being somebody who's not got his hand in someone else's pocket and say, hey, I'm my inauguration, I'd like you to pay a thousand dollars ahead so you can, you know, for my reelection campaign. I mean, that I find unacceptable, I find it unacceptable to be on a board of a bank, a major bank in the area where you're actually making more on the board than you are as the mayor here. So I also don't feel it's proper to be raising campaign funds during your term in office. Okay, we'll give you some leeway there, six months or a year, year out. You can start looking to do that if you're gonna do that but the problem has been the special interests and the local politicians. As I used the phrase before and I'll say it again, closing and closing. The incumbent politicians are what have gotten us into this mess in the first place. What we need in Honolulu is someone who can make good decisions, someone who can believe he can work with the city council, the governor's office, the HCDA and the unions because we all want the same thing at the end of the day. We want the city to thrive and prosper. And I will call that out when I'm working with organizations, I'll be like, hey, we're going on the right path, we're going here. But if I come across an organization that I don't find to be doing the right thing, I'll be in front of your organization describing it. And to that end, I plan on having at least at a minimum monthly press conferences, not a weekly event or two or three times a week where I'll stand in front of a microphone and just speak. I think that we need to have press conferences and then UGA will be able to hold me accountable to the standards I say. I'll be like, hey, I'm going to do this. This is what we do in the real world. You put an action plan together, action register and you click off what you're doing. And if I miss something or something's falling back, you'll be able to say, hey, you said you were going to do X, Y, Z and I'll say, okay, why we haven't is because of this. Thank you, Lawrence. Lawrence Friedman, candidate for mayor of the city and county of Honolulu here on Think Tech Community Matters. Vote Lawrence Friedman, mayor of Honolulu, August 13th. We need to make a political change. Let's move the incumbents out.