 Aloha, welcome to another episode of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Campania. We are continuing on with our new series called Politics in Hawaii, where we are going to be addressing as many issues and concerns as possible. We're going to be bringing in as many guests as possible from all sides of the conversation. This is not a partisan conversation. This is supposed to be a complete conversation, so that we can get as much out there as much learned as possible. That's what we're hoping, that's what I'm hoping for. Along with that, today we're going to be discussing very specifically the neighborhood board system. And what I'd like to find out is what we believe the role and impact of the neighborhood board is or could be, maybe should be. So we'll see. We'll see where we get in that conversation. So thank you for joining us today. Our guest today, I'm very delighted to bring in someone who is a very active neighborhood board member, Mr. Dylan Armstrong, who is the second vice president, vice president, second vice chair of neighborhood board for Minoa, neighborhood board number seven. So Dylan, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Carl. Pleasure to be here. Oh, thank you. So, okay, second vice chair, tell us about, what is the structure? I don't normally begin with this, but because the second vice chair is interesting, what is the structure and how do you happen to become second vice chair? Right. So neighborhood boards elect officers among the elected members. So internally, there are officer elections. They're held generally every two years, but of course, vacancies and circumstances can arise, which cause more frequent elections. The chair is the officer position that is the most circumscribed by the neighborhood plan, which is one of the governing documents that neighborhood boards operate by. Neighborhood boards are a city and county of Honolulu function. And the neighborhood plan stipulates that the chair has to run the meetings, has to keep order to the meeting, has to put together an agenda and presides over the elections. So a first vice chair would be someone who would step into the capacity of chair if the chair was absent, if the chair resigned until an election to replace the chair occurred. A second vice chair is sort of similarly like a lower backup. But to the extent that officer titles matter, secretary is an incredibly important position for neighborhood boards because they review the minutes and the minutes are a matter of public record. They're available online. They're also mailed out to those people who choose to subscribe. Is the secretary a member of the board or is the secretary because each board actually has a separate note taker that is there that makes sure that they transcribe the notes and make sure they get over to the neighborhood commission and to mayor's office ultimately. You raise a really key distinction that would be easy to miss if you were just observing your local neighborhood board meeting, which is that every neighborhood board that is part of the city and county of Honolulu neighborhood commission office system has a legislative assistant or sorry, a neighborhood assistant who is a paid staff member of the neighborhood commission office. They do take notes. They provide subject matter knowledge. So is this motion in keeping with Robert's rules of order? Is this in keeping with the neighborhood plan? Is this in keeping with the sunshine law and OIT? OIT, what's OIT? I believe it's, I forget what it stands for off the top of my head, but some of the transparency regulations for the neighborhood board come not only through the sunshine law, which applies to policymakers, elected officials statewide, but there's also internal city and county public notice, transparency, stipulations that the neighborhood board also has to follow by. In most cases it doesn't cause a difference, but sometimes when it has to do with how many days in advance the public has to receive the meeting agenda, that's where those kind of things. These are the sunshine laws and what you're able to cover, what you're able to talk about, how you need to inform the committee if I've had a conversation or if you've had a conversation from the neighborhood board perspective. I am also a neighborhood board member, neighborhood board number 14, so some of this I'm aware of, I think you've been involved longer than I have, so therefore I welcome you to really correct what we say based on your experience. But yeah, so let's take a little step back a little bit and say, okay, from the neighborhood board you're talking about the structure because I asked you from chair to vice chair to second vice chair, and you talked about how there are elections to that executive board members. Out of the neighborhood board members themselves. There's also an election every two years for the neighborhood board themselves. So everyone on the neighborhood board has to go through an election process. Tell us about that. How often, it is every two years, but tell us about that process and how it works. So I was elected in 2015, I believe in spring. It's a city-wide or rather Oahu-wide series of elections, so I stood for a position in my sub-district, which we can certainly go over the details of sub-districts later, but it involved a certain amount of campaigning. We were all, as candidates, given the opportunity to put forth an Internet biography, so a short sort of about you and why you're interested in the board. Some people doorknock, some people sign wave, some people use social media to campaign. In many cases it's not competitive if there is- I was just going to ask, how competitive is it? When I ran for neighborhood board, we all got into reclamation. There was no one challenging anyone. In recent decades, that's been increasingly common, is my knowledge. However, my sub-district was contested. There were six vacancies and 11 candidates, so it was one of the most intensely competitive in our neighborhood board's recent history. In addition to sub-districts, there's also at large. It depends on the neighborhood board. This is kind of- we're getting into the geography of the neighborhood boards. These are not necessarily the same as state legislative districts or they are their own creature. My neighborhood board goes from the back of Manoa Valley to the freeway, nothing past the freeway, except for a certain part of lower campus where there are some residences. It's its own thing. Our board does not have at large representatives or board members. Macaulay Mo'ili-Ili does, and an at-large board member simply represents or is elected from anywhere within the neighborhood board jurisdiction. As a sub-district for neighborhood board member, I was elected from the lower part of Manoa, closest to UH and a little bit surrounding Malca, but I was elected from that particular area. The reason why those sub-districts can be important for neighborhood boards that have them is in Manoa, which is full of retirees and students, the tendency is for those who have more time available or are more permanently established in the community, particularly retirees, to be active in the board. If there's a geographic socioeconomic difference across the community, having a sub-district allows you to make sure that you are representing people from all different communities, at least geographically. It's not perfect necessarily, but it is a way of increasing the diversity, and as a sub-district board member, are you allowed to cover the same things as an at-large member? You certainly are. You guys are. I'm an at-large member. You can cover anything in your neighborhood board jurisdiction, so I don't have to limit myself to a sub-district's particular area if it's anywhere within the neighborhood board fair game. Our current chair is actually from my sub-district, so I was able to get in as an at-large. He was very happy to include me with that, so I appreciated that. We get to talk more about our particular area sometimes, just between he and I, with some of the issues that we get, and then we bring that to the board. The whole neighborhood board structure, I believe, was put in place by, was it Mayor Fosse, going back a couple decades ago now, and it was put in place because, and correct me and add as you would. It was put in place to make sure that there was a means or a mechanism for the mayor's office to be able to reach deeper into the neighborhoods and to the communities to hear and get feedback from them and to have more of a two-way conversation between the mayor's office and agencies and departments and the individual residences that live in these communities. Would you agree with that, or what more would you want to add? The neighborhood board system is a citizen's advisory board. It is a community mouthpiece. It functions in a number of different capacities. It was instituted in the 1970s. Many communities rapidly established their own boards. Some are not officially part of the neighborhood board system and maintain community associations that I'm not as knowledgeable about, but those also exist. Yes. One of the gardens association and one of the valley association are two examples. Absolutely. So, because the neighborhood commission office is the authority for the neighborhood board system. This is part of the city and county, however, there are community issues that reach to the state level, the federal level, the interests of private groups or nonprofits. So while the city and county is where the neighborhood board is at, really anything that affects your community is fair game for discussion in a neighborhood board meeting. You have to follow certain parameters in the neighborhood plan as to being fair, favoring certain groups, not using your office to promote a particular political candidate or a particular political outcome. How strongly are those rules held to? Because I've heard many stories and this goes back perhaps several years to a decade or so where it has been much more problematic to make sure that these rules are being adhered to appropriately. So I don't know, do you have any knowledge or experience on how people have misused these situations or positions? Right. So, the neighborhood plan sets forth sort of a basic series of requirements and they're in the, sort of towards the end of the neighborhood plan because the first part deals with the neighborhood commission office that is the paid staff members of the city. But the neighborhood board members, we are volunteers, so we have to follow certain essential requirements as far as decorum, as far as fairness, certainly public notice going back to what we were saying about the sunshine law. If you breach those, there is a process. Board members can be formally reprimanded or even removed from a neighborhood board. And that is through the neighborhood commission office because that's- Who would bring that up? Who would bring that up? If there was a challenge, if there was a concern, if someone felt that the chair or one of the members of the neighborhood board to this community was abusing their position, who would be the one to bring it up to the neighborhood board commission? You can be any member of the community. And I'm saying community, not a resident. You don't have to necessarily be a resident of the neighborhood board in which this action took place. But if you're a business owner, if you are someone who in some way is established in that community and you're involved in an issue and you feel that there is an unfairness towards you or someone else, you can certainly bring that to the neighborhood commission office. And that's happened. Yeah. And it has happened. And there have been some challenges to that. So we're going to take a quick break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to dive into that a bit more because it's an important challenge, I think, that exists for a lot of community members with regards to the board. So thank you for joining us. Again, this is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, the politics in Hawaii series. Thanks again to our guest, Mr. Dylan Armstrong. And we will see you in one minute. Hi. Aloha. I'm Richard Emory. I'm with co-host Jane Sugimura of Condo Insider, Hawaii's weekly show about association living. The purpose of these videos is to educate board members and condo residents about issues relating to association living. We hope they're helpful and that they assist in resolving problems that affect the relationship between boards and their residents. Each week, Thursday at 3 p.m., we bring you exciting guests, industry experts who for free will share their advice about how to make your association a better place to live and answer a lot of very interesting questions. Aloha. We hope you'll tune in. Thank you. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, politics in Hawaii. In today's episode, we're talking about the neighborhood board system, the role and the impact of the neighborhood board system. So our guest today is one of the neighborhood board members from Manoa, neighborhood board number seven, Mr. Dylan Armstrong. And we were just discussing some of the challenges and if there's an issue or someone is abusing the power a little bit, we're going to stay on that for a brief moment and then we're going to move on to opportunities and other things that we can do within the board system itself. So okay, I've heard over the years there has been a misuse and what people in general, one of the challenges that people have with government is they believe it's corrupt. They believe that there is manipulation in the situation. And it has been suggested and several people who used to be board members have suggested to me somewhat recently for that matter that there was a time, if not currently, there was a time when even the mayor's office would have reached into what was happening in the neighborhood board system. And their particular agenda was pushed through the system more than the community's input. So that being one of the challenges, how do you see that as a way to, I don't know, address the community's interests if it's being utilized or misutilized? Sure. So I guess to get to the first part of what you were asking about, since this is a city and county of Honolulu neighborhood board system, Maui doesn't have this. I'm not sure about all neighbor islands, but certainly this is specific to Oahu. The mayor has the ability to send representatives and in fact does so to every neighborhood board that I follow or have friends run. The mayor sends a representative, the governor sends a representative. The legislators and the council members will either themselves show up or send a representative. That's right. And it's not purely state government or city and county. Sometimes you will get people from various nonprofit groups that are established in the community. As long as the neighborhood board chair is setting a place for them on the agenda, they can come speak. You can ask your neighborhood board chair to speak about whatever, if you have an issue, if you have an organization that's dealing with a community-wide issue, you can have that opportunity, but you have to work with your neighborhood board chair or simply work with a neighborhood board member who will go through the chair. That's knowing that that's available to you. That's one of the things. We'll transition to that. So it's a tough question to answer of uses of the situation, and unfortunately there's been, I think, a history of that. As a neighborhood board member of neighborhood board 14, I am not seeing that in my neighborhood board in any way. So I think that's a positive. It doesn't necessarily happen everywhere, and it isn't necessarily currently happening. So we'll move past that. And let's look at opportunities and what really can be done and how the communities and neighbors can utilize the neighborhood board system. Everything from if there's a concern about your street, about if road work needs to be done, if signs have been knocked down, if telephone poles have been broken or fallen off, anything from that level up to how is the park being utilized? Or is it being misused in some way? Are there crimes that are happening? We get the police department that shows up and gives us their statistics. We get the fire department that comes and shows us their statistics. Board of Water Supply tells us their thoughts. We get a range of information that makes that information available then to the community through the minutes, as well as just open to discussion. Whoever shows up from the community who has questions, from the nonprofit organizations that exist down the line to everyone, everyone is available to say something, to speak about something, to bring up a topic of concern or a question in each of these areas. So that is, I think, an important aspect for everyone to understand. The neighborhood board is there for you to utilize. The neighborhood board is there for you to say, I'm concerned about something in my community, in my neighbor's backyard, perhaps. I'm concerned, how can we address this? And what are some of the rules? And I don't know all the laws. I don't know what the ordinance are. What do we know? How can I address this? That's how, that's really the power that exists there. So how have you seen the community members, the residents themselves, come to your neighborhood board and how has your neighborhood board been able to embrace the community? Yeah, certainly over the years, there have been controversial and news, news attaining stories affecting the neighborhood board system. Paradise Park in Manoa would be one instance, but some of the neighboring neighborhood boards, particularly Moe, Ely McCully, Alamoana, have been involved in mopeds and they actually got involved in actively pursuing legislation to control the noise and the nuisance that people perceived associated with those mopeds. So neighborhood boards can be in and of themselves a vehicle for channeling those community needs and at their best, they're fairly effective at that because this is a volunteer organization. Neighborhood board meetings are what the members themselves put into it. It's not on the neighborhood commission office. It's not on whichever government officials choose to show up. It's on the board to do that. So you get a variety of board members. Are they passionate? Are they interested? Are they curious in the issues? Do they know about the issues in all the different parts of their community? If you go from one end of my neighborhood board jurisdiction to the other, you have very different issues. I mean, sometimes there are similar things with potholes or poorly paved roads or roads in need of repaving, but there are other issues that you would never know about. There was a shooting very close to where I live about a month ago. Only a few blocks away, no one would have heard it and no one did hear it. Those of us who were closer to it thought it was fireworks. So, and that's just the difference of a few blocks. When you have mountain ridges, when you have the freeway, when you have high rises, the neighborhood board provides you an opportunity as a participating member, as a visitor, as a guest, as someone from the community who's observing, you can learn a lot about what's going on. And if you are confused about those laws, then you can ask those elected officials who are there, you can ask those board members. It's a great opportunity when utilized to learn about how your community works at every level. Yeah, I would agree. And I'll make it very clear again, my neighborhood board routinely, every month, we get our legislators to show up. Sometimes it's just the representative, but often it's the legislators. Senator John Oakland has come almost every time. Representative Ono has come almost every time. And they are there to listen and they're there to give a reply. And if they don't have an answer, they will come back the next month with an answer. And they will follow up. And that's an important understanding of the access that you can have just there. So I think that's an important facet. And also council member Fukunaga, in not particularly, she shows up every time and she addresses the concerns. Yeah, and I think an important point to raise would be in the context of the neighborhood board meeting that we have tonight in Manoa. I invited, working with the city and county, I invited the acting director of the city's department of transportation services to come give a presentation on a study that was completed over a year ago. Is this the complete streets? The complete streets, which was a series of studies done island-wide. Which by the way, I'll add into that. That was obviously brought to each neighborhood board. It was brought to our neighborhood board and we went through the process and we got to vote on whether we were going to allow as a community a complete street program on Nuiuwanu, on Ruiha and how that would work. And if we decided we didn't want it, that was going to impact what was done. So there's a relevance there. Yeah, it's important to note that actual governing policy for different agencies and entities uses the neighborhood board system as a means for communicating what is happening to the public. So that's something that I think critics of the neighborhood board system should keep in mind because if you remove a neighborhood board and there are means to do so, you're actually removing a means for even private businesses, non-profits, as well as government to actually disseminate information to the public. As well as hear from the community and make sure that the voices are being heard. Right, so at a very passive level, neighborhood boards kind of function as community forms. You were talking about the monthly salad of reports from various police, fair department, board of water supply, perhaps our board frequently or nearly always has board of water supply, as well as the elected officials. But to be actively engaged as a board member, you can pass resolutions among the board. You can invite departmental heads from state and city agencies to come present what they're doing in your community or what they could be doing in your community and then have the input from the community right there. You've already paid for the space. People already know what time of the month to expect to go to the meeting place. And we get the board online. And we get the agenda mailed to us as well. Right, if you miss the meeting, you can get the minutes mailed to you. You can watch on O'Lello. And that information is on the neighborhood board website. The neighborhood commission staff do a tremendous job of making accurate minutes and making sure that information is available to people. And I'm not sure if all neighborhood boards actually have that arrangement with O'Lello, but many do. And it's a very consistent, I think. Not all do. I think some actually have it live. Some record it. Some don't. We only, and my neighborhood board, we only recently got a microphone system that works. So we used to just be, people would have to talk and we'd have to listen over the fans. So okay, all right. So again, it's the individual board members and it's the community and it's them connecting. And how engaged the board members are and how they bring the issues to the community. For example, our neighborhood board, we actually were able to get next era there to give us their thoughts. And we had point, counterpoint going on with next era in our neighborhood board so that our community can hear directly from them about the concerns and issues in that particular case. So if your neighborhood board is active, if they're engaged, if they're bringing the people to the table that are gonna impact your life, then I say that that's a positive thing that the neighborhood board can be doing. We have to be careful that it's not being misused and we have to be diligent. And that's where we recognize every two years there's an election. So every two years, if we don't like what our neighborhood board has done, you know what? Show up, show up, let us know. Show up, vote someone else in, vote someone out. And that's from the neighborhood board on up to the governor, everybody involved. That's what voting is about. That's what the political system is about. And the neighborhood board is a way to make sure a voice is being heard. So with that, I thank you for joining us. Thank you, Dylan, for joining us. This is a really short show and I know it happens really quickly. So thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, our Politics in Hawaii series. We'll be talking much more about a lot of topics. Next week, we have Chair of the Democratic Party of Hawaii, Tim Vandevere, coming. We're gonna discuss the impacts of the election of November 8th. So we'll see you on November 9th, to learn about that. So thank you, see you then. Thank you again to the entire crew and staff of Think Tech Hawaii and we'll see you next week. Take care.