they may all hold the title of mayor but they each face unique challenges in their respective counties that's been evident as we continue to navigate through the pandemic and while counties lift more restrictions other issues like homelessness affordable housing and crime have never gone away join the discussion with our four county mayors rick blangiardi derek kawakami mitch roth and mike victorino tonight's live broadcast and live stream of insights on pbs hawaii start now aloha and welcome to insights on pbs hawaii i'm yunji de nies hawaii's four county mayors are tasked with the job of solving problems facing their communities the majority of the issues are universal health safety economic recovery from the pandemic homelessness affordable housing over tourism traffic and much more others are county specific like the embattled honolulu rail project and the unknown future of the 30-meter telescope on hawaii island tonight we'll discuss the challenges and choices facing each mayor we look forward to your participation in tonight's show you can email call or tweet your questions and you'll find a live stream of this program at pbshawaii.org and on the pbs hawaii facebook page now to our guest derek kawakami was elected as kauai county's mayor in 2018. prior to that he served in the state legislature and on the kauai county council born and raised on the garden aisle he showed off his dancing cooking and magic skills in a series of social media videos during the pandemic in 2018 mike victorino was elected as mayor of maui county which includes the islands of maui moloka'i lanai and kahoolawe before that he served as a member of the maui county council he met his wife while they both worked at mcdonald's and this year marks their 45th wedding anniversary congratulations mitch roth was elected as hawaii county mayor last november prior to that he served as the county's prosecuting attorney since 2012. he has a bachelor's degree from uh man noah and a law degree from whittier law school between college and law school he taught english in japan where he met his wife and rick blangiardi is in his first term as honolulu mayor he was previously the longtime general manager of hawaii news now he moved to honolulu in 1965 when his dad was transferred to pearl harbor he was a starting linebacker at uh and went on to become a coach and color analyst for the football team welcome all of you fun to add a little color to all of your bios tonight we're so happy to have all of you on we want to start with the big headline of the day and that of course is the covet 19 case count statewide we've got a graphic to illustrate that 243 cases there statewide average going up 185 percent over the last 14 days when you break it down county by county you can see there that hawaii island unfortunately is leading the charge up 251 percent over 14 days followed by honolulu 194 percent maui county 154 percent and kauai at the end they're up 47 those are some startling numbers we want to start with hawaii island mayor roth um your reaction to those numbers tonight yeah you know today was a really bad day we had 50 before it was you know 9 13 20. and still those numbers are not great i think what we're seeing and i think this is on all islands that we're seeing a lot of people who are unvaccinated who are you know coming down with covet i think it's like 98 and that's really scary you know we have a lot of people that took a lot of responsibility and you know got their shots and uh unfortunately we have a ways to go we need to get some people to to get vaccinated on your island do you think it's time to have renewed restrictions i don't believe it's time to have renewed restrictions um yet um i think you know we really need to get the word out which we've been doing we've been doing testing again and we need to get people to get vaccinated mayor blangiardi i want to go with you you are next on that list when we look at the rising in case counts i actually looked up the previous administration's uh tier system and under the prior administration's tier system we would have been in tier two by now do you think it's time to scale back some of the openings that you've done i'm not prepared to do that i mean today was alarming the numbers have been rising uh we think we had 146 cases on oahu today so that's of concern but yeah i come right back to the fact that on those eligible for vaccinations on oahu 72 percent of our population has been fully vaccinated and you know we've got 61 from the state of statewide uh or including our kids but you know so we have 135 000 youth right now that are not eligible for vaccinations this has been a tremendous effort by this community this island to respond accordingly and appropriately if you will to the prevalence of the disease so at this point right now i have no interest in rolling back unless we get ordered to do that and i don't tend to do that and i tend to argue that point is there a benchmark if you will you know under the previous administration i know that you didn't necessarily agree with that tier system because it didn't account for the vaccine which of course is a variable that we didn't have when that was created but you know with that system there were parameters that the public could follow they knew that okay we get to a certain case count and there will be certain consequences is there a number for you will if you will you know if we get consistently 200 cases a day on oahu i mean what is the level that actually will make you want to turn back to restrictions or is there no level well let's be clear first of all the department of health is really the guiding light in this whole deal and we take our direction from them at the end of the day but at the same time um you know my biggest concern right now quite honestly is the vulnerability of our kids because we're not seeing kids getting sick getting sick they're here for we thought they were somewhat immune if you will are protected from the disease but we have adults refusing to get vaccinated we're now beginning to get kids sick i want to watch that we'll look for the incidents but i'm not tied to a certain number yunji you know part of this whole effort right now what we've been going through is about our own economic recovery and to roll back anything has dire consequences so i want to be really careful about what we're doing in the broader definition of public health which is beyond case counts of unvaccinated people mayor victorino let's go to you the the emir blanchiardi did mention children and i want to point out that 66 of that 243 were under the age of 18. that's 27 of the cases today uh 18 and under i should say the department of health doesn't actually suss out the different levels there so some of those uh were eligible for vaccination but the vast majority not what is your take on the numbers tonight well let's start with these those who are not able to get vaccinated the lower age groups from 0 to 11. you know i'm very concerned that adults have been negligible and not getting vaccinated and now are spreading amongst the children which then spread amongst other children and that's with school reopening on august 3rd it is very concerning for my community about going back to school yet i am encouraging and really wanting to see them to go back see the children go back to school to have in-class uh in-person classes for us here we've had this and we've had bigger numbers before we've been able to weather the storms by keeping a steady pace as far as vaccinations and as well as testing also our hospital and our medical facilities are not being taxed at this time we monitor that very closely that is my real gauge if we over capacitize or over capacity as far as our uh hospital is concerned and we get where there is a real challenge in the field our facility our medical facility then i would then look at rolling back but at this point i have no no need to go back as far as where we're at at this very moment mariko kami you were very well known for having some of the strictest restrictions during the height of the pandemic are you inclined to go back to some of those given the numbers that we're seeing you know 47 percent increase compared to the other counties it's not as bad but it's still significant yeah it is so significant and we're not looking at rolling back or adding any more restrictions you know the whole reason why we took a very conservative approach it was to get our vulnerable population and workers vaccinated and we were able to do that the people that are becoming sick have chosen not to take the vaccine or are too young and that is our biggest concern the keiki but we're looking at hospitalizations i really think that we have to learn how to coexist and this is part of coexisting with a virus but i would like to say that for anybody that hasn't gotten a vaccination there's many vaccines available it's very convenient if you want more information reach out i took one my whole family took one and um that is the best path forward i want to ask each of you and we'll sort of go in the reverse order mayor kawakami i'll stick with you you know on this whole vaccination point the state has sort of taken um you know a carrot approach versus a carrot and a stick approach saying okay we'll do a giveaway we'll make things widely available we'll try to make this as easy as possible but we are at sort of a standstill now where the the numbers are more of a trickle than a flood that we saw right at the beginning do you think that there is you know a more aggressive approach that should be taken for example as a as a county you know in your role would you ever mandate that county employees have vaccinations is there some other approach that you think is appropriate to try to push this you know yunji i think the bigger issue is um it boils down to trust when i talk to people about why they're hesitant a lot of it boils down to trust and there's no quick and easy answer to to fix that you know i got involved in politics because i didn't agree with it i didn't trust it and i said so i'm gonna get involved and make some changes and now that i'm here i realize that it is a very very hard thing to do on a government level even on a personal level so no i don't think there's a quick fix what i do hope and wish for is that the federal government would move to fully authorize this vaccine i mean so many people have taken it it's proven to be effective what are we waiting for and that's a question that i have not seen an answer for mayor victorino what are your thoughts on mandating vaccine for county workers if and when the vaccine is fully authorized well i believe that when you're looking at vaccinations even if it is fully authorized by the fda to ask someone or to mandate that everyone had to do it there are particular cases where either by being allergic to it or other health issues prohibits that and to mandate it would force people to maybe sometimes do something they shouldn't do i think trust is very important knowing that you're taking care of yourself and your family is really the mantra that i've been working on for the last five or six months because when you protect those you protect your community at large so it's very difficult but i think what i find too is a lot of false information out there on social media and other means that have made people become afraid of taking or getting getting vaccinated and that has caused another real dichotomy that none of us really thought would happen uh so overall even though my account is the lowest percentage-wise of vaccinated population not total by total population i still believe we have a good chance of getting them like what mr uh with uh mayor carl comey said once the fda fully approves it i think then you'll see a surge and an uptick in that respect why do you think that maui county has that specific challenge why do you think it's been so hard to convince people to get the shot particularly in maui well i think maui is a very different community you have a lot of uh people who live in certain areas uh that think differently that have come come to live here have brought their ways of life because they didn't like it where they were and they felt they could do it here and that's really changed really the whole aspect and and local style that we've saw used to do and so it's become a real challenge to convince people that when you get vaccinated or when you do anything it's not just for yourself it's for the community and your family at large and so that's the challenge we face but it's not a challenge that's insurmountable and i really positive that we can make a difference by just continuously working together mayor blangiardi your thoughts on mandatory vaccinations and if not that how do we move the needle on this well the um the case counts have come up a little bit among our county workers but it's still not a significant number and i don't believe philosophically that i would mandate we're going to do everything we can to encourage i think the two things have been touched upon here could hopefully trigger i think fda approval is going to be important at least some of the people i've talked to who still have this fear about being vaccinated that seems to be uh something that they're anticipating or looking forward to or maybe perhaps waiting and the other thing is i think i do think if in fact we can start vaccinating kids five to twelve that we'll see we'll see an uptick there we'll see a surge there for parents who want to protect their kids especially now we see kids getting sick and so within that like case in point on our island roughly 135 000 uh kids under the age of 12 if we were you know i don't know how many zero to five but if we were to get you know half of that many vaccinated uh that would be tremendous and that's just at half and i would anticipate maybe we'd see even more so it's sort of like that right now the one thing i will say uh is as i've gotten older i've learned that people fear differently i've had conversations with people who just refuse to get to get the drug take the vaccine even though they have evidence that it's safe they know it but they just can't get there and i don't even know how to reach them so it's going to take that i think our kids getting sick is going to motivate some adults because i think this is the first time we've been confronted with this situation where it's become very real mayor roth i'd like to get your thoughts on mandatory vaccinations you know it's not under your purview because this is the state system of prisons but we know that there's been a tremendous outbreak unfortunately in hilo at the prison system there um you know a worker like that in a jail system that is a front-facing uh worker that is interacting very closely with others you know is it appropriate ever to have mandatory vaccinations and if not that how do you convince people to take the shot yeah you know i have a real problem uh philosophically as well as mandating people i think there's some constitutional issues that that come into play there um so the question is is really how do you get these people to do it and i think one of the things that has been talked about is the fda coming out and saying yeah this is this is safe um and fully backing it um we've been working on all all four of us have been working on different kinds of things media going out and having other kinds of things we're looking at doing a backs concert um it's really difficult um when there's a lot of information that's really just false information out there um to to change people's minds sometimes but i kind of think of the um a bit like a parent saying i'm not going to feed my kids because you know sometimes kids can choke it doesn't make sense um you know oh they can have allergies but you know if you don't feed them they're going to die so you know the same thing with vaccines you know you don't have the vaccine you're probably going to get sick or you may get sick and if you get sick you're more likely to get very ill i want to move on to another topic we've got a number of questions here and we appreciate those of you who are calling and writing and please do continue to voice your opinions here i've got two for mayor victorino but i think this is something that applies to all of you and that is on this concept of over tourism uh kahealani on maui says mayor victorino why aren't you putting a cap on maui tourist and wilfred in kahului says when are you going to start listening to your residents and do something about over tourism we know that you have spoken out and said you know we want fewer airplanes what can you do on this issue because it does feel on ivy all the islands but particularly on yours that this is reaching a boiling point well i thank you for that question because here in my county we have had such a great uptick in returning visitor that it's made it very difficult on our resources our infrastructure the road to hana has been impacted tremendously our hospital i mean our hospital our hotels and other areas are really being taxed there is no way you can control tourism this is the united states of america and if somebody wants to come they can come all of us face that mean that fact i've asked for reduced air lifts and to some some minor success we've had that um and really one of the things i keep reminding everyone that right now the reason this pented up surge is occurring is because there is no place else to go many of the other resorts areas throughout the resort destinations throughout the world are closed at this time europe asia look at even japan they have the olympics and they're not even opening up to anybody from the outside so there is a real challenge we face in that respect we all have we are working on different aspects to reduce the number of visitors coming or reservations with our parks with our you know various attractions and various landmarks so that we can have better control on the crowds that go there and the times they go there so we're working on reservation systems and being able to really curb the amount of tourists but there's a lot of people that are very thankful that we have the visitors back because they're now able to get back to work and get some normalcy in their families because they're able to provide for their families not only in the resorts but many ancillary and small mom-and-pop um businesses are being are the benefactors of the the tourists that are visiting us the hospitality industry has been gracious so it's a it's a mixed bag you know those who complain i understand and you know you got used to having the beaches and having the roadways and having everything the way it used to be well we've got to try to work to manage our tourism and we're working on that right at this very moment we i speak you know mayor blanchiardi when we think about tourism we're not at the levels that we were pre-pandemic and yet people really do feel choked in some instances are you comfortable with the number with the level of arrivals right now and what do we do uh with with this animosity that seems to be growing in certain sectors of our community toward the visitors well you know since we've come in we've been looking at how our city could help with managing tourism as a concept and the clear the clear call for us has to do with illegal vacation rentals so if you look at the 2019 model we had 10 and a half million visitors if you talk to the hoteliers they'll tell you statewide on an annual basis we can handle seven and a half million people so in reality we had three million people in illegal vacation models it's been a huge issue on this island as it is i believe on certainly on maui as well so we've gone to work on that product and project because right now in the short term as many victorinor just said we're the only place to go people have saved up money they've been cooped up we're getting this influx of visitors but i'm looking at it more from a long-term strategy and we're very close to rolling out our plans which we think is really going to mitigate illegal vacation rental it's going to be very difficult people who own properties are not going to be happy about that that have been using them as illegal vacation rentals but we think we've developed a good plan and we're just about ready to swing into action it's going to take us a few more months i've been meeting regularly with the hotel industry and they're very much improv approval and support and our city council is also in favor and support of what we want to do so we've got to change some tax laws fundamentally and i'll just leave it at that but we're going to be very aggressive because we think we need to help manage tourism for so long people talked about marketing tourism and you know whether or not hawaii was being competitive in this new global arena of people traveling with money availability of all kinds of places now we're dealing with the fact we've got too many people so what can we do about that and we've also taken one other step what we did with hanauma bay and what we're going to do in a couple of other places with impact fees with respect to the prices to get in at the same time keeping them free for local people we think will also have some benefit and some effect you know i think a lot of people will be very interested and i know you just offered us a preview but if you could give us more specifics on that crackdown that you're talking about one of the issues has been that while laws may have been passed the enforcement simply wasn't there will this be different yes it will be and that's about as far as i'm going to go on tonight's show but i you know invite me back some other time but uh yeah no that's the whole idea is how do you enforce candidly our enforcement measures of the past have been a joke which is why it didn't happen you can't have a couple of guys not going to endure seeing who's home so they could talk to the person who owns the vacation rental that just doesn't work so we we we have looked at this and examined it very hard even before we started receiving tourists so we're taking a long-term approach to this i'm going to say it again a lot of people have speculated what's the number you know if tourists that hawaii could handle and maybe do so well and safely and and help them from a health standpoint seven and a half to eight million a year probably unless they start building new hotel rooms and we want to help manage down to that number mayor kawakami what's your take on this overtourism tension that we continue to see throughout the islands and i'd imagine on yours as well yeah i think the issue is exacerbated by the fact that we didn't have an acclimation period you know i equate it to buying a new fish for your aquarium you know you don't just go home and throw that fish in you let them float in the bag let it get used to its environment and i don't think anybody had anticipated how quickly uh tourism would would roar back and it did and um i will tell you though every segment of our community has a vested interest in striking the right balance the state of hawaii does the county of kauai does and the visitor industry does because if we cannot maintain a good experience for everybody those visitors are not going to come back so we're looking at changing systems and processes from within looking at transportation systems to take visitors off the road create incentives for visitors to take other forms of transportation such as shuttles we're working with the private industry we're looking at parking fees at our beach parks i'm looking at you know i'm looking at raising the fees for camping for non-residents because i'm not necessarily trying to market kauai as a camping destination i want them to stay in our hotel resorts our timeshares and our bonafide legal vacation rentals and we were very proactive as a county to actually regulate strictly enforce on the illegal tbrs and you know recently we're able to shake hands with airbnb the expedia's the third-party platforms of the world to tell them look work with us like market the units that are legal that's all we're asking you to do they've been great partners they are what we consider great companies to work with and um that is going to help us move forward with striking that right balance but it's going to be a big challenge and you know our businesses right now that have had to make sacrifices they're they're getting their workers back um they are able to increase their customer count and um you know there's a saying you got to go fishing when the fish is biting so for those companies that are dependent on the visitor industry um you know they are seeing a good return on economy and we should look at this issue as a glass half full and i i say we've got to continue to work on striking that right balance mayor roth what are your thoughts on some of the user impact fees that mayor kawakami is talking about you know on hawaii island having shuttle services like the ones that we've seen on maui and kauai they're a little bit harder to do just because you're covering quite a bit of ground uh the distance from let's say the the airport in kona all the way up the kohala coast not all the shuttles want to go that far but what do you think is the key for that would it be more user impact fees how do we deal with this over tourism issue on an island as big as yours well you know i think there's there's no one silver bullet for this i think there's a whole bunch of things that we need to look at and all of our islands are working on justice what they call destination management plans or d maps and uh you know some of the things that we're looking at in addition to what's already been mentioned is maybe taking some areas and closing them down to taurus for certain periods of time um you know for a month or so let those you know um places kind of regain what they have and cool down for a little bit and then open them up at certain periods and close them down at certain periods but i think you know we have to realize and mayor victorino brought this up that we're seeing something at this time that is only probably a temporary situation people have no place else to go they've been pent up so we're seeing big numbers now those numbers will probably change when other destinations open up and you know we have to make sure that we're taking care of the people who have been struggling we got a lot of people who you know were in the lines i think each island saw this the food banks were doing a lot of feeding and so it's important to get people back to work in safe environments and that's really what we've been looking at at this time one of the things affecting all four counties is the tussle that we saw between the governor's office and the state legislature when it came to the transient accommodation tax that of course now is punted back to the counties uh each county now has to establish their own tax rate i'd like to get an update from each of you on where you're standing in on that and we know that it can be up to three percent first of all um do each of you have the mechanism to collect the tax what will that tax look like and what are your concerns about how that might affect kama aina mayor plan giardia let's start with you well we took a position in favor of bill 862. after our discussions with the legislature quite honestly we felt it was fair to complete the if the governor had vetoed it they were going to override and that's exactly what played out we haven't come to a determination yet right now as to when we were enforced we met last week with isaac troy we now as a city and county have an opportunity to develop a second revenue stream along with property taxes there's a lot of benefit to that there's a lot of strategy to that uh we're putting the final stages together on that but knowing that we have now the ability to tax we're just going to proceed with that going forward that's one of the things that made really clear to the hotel industry much to their chagrin but the quid pro quo was our our promise to deliver on cracking down on illegal vacation rentals so we go forward mayor victorino have you settled on a tax rate we're working with the county councilor at this very moment uh we've introduced our plan and uh the vice chair of the council has also put in a ordinance to uh collect uh this uh real property i mean this uh t-a-t um the the transit accommodation tax for my county will be based upon the accommodations that are throughout the county and for some islands there's very little accommodation in others there's much more some of the challenges we face is you know the state is not going to collect this so we also have checked with the state tax department and they will assist us with the the the documentation on what their revenue stream coming from the various particular properties on each county and then we can then base our revenue off of that and we have our finance department our scott tabula and his people right now finalizing the plan and how collections when collections can start and how this money will be distributed based upon the usage between our hospitality and usage for our residents when it comes to housing and other areas where residents are so in dire need of help so we we're real close to putting something together and following the lead of the rest of the mirrors we're looking at three percent but you know that's not in stone right now but i think that's where most of us will start and move from there as far as how we can utilize this uh tit from the county's point of view and and mayor kawakami same question will you go to the full three percent and do you have the mechanism to collect that money if and when you decide to start charging it i think as far as a mechanism to collect we're all in the same boat all four mayors were sort of scratching our head as to why they just didn't write the bill to allow the state to collect it charges an administrative fee and um why create redundancies it's it's government waste um we already have a system to be able to collect it just why reinvent the wheel but yeah i'm gonna have to take the full three percent and that's just to break even when we pencil out how many services we provide to the state as far as sports facilities for our state schools when we take a look at the amount of rescues our ocean safety has to do for visitors the amount of rescues that we're flying our county helicopter to pull out visitors on state parks you know just to to make up that gap and continue to provide those services we would have to take the three percent and let's not forget that the american rescue plan money coming in from the federal government over the next two years it doesn't even cover um the loss of t.a.t to the colony of koi so i'm surely hoping that perhaps next session the legislature can make amendments and perhaps make the collection uh simplified um but we'll just have to wait and see but the way i'm looking at it when we pencil things out it looks like we would have to take the three percent it's not something we're excited about but it's just a financial reality to continue to provide services mayor roth i would imagine that given the number of hotels on your island versus mayor blanchiardi's island you're facing a similar challenge where to make up that money to what was taken away you're going to have to get to that three percent yeah i think that's that's pretty much true and you know unfortunately at this point none of us have a mechanism to to collect this i know that all of our finance directors are having this conversation and you know that three percent is assuming that we're doing um the same amount of tourists that we're doing now um and like you said earlier you know right now we have a lot of people coming but when there's other destinations that are opening up that three percent may um price us out of a market to even get close to to what we need so it's it's kind of a scary thing and uh mayor kawakami is right they're gonna have to make changes at the legislature for this for this tax to work for the counties you know one of the things that we were told by some of our legislators was that the state could collect it and unfortunately the way they wrote the law it's illegal for them to collect our taxes at this point i want to get to some questions here we talk about affordable housing on this program as long as i've been hosting it we've been talking about affordable housing and probably long before that uh marissa in inaloa has a question for you mayor roth he says with people from the mainland willing to buy home sight unseen for more than local residents can afford how can residents ever hope to stay and live here we have seen a real estate boom across the state um and and what would you say to marissa in inaudible tonight you know we've been focusing on affordable housing projects and making sure that those projects are you know affordable housing for local people where they're not going to be able to buy unless they earn a certain amount and under and they're actually from here so we've been working on several projects we just got one that was kind of stuck for a while and we we unstuck it and they're starting to move and we're looking at about 450 housing units opening in the next couple of years for this one project we're trying to work with some other uh developers and uh really put some initiatives together where we're looking at those people that just aren't earning as you know um as much as some of these people coming in from the mainland uh mayor blanchiarty akin kaimuki says what can you do at the county level to reduce the cost of living for families it's a similar question you know all these questions really tie back to housing i'm sorry it always goes back to housing as being the primary cause and candidly speaking yunji i think we were talking about affordable housing before you were even born much less since you could remember uh and that's one of the things that we came in here our top three had to do with homelessness the rail and affordable housing so actually tonight after the show i'm meeting with some out of town developers who have been in town this week we've met with local developers and our first piece of legislation we put through bill 1 which was the rendition of fuel and iteration of bill 7 had been signed into law two years ago as a pilot program that would nowhere is now beginning to get some traction so look it's about cost of land it's about you know being able to build at a reasonable cost understanding you know the ami what people are actually earning and being able to provide housing you may end up in more micro units than we like and different kinds of models but at the end of the day that's a big initiative for us and it just takes a while to get it going so that's what we're gonna pretty much do you know look we're in for an inflationary period everybody knows that with all the federal government money we've all seen at the grocery store or our supermarkets we're sitting at the gas station we're seeing in other places that's going to remain probably pretty hot for a while the one thing i think we can do and we can attack here is the cost of housing maybe in many cases rental but government historically has not been very good at that and we've made this a very special project for us i wish i could give you more specifics on what we're about to do but we are all over that and i'm really confident uh with some of the things we've been able to do at dpp and some of the people we've been dealing with and what we're looking to do that we're going to make a big improvement there it's going to take a while we're going to make a big improvement you know mayor victorino building on on what mayor blanchiardi was saying about the increasing cost of everything rent on your island was very high before the pandemic notoriously so people going on to craigslist and other sites to find an apartment and it would be gone you know same day and i'd imagine that it's only gotten worse we have the eviction moratorium ending in august are you concerned about a number of people perhaps finding themselves houseless or in dire straits when that happens on your island well we took a proactive approach from the beginning as far as assisting with rents throughout the county of maui and rental assistance but with the cares act from county funding and now um the special rental assistance that all of our companies have received i asked for 40 million and i'm probably able to use 15 or 20. so it's shown me that we are not as in in that dire street as far as rents and people behind in their rents uh to date we've given out almost six million dollars uh over the last two and a half months but i was expecting a lot larger number what i'm finding is mortgage and people that are behind on their mortgages which is now being looked at from our point of view and the other aspect is the council has just put together a 300 000 study on on housing and what needs to be done and we all knew this but i think they've confirmed that infrastructure to these particular affordable rentals and attainable housing is really really the big barrier because it has such a tremendous amount of cost by having the developers do that so we have money set to set aside with our affordable housing fund to do a lot of the infrastructure so that we can when we have these lands available i have somewhere about 750 to about a thousand units that could get started all in the next six months to a year with uh uh the amount of uh funding that's available to put the infrastructure in and the land that's available we could start moving on that very quickly and like like um mayor blanchiardi said we've been on it from from day one really doing the pandemic kind of let it slide a little but we're back on it's a hot topic in this community and we need to move and move quite expensive quite quickly to make sure we get this done to make sure our workforce and our residents are able to live here and raise their families here mayor kawakami this is certainly a problem on your island too affordability we've been talking about it for some time are you concerned about the eviction moratorium ending uh in in early august and what steps are you taking to make sure that people don't end up in in a difficult circumstance you know i think we all are and i think we're all facing the same challenge you know we continue to talk and communicate about the rental assistance programs about utility relief that kiuc provides and um and it's slow and i really don't know why it's moving so slow i'm hoping that people are not going to wait until the last minute to try to flood the system because we've seen what happens when that happens but you know we're taking approach and it boils down to housing i think the one common denominator that you've heard in these series of questions um is housing housing housing and you know i think the counties are held captive by policies that sound great but don't pencil out and i'm talking about housing policies that are known as inclusionary zoning you know i want to thank our county council they took a very courageous approach to revamp our housing policy that's something more workable but when if we're serious about housing we need to be serious about housing and right now we're looking at underutilized assets we have a project kealale and we worked at the state to get a state parcel former park property that was underutilized already had existing infrastructure and if you can lower the cost of goods sold these developers can sell the product at a lower cost and that's really how it pencils out economically and so if we want to take a look at taking the land costs and infrastructure costs create these public-private partnerships we really feel that on koi that is the path forward to creating housing opportunities for our people and that's the approach you're taking you know g i'd like to say something if i may because i'm so proud of my team uh and i think that this deserves being said we were granted 114 million dollars initially from the state federal government and state for rent utility relief that number is now looks like it's going to be a minimum of 180 million and we weren't about the task of trying to figure out you know how to distribute that money as efficiently and as equitably as we possibly could we looked at the mistakes that were made a year ago about the denigrating prior administrations but in the early stages of the karzak money we have now exhausted all of our federal uh federal monies we're now into our state monies we are along with catholic charities and the council for native hawaiian advancement we've been giving out nearly a million dollars a day and we'll continue to do that nearly a million dollars a day so i got a briefing this morning from our own corporate council about anticipated levels of you know evictions when it's lifted and i think we've got that down to a manageable number hopefully it probably will be in the hundreds not in the thousands i don't think some of this will be unemployed it's unavoidable but at the end of the day that's something i'm really proud of and in fact because the federal government tracks this honolulu has been ranked the number one city in the country in the country for doing it and for me on behalf of my team i'm really proud of that because we saw a real need on something we could do and they jumped all over it and they've done it they've done it extremely well and i just i want to say that from reassurance to anybody living on this island as well i want to stick with you for a second because we've got a number of questions coming in tonight for uh you mayor blanchiardi when it comes to hpd you know we have an interim chief right now of course you don't get to choose the chief the police commission does but we are in a state of transition at the police department if you will we of course have three hpd officers charged with the shooting death of a 16 year old on the one hand do you think that our police department needs to be reformed and and i want to also bring in amy's question from kailua she says what is your plan to strengthen hpd so sort of two different questions about the same issue well it's a good question first of all we have 289 vacancies in hpd we actually have 550 550 between hpd and the fire department except the fire department has people in queue we are in the recruiting mode for the for the police department so um the question of leadership is a big one right now interim chief vanek and myself are working very well but as everybody knows the commission's received applications they have yet to vet them i don't know who the finalists will be so under the interim circumstance though he's doing everything we possibly can so we've now engaged with steve ahn prosecutor we've re-instituted the wheaton c program we're going to be doing that pretty aggressively we've also as it was recently reported in fact in today's paper we're going to finally got a decent break and a decent article about the police work we've now begun to do on a 24 7 basis in chinatown so look i i come from a place in an understanding in my years of being in broadcast in news and understanding communities people feeling safe is first and foremost it's not just necessarily in a pocket like chinatown across the board and not just because i got the shop or endorsement but i really do believe in having a strong police department to be something in support of this community so people can feel good and safe mayor roth i want to ask you about 30 meter telescope we know that that construction is not going on right now but if and when it does start up again certainly there will be more protests on the mountain how do you plan to address that situation if it does come to pass well you know first off i i think the community and tmt has been working a little bit better together um but both the ki and the uh and people in the telescope community the astronomy community have been talking i i don't think i'll take the same role as mayor kim had taken this is really a state issue we will take a leadership role but it'll be a different role than was taken in the past mayor kawakami we have all these specific questions for each of you i want to ask you about your police chief under fire a number of months ago for allegedly mocking asian americans you stood by him when some others called for his resignation tell us about your thought process on that well you know it was in poor taste and um you know quite frankly i don't know what he was thinking when he made those comments but you know i've been able to work with him i think he he gets it and so uh we've moved past that situation and we're all focusing on making sure we take care of this community so you know for asian americans japanese americans it's gonna sting and it takes time and that's the bottom line it boils down to you know time heals i think he understands that i think the asian community understands that but i'm a mayor that has to work with everybody for the best of kauai and i cannot let those type of things slow us down because we have so much things to do so we've moved past that issue and i know it hurts um but i think he understands mayor victorino casey on facebook wants to know what happens when all the choke international tourists come back and do you really think that aggressive airlines like southwest and others will cut back on their flights well first of all maui county has never been really uh a high destination for the foreign visitors first of all because we're not an international destination uh many of our international travelers have to travel inter island and so we've never had a big dependency on the international tourists that are coming most of them go to oahu and the big island not so much to maui county and so i don't think it will be a major impact once the international markets open up although i do admit it does help they spend more they're more courteous especially our japanese visitors you know there are a lot of reasons why i enjoy them and as far as other aspects of our hospitality industry at this time again we're working on many plans as all of the mayors are and i'm very confident that working with the hospitality industry the stakeholders our kanaka and all other uh parts of our community we will come and become more resilient resilient and our economy will be diversified with technology and wellness and other areas that i believe really needs to be spoken about and not the dependency on the hospitality industry you know an issue on all the islands but particularly on hawaii island is trash mayor roth when you were running you talked about wanting to be more green on the island we know that the landfill issue is definitely one on both sides of the island can you tell us what progress you've made on that well you know one of the great things that we've done in the first 100 days we held a sustainability summit and we brought in about 2 300 people who registered and it's on the leo tv sister station uh but they've had about 17 000 views we took 14 different uh topics one of which of course is dealing with recycling and environmental management and so we're looking at different options coming out of that but we're starting to get people together communicating with each other and hopefully we'll have some really good plans coming out soon we have some real issues not just just with solid waste but probably our biggest issues uh are in waste water and you know that one topic alone is probably two billion dollars which is three times more than you know the county budget for a year that we need to look at and i know maui's got some similar issues honolulu went through some similar issues with that and so you know we're looking for solutions well given the scope of the problem i mean when you talk about needing that kind of money where do you even begin well you know one of the things that we've looked at at the legislature and we're going to come back to the legislature is public-private partnerships we have on our island some private endeavors doing wastewater that do a great job and they can do it economically uh pretty well and then we have some of our infrastructure on the big island that you know needs a lot of repairs we're looking at epa and so we've made a lot of progress i'd like to say probably more progress in the last six months than we did in the last 20 years in this area mayor blangiardi jeff wants to know he sent us an email honolulu county property tax is extremely low relative to other states why not raise property tax on non-resident owners and buyers to discourage investors and give residents a chance to buy that's a good question we're looking at that i promise we wouldn't raise property taxes on local investors but there's some properties in situations we've taken that into account we've been a little bit slow during this pandemic to necessarily pull the trigger on that but i think that there's a real possibility that we're going to look at certain kinds of properties owned by offshore investors and change the tax code and i wonder what you would say to the question that we posed to mayor victorino about the international visitors because honolulu obviously is an international destination uh what do you how do we balance that because when we have this rush of folks coming that is not a county for all the international visitors yeah that's about 43 percent of the market on oahu when it's at full bloom i go back to um you know what we're going to do with illegal vacation rentals in our efforts to help manage tourism and that's going to be the crux of it now how many international visitors are staying in late illegal vacation units i don't know many of them tend to want to go to the hotels um but we're going to sort that out and do the best we can look tourism is our economic engine and we're doing everything else in every other sector that we possibly can to stimulate to grow different businesses and do whatever we may but at the end of the day you know we just don't want to be overrun and we're going to try to handle that to the best of our ability and just quite hopefully within the context of that we'll be able to manage our asian business as well but it's a key part of our of our economy and we welcome it back we look forward to having our asian visitors come back i want to give each of you about a minute to share a final thought with us tonight the hour goes so fast we could spend another with you frankly um but i want to get your take we're in a very strange position right now where we're not really in the post-pandemic era those numbers today certainly were a slap in the face to a lot of us who were hoping that things were getting better what is your outlook on where we're headed right now and what are your concerns going forward what's your final message to our audience tonight mayor kawakami we'll start with you well i'm always optimistic and i do believe we're heading in the right direction more and more people are getting vaccinated they're getting their first shot they're becoming fully vaccinated and um but we got some work to do you know when all the dust has settled and we move forward we're gonna have to learn what worked what didn't work how we can rebuild trust how we can strengthen our health care system how we can take a proactive approach towards health care versus a reactive approach because we see what it looks like when our vulnerable population is at risk we're not going to forget them we're going to rally and protect them but we all have a personal responsibility i think to take care of our health after all the dust is settled we better have learned from this mayor victorino your thoughts about where where we are and where we're heading well for my county and i think much of the state at this time we're still in a very good place however we need to continue to i like like derek mentioned about vaccinations and really bringing in a better lifestyle a healthier lifestyle what i've talked about wellness and being able to have an industry called wellness here which already has started with larry allison on lanai with sensei and some of how he produces food how he takes care of his visitors the wellness when people come in to come become well or to get well or to stay well i think that also transparent transfers over to the general public and to our residents and a healthy community we are taking care of healthy people or getting people healthy will really blossom and that's where maui county i believe is one of our major steps agriculture is our second major move that uh we want to produce enough food to be sustainable not only for our county but to provide it for the rest of the state just like mr ellison is doing his food is now being produced and served all over the state of hawaii and i think we can like the big guy we have enough land to do something like that to be able to be leaders in the food industry especially when you're talking healthy viable food okay and mayor roth your thoughts you know i think we're in a pretty good place we had a tough day today but all in all i'd rather be living in hawaii than any place else in the world we have the greatest people um and you know they do rally together when things happen so you know even though we had a tough day i think we're in a much better place than other places i think with what we're seeing not only in tourism but thinking about sustainable energy agriculture there's so many great things that we have going for us and if we just do what mayor calicomi said learn the lessons move on we're going to be fine in the future and mayor blandryarty we have about a minute left we'll give you the last word tonight all right well i'll try to talk quick i want to echo what mayor kawakami said today i'm very optimistic i'm energized i'm excited about the road ahead you know we brought in more than 40 senior leaders both as directors and deputy directors to augment some of the ones we retain this team of people we have is terrific you know we had to put we had 60 days to put together a four billion dollar budget and it passed city council for the first time in the first round unanimously we had bond ratings this past week we did well with that not as i would have liked to move us to triple a but our bond sales yesterday went well the city of honolulu is in better shape than we thought i'd thank the people paying property taxes i think the people once again 72 percent of our island of those eligible to be vaccinated have become vaccinated so you know look there's a lot of good stuff ahead this is i echo what mayor rochester said the best place in the world to live i'm so blessed that my life has taken me here i know you know i wasn't fortunate enough to be born here i love it here and this is a chapter in our lives we're gonna we're gonna make something good happen having stepped in the midst of this pandemic out of that adversity we're gonna do great stuff going out going forward thank you so much for joining us tonight of course we thank our guests hawaii county mayor derek kawakami maui county mayor mike victorino honolulu mayor rick blangiardi and hawaii county mayor mitch roth next week on insights it's an issue that will take enormous effort to solve homelessness we'll hear from state county and community advocates on what can be done to end this crisis please do join us then i'm yunji de nies for insights on pbs hawaii aloha you