#thomassquare

And of course [chronic homelessness] is having a huge negative impact in Wai‘anae, Chinatown and Waikiki. We don’t want to negatively impact tourism.

How do we deal with the problem? First step is address the chronic homeless and we have the Housing First model which you know about, you wrote a good article on that (“Derelict Downtown,” Honolulu Weekly, May 15, 2013). That was very thorough and detailed, I liked that. We’re going to work on that.

And we’re also going to have some compassionate disruption here, some people think that it’s heartless, but there’s reason for it, based on our working with the providers. If we allow it to be convenient for people to sleep on the sidewalks and camp on the sidewalks, they’ll continue to do so. What we need is some disruption here in a compassionate way so they’ll move into shelters. Where they get the treatment they need, where it is safer than sleeping with your family on the streets where all kinds of bad things can happen.

They can get help to get permanent housing for long term. The tragic thing is that, on almost on any given night, there’s space in shelters. For example, Bill 7 that I signed into law, we’re working on the rules, I will use that enforcement tool to make it less convenient to sleep on sidewalks and at the same time, providers will use that enforcement mechanism to get people into shelters.

In terms of the sidewalks bill, I know this is a hot topic: Thomas square park and the deOccupy people. They are very upset that the planters were already there without their input. What was behind the decision to put the planters there?

This entire effort is to trying to create that area as a cultural arts district for the city of Honolulu. On the mauka side you have Honolulu Museum of Art, it has a world class collection [of] ancient, Impressionist and modern art. Then you have Linekona, where so many kids go to get art lessons during the weekends and evenings. Then you have the Blaisdell Center on the makai side.

And right smack in the middle, there’s Thomas Square, which is really a beautiful park. It’s actually pretty darn nice, there’s a great fountain and banyan trees that surround it. And as you know , it was where Kamehameha III was restored and where after a huge luau he went down to Kawaiahao church and uttered, “Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono,” which means the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness, the motto of the Kingdom and now the State.

And so the whole initiative is based on the cultural arts district, it’s about showing respect to this very special place, as the oldest park on the state of Hawai‘i. It’s the first one, as far as we know.

How do we show greater respect for this place? We have reached out to the community and will continue to do so to get their input.  And part of the beautification process was putting up these planters. Long term, we’d like to see art. But there’s a process of doing that, the type of art has to be something that you can’t damage, that wouldn’t cause any risk or liability. Could be sculpture, both along the sidewalk, you go to the Luxembourg Park in Paris, every summer the art moves and changes every time. Something like that.

But we’re not going to do it from top down, but reach out to the community. We’ll be looking for more input from all sides of the community.

In March, you said we don’t need any more landfills thanks to current technology. The Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill at Kahe Point is still around, how are things progressing since then?

I believe that any modern society does not need any landfills used today. You can look at countries like Germany that are eliminating landfills altogether. The good news is that we’ve made a lot of progress. I think our city is actually one of the leaders in the nation in terms of the amount of garbage we generate on our island; think about it, it’s just one island and it’s not like we’re trucking it to New Jersey. And now with the third boiler, when it comes fully online, almost 90 percent of the garbage we generate on this island will be burned to generate electricity or recycled one way or another. That’s pretty historic. So about 10 percent of all the opala we generate still goes into landfill. The largest portion of it is ash, which comes out of H-Power, because when you burn all these things it’s just like how you clean your fireplace—a lot less than what you put in. So [the ash] goes into the landfill. We’re looking for ways where we could use that ash, we need to take out the metals, lead and zinc—the newspaper print has a lot of lead, so if we can take that out, we could use [the ash] for road repaving, it comes out viscous, it’s almost like asphalt, it models and hardens like rock.  

Another progress is with sludge, this other byproduct that’s pilau that goes into the landfill right now and we’re in the process of getting permit from the Department of Health to burn it in our H-Power plant; the third generator can handle sludge. The great thing is, we have excess capacity there, so we are burning this human waste byproduct and generating more electricity.

As we continue to work on it, the footprint of the landfill will go smaller and smaller everyday and finally close. Then we do need a place if there’s ever—I hope never—a tsunami or more likely, a hurricane. Iniki really didn’t do too much damage to us, but Iwa did more damage to the Waianae coast.  We need somewhere we can take the debris short-term and then haul it away for the long term. So the landfill wouldn’t have garbage trucks going in every day, it’ll be gated and, just in times of emergency, be opened up.

So this is my last question. You studied law—

[Laughs.] I was a lawyer. I more than studied it. For almost 30 years. Corporate law, banking and finance.

Who were some of your clients, and how did it affect your management of the city as mayor?

I represented probably, at any given time, any financial institution in the state and about 40 credit unions. Many of them merged, some were shut down and some just went out of business. For me, I was an economist during my undergrad [years]. I like the capitalist system. I do think it’s the best system yet invented to distribute scarce resources. Of course, financial institutions handle a very scarce resource called money. [Laughs.] That we all wish we had more of, including me as mayor! Which is why I gravitated towards doing that kind of law.

How did it prepare me to be a better mayor? Here’s one thing, so many people in government have spent their entire life in government. It’s good to have perspective outside of government from the private sector, if your whole perspective was sitting in public sector, you get this view that you just pass laws and the private sector just does it. They don’t understand how hard it is to survive and how it works, that your profit margin is this thin. That’s why even on the fuel tax, I am conscious of the burden it places. So I think it gives me a perspective and a sensitivity that I wouldn’t have if I went right into politics and spent my whole life there. I think it makes me a better mayor, I think it made me a better legislator while I was in the house.

Is there anything you want to add?

I don’t think so.

Happy you got the job?

Yes, I love this job. I used to say the best job I ever had was when I worked for Dan Inouye in D.C. You ask my wife, she’ll say I flew out of bed every morning because I couldn’t wait to get to work, but I love this job even more because it’s about making a difference in people’s lives immediately, every day.

This is about taking away their sewage, you pick up their garbage, you cut their grass in the parks, pave a pothole out there that someone drives through every day. It’s harder to do that when you’re at state level, it’s a little higher. I’m down on the ground and I like it a lot.

[Points to reporter’s notebook, with illustration of the Eiffel Tower.] You’ve got your Eiffel Tower. That city gets it. And when you go there, just go to the Louvre. Spend 2 hours there, get totally burned out and leave. And sit in the Tuileries Garden. Watch the French, watch the Parisians enjoying the park.

And yet I also get to do the legacy projects like rail and sewer. I know that the rail system is going to serve people a hundred years from now, just like the one in Paris or Boston does, and it’s going to give back to the community many times more and it’s going to be heavily used, particularly as we become a more populated island [and] as we build more workforce housing at places like where the old Advertiser building is.