Editor's note: HPR's Audrey McAvoy will report on two other lieutenant governor candidates, Della Au Belatti and John Choi. Belatti's story aired on Thursday, July 16, and Choi's story will air on Friday, July 24.
Kauaʻi Mayor Derek Kawakami is a surfer. But lately he's spending less time in the water and more time on the campaign trail.
“It's hard to give a speech when I'm watching the waves out there,” Kawakami joked to a crowd at a recent meet-and-greet with voters in Waikīkī.
He and the other Democratic Party candidates for lieutenant governor entered the race in the spring, just a few months before the Aug. 8 primary election. The truncated schedule has them scrambling to introduce themselves to voters in a short amount of time.
The Outrigger Canoe Club on the white sands of Waikīkī was the site of one such effort.
Kawakami gave a short speech and talked story with attendees while wearing jeans, an aloha shirt and cowboy boots. He told the crowd he enjoys being in “the hot seat” and having people grill him.
One voter asked what he would do to help farmers. Kawakami said the state needed to maintain plantation-era infrastructure like dams. But he also acknowledged he didn’t have all the answers.
“I'm gonna have to come to the farmers and say, what is the best thing we can do with our limited amount of resources to support you,” he said.
The other week he was at a talk story event in Hawaiʻi Kai and a Rotary Club meeting in Hilo.
The Democrat has to move quickly because he only declared his candidacy in March.
That was after incumbent Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said prosecutors told her she was a target of a bribery investigation.
Luke denied the allegations. But in April she said she wouldn't run for re-election, creating a mad dash for votes.
A powerful position
Hawaiʻi’s lieutenant governors fill in when the governor is out of town. They otherwise don’t have major duties.
But they’ve often gone on to serve in more powerful positions, like governor or U.S. senator. That makes this race one of the most important in the election.
Former Honolulu City Councilmember Joey Manahan co-hosted the Waikīkī event. He hopes Kawakami will lead the state for years to come.
“We're really excited about Derek,” Manahan told the crowd. “He brings a lot of hope to this race, and I know he's going to be a great lieutenant governor and quite possibly our next governor, so I'm rooting for him to go all the way.”
Kauaʻi's approach to affordable housing
Kawakami told HPR Hawaiʻi’s top challenges are the high cost of housing, rising cost of living and what he calls quality of life issues like homelessness.
Kauaʻi has made some headway on affordable housing, and its approach could be used statewide, he said. The county asked developers what they needed to be able to make a profit building housing that average people could afford. Developers said the high cost of land and infrastructure and long permit wait times made construction expensive.
So the county responded by making some public land available for housing, installing infrastructure and conducting master planning.
“And then we went out to the developers to say, ‘All right, we eliminated the biggest cost drivers, and now we want you folks to do what you do best, which is build,’” Kawakami said
One of the resulting projects — the Lima Ola development near Hanapēpē — will eventually include 550 units for sale and rent.
The first ones for sale recently sold out, Kawakami said. The three-bedroom, two-bath single-family homes were priced around $500,000 leasehold. That’s one-third the median single-family home price on Kauaʻi.
The mayor criticized how Hawaiʻi has relied on “inclusionary zoning” to promote the construction of affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning is when governments require developers to build below-market-rate units in exchange for higher-density construction or faster approvals.
He called the approach popular with policymakers “but very ineffective.”
“So really good, you know, on paper, but doesn't equate to housing units being built at the pace that we need to in order to just try to catch up,” Kawakami said.
Pandemic fame
Kawakami is best known in his home county of Kauaʻi, which is the state's smallest with a population of just 70,000.
His fame spread some during the coronavirus pandemic when he filmed videos of himself dancing, cooking and performing magic tricks to entertain people stuck at home. Thousands across the state watched the clips that he and his wife posted to social media.
Campaign ads will help lift his profile further.
Kawakami has raised more campaign donations than competitors like state Rep. Della Au Belatti, which will help pay for the publicity.
He reported raising more than $280,000. Belatti raised nearly $90,000, but $50,000 of that was from a loan she made to herself.
He’s getting another boost from Hawaiʻi’s largest super political action committee, For a Better Tomorrow, which is also running ads for him.
The super PAC is funded by Pacific Resource Partnership, a coalition of contractors and the state’s largest construction union. It’s the same group that helped elect Gov. Josh Green as lieutenant governor in 2018.
U.S. election law allows super PACs to spend unlimited amounts so long as they don’t coordinate with their candidate.
“Money can be particularly crucial in a race like this when the candidates are not very well known statewide, and it's a very short timeline,” said Colin Moore, a University of Hawaiʻi political science professor. “Because what money can do is boost your name recognition, which for a statewide race like LG is absolutely essential.”
The window for boosting name recognition is tight. Voting by mail is already underway, and the primary election is in two weeks.
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