Kauaʻi County Mayor Derek Kawakami spoke with The Conversation about some of the priorities he outlined in his State of the County address last week. He, just like the other three mayors, gives an address every year on how he plans to keep the county humming.
CATHERINE CRUZ, HOST: Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi proposed to offer a $25,000 signing bonus for new police recruits to deal with the shortage of some 400 officers. The Garden Isle is facing some of those same hiring challenges. So how would the Honolulu bonus affect Kawakami's efforts to boost officers and other first responders on his island?
DEREK KAWAKAMI: The beautiful thing about all of us mayors is that we're all mindful of how our actions can have unintended consequences for the next mayor. Because although we're on different islands, all of our workers are under the same collective bargaining agreements, right, whether it's with HGEA, UPW, SHOPO, or the firefighters union. So, you know, Mayor Blangiardi had indicated that that was what he was looking at. And similarly, when we took a look at covering the basic health insurance plan for our workers, I went out to the mayor and to the governor to say, hey, look, this is what we're looking to do on Kauaʻi County in order to recruit and retain. You know, when they created the Prepaid Health Act, I believe in 1974, it basically positioned Hawaiʻi's workers to be covered as far as health care, but they exempted government workers. So I said, we're in a position financially where we can afford to cover it, and so we're going to take a look and see if this helps retain some of our workers — if it helps recruit. But more importantly, from a morale side, when we have clerical positions that, you know, a large portion of their paycheck is just for health insurance, it's hard for them to even make ends meet as government workers. So his proposal didn't come as a surprise. But on the flip side, there's things that we do that could potentially put my fellow mayors between a rock and a hard place. So we're always mindful about that.
CRUZ: Okay, so talk about your plan.
KAWAKAMI: This proposal that we included in the budget came from the police chief himself. So apparently, there is a hiring agency that specializes in the marketing of these type of police positions. And then, of course, we wanted to make sure that they're able to target our local workforce before they go out and recruit elsewhere. And so all of these things can happen. So we said, look, nothing changes if nothing changes. So we're going to try and take a different route to see if we can reap any of the results. So this came from the department itself, it sounded good. If it works, we may take a look if this agency can help us recruit people to work at the DMV, or engineers that would like to work at public works in the building division, because those are the areas where we're severely short-handed.
CRUZ: So you're not looking at this solely to boost the number of police officers, but wherever you have shortages.
KAWAKAMI: Potentially, but I know that this particular company that they were looking at is geared specifically for first responders and law enforcement.
CRUZ: Do you think Mayor Blangiardi's proposal to have a signing bonus is going to impact your recruits? That maybe someone from Kauaʻi will come over to Oʻahu and start here first.
KAWAKAMI: I'm not sure if a signing bonus is what it is that's going to push somebody that lives, breathes and loves Kauaʻi and wants to stay here and raise their family here to move over to Oʻahu. There's a lot that comes along with being a police officer in Honolulu. I mean, I take a look at what's out in the news every day as far as violent crimes. And that's not to say Kauaʻi doesn't have our fair share of violent crimes. But gosh, I don't think it comes close to the level of any urban atmosphere. So I think it just depends on the individual. I'm pretty sure that we're going to have people saying, hey, how come Kauaʻi Police Department doesn't have a hiring bonus? And the answer is quite simple. We're not there yet. If it seems to work for Honolulu and say our endeavor doesn't work as intended, we may look at it, but we'll also take a look at how that's going to impact morale of current officers. I haven't heard from them on what they would feel if somebody coming on had a $20,000 bonus. So I think the beautiful thing about not being the first one is being able to see how things pan out. I think the way that Mayor Blangiardi rolled out the hiring bonus is good though because from what I understand, the payment comes in phases. And then at the end of the day, somebody has to, I believe, be there for maybe three years to be able to qualify. So I think how they rolled it out is really, they put deep thought into it.
CRUZ: The other thing that piqued my interest when you gave your address was the proposal to start taxing vacation rentals, you know, the same that you would hotels and resorts.
KAWAKAMI: Oh absolutely. Not only that. When we hear people talking about vacation rentals perhaps in a negative light, a lot of the conversation is all of these vacation rentals could be affordable housing — and that's not necessarily completely true. But it's not necessarily completely false, either. But when we took a look at what raising the property tax of the vacation rentals to the same as hotel and resort would net, it increased about $5.8 million. So we said, okay, every dime that this tax increase generates, we're going to put every single penny into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, so that here's the contribution from the industry to build affordable housing, you know. We're going to be able to build a lot more housing because of this tax increase. And for the most part, I think a lot of people don't necessarily have a problem with paying taxes or having a tax increase. What I hear from people is, where is my money going? And so for these people that are operating a business in our neighborhoods, if they're asking, where is my money going? I can tell them, every single dime is going to building housing for our local people. And most of them just want to know how their money is being put to use.
CRUZ: Is there anything else that you have on the vacation rental front that you're looking at? Any other modification of any rules?
KAWAKAMI: No, we're good. You know, we actually have had an ordinance in place for over a decade that regulates vacation rentals that were operating outside of the designated areas that they were supposed to be operating in. And because we've had this ordinance in place, it basically capped the amount of vacation rentals outside of the resort areas. It's something like I believe, a little over 400. So that means that we will not have any more than these 400 units that are operating outside of the VDA. And then because we had a good ordinance, we were also the first county in the state to be able to work directly with Airbnb, Expedia, VRBO, and all the third-party platforms to say: we have an ordinance in place, here is a list of vacation rentals that have a legitimate-use certificate, can we work together to make sure that the units that are on your platform being marketed are in compliance — and we've had a great working relationship with Airbnb, VRBO and Expedia for, gosh, I think from my first term in office, so we're good. We don't need any legislation at the Legislature. I know that there's talks about the amortization bill, you know, Kauaʻi wrote that bill, our former planning director wrote that bill, and year after year after year after getting shut down at the Legislature, we finally came in and worked around it and worked directly with Airbnb to address all of the issues that we had. So Kauaʻi is in a good place as far as the regulation of vacation rentals. In fact, because we've regulated that market so good, we're getting more revenue from the vacation rental market than we are from hotel and resort. In fact, a majority of our revenues is coming from vacation rentals. And with this dollar increase, it's going to even generate more revenue.
CRUZ: As we look at the vacation rental situation there on Maui and the tragedy that's unfolded, and then the unintended consequence of paying the landlords, you know, to provide more long-term housing for our local people — how are you looking at Maui and what they're going through with the wildfires in their situation?
KAWAKAMI: It's hard to be a Monday morning quarterback on the Maui situation because there's so many challenges, unprecedented challenges that right now Maui is facing, and I think in a large part, even FEMA is facing in this situation. I'm not sure if FEMA has ever had to house this many families and individuals in hotel rooms. What I can say is that one, we had an affordable housing crisis prior to the wildfires, but this further even puts an exclamation point on the need for the county and state to work together to get more affordable housing as quickly as possible. And I think we historically have fallen short on the affordable housing inventory because I think we've relied on antiquated policies that really have reaped very little to none of the housing units that we're actually striving to build for our local people. And so you know, on Kauaʻi County, we started to land bank and build upon existing properties that either the state or the county already owns that have existing infrastructure. And because we've really taken that approach to just pragmatically work the economics of housing and lower the cost of goods sold so that developers can come in, build a specific product at a price point, and having government meet them halfway with infrastructure and land costs — right now Kauaʻi County is the biggest affordable housing developer on Kauaʻi. And this next year, we're going to be getting more units online and hopefully this will be the model to follow into the future to rely less on policy and more on pragmatic steps that really make economic sense.
Read Kawakami's full State of County address here.
This story aired on The Conversation on March 19, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
