Upcoming election will be start of new era for OHA

Perhaps the least noticed big change in local elections this year is happening with the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

For the first time since the OHA trustee elections started in 1980, there will be a primary election with the general election serving as a run-off for contested OHA seats.

For years, there have been complaints that the old system with everyone running in just the general elections served as an incumbent protection plan.

"The current OHA election system severely undermines the democratic process. This election process distorts the outcome and dilutes the voting power of the citizens," Kuhio Lewis, an unsuccessful OHA candidate, said in testimony when the OHA election was changed by the 2013 Legislature.

Even the actual law rewriting the OHA election plan noted that "because the pool of trustee candidates is not narrowed by a primary election, incumbent trustees may be provided an unfair advantage."

Perhaps the most non-representative OHA was back in 2000, when there were 51 candidates for three trustee at-large seats. The winning candidates had only 6.8, 5.4 and 4.1 percent of the total votes cast, respectively. The rest of the votes went to the remaining 48 candidates.

OHA Trustee Peter Apo says the new law is going to have a big effect.

"Incumbents can’t rely on name recognition or a face-off with an unknown independent," Apo said in an interview. "So it is an advantage to an incumbent not to have a primary."

The big thing to remember in OHA elections is that all trustees are elected statewide, even though five of the nine seats are representing an island district.

"This means that the elections are first won on Oahu where most of the people live and then on the neighbor islands, even if it is a neighbor island seat," Apo said.

"You have to coordinate your campaign, you have to have representatives on all the islands; it is a very complex election," Apo said.

The current Democratic Party chairman, Dante Carpenter, is a former OHA trustee, state legislator and Big Island mayor, so he knows his way around local elections.

Carpenter said he is solidly in favor of the new primary election rules.

"This is going to help newcomers who wouldn’t get the exposure. The assumption is always that the incumbents get all the press, so this will be a more challenging election," Carpenter said.

And part of that challenge will come when it is time to pay the bills.

"It will be more costly for the candidates. But that is part of the commitment of running for office. It is a statewide office, just like running for the U.S. Senate or governor," Carpenter said

The elections, however, will be just the beginning of the hard work for the new OHA cast.

There probably has never been a time when OHA was so much tied up in the affairs of the state. First are the decisions to be made with the Kakaako Makai lands along Honolulu’s waterfront.

The Abercrombie administration gave them to OHA to settle past ceded lands claims, representing them as being worth $200 million, but the catch is the lands must be developed to make that much money and state law forbids much of the more valuable forms of development such as hotels and condos.

Just as controversial is the Native Hawaii sovereignty movement with meaningful federal recognition. If something with real validity is going to happen, it will have to be with a sympathetic president such as Barack Obama helping the process along.

So time is short, and the process starts with this year’s primary election.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.