Council leader must step up

Homelessness on Oahu often is described as an all-hands-on-deck crisis. One reason progress toward solutions seems so plodding is that all hands are not on deck. They’re on different ships altogether, in fact, headed in different directions or — worse — simply adrift.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for Honolulu’s woeful homelessness problem, of course, but the Honolulu City Council’s disjointed approach figures into the overall failure, and its chairman, Ernie Martin, has to own a large share of that record.

The Council clearly needs leadership as the city grapples with the homelessness issue, and if the chairman can’t provide it, he should make way for someone who will make the necessary commitment.

The decision of the Council last week to override a mayoral veto of a legally precarious ordinance underscored the dysfunctional dynamic of city governance.

The city’s legislative branch has made odd policy choices. On the one hand it authorized bond money for housing development, but funded only part of the administration’s "Housing First" effort, withholding all funds for staff support. Council members could rightly counter that the requested six positions were too costly — but there was room to negotiate downward from that request. Further, the Council’s decision to create two housing jobs within its own support staff puts the lie to the fiscal austerity argument. Martin said later the jobs were approved because "we need to do more," but it’s up to the executive branch to handle execution, and the administration could have used those jobs.

As the Star-Advertiser’s David Shapiro astutely noted in his Sunday "Volcanic Ash" column, the Council’s decisions seem to be driven by "petty political competition rather than a good-faith effort" to tackle homelessness.

In general, the Council lacks any strategy for dealing with the immediate problem of families living on the streets, beyond pushing them from one sidewalk campsite to the next with the expansion of its "sit-lie" ban. But by itself, sit-lie can’t solve homelessness. A real solution requires provisions for rehousing, with the financial, medical and social-service interventions that make it possible.

Along those lines, the only practical initiative to come out in recent weeks, even if it’s only a stopgap measure, is the city administration’s move to provide more secure transitional shelter and social services at a city-leased property on Sand Island.

The plan, dubbed Hale Mauliola, deserves a chance to succeed: Honolulu desperately needs to see forward movement, in fact. But the project has earned little support from the Council and an outright diss from the community representative, Councilman Joey Manahan, who called it a "piecemeal" approach that shifts the problem from one part of his district to the next.

That’s an odd critique coming from a member of a body that has focused its attention on precisely that: pushing people to stake their tents somewhere else.

Martin has defended the veto override of the sit-lie expansion as the only means to enact a measure immediately that "offers relief" to constituents in Council business districts. That relief is illusory, though, since Mayor Kirk Caldwell, who has expressed reasoned concerns about the constitutionality of the expanded ordinance, is not likely to use it aggressively.

In fact, in recent raids of the encampment along the Kapalama Canal, the existing property-storage ordinance was the means of seeking to clear the area of personal property, not the expanded sit-lie law.

The administration had proposed an alternative sit-lie expansion that was more narrowly focused on clearing business sidewalks, and the chairman points to his own proposed amendments to the ordinance that are now in the hopper. Why the rush to override the veto, then?

Clearly, it was so the Council could claim it was taking action, even if that action amounts to political posturing. Instead, the Council should have invested its energy into a collaborative effort to craft a new bill that both the lawmakers and the administration could support, and implement effectively.

Martin said in a later interview he did not drive the veto override, but he’s the chairman, and he should be behind the wheel — following a more productive route.

Real people are suffering because there’s been no true collaboration in city government to move the needle on homelessness. Unless Martin reverses his course of stubborn obstructionism, someone else in Council should stand up and fill the void.