Accepting the unacceptable is a fact of life for Hawaii

Former Israeli President Shimon Peres once said that if a problem has no solution, then it’s no longer a problem, but a fact.

Often, Hawaii’s political leaders seem to make a specialty of turning problems into facts.

The Peres proposition can be taken two ways. Some problems actually don’t have solutions and must be treated, as he says, as facts to be coped with.

With other problems, however, it’s not that no solutions exist, but that there’s no will among those in charge to make the hard decisions that lead to solutions.

The latter scenario is where public policy in Hawaii often crashes onto the rocks.

A favorite word in local official circles is “unacceptable.” How many times have you heard it said just in recent weeks?

Gov. David Ige said Hawaii’s growing problem with chronic homelessness is unacceptable.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell said it’s unacceptable that the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation now projects the $6 billion-plus Oahu rail project will be even further over budget and behind schedule than stated in the spring.

State Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Jill Tokuda said it’s an “unacceptable situation” that our public school students and teachers are forced to work in scorching hot classrooms with no air conditioning.

The thing is, they’ve all accepted these problems they call unacceptable for years, effectively making them facts of life.

Homelessness has been growing exponentially since the Cayetano administration, but Ige was tight-fisted about getting it solved in his previous role as chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

The lack of urgency has carried over to his election as governor.

He didn’t bother appointing a homelessness coordinator until eight months into his administration, and his only “action” has been to appoint a committee that after months of work has done little to increase the shelter inventory for Hawaii’s homeless.

Caldwell was the city managing director and self-described point man on rail when many of the gross miscalculations were made on budgets and construction schedules that directly caused today’s cost overruns and missed deadlines.

He played politics when he accepted the bad numbers back then and he’s playing politics now when he calls it unacceptable.

Overheated schools are hardly a new problem; the Honolulu Star-Bulletin sponsored a project to cool Waianae classrooms during a similar outcry about the imulike learning environment nearly 20 years ago.

Tokuda (D, Kailua-Kaneohe) and fellow legislators call the problem unacceptable, but the fact is they’ve accepted it for years by refusing pleas to budget more for air-conditioned classrooms and repairs to aging school electrical infrastructure that can’t handle cooling systems.

There’s one problem-turned-fact that underlies it all: The double-talk won’t change as long as local voters keep accepting political leadership that accepts the unacceptable.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.