What, no canoe? It may be a sign of our progress as a state that Gov. David Ige was able to deliver his first State of the State speech and not once in the half-hour address were we bundled into a canoe.
Former Gov. Neil Abercrombie launched his administration with us in a canoe that was on the verge of capsizing.
On Monday, the ship of state did not hoist a rhetorical sail, the citizenry did not have to grasp a paddle nor bend in a collective effort.
Ige’s imagery was perhaps an even simpler metaphor.
Simply he’s a carpenter building a house and therefore is starting with the foundation.
We are not talking about castles in the sky here. This speech, Ige said, was about "beginning at the beginning, building a solid foundation for this administration."
Foundations are important, but like any base work, the speech had all the excitement and thrills of a concrete pour.
Ige may not be setting your socks on fire with his oratory, but he gave the impression of someone who knows what he wants and what works.
For instance, the Department of Education and the University of Hawaii are two entities that are more about challenges than accomplishments.
"Before education can transform them (children), we must transform our school system," Ige said.
"I challenge the leaders of public education to stop issuing mandates from the state office and to focus on empowering schools and delivering resources to the school level," Ige said, noting that his appointments to the Board of Education will be for people who "embrace school empowerment of our principals and teachers."
As for the University of Hawaii, with it countless funding and organizational problems, Ige said UH should go past the usual town-and-gown relationship and become a community leader.
"Its goals must be clear; its planning must be precise; its actions must be forthright.
"I challenge our university leaders to focus on execution, accountability and delivery in all that they do," Ige said, leaving out the usual praise and instead giving orders for some work in the ivory towers.
Reporters asked Abercrombie, who was rejected by voters in favor of Ige, about the speech and the Manoa Democrat said he could see a continuation of many of his themes in Ige’s speech.
The new governor may disagree.
In an informal news conference after the speech, Ige said he was shocked to learn that cranking out the monthly state payroll consumes more than a million pages of paper.
Ige, who may be the first governor in Hawaii to use the phrase "optical character recognition" in a sentence and know what it means, said he was concerned about the Abercrombie-ordered push to computerize state government.
The effort is fine, Ige said, but by creating a separate informational technology department to do it, instead of getting state employees to use computers instead of paper at work, is not efficient.
"The easy answer for IT transformation was to set up a separate office and leave everyone behind," Ige said.
Instead, Ige told reporters: "I’m committed to reorganizing and reevaluation existing jobs and redefining them."
It may not be a headline-generating policy change, but that subtle adjustment in approach may be what the public now wants.
———
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
