Lee Cataluna: Endless campaign is finally near its end

Folks from East Honolulu are going to feel a letdown after tomorrow. It doesn’t matter who wins. After all the campaign mailers and Saturday morning knocks at the door and dinnertime robocalls, once the special election is over, things won’t be so special anymore.

There’s been so much attention on City Council District 4, the heavily populated part of the island that starts at Ala Moana Beach Park and reaches all the way to Hawaii Kai, hitting all the hills and valleys in between. Voters in the district have been ardently courted ever since the Hawaii Supreme Court invalidated the general election results that had Trevor Ozawa and Tommy Waters separated by 22 votes and a lot of sloppy ballot-handling.

For months now District 4 has been showered with attention, voters’ mailboxes stuffed with glossy mailers, fences festooned with campaign signs, commutes greeted by rows of dedicated sign-wavers.

This do-over election for a seat on the nine- member Council, which comes with a salary of about $71,000 and the opportunity to cross swords with the likes of Ron Menor and Ikaika Anderson, has a high-stakes feeling, perhaps higher than the office warrants.

It’s clear they both really want it. It would be hard to say who’s had more sign wavers — most days, when one candidate had a team out, so did the other. It would be hard to say who had more yard signs. On some streets it alternates Ozawa/Waters/Ozawa/Waters house to house and often both on the same fence.

Their campaigns can be compared by money raised and money spent, but that’s not a true measurement of interaction with the community; not like, say, showing up at neighborhood board meetings — those long, droning evenings in school cafeterias where the smallest but often most important acts of democracy take place.

Scanning through the online minutes of neighborhood board meetings in the Council district since the start of the year is another measure. The office of the Council member almost always sends a staffer to these meetings, even if the actual Council member doesn’t show up. Tommy Waters was listed as present at five meetings this year. Trevor Ozawa’s attendance was marked at two.

Meanwhile, Mike Formby, the interim Council member keeping the District 4 seat warm, was marked present at eight neighborhood board meetings in 2019, often going to two a week since took office Feb. 4. Way to set the bar high, Mr. Formby.

All the urgent campaigning will be over by Saturday night (hopefully). Voters in the district will miss all the attention and phone calls. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe all the effort that went into winning the seat will turn into effort in serving the community, and the District 4 Council member will show Formby-esque commitment to in-the-trenches, citizen-participatory democracy.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.