On Politics: Blangiardi, Amemiya campaigns go in divergent directions, but all points will lead to rail

Hawaii’s statewide, mail-in ballot election is on. Voters are making choices with the Honolulu race for mayor among the most important local elections of the season.

The candidates are two untested Honolulu businessmen: Rick Blangiardi, the retired Hawaii News Now television executive; and Keith Amemiya, a well-connected insurance executive. He’s the son of former Hawaii Attorney General Ronald Amemiya and the cousin of Roy Amemiya, Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s managing director.

Blangiardi’s campaign is mostly self- or family- funded. Campaign spending reports show he loaned the campaign $450,000 with his wife tossing in another $15,000.

The big bucks in the campaign, however, come from the Amemiya campaign, where the donors serve a go-to list of Hawaii’s political insiders including Micah Kane, Bert Kobayashi, Robert Kurisu, Colbert Matsumoto and Robert McFarlane.

Amemiya has raised $1,611,026 and spent $1,813,132.

The candidates’ strategies appear going in two directions. Amemiya is campaigning hard as the Democrat in the group and casts Blangiardi as a conservative businessman while, ironically, saying it is Blangiardi who is running “a political insiders campaign” pointing to supporters like former Govs. Linda Lingle, a Republican, and Vicky Cayetano, the wife of the former Hawaii Democratic governor.

Amemiya is also strongly supported by Hawaii’s senior U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, and it is expected that Amemiya will attempt to draw Honolulu Democrats together to rally around his campaign even though the race is nonpartisan and there is no Republican or Democratic candidate.

Blangiardi is aiming his campaign at picking up the support of women voters. His campaign has opened up a “Women for Rick” effort to feature women supporters, including Cha Thompson, Colleen Hanabusa, Maile Meyer, Ginny Tiu and Ann Botticelli. Campaign sources say research shows women voters to be a somewhat undecided voting group that Blangiardi hopes to win.

In the August primary election, Blangiardi was the top mayoral candidate, picking up 69,661 votes to Amemiya’s 55,116 votes.

As for campaign issues, Blangiardi last week put up his own “action plan” for Oahu — which although not as specific as the one already posted by Amemiya, contains many of the same broad issues concerning COVID-19, restarting the economy and trying to control the spiraling costs for the city rail project.

Amemiya, however, groused about the Blangiardi plan, saying: “My opponent still hasn’t done the hard work of learning the city and figuring out what to do other than assembling his CEO friends to make a plan in February.”

Blangiardi’s plan calls for looking at city property “for economic development in partnership with the private sector.” He adds that he wants city money to go for city construction that would fight sea-level rise and climate change.

Both candidates say they would not raise property taxes to pay for increases in the cost of rail.

But as speculation increases that the half-finished, nearly $9 billion project is going to run out of money, neither man has been able to say what they will do if that happens.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.