From the coronavirus pandemic to the troubled rail line, 2020 is a year to forget

Shortly after word spread that a novel coronavirus was circulating in far-away China, Honolulu was chosen in February as one of several U.S. airports where all flights to America from China would be funneled.

The U.S. had declared a public health emergency due to the outbreak in China, placing a temporary ban on foreign nationals who recently traveled to the country and ordering an unprecedented 14-day quarantine of those who visited Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Then in mid-February, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser broke the news of a Japanese couple who had visited Maui and Honolulu and tested positive for the virus upon returning home, sounding the alarm for health officials.

On March 5, Gov. David Ige declared a state of emergency for Hawaii after the death of a passenger from California on a cruise ship that visited the islands. The next day, Ige announced the state’s first confirmed COVID-19 case: a Hawaii resident who traveled on the Grand Princess cruise ship in February.

Hawaii was the first state in the nation to order returning residents and visitors to undergo a 14-day quarantine, dealing a crushing blow to Hawaii’s tourism industry. On March 25, Ige ordered nonessential workers statewide to stay and work at home, further stifling the economy and causing businesses to close and lay off workers.

Due to its dependence on tourism, Hawaii experienced some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation at over 20% at various points of the pandemic.

Caught off guard, health officials scrambled to assess the extent to which the coronavirus was spreading in the community, while struggling with a shortage of test kits, personal protective equipment and other supplies. It took months before the Department of Health established adequate testing and contact- tracing programs. By then, the virus had spread on Oahu, peaking during the summer at more than 300 new cases per day.

In addition to travel and stay-at-home restrictions, the counties placed controls on virtually all aspects of everyday life and commerce, mandating mask wearing and social distancing, limiting gatherings and business operations, and curtailing outdoor activities.

Private and public schools and University of Hawaii campuses switched to online-only instruction in March, optimistic in being able to resume in-person classes by April. For most campuses, it wasn’t to be. Distance learning was still in place when the Department of Education opened the new school year Aug. 17.

On Aug. 27, a second stay-at-home order took effect in Honolulu and was “highly effective at reducing the number of positive COVID-19 cases in the city.” By the fall months, the virus had reached Hawaii’s most vulnerable populations: nursing home residents and those in rural communities such as Kalaupapa on Molokai and on Lanai, while also infiltrating Hawaii prisons and other group settings.

As cases rose, criticism of the Health Department centered on the leadership of Health Director Bruce Anderson and Dr. Sarah Park, the state epidemiologist blamed for failing to build a robust COVID-19 testing and contact-tracing program. Park was placed on paid leave Sept. 4, just four days after Anderson announced he would retire.

A sign of hope came in December, when Hawaii received its first shipment of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and immunizations of health care workers and first responders began, with long-term-care residents and staff next on the priority list.

As of Wednesday, the Department of Health had confirmed 21,209 COVID-19 cases statewide since the start of the outbreak and a death toll of 285.

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Kristen Consillio, Star-Advertiser

COVID-19 PANDEMIC INFECTS ECONOMY

Hawaii’s visitor industry has bounced back some from its low point in April but ended the year well below profitably, dragging down virtually all other economic sectors.

Tourism — which accounted for the largest piece of the state’s gross domestic product at 17% — bottomed out in the spring amid COVID-19 fears and lockdowns, including a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all incoming passengers in effect from March 26 to Oct. 15, when the state rolled out the Safe Travels Hawaii pre-arrivals testing program.

The economic recovery since Safe Travels Hawaii began has been lackluster. The Hawai‘i Tourism Authority reported that 183,779 visitors came to the islands by air in November, which was still more than 77% below November 2019. In the first 11 months of 2020, HTA reported that visitor arrivals to Hawaii dropped almost 74% to nearly 2.5 million visitors.

By year’s end the state is projected to have seen only 2.7 million visitors in 2020, down from 2019’s 10.4 million.

“The lifting of local restrictions on Oahu in late September put Hawaii back on the path to recovery, but as of late November, the recovery has made up less than half of pandemic losses,” according to the latest economic pulse report from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.

UHERO reported that visitor arrivals in November, the first full month of the Safe Travels Hawaii program, returned to less than one quarter of the pre-pandemic level. Leisure and hospitality industry employment is back to only half of its pre-pandemic level, UHERO said.

Many of Hawaii’s hotels temporarily closed as government restrictions and fear of COVID-19 significantly reduced travel demand. About 75% of Hawaii hotels are operating again, but Hawaii’s formal welcome- back to travelers hasn’t filled rooms to the degree many had hoped, and less than a quarter of the 8,000 Unite Here Local 5 hotel members are back to work. Some 5,000 of them already have lost their health insurance.

UHERO said employment in nontourism sectors is running about 10% lower than last year’s level.

“The statewide unemployment rate has receded nearly ten percentage points from its May high, but it remains more than twice the national average,” UHERO said.

Keli‘i Akina, president and CEO of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, said in a statement that “state and county lockdowns have hit the state especially hard. Given such bleak economic prospects, it’s no surprise that residents are leaving the state quicker than ever.”

Recent U.S. Census Bureau data shows Hawaii’s population declined in fiscal 2020 by 8,609. The drop was almost five times worse than UHERO had projected.

At the close of 2020, Hawaii’s tourism-dependent economy still had much further to go.

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Allison Schaefers, Star-Advertiser

A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD ERUPTS IN FLAMES

On the sunny, windswept morning of Jan. 19, a small, quiet neighborhood at the foot of Diamond Head was struck by inconceivable tragedy.

At about 9 a.m., residents lingering over Sunday breakfast were shaken by gunfire, shouts and sirens as Honolulu Police Department and Honolulu Fire Department personnel filled the streets, warning people to stay indoors as red flames leapt and thick black smoke surged from a 1920s-era wood cottage at 3015 Hibiscus Drive.

Neighbors had called police to report assaults by the home’s basement tenant, Jaroslav “Jarda” Hanel, 69, against his landlady, Lois Cain, 77, who had filed an eviction notice against Hanel four days earlier. When another tenant, Gisela Ricardi King, attempted to rescue Cain, Hanel stabbed her with a gardening tool. Two other neighbors persuaded Hanel to drop the weapon and pulled the bleeding King to safety.

But there was no saving the two police officers who responded to the call. As they walked down the driveway to the basement entrance, officers Tiffany Enriquez, 38, and Kaulike Kalama, 34, were gunned down by Hanel. In the ensuing shootout, fire broke out and a cache of ammunition in the house exploded.

The fire leapt from house to house while firefighters were held back by police because the suspect was still at large. In the end, seven houses were destroyed and investigators found the remains of Cain and Hanel in the blackened ruins of her house.

Residents said the tragedy might have been averted if authorities had taken more action in response to prior complaints about Hanel’s threatening behavior. He reportedly suffered from mental problems and neighbors had filed restraining orders against him.

Crowds lined the streets to honor the fallen police officers during funeral motorcades held Jan. 30 for Enriquez and March 7 for Kalama that included a final roll call in front of HPD headquarters.

Almost a year after the tragedy, the adjoining lots — cleared of the burned remnants of houses and trees — lay carpeted in green grass.

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Mindy Pennybacker, Star-Advertiser

A VOTE FOR MAIL-IN BALLOTING

Hawaii set records in the 2020 elections — the state’s first large-scale effort at mail-in balloting — and shed its reputation for voter apathy.

But the question remains whether the outpouring of election enthusiasm will become the new pattern or a fluke that reflected a tumultuous year in which voters were provoked by a contentious presidential race and frustrations over the COVID-19 pandemic and a stalled economy.

During the August primary and November general elections, there was a long list of theories why people voted early by mailing in their ballots, as Democrats had urged; stood in line on Election Day, as President Donald Trump had instructed supporters; and voted for the first time in their lives.

Under the state’s new voting system, only a handful of the usual 235 polling sites were open on the day of the primary and general elections, leading to long lines. In the Nov. 3 general election, so many people were still waiting to cast ballots in every county by the end of the scheduled polling period that election results were delayed by more than four hours to allow them to vote.

In Honolulu alone, 4,520 people stood in line to vote in person at Honolulu Hale and Kapolei Hale, with some 1,805 of them registering to vote on Election Day.

Overall, though, Hawaii voters displayed an overwhelming preference for submitting their ballots by mail or at dropoff locations, with only 5% of those who voted in the general election doing so in person in the days leading up to and including Election Day.

In all, Hawaii voters set a statewide record in November for total number of votes cast in any election — 579,784 — while raising voter turnout to 69.6%. That compares to 58.4% in the last presidential election in 2016 and 52.7% in 2018.

As for the outcome, in addition to picking former Vice President Joe Biden over Trump, local voters elected first-time mayors for Honolulu and Hawaii counties, a new Honolulu prosecutor and a record five new Honolulu City Council members, including the first female- majority Council, with women holding five of the nine seats.

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Dan Nakaso, Star-Advertiser

A TALE OF RAIL

A year ago this week, officials with the then-$9.2 billion Honolulu rail project said confidently that they expected the first leg of rail to be open by the end of 2020.

A year later, with the East Kapolei-to-Ala Moana line still not operational, rail officials are again hoping operations can get underway — sometime after the midway point of the new year.

The past 12 months have been among the most tumultuous chapters in the bittersweet tale of the now $11 billion-plus (including financing costs) project. On the one hand, the rail is facing more questions about its financing than ever before. On the other hand, all signs point to the project’s first leg — from East Kapolei to Aloha Stadium — finally being on track to open in 2021.

And the year appears to have ended on a good note: On Monday, the Federal Transit Administration formally announced the city will have an additional year to come up with a satisfactory financing plan that will allow $250 million in promised funding to finally be delivered.

Also Monday, HART Board Chairman Tobias Martyn announced the agency had selected longtime city Environmental Services Director Lori Kahikina as its interim director, replacing much- maligned Executive Director and CEO Andrew Robbins, whose $317,000-a-year contract was not renewed.

Robbins, first appointed in 2017, has had a rocky relationship with a majority of the board, Mayor Kirk Caldwell and Honolulu City Council leaders. Among the key points of contention was his role in HART’s pursuit of a public-private partnership to build the final 4.1-mile, Middle Street-to-Ala Moana segment, as well as a major transit center at Pearl Highlands, and then operate the line for the first 30 years.

In September, the Caldwell administration announced it was withdrawing its support from the public-private partnership process and urged Robbins and the HART board to switch gears and proceed with a more traditional design- build delivery model. Despite pressure from an increasingly vocal majority on the board, Robbins wanted to stay the course.

Details of the two private partner proposals that had been submitted were finally released at the beginning of December and both were found to be more than $1 billion higher than the $1.4 billion HART officials had anticipated.

Meanwhile, HART and city leaders are facing the financial uncertainty of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, since the bulk of rail funding relies on state general excise and hotel room taxes. Caldwell in mid-November said his experts are telling him the project will now cost $11 billion, with financing, and that it could be as late as 2033 before the last Ala Moana station is completed. Officials acknowledge the remainder of the rail project likely will have to be built in segments as funding permits.

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Gordon Pang, Star-Advertiser

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