Rick Blangiardi, less than a year into his new job as Honolulu’s mayor, is showing that sometimes the best course for a leader is to just say “no.”
City Hall swarms with issues that are wildly important to small segments of Honolulu’s politically active population. Besides being linked by geography, such as Hawaii Kai voters or suburban commuting voters, Honolulu also groups voters by their demands to preserve or hold on to a special place.
Last week Blangiardi was wise to listen to the unanimous opinion of the City Council to dismantle the Haiku Stairs, ending decades of contention between hikers and those who live in the Haiku Stars neighborhood. Blangiardi and the Council went against the determined efforts by a vocal group of hikers and those who measure their popularity by counting how many internet users view their YouTube efforts.
Agreed that the videos of those trekking up and down the somewhat-treacherous stairs to the Koolau summits are spectacular, at the same time, there are others who feel that summiting a 12-foot ladder is challenging enough.
Blangiardi said last week he would go along with the Council’s recommendation to spend $1 million to remove the stairs.
“We recognize the interest the stairs have to certain community groups; however, issues such as trespassing, personal injuries, invasive species and overall safety of the public cannot be ignored,” said the mayor.
The political furor of the stairs is testament to the futile attempts at appeasement rather than firm decision-making of former Honolulu mayors.
Honolulu’s Board of Water Supply, when it owned the property, was spending $250,000 in security annually to deter hikers, who for decades have trespassed on private property and ignored guards and no-trespassing signs to access the stairs, according to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser report. At the same time, the city spent $875,000 in 2002 to repair the stairs with an eye to reopening the attraction that had been closed because of the danger in 1987. Now the word “no” is a bit higher in the Honolulu Hale vocabulary, and we are spending $1 million to take down the stairs.
Usually the city doesn’t waste money making decisions it is soon to counter; instead, the money is squandered in needless studies for controversial projects. The Waikiki War Memorial Natatorium comes to mind as a municipal sinkhole.
The last of the many byzantine studies the city offered up, instead of a firm decision, was a three- volume environmental impact statement issued in 2019 that studied all possible aspects of the almost- completely collapsed Natatorium built as a memorial to the Hawaii soldiers who died in World War I. It is a fine study that caused city leaders to carefully put it on a shelf and then ignore it.
If Blangiardi can repeat his ability to make a decision and act on a longstanding city issue, instead of following his predecessors and ignoring it, perhaps he can take up the Natatorium issue and come to a decision.
Or if he really wants the “Most Decisive Honolulu Leader” award, then Blangiardi should come up with Honolulu’s biggest decision: what to do with the ongoing mess that is the city rail project.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
