Is Honolulu Council President Tommy Waters ‘Invincible’?

Eight years after his first campaign for Honolulu Council, Speaker Tommy Waters is running for office.

He lost his first attempt in 2014 and narrowly won his second after a special election contest in 2019, taking over the leadership position on the nine-member council in 2020. This year, Waters faces a single opponent who is best known locally level with his vocal opposition to masking mandates in schools.

The rival candidate, Kaleo Nakoa, who recently served on the Hawaii Kai Neighborhood Board, says he filed because he thought Waters would run for U.S. Congress. After Waters announced his intention to remain on the council, Nakoa decided to remain, saying he had already committed to his candidacy.

“Maybe it’s my calling to do something or raise the issues that (are) going on,” he said in a recent interview.

Waters ends his first term as the District 4 representative on the council with largely positive reviews from his constituents. But his area has seen a rise in homelessness and he has faced criticism for less personal engagement with the community since he was elected council chairman.

Affordable housing

Waters said the biggest issue facing Oahu is the need for homes that residents can afford to rent or buy.

The issue is important in his district, a relatively affluent area that stretches from east Waikiki to Hawaii Kai. Multi-million dollar homes line the waterfront in Kahala; matcha soda goes for almost $10 at Kaimuki. Residents to engage in civic life.

Slightly removed from the urban core, this area has traditionally been isolated from Honolulu’s homeless population, said Lori Yamada, who grew up in nearby Palolo Valley before moving to Kaimuki, where she serves as neighborhood council president.

Now the number of homeless people is increasing, even as they face a crackdown elsewhere on the island.

Waters admitted this during the 2018 appearance on PBS Insights, when he listed homelessness as the number one problem. So far, things have only gotten worse.

A report from Partners for Care, an Oahu-based group dedicated to ending homelessness, shows the same trend that Yamada noticed: Waters took office in 2019, and since then the organization’s East Honolulu homeless population has grown from 326 people to 575.

Waters framed the problem as one rooted in supply, arguing that more affordable housing is needed. He said the city council had set aside $200 million to create more affordable housing, but it was now in the hands of Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s administration.

“The frustrating part … is that once we appropriate it, it’s up to the administration to manage, right? And as far as I can tell, at this point they haven’t touched any of that money,” Waters said in a recent phone interview.

Blangiardi’s office declined to comment even though the Department of Human Services released almost $30 million from the affordable housing fund in August.

Local issues

In East Honolulu, residents also tend to oppose efforts to increase housing supply with large developments. “They created Livable Hawaii Kai Hui so they can stop and manage the growth,” Waters said.

He mentioned the collaboration he facilitated with the Hawaii Kai Neighborhood Council in crafting the East Honolulu Sustainable Communities Plan, which stipulates that any new commercial development must be in the Hawaii Kai Towne Center, but that the Kalama Valley Mall could be the site for new housing for young people starting and for kupuna who are declining.

Nakoa isn’t convinced that building more units will do much good.

“We don’t need more affordable housing, we need to make housing affordable,” he said. “And we need programs that stop these absentee owners from buying it up.”

Both candidates agree on that last point, citing a longstanding problem in Hawaii that outside buyers can leave houses vacant as investments.

Waters introduced the idea of ​​a vacancy tax, saying his predecessor, Trevor Ozawa, had drafted a similar bill. However, he knows this legally proving a vacancy is a tough nut to crack.

Hyperlocal engagement

Nakoa said he joined the neighborhood council in August 2021 after hearing neighbors discuss the proposed Luana Kai seniors facility, which has been in the works for the past few years and would be built at the entrance to Kalama Valley, a quiet enclave in Hawaii Kai.

Last September, the neighborhood board issued a resolution communicating his opposition to the project and a desire to be better informed, but the project is still in the planning stages and its fate is up in the air.

Nakoa said he decided to run for city council when Waters was considering a run for the U.S. Congress to replace U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele, who ran unsuccessfully for governor. He said he was also disappointed that Waters had not been more involved in the debate over Luana Kai’s development.

“He’s not a bad guy,” said Nakoa of Waters. “I just feel like I’ve been on the Hawaii Kai board for over a year and he’s never been on the Zoom calls.” Nakoa’s last monthly meeting as a board member was last July.

Minutes from neighborhood council meetings show that Waters hasn’t appeared in person as often as he used to since he was elected and then council president.

But board chairmen spoke highly of him in interviews.

“He was quick to respond to what we needed,” Yamada said. The Kaimuki board chairman referred to the Queen Theatre, an icon from the golden era of the neighborhood’s main street, Waialae Avenue, which has fallen into disrepair.

His owner didn’t take care of him, Yamada and the board said prompted Waters to introduce a resolution last year in order to take control of the city and restore it to its former glory.

Richard Turbin, chairman of the Waialae-Kahala Borough Council, also appreciated Waters’ hyperlocal involvement.

A quirk in the language of what constitutes a public beach has inspired wealthy beachgoers to plant vegetation along the sand, he said. When he took Waters for a walk to show him the problem, they ran into a man stealing sand.

Waters called them out, Turbin said: “He had more guts to deal with that guy than I did.”

When it comes to neighborhood council appearances, Turbin said, Waters often sends aides. But Turbin said the assistants are good connections.

That doesn’t mean they agree with everything the city council has done under Waters’ leadership. Particularly controversial was the passage of a bill banning short-term rentals for less than 90 days — up from the current 30 days — in most areas of Hawaii’s most populous island. The new regulations come into effect later this month.

Turbin thought the 30-day minimum was a fair compromise – “then they suddenly bumped it up to 90 days all of a sudden” – but overall the board felt it was prudent to do something about over-rentals that saw an influx of tourists in some residential areas, he said.

The big issue now, Turbin said, is that the council needs to improve oversight of the planning and permitting department, which has been plagued by long delays and had several officials arrested last year in a bribery scandal.

Is Tommy Waters ‘Invincible’?

Waters’ first two campaigns for City Council were against Trevor Ozawa, a fellow attorney who won a close race in 2014.

Waters initially lost the 2018 election as well, but in a rare move the state Supreme Court overturned the result, setting the stage for a special election rematch in April 2019, which he ultimately won.

Ozawa – who was appointed chairman of the council after his initial victory in 2018 — chose not to run for his old seat this cycle, clearing the way for Waters and Nakoa to bypass the Aug. 13 primary and move on to the Nov. 8 general election, as there were only two candidates.

Nakoa is an outsider, and during a phone interview he could be heard getting lots of affirmative honks as his team waved campaign signs along the way. His Instagram account includes a post with former Republican gubernatorial candidate BJ Penn, and he’s campaigned on the idea that he’s not an established politician.

“I’m the worst politician in this race because I’m going to speak my mind,” Nakoa said. If there is an issue in his district, he explained, he would be honest with his constituents rather than sugar coat the truth.

He has not sought the support of the unions — “not that I don’t value their opinion, but I want to hear it from the people,” he said.

Meanwhile, Waters has strong union support, one of the few components that make him seemingly “invincible,” said Colin Moore, director of the Center for Public Policy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Because there was no primary for their race, Nakoa and Waters were not required to file campaign finance reports until Oct. 3. Nakoa raised almost $4,000 by Sept. 26 and had just over $1,000 on hand at the end of the reporting period.

Waters has raised over $300,000 by this point in the election cycle, bringing her total cash on hand to nearly $250,000.