The Issues
I’ve got some ideas for the future of our community, and I’d like to hear yours. Here’s where I’m at.
Governance
Fix the process, and we have a real shot at fixing the problems.
Before session even begins, I’d advocate within the Democratic caucus to pass House rules that better organize our work and ensure public accountability.
Too much gets decided behind closed doors, and too much never gets decided at all. Bills die every year simply because a committee chair declines to hear them. That’s worth revisiting, especially for bills with no fiscal impact that get stopped in Finance. Committee chairs should facilitate the will of the majority. And we should limit the power of any single chair to quietly bury legislation. I’d also push for rules that give the public real notice and real time to weigh in before major votes.
We should also know what we’re voting on. Right now bills move through the Legislature without independent analysis of what they’ll cost. Hawaiʻi authorized an independent Office of the Legislative Analyst decades ago and simply never funded it. I’d work to finally stand it up. Ignoring price tags isn’t how you run a household, a nonprofit, or a state.
Furthermore, I support real ethics reform with independent enforcement, so accountability doesn’t depend on lawmakers policing themselves. And I support term limits. When people hold the same seat for decades, fresh ideas wait at the door.
Democracy in Hawaiʻi needs competition at the ballot box. As a one-party state, most races are decided in the primary and too many go uncontested. I support a single open primary where all candidates share one ballot and top vote-getters advance, and I’d explore ranked-choice voting. I’d also fix public financing, which is currently far too little to run a competitive race.
Water
But we have failed to care properly for our water resources for too long.
Upcountry’s water demand already exceeds our supply. Climate projections point to less rainfall in the years ahead. Our infrastructure is old and expensive to maintain, and it loses water we can’t afford to lose. Water restrictions have become a regular occurrence.
The County is working on solutions. We need the State to be a real partner, and we need community at the center of the conversation. There are short-term fixes we can implement now, like the two water tanks Kula residents have been advocating for. And we need mid- and long-term solutions so Upcountry always has the water we need to flourish.
I also want to see water abundance across our islands. Reducing scarcity is itself a form of protection. That means serious investment in wastewater recycling to drinkable standards, even if the water is only used for agriculture at first. Having that infrastructure in place reduces the burden on our surface and ground water and gives us options when we need them. Water protection has to come first. There is no reasonable and beneficial use of water without a foundation of protecting and maintaining the resource for the future.
Housing
We can’t simply build our way out of this. We have to change who our housing serves.
I’d build permanently affordable rentals on public land. As public rental inventory grows, it also becomes a tool to stabilize the whole market. I’d also create a resident housing market through deed-restriction tools, modeled on programs like Vail’s InDEED, that keep homes in local hands for good.
I’d raise the capital-gains tax on non-resident property sales and support higher county taxes on second homes. Both raise revenue for housing while cooling the outside demand that drives up prices.
Outdated building codes drive up the price of every project. I’d advance reforms like allowing single-stair buildings up to six stories, which cost less and fit smaller lots. Our slow permitting adds cost that gets passed straight to families. We need to fix that.
In our current system, we draw community plans with residents, but leave those plans wide open to revision between scheduled plan updates. This leads to a loss of public trust in our system, constant battles over new development, and additional costs that we all must shoulder. We need to end this cycle. I’d draw the lines fairly, with community and a realistic projection of where growth should go, rezone to match, then make it genuinely hard to change those lines between planning cycles. At the same time, we need to move toward by-right administrative approvals of development. When the plan is clear and holds the trust of our community, there’s no need to fight over every development project.
Government should proactively build and upgrade the water, sewer, and roads that align with community plans. When it doesn’t, the cost has to be passed on to buyers.
Cost of Living
Hawaiʻi’s cost of living isn’t one problem. It’s all the problems we continually fail to fix, growing year by year.
I know what it’s like to struggle to make rent and pay the bills. And I’ve watched people I love leave these islands because they couldn’t afford to stay. Every departure leaves a hole in our families and communities.
Our system is upside-down. Working families pay a bigger share of their income than the wealthy do, in large part because the GET gets layered into the price of nearly everything we buy. I’d remove it from essentials like groceries and medicine, and make our state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable so working families get money back rather than just a smaller tax bill.
We import most of what we eat, which leaves us paying more and exposed to every disruption. Growing more of our own is the lasting fix. That means supporting our farmers and ranchers, using the State’s purchasing power so schools and public institutions buy local, and protecting the ag land and water that make farming possible.
Our shipping rules make everything more expensive, and they hold neighbor island producers back. A grower can only scale if they can affordably move product to market. Fixing this does double duty: lower prices for neighbor island families, and real growth in local production.
We can’t find and keep enough childcare workers because the pay is too low. Programs stay small or close, and subsidy money goes unused. I’d prioritize living wages for childcare workers alongside real pathways to train and credential new ones. I also support paid family leave, so parents can care for a newborn without rushing back to work.
Our Economy and Our Resilience
Economic development is a throughline in my career, and I have come to see clearly: we must reorient our economy around place and community.
We rely too heavily on tourism, and the jobs it creates too often don’t pay enough to live here. So let’s invest where we’ll always have need. Food and energy self-sufficiency build resilience and create good local careers. And let’s make it easier to start and run a business here.
Hawaiʻi has some of the highest costs and most burdensome regulations in the country. For small and startup businesses, that’s a wall. I’d streamline permitting and licensing, and adopt licensing reciprocity so qualified people aren’t blocked from working here. I’d also push for GET relief for small businesses. Because the GET taxes gross receipts, it hits you even in a bad year when you’re barely breaking even.
There’s a lot of small-scale economic activity in our communities, people already working hard, just outside the formal system. Lower the on-ramp with simple registration and tax relief at the bottom, and more people will formalize, growing our economy and their own futures.
Strong communities are the foundation of disaster response and recovery. It’s the most important lesson I’ve taken from my work after the 2023 wildfires. When systems failed, neighbors didn’t. So I’d invest in that strength: community emergency hubs, local response training, and reliable backup power and communications Upcountry. And resilience planning should start with the people who live here.
Education, Workforce Development, and Justice Reform
To start, we should be clear about what we want our schools to do. I want a system grounded in Hawaiʻi that educates toward the future, opens critically thinking minds, and instills in every student a sense of kuleana to our shared betterment. Having taught learners from preschool through university, I know this is possible. We just need the courage and creativity to make it happen.
The solutions begin with teachers. Research consistently shows that, aside from family circumstances, teachers are the single biggest factor in student success. Yet we pay them too little to live here, and we lose good ones every year. I’d raise teacher salaries and invest in recruiting and training a new generation of educators.
That takes money, which means expanding the tax base that funds education. I’d invite the counties to partner with the State, supplementing funding for teacher salaries, training, and facilities. There’s significant revenue available to counties in taxing second homes and investment properties. In return, the DOE could shift its function from control toward coordination, giving communities and schools more say over our education system.
We also need to connect school to the work waiting for our young people. I’d grow career and technical pathways, paid internships and apprenticeships so students earn while they learn, and partnerships between schools, UH, and local employers so what we teach leads to jobs that actually exist here. Too many of our keiki leave because they can’t see a future for themselves. That’s a problem our schools can help solve.
We shouldn’t expand jails before we fix the system that feeds jails.
I understand OCCC is aging and unsafe, and no one should be held, or work, in poor conditions. Replacing a facility that’s genuinely failing is important. But building a bigger one, at enormous cost, before we’ve done the harder work of keeping people out of jail in the first place? That’s backwards.
So many of those who sit in our jails are people awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail, or people struggling with homelessness, addiction, or mental illness. Those challenges belong in treatment and community care, not a cell. And here in Hawaiʻi, incarceration falls hardest on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, which makes getting this right a matter of justice, not just budgets.
I support bail reform, so release decisions are based on genuine risk to public safety rather than the size of someone’s bank account, while maintaining judges’ ability to detain those who truly pose a danger. In the longer term, reducing incarceration means addressing why people end up in the system at all: weak social bonds, unemployment and income inequality, and an education system that too many young people feel shut out of.
That means reforming our education system so young people see a path forward, investing in job training and living-wage work so economic need isn’t what drives someone into the justice system, and supporting more community organizations, churches, and hālau that keep people connected to one another. When people are connected — to work, to school, to family, to place — they have the support they need to make good choices, and fewer of them end up before a judge in the first place.
Healthcare
Hawaiʻi already leads on coverage. Our Prepaid Health Care Act means most workers have insurance. But coverage isn’t the same as protection. Families still face high deductibles, surprise bills, and, on the neighbor islands, the cost and complexity of traveling just to see a specialist.
Our medical system is hard on neighbor island families. On Maui we have one hospital where mothers can give birth. We struggle to keep women’s health physicians in our clinics. All three of the state’s NICUs are on Oʻahu, so when a Maui baby needs critical care, they’re flown to another island, away from family. That imbalance puts lives at risk, and it has to change.
I’d focus on closing those gaps: strengthening protections against medical debt, pushing for price transparency, supporting neighbor island patients facing travel barriers, and growing our own local pipeline so we can recruit and keep doctors, nurses, and care providers here. And I believe we should seriously explore moving toward healthcare as a guaranteed right, not a privilege tied to your job.
ʻĀina and Climate Change
My relationship to ʻāina is familial and generational. I know the names and uses of our native plants, along with the akua for whom they are body forms. I know the prayers to enter the forest and to collect offerings. Protecting our ʻāina, and finding ways to bring it greater health, is at the foundation of everything I do.
Act 96 created a dedicated funding source to protect our environment and build resilience. Now, the hard part isn’t finding the money — it’s spending it well. Our Green Fee funds should focus on hazard mitigation, infrastructure resilience, and environmental stewardship. Allocation decisions belong with the Administration, guided by clear standards, not with the Legislature. And we should create a fund that allows multi-year commitments and more creative financing, so every dollar goes further.
We import roughly 90% of our energy, which leaves us vulnerable and sends our wealth out of state. Geothermal is one of the few sources that can provide firm, around-the-clock power, and it opens the door to cascading uses supporting new local industries. However, geothermal development is opposed by many Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners, because of concerns about the commodification of our ʻāina and culture and the continual displacement of our people from our homelands. Those concerns can’t be brushed aside. The work I’m engaged in is about empowering that conversation, bringing cultural practitioners to the center of it, so that if we pursue geothermal, we do it in a way that is culturally appropriate and community-led.
I also support tax incentives for battery storage and for electric vehicles, including home charging units and more high-speed public chargers.
I support managed retreat, shifting development inland from the coast, as a strategy for sea level rise and coastal erosion. I’d like to see coastal development replaced by green, communal spaces. The challenge is the how. The State needs to work with the Counties, and we need development, finance, and insurance systems aligned with the plan.
Talk Story
I want to hear about your ideas for our communities and the future for our families in Upcountry Maui. Please reach out anytime.