COMMENTARY

By David Polhemus
Advertiser Editorial Writer

Honolulu city government is in its worst financial shape in a long time, and we need to hold somebody accountable.

There's plenty of blame to go around — enough to cover the mayor's office and the City Council with shame.

The council certainly deserves its share of censure. It received a budget draft from Mayor Jeremy Harris, admittedly an uncomfortable document calling for higher taxes and fee hikes, but one that preserved core services.

The council, for reasons that are still hard to fathom, attacked it with meat cleavers. Using some questionable financing, their result avoided a few fee increases, but managed to force cuts in bus routes and to close satellite city halls.

(Lots of confused readers are blaming the struggles of libraries and schools on the city, but those are the fault of those other guys, over on Beretania Street.)

Let's be clear about essential services. It's one thing to put off cutting the grass in a park for a couple of weeks. It's quite another to make bus riders stand all the way to Wai'anae or to wait in long lines to get permits because there are fewer satellite city halls.

These are the sorts of services that government exists to perform. If council members can't get this right, they're in the wrong line of work.

Incredibly though, someone else already seems to be getting the blame.

Our mail suggests that people think the mayor's "vision teams" are the real culprits. Neighborhoods around town are planting trees and building hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of opulent signage to validate their sense of community.

The high visibility of these signs is by design, but it also makes them lightning rods for public anger. Of course the money now being spent on them came from last year's budget, but few people can (or should) accept spending for such luxury items at the same time taxes and fees are being increased and essential services are being cut.

The buck for the vision teams stops on Jeremy Harris' desk. The idea was to give $2 million a year to each of 19 neighborhoods to spend as they like, thus making them feel empowered, even loved. You see these signs, roundabouts, tree-lined medians and other handsome, if modest, results around town.

But this comparatively inexpensive feel-good process masks an underlying disaster, diverting people's attention from major projects that have been deferred for years. They are problems that are much bigger than any given neighborhood.

Look what has been happening, for instance, to the city's roads and streets. After years of delayed or deferred maintenance, bone-jarring surface potholes are no longer the main problem. Damage to the underlying roadbeds is going to take millions and millions of dollars to fix.

And then there are the sewers, with literally billions of dollars of work needed. Harris contends that it would be foolish to spend the money for secondary treatment of sewage at the Sand Island plant, where 70 million gallons a day of partially treated effluent flow into an ocean outfall.

With EPA displeasure that the massive improvement project at Sand Island is far behind schedule, one wonders who will look foolish if the city's application for renewal of its secondary treatment waiver is turned down this time and we have to pour hundreds of millions more dollars into that plant.

The City Council is deserving of jeers for its budget performance this year. It's amazing that some members seem to think their performance positions them as viable mayoral candidates for 2004.

But I blame the seriousness of the budget situation they inherited on Harris and — if my theory is correct — his now-battered game plan to become governor.

I think he intended to have ridden into Washington Place last year on a surge of popularity owing to his "vision teams," Sunset and Brunch on the Beach, the Hanauma Bay upgrade and magnificent if extravagant soccer and tennis facilities.

His popularity also depended on postponing needed property-tax increases, which contributed to the unwise deferment of work on gritty but necessary infrastructure projects. No one understands better than Harris the exponential cost consequences of putting off this work.

The vision teams, bless them, are now expendable. Harris now finds himself still in Hono-lulu Hale, dealing — skillfully as always — with headaches that he hoped would be his successor's problem.

David Polhemus is an editorial writer at The Honolulu Advertiser. E-mail him at dpolhemus@honoluluadvertiser.com