By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

If you've been following the budget battle between Mayor Jeremy Harris and City Council Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi, you may be feeling a bit bewildered.

Not to worry. Bewilderment is, one suspects, one of the objectives here.

Start, for example, with the mayor. After years of budget cuts and holding the line on taxes, he finally hit the wall. Harris says the budget cannot be cut any more, and the demand for services is unrelenting. It is time, finally, to raise property taxes and fees.

The tab — taxes and fees together — is about $50 million.

Thanks a lot, says Kobayashi. After years of taking credit for holding the line on taxes the mayor drops a major tax and fee increase in our laps on his way out the door.

(Harris' term is up next year.)

In response, Kobayashi proposes (and you have to take this as a PR bluff more than anything) that she simply will ignore the Harris budget. Under the City Charter, if the council fails to act, the mayor's budget becomes law.

Let Harris figure out how to make this work, Kobayashi says.

If her purpose was to make a political point and get the mayor's goat, she succeeded. The Harris team is beside itself over Kobayashi's gambit.

For starters, they point out, they are simply following the rules. The charter requires the mayor to come up with a budget each year. That budget is supposed to include both a spending plan and a revenue plan. That is to say, how much will be spent on city services, and where the money will come from.

Kobayashi says this is a "ghost" or "phantom" budget because is it balanced with taxes and fees that do not exist today and — depending on the council's decision — may never exist.

Harris says this is absurd. Every budget comes with an income plan; it has to. If the council doesn't like the tax package it includes, it is free to come up with an alternative.

Kobayashi surely understands this, so her point is less about Harris steamrolling a tax hike through the council than about responsibility. Her objections make the case that it is Harris, not the council, who has taken the city to a point where only a substantial tax and fee increase will keep it running.

And that's where the politics of this all become clear. Kobayashi obviously is thinking about running for mayor next year when Harris steps down. Among those she will face are former council colleagues Mufi Hannemann and Duke Bainum.

The last thing she wants is to have those two hang a big tax hike around her neck, which they certainly would do if given the opportunity. So take all this for what it is. Harris, no longer concerned about next year's elections, can propose the bitter tax and fee medicine which, in truth, was long overdue.

And Kobayashi, who will have to face the voters soon enough, is left to make a fuss over how bitter that medicine truly is.

Reach Jerry Burris through letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.