Both candidates list public education, drugs and traffic among their top issues.

Coffee supports breaking up the school system into districts with locally elected school boards, saying the centralized Department of Education bureaucracy swallows up money that would otherwise go to individual schools.

"I want to spend as much energy as necessary to truly change our education system to what it should be, and it can be second to none," he said. "But not with the centralized system that we have there now."

Oshiro, who opposes the local school boards idea, said the Democrats' education reform bill passed this year will "go a long way" to improve public schools by providing smaller class sizes, more textbooks and "giving individual schools the flexibility and authority to prioritize their own needs." The new law also establishes a "weighted student formula" that bases school financing on the needs of students rather than enrollment.

Coffee said he wants to give law enforcement more tools to battle the crystal methamphetamine epidemic and supports easing wiretapping restrictions and restoring "walk and talk" and "knock and talk" drug investigations.

"What the bottom line there is if a person wants ... (to) commit a crime, they'd be sure to have some ice paraphernalia on them, so that when they get caught or arrested they can claim they're an ice addict and then they go to rehab instead of prison," he said.

Oshiro said the law gives judges discretion over whether a drug offender should get treatment or incarceration and that similar laws in California and Arizona have been successful.

"We can't only have this throw-them-in-jail, lock-them- up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude," he said. "We need to have an approach that tries to break the cycle of addiction."

To help alleviate traffic problems, Coffee said he would look into more contraflow freeway lanes in the morning and evening, "with one-way opposite direction parallel streets to accommodate other traffic."

He said he would also explore four-day workweeks, an elevated highway and a fixed guideway system.

Oshiro said road expansions and other initiatives are "Band-Aid approaches" to the traffic problem and that the state needs to move more government services to Kapolei, which will draw other businesses. He said he also supports building the University of Hawai'i West O'ahu campus and mass transit.