Posted on: Sunday, September 5, 2004

By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

Unless Frank Fasi stages another of his unexpected comebacks, the next mayor of Honolulu will raise your taxes.

Count on it.

Front-runners Mufi Hannemann and Duke Bainum have been remarkably candid about the fact that Honolulu faces demands that can be met only by taking more money out of the pockets of O'ahu taxpayers.

Let us be clear here. Neither candidate suggests he wants to raise taxes or would not do everything in his power to avoid that unhappy decision.

But both Bainum and Hanneman spend a lot of time talking about the need to get Honolulu's sewer system up to first-class condition, upgrade the pace and quality of road repairs and maintain top support for parks maintenance, police and fire protection and the like.

None of this comes cheap.

Love him or hate him, Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris held the lid on taxes for most of his administration. He scrambled, angled, squeezed and balanced in an effort to provide what the city wanted without increasing the tax burden on its residents.

That left a civic pressure cooker, simmering and shuddering, that his replacement will have to deal with. There are bills coming due and needs to be met that cannot be satisfied without money.

Chat with Hanneman and Bainum, and you hear a person conflicted —"can't talk about tax hikes, makes the voters mad" — along with "big needs ahead, someone has to pay for them."

Take mass transit. Both candidates argue that some form of rail transit is needed. They also admit that without a "dedicated" source of local support for such a billion-dollar-plus project, Uncle Sam is unlikely to help.

Bainum says such a dedicated source might be cobbled out of state support (maybe more of the hotel-room tax), property taxes (from the real estate value generated around transit stops) and well, yes, some kind of increased levy on the residents of Honolulu.

Hannemann offers much the same scenario, although he argues forcefully that this cannot be laid on the backs of Honolulu taxpayers alone. It is a statewide obligation, he says, that requires state cooperation that drops state tax dollars on every county and every county's transportation headache.

Which brings us back to former Mayor Fasi, who declares absolutely that he will not raise taxes — not for sewers, for roads, for transit.

So where will the money come from? Fasi proposes selling the Aloha Stadium (and its prime location at the intersection of several freeways) to a private developer and turning Midway Island into a casino resort.

Well, yes. But unless a number of unlikely scenarios come to pass, the next several years will see Honolulu residents paying more in sewer fees, gasoline taxes or property taxes, than they have become accustomed to for nearly a decade.