ONCE upon a time Hawaii was fat with money. So much money flowed through the state coffers that the governor started giving it away. Cayetano’s big
construction programTo the schools, the governor pledged $90 million a year. But when the governor left office he was very troubled to learn that as much as he wanted to spend the money and as much as the schools needed the money, he couldn't push the paperwork fast enough to spend $90 million a year in extra school construction. That's a true story. It happened to Gov. John Waihee between 1989 and 1994.
Today, Gov. Ben Cayetano, who doesn't have much money to spend, wants to pony up an extra $1 billion in state construction bucks. The money will go for needed prisons, schools, libraries, harbors and tourist facilities.
Strangely enough, while no one is saying don't spend it, critics doubt it can be spent in time to help the economy, others say paying the interest on a $1 billion construction spree will damage the state's economy instead of help it and, most damning, construction leaders don't believe it will help at all.
"What should Ben Cayetano do?" Walter Kupau, the head of the Carpenters Union asks.
"First thing he should do is resign, second thing he should do is resign and maybe the third thing he should do is resign," Kupau said.
Cayetano's political advisers had hoped to win back critical union support with the $1 billion announcement. Attempts were made to have the construction unions cheer the announcement, but Cayetano's stock, already damaged by prolonged labor negotiations with the public employees, went nowhere.
The outspoken and politically powerful Kupau called the offer "a cruel trick to play on people who are hungry."
"I have a couple of hundred carpenters working in Las Vegas right now so they can feed their families, make their house payments and their car payments back here in Hawaii. They are separated from their families, and I blame Ben Cayetano for it," he said.
Another union leader, who asked not to be identified, said, "The governor has succeeded in bringing us together." Unfortunately for Cayetano the labor solidarity is not for him but for someone who will oppose the Democrat in two years.
"There is going to be blood in the water and a lot of opportunistic sharks in it," another union official said.
Ironically, at the same time that Cayetano can't get immediate support for his hyper construction budget, labor unions, the usual allies of a Democratic incumbent governor, are clearly fed up with Cayetano's brusque manner.
"Talking to him is like talking to a hole in the ground," Kupau says. "So why talk to him?"
ANOTHER labor leader involved with the public employee unions said Cayetano "makes things harder than they have to be."
"If he can find a way to make you feel bad, he does," the labor leader said.
Cayetano, who two years ago won the governorship in a three-way split with 34 per cent of the vote, has said he would do what's needed to be done. If the voters liked it, OK; if they didn't he would go back to private law practice and make a fine living.
Two years on the job have shown Cayetano isn't afraid to make enemies, but they have also demonstrated that it takes more than one term to change state government.
So as the pressure mounts from unions, voters and even his own accountants and economists, 1997 will be Cayetano's make-or-break year.
