PROCESS may be the ultimate undoing for the Cayetano administration's hopes to escape this legislative session with a balanced budget. Inclusiveness was
lacking in task forceThe problem started last year as Hawaii slipped into the seventh year of its economic morass. That was when government and business leaders called for leadership.
When the pressure groups, coalitions and others launched a series of conferences in order to reach community consensus, Gov. Ben Cayetano, with the agreement of Democratic legislative leaders, set up the Economic Revitalization Task Force.
The idea was to get the movers and shakers together, have them come up with a solution to our economic problem and then get the Legislature to approve it.
The mistake Cayetano and others made was to exclude important community groups, including social service agencies and the counties. The task force threw those on the outside a bone, by allowing them to set up subgroups, but their recommendations were largely ignored.
"Process is everything," says the Rev. Frank Chong, legislative observer, lobbyist and director of the Waikiki Health Center.
Chong, who supports most of the task force's tax-increase proposals, because the poor, sick and displaced people whom he represents will be ignored without continued government assistance, contends that the process was flawed.
"In my experience, if you involve people at the most basic level of dialogue and ask them for their advice and input they will contribute their best knowledge.
"You will also garner their support, enthusiasm and loyalty," he said.
And when you exclude them, you get a public opinion poll like the recent one showing that 62 percent of those who know about the tax plan didn't like it.
This has got to stun the governor and the Legislature, because the honchos in charge of the Revitalization Task Force came up with a public relations campaign estimated by some to cost between $500,000 and $1 million.
Of course, this is a plan that lends itself to confusion. Public employee unions, battling to protect their members, argue that the tax plan amounts to the public paying just 37 cents more a day to keep the university open.
This comes at the same time that Cayetano is calling it the state's "biggest tax decrease."
Among those who have actually paid attention to the task force and its centerpiece tax plan to raise the excise tax and lower income tax, the proposal is even more troubling, because there isn't that much evidence that it would help.
For instance, Moody's Investors Service, which rates Hawaii bonds, says the relationship between tax changes and economic development "has always been a tenuous one."
Politicians, however, know that the relationship between tax increases and life in public office is usually more than tenuous.
FOR Cayetano, the situation has become drastic enough for him to blame the public, as he did last week on KHON-TV 2 News:
"Hawaii is one of the most provincial places in the world...I don't think there is any other community in the United States, the entire United States of America, which is as resistant to change as we are here," he said.
Perhaps if Cayetano and the other political leaders had followed the process -- opening the task force to all -- they would now be following Chong's suggestion:
"Our job is not betterment but empowerment, to help people discover the power that is within them to take part in their own destiny."
Full text of the Governor's
Economic Task Force recommendations.Richard Borreca reports on Hawaii's politics every Wednesday.
He can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com