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Seizing the challenge
at Honolulu Hale

Winning by 1,300 votes as Mufi Hannemann did last year means every supporter thinks he or she is the one who put him over the top. And every opponent calculates that if just 656 voters picked someone else, Mayor Hannemann never would have happened.

If Hannemann's hold on Honolulu Hale is precarious, it has not forced the 50-year-old Democrat into either belligerence or appeasement.

When Hannemann first ran for mayor in 2000, old friends said he had been preparing his whole life for the role of chief executive. In fact, the Kalihi-raised former Iolani and Harvard athlete, White House Fellow and two-term councilman has had a career of working toward something big.

Since winning City Hall, Hannemann has worked mightily to make Honolulu his city, not a city in reaction to former mayor Jeremy Harris, or a municipality shaped by the Democratic Legislature or Republican governor.

Hannemann started by canceling Harris' expensive transit and urban redesign projects. The risk was that Hannemann acted while Harris' spendthrift administration was still basking in a round of ill-founded media goodbyes that attempted to establish Harris as one of the city's great mayors.

Political risk or not, Hannemann ordered both budgets and trees chopped.

The bigger gamble, however, is still on the table. Hannemann is now the identified face heading the drive for both a 12.5 percent general excise tax increase and a mass transit system. The three neighbor island mayors have all backed away from calling for a tax increase.

Hannemann had a political showdown of sorts during the Legislature's closing weeks when he met with more than two dozen union leaders and the House and Senate's Democratic leaders.

The mayor answered the objections over how long the tax increase should remain and how to fund the project as fast as possible so as not to have years of new taxes sitting in the bank while transit plans were still being drawn. But some legislators were still critical, Hannemann shot back that now was "not a time to be myopic." Legislators then rushed to defend their position, and in a tense exchange said that Hannemann was insulting them. Finally one of the union leaders broke up the harangue and got the meeting back on track.

Calling transit not a solution, but another option for a modern Honolulu transportation scheme, Hannemann was one of the first to testify before the City Council when it started considering the tax increase.

It will be the Council that makes the final decision on tax increases, but Hannemann has already made himself the target.

Like the ball player who with two seconds left in the game and down by one point says "Feed me the ball," Hannemann is showing exactly what all those years of government practice were for.