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Under the Sun
Cynthia Oi
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Being mayor a dirty job, but Mufi has to do it
WHEN Mufi Hannemann became mayor 16 months ago, he repeated his campaign pledge to direct his attention to the basics of running a city.
No more teams with visions of fancy-schmantzy community signs, no more generous new parks that drained tax dollars to build and maintain, no more window-dressing projects with fountains and trees. Nope. His administration was to be about streamlined essential services, about nut and bolts.
Unfortunately, many of those nuts and bolts were worn away, rusted and fractured during previous years and previous administrations. Hannemann has been left to hold together the pieces while at the same time nudging forward the beginnings of a mass transit system, arguably the most ambitious plan any city leader has attempted.
Then along comes a vexatious bout with the forces of nature -- an unrelenting series of rainy days that overwhelmed a crippled system that's supposed to treat and whisk away wastes of a million island inhabitants.
There have been scores of inadvertent sewage discharges across Oahu during his tenure, but none like the one in Waikiki last month. The decision to divert 48 million gallons of raw sewage into the Ala Wai Canal after a four-decade-old pipeline cracked dwarfed earlier spills and polluted a stretch of shoreline in the heart of Hawaii's tourism haven.
CITY OFFICIALS had been warned that several segments of sewer pipes were in danger of failure, but that was a year before he took office. This allowed him to place the blame squarely on his predecessor, Jeremy Harris, and he did.
"We are paying the price of deferred negligence," Hannemann said at a news conference Saturday. He presumably meant "deferral and negligence," but jumbled language aside, you get his drift: that Harris had not done his job properly.
It's true that Hannemann inherited a load of postponed repairs of the sewage system as Harris chose to put money on high-visibility, above-ground ventures rather than the practical aspects of city operations. So the current mayor can claim cause for laying blame.
But Hannemann now holds the title and the responsibilities of managing the city. Assuming the office comes with the occupational hazard of picking up the debris left by someone else, and pushing off culpability to the other guy gets old real fast.
THERE ARE others at fault, including an enabling City Council too politically timid to press for costly repair work even though members were well aware of the old system's vulnerability.
Also to blame are ourselves, all of us who automatically howl when fee increases are proposed without considering the need for modernizing nor the consequences of disintegrating pipes and worn-out plants.
As development swells on Oahu, so does the burden on public services like the sewage system and trash collection. Every new home and condominium, every additional hotel and commercial structure, every shopping mall and megastore places a bigger the load on those services.
Expanding the capacity of infrastructure to handle the increases has to be paid for by taxpayers, who predictably oppose the price because most working, it seems, are struggling with their own budgets. Still, for the city's economic growth, services also need to grow.
HANNEMANN has been more willing than his predecessor to bear the wrath of taxpayers in making hard decisions about the city's priorities. He appears to realize that you can please some of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time, and that his job requires making tough choices.
Just as he seemed to be hitting his stride, the sewer pipe break swept in. At his news conference, he railed against "armchair quarterbacking," and said that "if people wanted their wastewater system improved, then they should have elected me mayor in 2000."
They didn't in 2000, but did in 2004.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at
coi@starbulletin.com.