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Editor’s note: Do you have questions for Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle? He said he didn’t have time to be interviewed in advance of this article, but agreed to talk with Civil Beat on Tuesday morning. What would you like to know from him about his first six months on the job? Send questions to alafrance@civilbeat.com, and we’ll ask the mayor for you.

Six months on the job, and Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle is — absolutely and unequivocally, as he would say — finally settled in at the helm of the city.

No longer the new guy at Honolulu Hale, Carlisle has now presented his first budget, given his State of the City address, even led Oahu through an overnight tsunami warning.

So how’s he’s handling his new gig, anyway?

You know, besides all of the parades and handshakes, lei-draped keynote remarks and ceremonial fluff. (Read a related article about the mayor’s style.)

To get a sense of what Carlisle has accomplished in his first six months on the job, we looked back to what he pledged to do in the first place. Some of his key campaign messages involved his commitment to:

• Improve the city’s financial health
• Advance the city’s rail project
• Take steps to make government more transparent

Fiscal balance

Carlisle promised a financial overhaul at City Hall. Getting Honolulu’s “financial house in order” was a theme of his campaign, and voters signed on to what Carlisle assured them would be a partnership with the private sector that would “dramatically increase” its economic health.

In speeches since he was elected, Carlisle has continued to focus on drastically changing the city’s financial complexion.

But to Carlisle’s surprise, the city wasn’t in as bad shape as he anticipated. In fact, he inherited no budget shortfall from his predecessor. Still, Carlisle identified areas — such as the city’s borrowing habits — that he said needed to be altered.

In his February State of the City address, and the presentation of his first budget a week later, his specific fiscal priorities emerged. Carlisle announced he would:

• Reduce “staggering” debt by slashing capital spending
• Ask labor unions to shoulder cuts to pay or benefits totaling at least 5 percent

But Carlisle also made some decisions that surprised and frustrated those who elected someone they thought would be a hard-nosed fiscal conservative:

• Raising property taxes for resident homeowners
• Raising the fuel tax
• Increasing fees for services

Carlisle argues these steps are necessary to generate revenue, which is needed to pay for capital projects instead of continuing the practice of borrowing money for those projects. Reducing the city’s debt was one of the top priorities he cited in an essay he wrote for Civil Beat about why voters should pick him, published the day before he was elected.

In that same essay, though, he talked about the importance of removing the burden on taxpayers.

“We have to stop putting the burden of government on taxpayers, which causes government to get fatter and taxpayers to have less money,” he wrote.

Six months later, the City Council’s budget chairman criticized the mayor for presenting an operating budget that didn’t truly represent “lean” government, and said the council would look for ways to ease the strain on taxpayers. Several City Council members also moved to eliminate some or all of the $44 million Carlisle proposed spending on vacant funded positions, another area where they said government fat needed to be trimmed.

Budget Chairman Ernie Martin and other City Council members ended up proposing drastic cuts to the mayor’s spending plan, and called for reinstating some funds for capital projects.

Martin said the goal is to eliminate some of the fees the Carlisle administration wants to implement, to reduce the burden on taxpayers.

Given the lack of a budget gap, the mayor’s proposed tax increases are particularly striking.

Keeping Rail on Track

On rail, Carlisle is a convert. He acknowledges he used to have his doubts but has since become a champion of the project.

In fact, the extent to which the $5.5 billion plan has moved forward under his leadership can be seen as one of the mayor’s great successes. One of his first moves as mayor was a trip to Washington, D.C. that included meetings with top federal officials on rail. Since then, with his enthusiastic support and a little bit of luck, he’s seen the project hit the following key milestones:

• The governor’s acceptance of the federal Environmental Impact Statement
• The Federal Transportation Administration’s issue of a record of decision, enabling some early construction to begin
• A splashy ceremonial groundbreaking
• The first-ever business visit to Honolulu by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff
• The selection of awards for two major rail contracts
• The dismissal of a lawsuit aimed at halting the project

Carlisle set out to advance the rail project, and it has seen enormous progress in his first six months as mayor.

Out of the Mayor’s Control

It turned out that some of the things Carlisle promised to handle are out of his control.

On the campaign trail, Carlisle was careful not to make promises he couldn’t keep. The guarantee that he’d review all the information before coming to a decision was a popular refrain from the former prosecutor. It still is.

But one thing Carlisle made clear during the campaign was his intention to end furloughs. Before he became mayor, he said he would try to eliminate mandatory days off before the fiscal year ended. In a passionate November speech, he declared furloughs were “invented by the devil,” while also quietly acknowledging he would let them “die of their own death” with the end of the fiscal year, rather than continue to try to end them early.

When Carlisle presented his budget in early March, he called furloughs “public enemy No. 1.” But the first labor negotiations to culminate in a tentative agreement do not necessarily reflect his values. While the deal between state and county governments and the Hawaii Government Employees Association includes a pay cut, the deal also includes more vacation days. In other words, workers may not have a calendar of Furlough Fridays, but they’ll still have the net effect — less work and less pay — of mandated days off.

Carlisle appeared blindsided last week by Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie‘s announcement of the deal. But just because he isn’t happy about how union negotiations are beginning to play out doesn’t mean he can change what’s happening. The governor is essentially in charge of the negotiations, with Carlisle taking a back seat.

The mayor has largely stayed out of some other subjects he talked about during the campaign. We haven’t heard a whole lot from the mayor about homelessness — except to say the city “simply can’t tolerate” it in one particularly colorful speech — or recycling.

Both are areas he cited as important during his campaign, but much of his hands-off approach to tackling them is stylistic. Carlisle said he is deliberate about letting his Cabinet members lead, and not interfering unless necessary.

A Promise of Short-Term Change

In his campaign, Carlisle talked a lot about changing the way government does business. He called inertia “the great enemy,” and led a campaign promising voters that not everyone would like what he had in store for them. He alluded to possible lay offs. He talked about making government lean.

“In the short term, we need change,” Carlisle said that day. “Plain and simple.”

Carlisle delivered an immediate change in leadership style, but ultimately the top leadership at City Hall didn’t change much. In the two weeks after he was elected, the attitude in city offices was somewhat hushed. After months of listening to a campaign promise of putting an end to business as usual, staffers across departments were left wondering if they’d stay employed through Halloween.

Months later, though, Carlisle found himself defending his decision to keep the vast majority of the Cabinet formed almost entirely by his predecessor. In his State of the City address, his decision not to “clean house” was one of the first areas of business he addressed.

“There was pressure to do so and we have been criticized for not doing so,” Carlisle said. “We wanted experienced and professional city leadership, so we prevailed upon those talented and knowledgeable individuals who shared our philosophy of change to remain on the city team.”

Sunshine on City Government

On the night of the special election last September, minutes after Carlisle got word that he would be Honolulu’s 13th mayor, Civil Beat asked him what — beyond getting the “financial house in order,” — the mayor would do first.

He didn’t hesitate: Transparency.

“The more people see, the better,” he said.

When he arrived at City Hall, though, he said he found a “circle-the-wagons mentality”.

It was that attitude that drove him to create a — nicknamed “the transparency portal” — on which he uploaded a line-by-line version of his spending plan, his financial disclosures and those of his cabinet. He announced the site the day he outlined his budget, and even had the city Information Technology director at the front of the room for the press conference about his proposal that day.

Since then, though, the site has barely changed.

Carlisle is often willing to stop and chat with reporters in the halls of Honolulu Hale. But he also shuts down when he hears a line of questioning he doesn’t like.

Still, Carlisle has never claimed to be an advocate for government that’s totally open.

He told Civil Beat in November that he was “a little concerned” to learn that emails he sends as mayor are considered government documents, and complained about the “incredible burden” from reporters who are “not even paying” government for access.

An attorney first and foremost, he is strategic about what information he shares, and when he shares it. The mayor has three staffers who work as press liaisons to help him do so.

Yet there’s plenty the city refuses to make public. The Honolulu Police Department, for example, continues to refuse to comply with open records laws when it comes to the names, salaries and job titles of its staff.

A Civil Beat request for records went on for more than four months, after we were told the city’s antiquated system for keeping records prevented officials from retrieving information — in this case, how much overtime each department paid on furlough days — it maintained.

Ultimately, that request was granted. A city spokesman said it was possible because officials are just beginning to be able to mine information from the multimillion-dollar system approved in the fiscal year 2006 budget by former Mayor Mufi Hannemann.

Challenges Ahead

Carlisle has many more challenges to face. The city’s task to host the global Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference next November is a huge opportunity for Honolulu, and will be an enormous city undertaking. The city is searching for the new site of a landfill to last at least 30 years. In the meantime, city officials have to convince the state to let the current landfill stay open.

Carlisle will have to maintain oversight of a massive sewage settlement between the city and the federal government and other parties. Compliance with the agreement will cost the city billions of dollars in the coming decades.

There is enormous political pressure to successfully complete the city’s rail project, and even with the creation of a semi-autonomous transit agency, Carlisle will likely continue to play an important role in advancing the proposal. Homelessness continues to require attention in Honolulu.

Carlisle’s term officially ends in 2012, but he doesn’t want to go anywwhere. If he has his way, Carlisle will be elected twice more, and eventually develop a track record of 10 years as mayor.