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Editor’s note: For Hawaii’s Aug. 10 Primary Election, Civil Beat asked candidates to answer some questions about where they stand on various issues and what their priorities will be if elected.

The following came from Michael Konowicz, candidate for Hawaii County Council District 9, which includes North and South Kohala. The other candidates are Cindy Evans and James Hustace.

Go to Civil Beat’s Election Guide for general information, and check out other candidates on the Primary Election Ballot.

1. What is the biggest issue facing your district, and what would you do about it?

There is a housing affordability crisis on the Big Island that is especially acute in our district. Last month, the median sales price for a single-family home in North Kohala was $3.1 million while the South Kohala median was $1.3 million. Work is underway on the new  Nānā Kai subdivision in Waikoloa Village where the builder has approvals to build 1,750 residential units, with the first few hundred starting at a price-point around $2.5 million.

Meanwhile condo prices are also skyrocketing, climbing 62% in Waimea and 81% in Waikoloa over just the last 12 months. Rents are rising as a result, too, making it unaffordable for more and more people in our community, forcing blue- and white-collar workers, teachers, nurses and even doctors to leave.

We need to secure land for affordable housing much like we do with public open spaces; we need to broaden qualification standards for affordable housing, we need to eliminate county bureaucracy and red tape and streamline planning and permitting to encourage development while reducing its cost and we need to reinvent the County’s Chapter 11 code on affordable housing to produce more positive results for the people of our island.

2. Overtourism can degrade the environment, threaten biodiversity, contribute to wear and tear on infrastructure, generate traffic and disrupt neighborhoods. What do you think about the amount of tourism on the Big Island and how it’s managed?

Tourism is our economic engine and the lifeblood of our communities on the island, especially this district that calls most of the island’s resorts and their employees home. The latest Hawaii Hotel Performance report from the Hawaii Tourism Authority shows things are soft on the Big Island, with visitors down 7.9 percentage points since 2019 and resort managers telling me advance bookings for this summer are off considerably from where we were in past years.

Until our economy is better diversified, we shouldn’t add further headwinds to the tourism industry; instead, we should work together collectively to make sure visitors are aware and respectful of our environment and culture concerns, all while leaving as little of a footprint on our island as possible.

Today,  the resorts are taking on reef restoration, are diverting hotel resort fees to on-island forest funds, and they donate considerable amounts of food and money to our communities. Leveraging the learnings of those projects, as a council member, I’d like to help collaborate and facilitate relationships between community groups and the resort owners to make sure that everyone and every place on our island is benefiting from our tourist trade in a positive way.

3. What needs to happen to relieve traffic congestion in and around Kailua-Kona and along the Puna-Keaau-Hilo corridor?

Our county does a poor job of being proactive on all fronts of infrastructure from waste management to road improvements; we find ourselves always being reactive, attempting to patch fixes on today’s problems created by poor decisions made by yesterday’s leaders.

As a council member, I want to future-proof the island and make decisions today that will have positive impacts here 20 years into the future.

Traffic congestion and accessibility isn’t a problem just around Kailua-Kona and Puna-Keaau-Hilo; it is a rampant problem everywhere, from Waikoloa Village where 7,000-plus people live in a high fire-risk area  with only one road in and out, to Waimea, where traffic is often gridlocked, interfering with commerce that comes/goes through the nearby Kawaihae Harbor.

We need to properly plan for growth and not merely react to it; we need to make sure zoning and permitting is aligned to our general plan and designed for a sustainable tomorrow. I want to invest in infrastructure today, developing roads and bypasses now, and rejecting proposals and projects that will only create problems for us in the future.

4. The cost of living on Hawaii island is rising rapidly. How are working and middle-class people expected to buy a house or pay the rent as well as take care of other expenses? And how can the county government help?

Hawaii’s cost of living is astronomical, with a housing affordability crisis and other costs, such as food and insurance, out of control. While some costs are outside the control of local government, such as poor federal policy or bad federal law like the Jones Act, there are places we can work to improve these costs.

According to a March 2024 UHERO report, more than half of housing costs today are due to failures in planning and permitting. By fixing the planning and permitting process, we can cut housing prices significantly. Insurance costs are also driven by replacement costs and 58% of those costs are regulatory on the island. By streamlining the permitting process, we can help drive insurance costs down, too. 

For kupuna that are on a fixed income, I want to freeze property taxes. This will have a negligible impact to the county budget but will provide significant impact for the economic well-being of our older residents.

The county can also facilitate the creation of food hubs that could provide processing, markets and distribution for local farmers. These hubs will make it easier and less expensive for local farmers to deliver sustainable and affordable foods to local buyers.

5. Do you support the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea?

Whether or not the Thirty Meter Telescope is built here is not the purview of the County Council; as such, as a council member, I would respect the final decision made by the  stakeholders responsible for what happens on Mauna Kea.

Personally, though, as a man of science, and as someone with great appreciation of the science and discoveries made by Native Hawaiians and others here in our astronomy industry, I do support their mission, the advancement of the science of astronomy and all the scientific benefits they achieve that improve all of humankind.

6. Homelessness remains a problem statewide, including on Hawaii island. What would you do to come to grips with this persistent problem?

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet available to fix the homelessness problem here nor is there any municipality anywhere in the U.S. where efforts seem to be truly working.

Our warm weather, our out-of-reach unaffordable housing, easy access to drugs, a lack of mental health facilities and inconsistent law enforcement are providing the perfect storm for homelessness to continue to be a growing problem here. While Hilo and  Kailua-Kona are homeless hotspots, other communities in my district also see a growing homeless population, even in places like Waimea and Waikoloa.

Beyond making housing affordable and accessible, we need to improve drug, alcohol and mental health treatment  facilities. Most of the chronically homeless, even those with grave emotional and mental disorders, have addiction issues. We must create infrastructure to treat these individuals.

With housing and treatment options available, we must also empower law enforcement to enforce the law, even among the homeless. They should leverage every offense, such as loitering, public urination, public nuisance, intoxication, trespassing and all drug-related offenses, as an opportunity to force the chronically homeless to enter treatment.

7. Half of Hawaii’s cesspools are on the Big Island, some 49,300. Seepage from cesspools can make people sick, harm coral reefs and lead to a variety of ecological damage. By law, cesspools must be upgraded to septic systems by 2050. What can be done to help people who may not be able to afford the conversion?

Allowing cesspools to be built on the Big Island even after their use was banned by federal law shows just how bad some of the decisions made by past leaders are impacting our communities today. I want to have a theme of future-proofing Hawaii in all decisions I make, including getting us on the right path of proper wastewater management. The lack of action on this front by county and state officials, knowing the clock is ticking down to a 2050 or sooner deadline, is infuriating.

First, this is a state issue that needs state and federal resources to resolve. Our residents lack the money and  resources to solve this on our own, and even the waste treatment industry lacks the labor, supplies and equipment on-island today to make this 2050 deadline.

As a council member, I would use my office to amplify the concerns of the community and rally their attention to state and federal resources that can help, and use the office as a bully-pulpit to get the attention of state and federal resources to work with us in resolving this crisis.

8. What is the first thing Hawaii County should do to get in front of climate change rather than just reacting to it?

The first thing Hawaii County needs to do is make sure it is resilient for whatever the future brings.

Hawaii has many man-made crises facing it, such as an affordable housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and even a waste management crisis. And all of these man-made crises exist while we are perilously close to the next natural disaster, whether it be wildfire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami or hurricane.

We need to be proactive on every front to keep our community safe and secure from any threat it faces and need to focus on resiliency to anything we face, whether they be man-made or natural. We also need to make sure the county isn’t itself creating the next disaster: Are we keeping communities safe by having sufficient roads and access in/out of them to keep people away from fire and lava? Are we investing sufficiently in waste management to keep our environment clean and our people safe? Is our Civil Defense staffed to have people not only trained to tackle disasters, but do they also have plans in place and are our communities aware of those plans to keep themselves safe from our next quake, tsunami or fire?

9. Should the Hu Honua biomass energy plant be allowed to start operating? Why or why not?

HECO and our state officials have failed us by not future-proofing both our electrical grid and the generation of electricity. Due to that failure, we find ourselves the victims of failing generation plants, roving power outages to prevent grid collapse, and increased fire dangers because it isn’t clear whether or not the utility companies and their regulators have done enough to harden lines and poles that deliver power to our communities.

Because of those failures and bad decisions made in the past, we have an extremely fragile electrical system that wouldn’t even be considered acceptable to less developed countries.

With that said, we do need to be inventive and creative with how power is created and deployed on the island. And we need to be equally creative in how we dispose of trash; modern, clean incineration of green and solid waste could be a solution to both problems we face.

Specifically, the Hu Honua biomass energy plant could be a solution if key environmental concerns about their operation were resolved. This is a state issue but the council should be more proactive in conversations dealing with future-proofing our electrical system.

10. How would you make the county administration more transparent and accessible to the public?

As a member of the Big Island Press Club for many years and its president up to the time I announced my candidacy for County Council, it was always a mission of mine to make the county administration more transparent and accessible to the public. I have fought for and against multiple county and state bills that ultimately lead to more light shining on public issues, more access to government records, meetings and decisions, more protected freedoms of speech and press and greater government accountability.

That passion for the public’s right to know is why I’ve made having an open and honest government one of my core campaign platforms, along with affordable housing and infrastructure improvements.

Even today, I’m fighting against Gov. Green’s veto threat of House Bill 2581, which if he vetoes, would allow the governor or any island mayor to shut down the press and any communication, for that matter, anytime they declare there’s an “emergency.”

With my journalism background, I want to over-communicate with my constituents: I want to keep them informed of local issues and actions and engage with them every step of the way to bring smart solutions to life.