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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 Michelle Galimba, candidate for Hawaii County Council District 6, which includes Kau, portions of South Kona and Volcano. The other candidates are Kyle Jones and Ikaika Kailiawa-Smith.

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?

The biggest issue facing people living in my district — and every other district in Hawaii — is the lack of housing that regular people can afford, even in my rural district where land is relatively inexpensive.

Unfortunately our building codes make it more and more expensive to build affordable homes — either by developers or by individuals. We need to build more flexibility into the current system which requires our county to adopt International Building Code standards. These standards only make it more and more expensive to build or even repair a legally permitted home. Some of the standards make sense and some of them are not relevant to our climate and way of life. 

The biggest issue specific to my district is lack of basic services due to our remote location. If re-elected, I will continue to advocate for increased basic services for my district such as increased police, fire and animal control personnel, as well as the facilities and facility repair that allow these public servants to do their jobs.

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?

We need to manage tourism to benefit our local communities. Cornell University put out a report called “Destinations at Risk: The Invisible Burden of Tourism,” which looks at tourism as a global phenomenon. One of the insights in this report that really struck me is that that overtourism destroys the very “product” that it is selling.

It is a little disturbing to look at our island home and the culture that we all create together through this lens — as a “product.” However I also think that it is a useful way to help us to take ownership of tourism as our “product.” 

We absolutely have the right and obligation to manage tourism and its social and environmental costs proactively. In other words, as owners and stewards, we need to insist on protecting our “product” and at the same time ensure that our local communities are compensated fairly for the “product” we are the producers and stewards of.

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

We must invest in providing multiple modes of transportation that are convenient and cost-effective. It wasnʻt so long ago that using public transportation was a normal thing to do for everyone.

The cost of building new roads or even widening existing roads are an immense burden on taxpayers, and doesnʻt necessarily lead to better outcomes. It will be more effective in the long run to strengthen our public transportation system and make it normal to use it again.

We also need to make room on our roads for other forms of personal transportation such as bikes, e-bikes and plain old walking within neighborhoods and town centers.

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?

I commend our current county administration and the previous term of the County Council for prioritizing affordable housing needs and giving our Office of Housing and Community Development the resources to nearly double the affordable housing units in the pipeline — for instance, the 99-unit Kaloko Heights project currently being finished in North Kona.

Government as a whole must continue to support affordable worker housing, as well as middle class/market housing solutions. We also need to incentivize long-term rentals by lowering county real property taxes on long-term rentals. Council Member Jenn Kagiwada and I are currently working on a bill that does just that.

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

The movement to protect Mauna Kea was a watershed moment for the Hawaiian community and for young people. That outpouring of love and determination to protect Mauna Kea (and by extension other places of high natural and cultural value) must be respected.

As such, I cannot support the construction of the TMT until a broad consensus is reached around a plan for the management of the summit.

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

Our County of Hawaii Office of Housing and Community Development recently presented a progress report to the Council  that included the quote: “Homelessness is the result of the profound and catastrophic loss of family.” This rings very true to me.

Families have a key role to play in providing individualized, organic support. Supporting families so that they can support troubled family members is an important element in addressing this problem. However not everyone has a family to help them and so we need to also support family-like environments such as the kauhale villages that provide simple housing and social support.

Getting better resources to rural districts such as District 6 is also important, as most of the resources of the social safety net are only accessible in urban areas. 

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?

The state mandate to convert to septic systems is meant to protect our oceans and freshwater aquifers. Given the recent release of 600,000 gallons of wastewater in Keaukaha that had not been properly treated with chlorine, the most urgent issue on Hawaii island is the renovation of our Hilo wastewater plant.

It is frustrating to me that addressing wastewater responsibly has become prohibitively expensive, not just for individual households, but even for communities and county departments. We need the state to update regulations so as to make it possible for communities to design and deploy wastewater systems that are equally effective and less expensive, and are already being used in other places in the U.S.

In the meantime, we must advocate for the state to fund this mandate by providing subsidies to households in priority areas, such as near the coastline, that do not have the financial means to upgrade their wastewater systems.

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

As a rancher I am already dealing with the effects of climate change in terms of increased drought and lack of predictable weather patterns. This makes it difficult to produce food for our community.

However, farming and ranching has the potential to be an effective tool in capturing carbon. Ranching practices such as agroforestry (incorporating trees into pastures) can help to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

One of the most important things we can do to address climate change is to face up to it with honesty and humility, without panicking or blaming others, and look for ways to help in whatever way we can.

Hawaii Countyʻs new Office of Sustainability, Climate Change, Equity, and Resilience is designed to obtain and deploy state and federal funding that can help us to incentivize sustainable agriculture and forest restoration, build green infrastructure such as electric vehicle charging stations, and help us all to address climate change in everything we do, from big government projects to everyday habits and social norms.

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

At this point, I cannot see a valid path for the Hu Honua plant to start operating because there is not a realistic, long-term source of feedstock and it does not align with the goal of decreasing costs to consumers and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

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

I would like to see our county administration and council work together to empower and engage the public by regularly reporting on the key metrics that can inform high-level decision-making.

We need to develop a framework or dashboard of economic, social and environmental information that will provide a common language for the county administration, council and public.

My colleague on the Kauai County Council, Felicia Cowden, expressed a similar idea in her Q&A for this election. This will lay a foundation for both county government and the public to engage with and contribute to county decisions and strategies.