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The race for Honolulu mayor is quiet this year. 

Mayor Rick Blangiardi is outspending his opponents by hundreds of thousands of dollars. His most serious competitor, realtor and frequent testifier at the Honolulu City Council Choon James, said that she decided to run because it seemed that nobody else was.

“I was always hoping there’ll be candidates who would take the load, but seems like nobody wanted to do it,” James said. 

It’s a different dynamic compared to previous Honolulu mayors’ reelection bids. 

“That race has always had a pretty well-financed challenger,” said Colin Moore, an associate professor in political science at the University of Hawaii Manoa. 

That can happen when there’s a big divide within the dominant political class, like if a candidate aligned with the Hawaii governor challenges the Honolulu mayor, Moore said. But Blangiardi and Gov. Josh Green have been united on many issues.

They both court development to boost the supply of housing. They both view homelessness as a defining problem of their respective administrations. They .

“They’ve been pretty much the same on a lot of policy, so there’s not really a group that would I think finance or push a challenger to run against Blangiardi,” Moore said. 

Choon James

James was born in Singapore and first came to Hawaii as a teenager to attend Brigham Young University-Hawaii. 

She was exposed to American influence growing up, and said that her family members enjoyed discussing current affairs and politics. 

“We grew up like Americans and loving the Constitution,” James said.

She is a particular supporter of First Amendment rights like freedom of speech and assembly, she said. She exercises those rights often when she testifies during City Council meetings via Zoom on matters like the budget and property tax rates for short-term rental owners, which she wants to be lower.

Twelve candidates pulled papers to run for mayor, but only five filed. One person withdrew a few weeks after filing, leaving Blangiardi officially unopposed two days before the filing deadline. 

Seeing this, James said she remembers thinking, “I’m just going to run so that I can at least have the conversation in the public square.”

As in her 2020 campaign for the same office, her main issue is opposing the city’s controversial and over-budget rail system Skyline.

As a native of Singapore, James appreciates well-run public transportation. But she thinks that Oahu’s rail project deserves to be reevaluated considering its high cost overruns from just over $5 billion to almost $10 billion. 

She points to affordable housing initiatives as another questionable public expenditure. She said millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent subsidizing the construction of housing developments, but that the cost of affordable units is still beyond what many consider “affordable.”

Like Blangiardi, she is against allowing homeless people to sleep on sidewalks and in public spaces. She thinks there should be alternative places to stay beyond shelters, and mentioned organic farms as places that could help homeless people build skills and a sense of pride.

On the issue of where to put a new landfill, James thinks that the current location at Waimanalo Gulch, which has capacity until the mid-2030s, can be extended beyond the scheduled 2028 closing date. She worries that Oahu doesn’t have space for a never-ending supply of new landfills, and thinks that more effort should be directed towards waste-to-energy facilities like H-Power.  

James emphasizes her experience with mediating between different interests. 

“I have been in real estate for 30 years. And my job really is to get everyone together,” she said.

James is not soliciting donations, choosing instead to loan her campaign $10,000. She has spent a little less than $2,000 on advertising in two North Shore publications, North Shore News and Paumalu Press, according to her most recent campaign finance report. 

Read Choon James’s Civil Beat Candidate Q&A survey here.

Rick Blangiardi

Blangiardi chalks up his lack of serious competition to what he deems a successful first term.

“Anybody who was a wannabe out there, who thought they had a chance, and they waited for us to fail and fall – we didn’t. And not only that, but they can smell the success we’ve created,” he said.

During his first term, Blangiardi put more of an emphasis on housing development, instituted new homelessness programs, implemented software updates to expedite the city’s notoriously dysfunctional permit processing and made progress on the long-troubled rail project Skyline. 

Blangiardi has been taking an active role in housing development. His administration spent about $50 million on properties in Iwilei and lobbied to change state law so it could finance mixed-use neighborhood development there. To take on more projects like this, he announced the merging of his Office on Housing and the Department of Land Management, which acts as the city’s real estate arm. 

On homelessness, Blangiardi said that his approach is not just to take people off the street but also to treat them through a new program called Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement, or C.O.R.E., and through respite centers like Leahi Health Center. 

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision gives more leeway to cities to pass and enforce laws against urban camping, and Blangiardi thinks that it will help his administration reduce the homeless population by a quarter within a year.

“We’ll take a thousand people off the streets,” he said. 

He also emphasized the city’s Rent and Utility Relief program, which since the pandemic started has given out .

“We got through Covid without any spike in homelessness,” he said. Though there have been small increases year-to-year in the homeless count, the program helped avoid a large and sudden bump, he said. 

The city’s rail system has been a perennial problem since construction began more than 10 years ago.

Blangiardi helped negotiate a shorter rail line to regain over $700 million in funding that the federal government had withheld because of concerns about the project’s mismanagement. 

Skyline’s first segment opened last summer between East Kapolei and Aloha Stadium, though critics deride it as a path from nowhere to nowhere and point to : about 90,000 trips per month, or 30,000 trips fewer than .

Those numbers will surely rise as Skyline reaches more areas like the airport and Kalihi, where stops are scheduled to open next year before its final segment heads downtown. But the cost of operating an incomplete and underutilized system incenses some critics who think the money could be better used for other things.

Landfill negotiations have been one of Blangiardi’s most challenging problems. The island’s only municipal landfill at Waimanalo Gulch on the West Side is scheduled to close in 2028, and the mayor was supposed to name a new location by the end of 2022, but instead requested a two-year extension.

Various restrictions leave little room on Oahu for a new location. Waipio soccer complex was the frontrunner earlier this year, but the U.S. Navy, which owns the land, decided against it.

Blangiardi still doesn’t know where a new one will go despite the two-year extension almost being up. He is considering lobbying to amend a state law that restricts landfill placement to more than half a mile away from schools, hospitals and residences.

He also thinks that the city Department of Environmental Services has the technical expertise to build a landfill over an aquifer, despite the Landfill Advisory Committee coming out against it, though the mayor acknowledged that residents may be skeptical after Navy jet fuel leaked into the water supply at Red Hill.

Blangiardi has raised more than $500,000 since the beginning of the year, much of which he spends on advertising, and had more than $350,000 on hand as of his most recent campaign finance report.

Read Rick Blangiardi’s Civil Beat Candidate Q&A survey here.

Karl Dicks

Dicks said that before his first run for mayor in 2020, he planned to retire part-time to Guatemala with his wife, but that a sign from God swayed him to run for public office.

He is skeptical of affordable housing development, and thinks that subsidies should only go to local developers who are building homes for local residents. 

On pedestrian safety, Dicks said that too many crosswalks span dangerous streets and include no signals, leaving pedestrians as sitting ducks for fast-moving cars.

Dicks said that he admires Blangiardi’s efforts and believes he has good intentions, but that the jurisdiction is too much for any one person.

“I see his commitment. And I see what he’s up against. It’s an impossible task to represent so many different parts of Oahu, from Makaha to Hawaii Kai,” he said.

He thinks the island should be split into more municipalities, each with their own units of government.

“I think Oahu needs a minimum of six mayors and six city councils,” Dicks said.

Dicks, who like James also unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2020, has raised $1,000 this year for his mayoral run, from Railing Specialist Group Hawaii. He has spent about $1,000 on radio advertisements.

Read Karl Dicks’s Civil Beat Q&A survey here.

Duke Bourgoin

Bourgoin said he was not available for an interview, and in an email directed questions to , where he advocates for sustainable farming, a downsized rail system through urban Honolulu and enforcement against noise pollution.

He also calls for a solution for homelessness that involves placing people on farms, lowering speed limits and adding pedestrian infrastructure like on-demand crossing signals, and planting more trees.

Many of his ideas involve the use of chip technology — to detect if somebody is breaking noise pollution laws, for example, or leaving street lights off at night unless they determine somebody is coming.

He has not filed any campaign finance reports this year.