������Ƶ

Editor’s note: The Civil Beat Editorial Board and reporters recently spoke with three members of Gov. Josh Green’s Climate Advisory Team. Chris Benjamin is the team’s chair and a special advisor to the governor. Denise Antolini has more than 30 years of experience in the environmental law field in Hawaii. And Robin Campaniano served as the state insurance commissioner and is a retired insurance executive. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us what the Climate Advisory Team is. And by the way, how did you come up with such a clever acronym — CAT?

Chris Benjamin: The governor gets full credit for that. We had nothing to do with that. But it works because it’s also short for catastrophe and it works in a lot of ways. The governor called me in late April, early May and asked if I would chair this group, and it was really very much undefined at that point. But what his goal was was to assemble a team that would make recommendations ahead of the 2025 legislative session to help address and improve Hawaii’s readiness for future disasters.

Despite the very broad name of the Climate Advisory Team, we really are not focused on all things climate. We’re not working on climate mitigation, for example. We’re not looking at those long-term stressors that come from climate change, like rising sea levels and heat. Those influence the likelihood of disasters.

But our specific mandate is to look at Hawaii’s readiness for the next disaster, assuming and recognizing that we will have more storms and more climate events. And then the task that we have with that in mind is to come up with a package of legislation and potentially non-legislative actions that will help improve Hawaii’s readiness for future climate events.

Robin, how did you get roped in?

Robin Campaniano: I think they were looking at my knowledge of insurance and a little bit of finance to handle some of the financial issues that were that we’re facing.

And Denise?

Denise Antolini: Answered a call from the governor’s team. I was really impressed that the governor was reshaping what was originally announced. When it was originally announced, I wondered what it was. And I got invited to join and to really help on the environmental resilience issues. And then we added Kawika Riley (vice president of external affairs at Kupu, a sustainability nonprofit) and then Chip Fletcher (the governor’s special advisor for climate and resilience). It’s trying to balance out covering all the different areas that the governor charged us to look at. So I’m happy to be on the team. It’s been quite a ride.

Benjamin: I think that evolution of the team is indicative of what we see our mandate being, because when the team was first conceived, I think it was largely conceived as a group that would look at how to create financial protections for Hawaii in the future. How do we address some of the the challenges, the financial challenges? But as we got into the issues, we recognized that resilience was very critical and probably as important, if not the more important element of our work. And to look at resilience, we really needed to have folks with the environmental background, with the science background. And so we built out the team to reflect the mandate that we saw and the direction that we wanted to go.

What have you done since you formed?

Benjamin: We’ve done close to 50 interviews of folks at state agencies, businesses, industry groups, nonprofit organizations ranging from social service to environmental folks in other parts of the country and the world — Miami, Alabama — other places that have done innovative things with respect to climate readiness and recovery. And we’ve taken all that information in.

Our specific mandate is to look at Hawaii’s readiness for the next disaster.

Chris Benjamin

We’re also conducting a survey of over 600 households in Hawaii to get broader input. And we’re planning other forms of engagement down the road to really understand what the current state of affairs is and what we believe we can do to make it better. And so we’ve been mostly taking in information. And then over the last month, we’ve pivoted to more of the process of assimilating that information and beginning to develop our recommendations.

What’s the feedback you’ve been getting from all these people you’ve been speaking with, generally?

Antolini: No. 1, that it’s urgent that we learn from Lahaina — and not just Lahaina. But it’s really urgent that we build on the lessons from the great disasters, particularly Lahaina, but also about the prior hurricanes that have hit Hawaii — and not wait. So urgency is probably the No. 1 issue.

No. 2, that it’s all hands on deck, and particularly community-driven solutions are absolutely key. So it can’t just be top-down. It’s got to be top-down and bottom-up and sideways and every way. And the third is, I think that we’re really looking for the legislators to build on the great work they’ve already done in the last session and to really advance them all and take some leaps forward.

And the plan is to get bills in the next session, and it’s only the next session that you’re focused on. Is that correct?

Benjamin: No, I would say what we want to do — we’re trying to make this clear with everyone we’ve met with — is we’re really looking at a long-term plan. We will only be recommending maybe that first year of of legislative action. But we want to make sure that we’re laying the foundation for longer-term improvements. And because that’s critical, we’re not going to solve this problem in one year.

About Lahaina — we have all heard now, with all the reports that have come out, there were predictions that something like exactly that was going to happen. What’s going to make it different this time? Because you’re talking about probably some pretty major pieces of legislation with a lot of money involved. Do you think people really learn the lessons, given the history?

Campaniano: I think it’s going to take some time, because I reflect back upon Hurricane Iniki. I was running an insurance company at the time. And it took a long time to rehabilitate the entire community. In fact, there’s still messages that still remain from 1992, there were lessons that were slow in coming. There were other lessons that were fast and they’re long-lived lessons.

I mean, when I go to Kauai and I talk about hurricane preparedness, those people get it. They understand. And it’s made hurricane preparedness easy when we talk it through on the island of Kauai. And I sort of think that we will see the same thing with Maui. After Hurricane Iniki, there was a concerted attempt to improve building codes to require new construction, to have hurricane clips and other measures to make the house more windproof. I suspect we’ll see the same thing in the wake of Lahaina.

This is something that we haven’t been involved with — the funds that have been created to provide compensation for victims. That happened relatively quickly. Some of the rebuild efforts, as slow as they are, I think are happening relatively quickly compared to other storms or wildfire events on the mainland.

So I think we are learning from the mistakes as we speak in looking at the efforts on Maui, and it’s like a couple of steps forward and backwards, and then moving forward again. Things are happening relatively quickly relative to a lot of places on the mainland, and certainly better than the experience that Puerto Rico experienced (with Hurricane Irma in 2017). They’re still having some challenges there.

The governor has brought up in several legislative sessions this idea of trying to advance what was originally called a green fee and then kind of retooled to a climate impact fee. Are you still pushing the TAT (transient accommodations tax) increment or the $25 fee on visitors? What have you learned about what happened, and how might you adjust what you would be looking for going forward?

Benjamin: I’m going to start with the big picture, which is — you’re exactly right — I don’t think the timing of the formation of this group was coincidence. It was right after a legislative session where I think the governor didn’t feel we made enough progress, and he recognized the value of convening immediately after session, doing the work that we’re doing and engaging early with the Legislature heading into the next session. Because I think he definitely wants to see more progress at the next session. And that’s what we hope we can help facilitate.

Our primary focus to date has been on identifying those actions that we think the state should be taking and where the dollars should be going. We are certainly weighing in to some extent on the revenue sources that will support that work. But to some extent that’s going to be a little bit out of our hands. That’s going to be a little bit more of a political process to figure it out. But I will say that, for all of us, we’re interested in as many revenue sources as can be identified to do this work, because there’s a lot of work to be done.

Antolini: I think you’ve analyzed it right in terms of how close the Legislature has been for several years to advancing the ball in terms of what was formally called the green fee. So I totally agree with Chris: The goal of the CAT is to make very strong and clear recommendations and to lay out perhaps a menu of potential funding sources. But the sausage machine will ultimately determine which of those funding sources are feasible politically and also financially.

So I don’t think that you’ll see us lock into a particular mechanism, but there are mechanisms out there for funding, and we’ve been brainstorming a lot with consultants about some new possible funding mechanisms.

One of the goals is to not burden residents with new taxes or new cost of living increases or anything like that. So we’re really focused on ways to raise revenue that are potentially creative and not adding to the cost of living for residents while making really powerful investments in resilience and recovery, which will pay off in the long term.

Campaniano: I think it’s not unusual for sausage making to last a couple of years. But in the meantime, each one of us have had a lot of informal talk stories or interviews. What’s really interesting — and what I’ve really been encouraged by — it that, uniformly, from all walks of life — professional, very conservative people, very liberal people — they all support the stuff that we’re working towards. So I think we’re on to something. I think everybody collectively gets it that we have to do something now to work together to protect against potential catastrophes of the future.

But do you think a visitor impact fee is still a strong possibility?

Benjamin: When you talk about a visitor impact fee, if you mean sort of a $25 fee on arrival, I’m not an attorney. My understanding is there are legal issues with that. So I can’t opine on Denise’s earlier point, some form of nonresident revenue source, which would imply a visitor revenue resource would be appropriate. Whether that becomes a TAT, which is, you know, obviously something we know how to administer, or it’s a new form of fee, I think we’re relatively agnostic.

Antolini: I think that’s right. Whether or not it’s the green passport, the stewardship fee, whatever you want to call it — it’s gotten so many different names — or if it’s some change of the TAT in a reallocation, that’s not up to us. But I think we’re going to say these are mechanisms that are on the table. I think it’s very fluid right now in terms of the prior discussions about what the exact mechanism is.

Talking about all the outreach and all the interviews, how much of that has been with the hotels, the local industry, the Mufi Hannemanns of the world? (Hannemann is the chair of the Hawaii Tourism Authority.) That seems to be a huge piece, a core one.

Benjamin: We have had several meetings with the tourism industry, including Mufi and hotel owners and other representatives in the industry. But again, we are focused more on the right initiatives than we are deciding on the revenue source.

Denise mentioned a menu. What’s on the menu?

Antolini: I’ll focus on the substantive recommendations rather than the funding mechanisms. So just in the area of environmental resilience — and these are just our conceptual ideas at this point — but we’re looking for where can we get the biggest bang for the buck for the state and partners — could be federal (or) nonprofit partners — to invest in environmental resilience such that we lower the risk of wildfires and also lower the risk of hurricane damage.

So, for example, the No. 1 issue that keeps popping up universally is reducing the invasive grasses that are just like a cancer across our islands. It’s just fuel for the next fire. And actually, we see a lot of landowners and government agencies now actively removing grass. Everybody knows that that’s a high priority. It’s not just the grass — some of the invasive trees are like matchsticks — and replacing those nonnative fuel sources with thriving native ecosystems.

Another example would be restoring our forests and watershed, which the Department of Land and Natural Resources and others have done tremendous work in. We can reduce erosion and absorb heavy rainfall, which comes from hurricanes and rain bombs.

And I guess the third one that we all love is investing in our coral reefs so we have resilient reefs. Primarily it’s a buffer against storm surge, but we know coral reefs also have all these other benefits. Everything we’re looking at has multiple secondary, tertiary benefits on the resilience side.

Benjamin: And then continuing on the resilience theme, we move into community resilience and infrastructure. And I’ll take those as two separate topics.

From an infrastructure standpoint, when we think about things that can reduce our vulnerability to disasters, we think about utility poles, we think about roadways, we think about harbors and redundancy there and all those sorts of things. Our general feeling is that between the Public Utilities Commission’s requirement that all utilities develop hazard mitigation plans, the work that the Department of Transportation is doing with harbors and highways on looking at resilience, a lot of the work that other companies are doing, we feel that generally there’s a lot of good things happening with respect to large infrastructure. More has to be done, but we think it’s going in the right direction.

Some of the rebuild efforts, as slow as they are, I think are happening relatively quickly compared to other storms or wildfire events on the mainland.

Robin Campaniano

Where we think that there is not nearly enough being done is in residential resilience, single-family residents. Our view is that the most important thing we can do is keep people safe in their homes, in their communities, because the safer people are in their homes, not only the less loss of life you’ll have, but the less stress on community resources after a storm you’ll have.

And so a big focus for us is how we can make communities, neighborhoods and homes safer. A lot of our recommendations will center around that. We’re contemplating the possibility of a residential resilience pilot that would be a retrofit program, at least to test that out and see what we can do to improve residential resilience while we’re looking at how we can support and expand the work of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, how we can support the development of resilience hubs in communities.

Just on the grasses — have you talked at all with the U.S. Department of Agriculture which was last year proposing to drop the same invasive grasses by helicopter and drone to revegetate Upcountry and parts of Lahaina?

Antolini: What you’re pointing out is the tension between doing something quickly and doing it well. And I think Hawaii learned part of this lesson back in — I think it was 1903 — when to address erosion. There was a broad consensus that we needed to reforest quickly. And that’s one of the reasons why a lot of our mauka lands have invasives. So, yes, there is that tension

But I think there’s broad consensus that we can’t just allow the fallow land and these invasive grasses to just sit there, particularly with increasing drought conditions. What will you replace them with?

So at the granular level, I think there’s still a lot of thinking to be done. But long-term maintenance and reviving agriculture on fallow lands — agriculture in and of itself helps to manage the problem.

It’s really urgent that we build on the lessons from the great disasters, particularly Lahaina but also about the prior hurricanes — and not wait.

Denise Antolini

What about reducing some of these ideas to bills? Have you started doing that?

Benjamin: We are not policy experts, but what we are doing is we’re working on capturing our findings and our recommendations in a white paper that will be made public and that will form the basis then of the discussion with the policy folks about how do we translate these ideas into legislation.

Now, there will be overlap in that process. We’ll start working with the policy folks on the legislation before we’ve probably completely wrapped up the white paper because we do hope to get the white paper done relatively soon. But the process of taking these ideas and translating them into policy depends on understanding what other legislative proposals there may be from other other legislators, other departments of the state. We don’t want to necessarily be in conflict with or duplicating other things.

You mentioned innovative things you’ve seen in other places. Were there laws or bills in other places that might work here?

Benjamin: Yes, absolutely. I mentioned earlier Alabama, and they have a program called Strengthen Alabama Homes, which we think is a very interesting program through which grants are made to retrofit homes to make them safer. We’ve spoken with Alabama and we’ve spoken with the folks who created that program who have now left to run another organization about how you go about doing that. So we’re tapping into them on the disaster relief fund topic.

We’ve looked at models from other states. We’ve met with folks from Miami-Dade County to look at some of the policies that they’ve implemented. We’re definitely trying to learn from successes of other other markets.

It’s November. The bills are being written now. The governor has to submit his budget by mid-December. Bills cannot be introduced much later than opening day in January. You’re really under the gun here, are you not?

Benjamin: We absolutely are.We hope to have the white paper done before Thanksgiving. We are very quickly trying to move from concepts of a plan to real plan.

And you are a volunteer board. You are unpaid.

Benjamin: Yes, that’s right.

One of the things that’s is you’re not subject to the Sunshine Law because it’s the governor’s executive order here, although you say you’re also very committed to being open and transparent in the process. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Benjamin: I can’t comment more broadly on sunshine laws, but I can talk about what we’re trying to do to be transparent. So we created a website where we’ve been posting updates on our work. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the materials we’ve put there. The white paper will be going there. We plan to have a webinar. At some point we would be open to even working with you on some sort of a public forum if that’s something you’re interested in.

We very much want to get as broad input as we can. We have a short window of time to do this work. But keep in mind, we will be involved probably throughout the legislative session, because even though bills have to be introduced by a certain time, there’s going to be a process that continues. And throughout that process we want to be transparent and getting input.

One of the recovery strategies that you’re pursuing is “the difficult insurance market facing the state.” Robin, what does that mean?

Campaniano: I think what we’re looking at is to see whether or not we can utilize — I’m going to take a broader perspective — insuring risk transfer mechanisms to actually help in the development of our programs. As we go out and talk (in the community), we found that efforts to build resilience, to build safer homes, is at the top of everybody’s plate. And so theoretically, if we can convince the reinsurers that we’re doing our best to make sure that we are fortifying our homes so that it’s of less risk, then perhaps we can convince the insurance market to look at Hawaii through a different set of lenses.

So that’s one of the types of perspectives we’re looking at. And in doing so we’ve explored the concept of whether can we use other mechanisms? Right now, The Nature Conservancy has deployed a parametric insurance program to safeguard Hawaiian reefs. And that’s a really novel, great program. Well, can we bring it onshore? And that’s what we’re taking a look at.

And by the way, it’s not only parametric — we’re talking different models of delivering a product. We’ve got a great captive insurance industry. Can we tap them to look at creative solutions to provide some kind of mechanism to get recompense for our citizens, faster or maybe cheaper? Can we look at something called community-based catastrophe insurance? CBCI is also fairly brand new and looked at by some New England communities to provide flood insurance for low- and middle-class families. Can we look at models like that?

Can we go work with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands? Can we go out to the Waianae Coast and find a way to help them as we help them build their homes to be more resilient? But it’s marrying the two that we think can be very beneficial. We’re scrambling to find perhaps the right way to pursue these things.

We’ve been writing about really high hurricane insurance rates, especially for condominiums and apartments. What do you see short term in terms of anything changing in those premiums for people? And then what can you do about it?

Campaniano: I’d have to defer to the Property Insurance Task Force and the commissioner, because they’re the ones that have been charged with that specific responsibility. And yes, I’ve talked to the commissioner a couple of times, and I think he’s in the process of issuing a white paper. So I’ll defer to him.

CAT is not part of the Property Insurance Task Force. Do you think you should be?

Campaniano: Well, it’s a small state. One of our CAT members, Gwen Yamamoto Lau — a great financial resource for us — is also on the Property Insurance Task Force. So there is a little overlap.

But we do realize that we’re an advisory group. We do not sit on a 9-to-5 basis. But we do have to work in coordination and side by side with state and county officials and some federal officials as well. We don’t want to take away their kuleana. We just want to make it easier for them and then help them out.

You’re not engaged with the State Energy Office or the Energy Working Group dealing with the decarbonization pathway. Again, it seems like it’s something right up your alley?

Benjamin: Yes and no. No, the CAT is not involved in any of that. Some of us wear other hats. And one of the hats I wear is I am part of that process. But that’s not part of my CAT work. And Chip Fletcher and I overlap on that as well.

I’m always super cognizant of the more than 150,000 single-wall wooden homes. Is there anything that can realistically be done to significantly fortify the homes stock that goes back 80 years?

Benjamin: Well, I wish I could say the answer is yes. But all I can say is that you’ve hit on a significant vulnerability that I don’t think gets enough attention. And that’s one of the things we want to bring attention to. We do hope that we can create a program that could scale rapidly. But 150,000 homes retrofitted — and some of these are not going to be simple retrofits, especially if you’ve got, say, pre-1960s single-wall homes that can be very vulnerable.

And the same thing goes in our public infrastructure, our businesses, our multi-family condos (where) there is a lot of maintenance and resilience measures that need to be addressed to make our state safer and our residents safer.

And the real solution on insurance is going to be taking those steps. It’s going to be a long-term process of demonstrating that we have made ourselves more resilient, both through our physical improvements and through the coordination of resources and our responses.

So all I can say is we feel an obligation to try to develop a program that will begin to make our residents safer. But I’d be lying to you if I said that we thought we could fix that problem in a short period of time. It’s a significant problem.

And it goes back a little bit to your question earlier, do we think Lahaina is going to get everybody to the mindset where they’re willing to make these changes? And I think the answer is it does make things, especially wildfires, more top of mind, but it doesn’t get us to the place where we really need to be, to be willing to spend the kind of resources and devote the energy to making these changes. That’s why we have to continue with education awareness. It’s one of the reasons we’ve surveyed over 600 people to get their perspectives on how people are thinking about this.

How are you going to pay for this? A green fee could only go so far, even if it gets through the Legislature. We just enacted the biggest tax cut in the state of Hawaii history. We’re looking at a reduction in several billions of dollars over the next eight to 10 years or so. If your solutions get adopted at the Legislature, do you have a dollar figure in mind?

Benjamin: We don’t yet have a dollar figure. We are doing some analysis. We’ve hired some consultants to do some modeling for us to look at potential loss from various hypothetical weather events that will help us size the need for some sort of relief fund. And we are in the process of defining some of these other resilience programs. There’s some work being done to identify and update our understanding of the environmental conservation spending gap, as well as what it would take to implement and scale some of these residential resilience programs.

So we don’t yet have a number. You’re right that it’s going to be big. And it’s going to be a challenge to raise those funds. But we believe that it’s essential to start, and also that we can build a fund over time that will help us address and then implement some of these ideas.

Campaniano: Building on the concept of that and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Our consultants are trying to determine what’s the size of the next storm or fire storm going to be and how do we protect against it. And these numbers are actually kind of scary large — just look at Lahaina, it’s several billion dollars. And what’s it going to take to prevent or minimize the losses caused by that?

We know there are studies that have been popping out that indicate that for every dollar spent, you get $3 or $4 or $5, whatever, in return. So the concept we’re looking at is, yes, we know it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. I’ll pull a number out of the air: If we can spend $100 million, will that result in $300 million of savings the next time a storm hits or a fire begins? That’s the kind of analysis that we’re looking at. We know there’s a cost benefit that’s very favorable, but we’re desperately trying to quantify it the next couple of weeks.

Benjamin: One of the challenges is that the savings are dramatic, but they’re also theoretical because you only realize those savings if there’s another storm event. But if there is the investments that we’re talking about, they will pay for themselves in multiples.

The challenge we have right now in Hawaii is that we’ve been relatively hurricane free for 30 years. And I think that we may have been lulled into a false sense of complacency. And part of what we need to do is tell the story of why that is very likely to change. We can’t view past as prologue in thinking about the merits of these investments.

You’re appointed by the governor, you’re focused on the Legislature. Are you engaging the counties and the federal government as well?

Antolini: We have I think met with every county at various levels. And I was honored to be part of the interview with (Maui) Mayor Bissen, which was quite poignant. You know, just to spend time with him and MEMA Administrator Amos Lonokailua-Hewett. So we’ve had multiple meetings. We haven’t all been involved in each meeting. I think we haven’t yet touched the federal delegation directly, but indirectly in the governor’s team.

Benjamin: And we did meet with Sen. Schatz and staff to talk about federal funding sources and how that can be helpful to our efforts.

We’re honored to have the opportunity to provide this input to the governor. I’m incredibly thankful to the dedication of my teammates here. And we just hope that we can leverage this moment in time and the awareness that we have on disasters — in part because of Lahaina but also in part because of what’s happening right now on the mainland and the wildfires and the hurricanes.

This is a clear and present danger, and we’re very hopeful that we can put forward some proposals that will help Hawaii become safer. But it’s going to be a decades long process, most likely. And so we have to start taking the first steps in that direction.