Krishna Jayaram, the City and County of Honolulu’s newest managing director, told Aloha State Daily that he sees himself as a problem solver who wants Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s administration to be efficient and serve the public.
“I want us to be just a well-run machine by the time we’re done: a professional place, getting things done, the internal wheels are all moving smoothly,” he said. “I’d like there to be a culture and a pride in that.”
The Honolulu City Council confirmed Jayaram as managing director on Aug. 12 after former Managing Director Mike Formby stepped down from the position in May to become CEO of Pacific Marine and Supply Company, a conglomerate of industrial maritime companies. Jayaram had been serving as the acting managing director in the interim on the mayor’s staff of 29 people.
“The Mayor’s the big visionary. He’s the one who articulates the direction the city needs to go in or should go in,” Jayaram said. “I see my job as part of that vision making but also ensuring and making sure departments are executing on that vision.”
Jayaram said that while his time in the role is limited, with just over two years left in Blangiardi’s second term, he works to engage, support and guide the departments in accomplishing the mayor’s priorities.
Public safety is always top of mind, Jayaram said, adding he is “making sure that police, fire, EMS, ocean safety, that they’re all functioning to the best of their ability.”
Jayaram applauded Chief David Lazar, who joined Honolulu Police Department in July and has since announced in October an initiative to reassign 100 officers to patrol to increase the number of officers on the road and reduce overtime costs. The department graduated 32 officers from its academy on Friday.
Jayaram said that he aims to bolster the Department of Emergency Management during the next two years.
“Living here, you always sense the vulnerability to climate-related, weather-related catastrophes, but this year in particular it was sort of constant, and we all felt it constantly,” he said. “We don’t want to wait until something truly bad happens to take action. We want to get started now.”
The city added 13 positions to DEM in this years’ budget, increasing the staff to 30, and Jayaram would like the city to build a new emergency operations center.
Jayaram said that the city is strengthening the Department of Ocean Safety, which was created in 2024. The city is opening a new ocean safety facility in Kailua this week and will move the ocean safety headquarters to a Kakaʻako warehouse in the coming months.
“We want to really give them the tools to be the best department they can be,” he said.
The administration is also grappling with what Jayaram calls “big picture issues: the cost of living, housing, addressing the houseless.”
The housing policy division within the Department of Housing and Land Management is developing a planning tool with city data to visualize housing on the island in 3D and how changes in zoning laws could change development potential.
Outside of the public eye, Jayaram and his team are thinking about the “internal, non-sexy efficiencies of government.” For example, he said they are considering hiring practices, training for city employees, and succession plans as the baby boomer generation retires.
One of those internal processes that the public may not think about until it doesn’t work well is how the city procures goods and services, he said.
“Government is regulated in how it does that, because we want to make sure it’s fair and impartial and transparent, but the fairness, impartiality and transparency makes us a bit slower, and in a lot of our eyes, it makes us so slow that we can’t deliver the goods and services that we want to deliver as quickly as possible,” he said.
The mayor’s office started an internal procurement working group in 2024 after hearing from departments that employees struggled to do their work because they couldn’t procure the goods and services they needed, he said. For example, Honolulu Fire Department struggled to procure fire apparatus.
The office hired 10 people to the procurement team, which he called a straightforward approach, and is working on an initiative to improve training new hires on the procurement process. The mayor’s office also hired a consultant to evaluate the procurement process and present the city with a plan to improve it.
Blangiardi selected Jayaram to serve as the city’s first LGBTQ+ liaison in November 2023 to serve as a bridge between the mayor’s office and the LGBTQ+ community after the city received a score of 60 out of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign annual Municipal Equality Index, which evaluates how cities across the nation support the LGBTQ+ people who live and work there, in 2021.
Jayaram said that connections have strengthened over the last three years, and city earned a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign in 2025.
“Now, I might be a bridge but I’m one bridge of many,” he said.
Jayaram said that it never crossed his mind that he would work as the managing director of a city. He grew up in Long Island, New York, and worked for a corporate law firm in New York City after graduating law school in 2000.
He went on to work as an attorney for the New York City Law Department and the San Diego Office of the City Attorney before moving to Hawaiʻi to be closer to family in Japan in 2010. Since then, he’s worked for the city in the Department of the Corporation Counsel and the state in the Department of the Attorney General before moving to the managing director’s office in 2022 to serve as Formby’s deputy.
Jayaram said that he has no ambitions of running for mayor.
“I love working for mayor,” he said. “For me, I think I’m in the role that’s right for me, and I don’t think that mayoral role is right for me.”
Jayaram said that most of his time is spent in meetings with city departments, stakeholders and state officials. One of his goals is to increase the public’s trust in local government, he said.
“I hope to think that our local communities that we serve would look at us and think ‘this is a group of people who know what they’re doing, they’re ethical, they’re hardworking, they have the communities’ interest at heart, they’re getting things done for the good of the community.’”
Haley Lehman can be reached at haley@alohastatedaily.com.
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