Members of the Honolulu City Council voted for Tyler Dos Santos-Tam to chair the council starting in December. Esther Kiaʻāina will serve as vice-chair and Scott Nishimoto will be floor leader.
On Oct. 27, Dos Santos-Tam introduced a resolution to reorganize leadership of the Honolulu City Council and the resolution passed with five votes on Thursday afternoon.
He will replace Tommy Waters as chair after the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court found in August that Waters was not eligible to run for reelection.
Dos Santos-Tam told Aloha State Daily on Friday that it’s “unusual and frankly, unprecedented in recent memory” that the sitting chair is ending his term. He said that the new chair needs to plan for the inauguration in January and work on budgeting, staffing and other internal administrative issues to prepare for the new term.
Honolulu city charter requires the council to meet at noon on the second day of January that falls on a business day to elect a chair, vice-chair and floor leader.
The last time a chair was elected, an outgoing councilmember introduced a resolution in December 2020 for Waters to lead the council when the council met for the first time in 2021. He has led the council since then.
Waters elected chair: The first order of business in the new year will be to adopt a resolution on council leadership. Any councilmember can propose a resolution, but Dos Santos-Tam said, “I certainly hope that we keep the same arrangement because this is a team that is ready to take on the big issues that we face as a city.”
Dos Santos-Tam said that he won’t make committee assignments until December or January.
Dos Santos-Tam’s district covers portions of Kakaʻako, Downtown Honolulu, Chinatown, Punchbowl, Papakōlea, Pauoa Valley, Nuʻuanu, Iwilei, Liliha, ʻĀlewa Heights, Kalihi and Kalihi Valley, according to the city council. He’s a frequent rider of TheBus and said that Route 13 riders share issues with him that they face.
“Having a leader who understands not just the problems that we face but has put forward solutions and seen them through matters,” Dos Santos-Tam said.
In his first term, Dos Santos-Tam sponsored legislation that requires bars and nightclubs in Honolulu to keep naloxone spray on site to reverse opioid overdoses as a condition of their liquor licenses.
“This is an example of us getting ahead of a real issue that’s vexed cities and states around the country,” he told ASD.
He co-sponsored bills to authorize the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) to study extending Skyline, to regulate electric bicycles and to lower speed limits near schools, and sponsored bills to create the Downtown Honolulu Business Improvement District and establish a local residence preference for City sponsored housing programs.
Affordability is a top issue for Dos Santos-Tam, which he said impacts “every family island wide, but in particular, we need to keep our focus on the most vulnerable in our communities.”
“The reality is rent keeps going up for people,” he told ASD. “It’s harder for families to make ends meet. We need to be tackling out housing prices head on. We need to be tackling cost of living issues head on.”
He plans to introduce legislation to expand the low-income bus fare, make it easier for small businesses to obtain permits and push to create more housing.
“I really believe that Honolulu can be a city that works and in a city that works we produce enough housing for our people, the transportation system works for everyone, we have clean and safe parks, but none of this happens by accident,” he told ASD. “It requires us to put forward good policy ideas. It requires us to push and ask tough questions.”
While Dos Santos-Tam received support in public testimony, he also garnered backlash for the way the leadership reorganization came about.
The Office of Information Practices (OIP) opened an investigation into five city councilmembers accused of violating Sunshine Law, the state’s open meetings act, after it received two anonymous complaints that the city councilmembers met at a Zippy’s in Waipahu.
According to a letter from the Honolulu Department of the Corporation Counsel, Councilmembers Radiant Cordero, Dos Santos-Tam, Ester Kiaʻāina, Augie Tulba and Matt Weyer met in an “impromptu gathering” on Oct. 5 and discussed future council leadership but did not vote or decide on the future chair, vice-chair and floor leader.
“To be clear, the Councilmembers neither made a commitment to vote nor sought votes for any of these positions,” Corporation Counsel Dana Viola stated in the letter.
Councilmembers Andria Tupola and Val Aquino Okimoto, two councilmembers who did not attend the meeting, voted against the resolution on Thursday. Waters abstained from voting.
Okimoto said during the council meeting, “My opposition is due to concerns that pushing this resolution through today inflicts needless institutional damage on this council, defies the spirit of our open government laws and flies in the face of basic common sense.”
“This measure is an attempt to predetermine and lockdown power before the new council convenes and it is doing so under an active, unresolved legal cloud,” she said.
She said that the reorganization born out of private meeting insults the public’s expectation to “transparency, ethical leadership and respect for the democratic process.”
She said that the “reorganization born out of a private restaurant caucus insults” the public’s expectation to “transparency, ethical leadership and respect for the democratic process.”
Tupola said during Thursday’s meeting that when she met with Dos Santos-Tam on Oct. 6, he told her that the five councilmembers took a vote on its future leadership.
Dos Santos-Tam told ASD that he “vigorously disputes” depictions of a conversations between himself and another councilmember.
He said, “We are a policy making body. We are not a high school drama club and so we have to approach our work seriously and I think the body is going to continue to look at legislation, whoever that may come from, and determine how best to move forward.”
Dos Santos-Tam said that he will follow OIP’s process and recommendations.
Aloha State Daily reached out to OIP and the Honolulu Department of the Corporation Counsel for comment on the ongoing investigation.
Haley Lehman can be reached at haley@alohastatedaily.com.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
