Star-Advertiser: Neighborhood boards are valuable

Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Neighborhood boards are valuable
May 24, 2016

The City and County of Honolulu principally comprises Oahu, a small but crowded island, the 13th most densely populated municipality in the country. The city contends with lots of issues packed into that compact space, too many to be vetted only by nine elected City Council members and the mayor.

This is one reason why, in 1973, the city established a system of 33 neighborhood boards, with members elected to represent different parts of the neighborhood. They are advisory in nature but they are, without a doubt, a useful sounding board for myriad issues affecting communities across the island.

Many of the problems of efficiency could be corrected through administrative action, so a proposed amendment to the City Charter that would effectively abolish the neighborhood board system seems excessive as a possible solution. The Honolulu City Charter Commission should reject the proposal to put the change up for ratification on the November general election ballot.

The proposal is to ask the voters whether the city should continue the Neighborhood Commission at half its current annual budget. The agency currently runs on $931,784 a year, with a staff of 17. For what it delivers, that does not seem to be an outrageous sum of money, considering the million-dollar projects that seem inconsequential by comparison.

If the proposal makes it to the ballot and is ratified by a simple majority of those voting, the board system would sunset, once the commission develops a strategic plan. That plan, according to the proposal, would be accompanied by a timeline for “restructuring the delivery of information to community members through implementation of current communications technologies.”

Basically, this means the bulk of citizen participation in governance would be handled online. However, while the virtual town hall is a helpful supplemental strategy for gathering public input, it is simply no substitute for the face-to-face interactions of communities with the officials who serve them.

In effect, it would be a fix of something that isn’t broken, or at least an institution that could be remedied through administrative tweaks — reducing the size of some boards, or improving the election process to draw more participation. These don’t require a Charter amendment.

The monthly evening meetings bring together board members with elected officials or their staffers, as well as representatives of agencies such as fire and police departments.

The community needs close ties with these people, and nothing works as well as periodic meetings. These are held close to home and at an hour convenient to residents too occupied by day-to-day work or responsibilities to follow local issues through midday meetings at City Hall.

Often, issues that otherwise would fly below the radar do come to light through the neighborhood boards. In many cases, Council members get their first inkling of how the community views an issue by watching what bubbles to the surface at these neighborhood meetings.

There have been countless examples of projects that first were vetted by the boards. Early feedback on the planned bikeway system, Waianae highway improvements, Waikiki hotel projects and the vacation-rental controversy came largely from the boards.

The recommendations from these grassroots discussions, forwarded to Council, may not find favor with the decision-makers in the end, but they’re certainly a valuable element of democracy.

Without the neighborhood board system it’s hard to imagine how Honolulu would keep in touch with its citizenry. That is a core concern of government, which should not act here to dismantle that provision to its voters.