When Hawaii Gov. Josh Green announced last week that up to $75 million in EPA funds will be available for use by the Honolulu Board of Water Supply in the wake of the Red Hill water crisis, he added a powerfully reassuring statement: 

“The BWS’ decision to raise water rates by about 50% may create a hardship for many residents. It’s important for the BWS to take advantage of federal funding to reduce the costs it passes on to Oahu residents. My administration is focused on partnerships and solutions.”

Thank you, Gov. Green. God bless you.

Being in politics is all about deftness, three-dimensional chess, hypervigilance to see things others cannot see and the uncommon gift of reading between the lines. 

So, in case you missed it, this beautiful announcement of EPA money essentially means that the Pottery Barn Rule on Oahu is in full effect. I translate this policy as: “You break it, you buy it, because we ain’t paying for something that the federal government did to us.”

Yes, this kind of cause and effect of “the person who breaks is the person who pays to replace it” is only common sense for those of us who live in the real world. It is not, sadly, always common sense in Hawaii policymaking circles. In post-plantation Hawaii, there are people in corporate business (and/or public-private partnerships) who think that payment for “mistakes” should always be socialized and profits for “success” should always and only be privatized.

Meaning, if the power company’s downed lines may have started a fire that burned down a town, guess what, “Sigh, sorry, you ratepayers are gonna have to pay for fix it.”

Meaning, if the U.S. Navy contaminates the civilian water supply, guess what? “Sigh, sorry, you residents are gonna have to pay to fix that.”

I love how the solution to everything that’s wrong in Hawaii is “sigh, guess we’re gonna have to make the public pay more, because, you know, we have to raise that money somehow. We can’t count on others. We just have to stick our people with it, instead.”

That’s not how you treat democratic citizens of the United States of America. That’s how you treat serfs on a feudal plantation. This is a pattern, and you’ll find that nearly everything in Hawaii is a one-trick pony of “send the profits to the companies, send the bill and bad news to the public.” 

I’m so thankful to the Green administration for siding with the ratepayers of Hawaii when it comes to water. Mark this as a great moment in our history, because it sets a precedent more than anything else that responsibility is a unique concept; it may be delegated but it always must stay with the responsible parties no matter what.

The Federal Government Has More To Do

But let’s not stop there. The fact of the matter is that the federal government has a long-term historic responsibility for protecting, preserving, and supporting the environment in Hawaii. Hawaii did not just “accidentally” become the 50th state;  the agricultural, geopolitical, and military significance of the Hawaiian islands were critical to the federal government from annexation to territory to statehood, and this has left negative enduring legacies in its wake.

No, this is not an anti-American sentiment. In fact, I’m proud to be an American, and I’m grateful to live in Hawaii. And it’s because I’m proud to be an American, that I recognize that when Americans mess something up, Americans fix it and leave it in a better condition than we found it as our pattern of governance.

The Navy didn’t just start contaminating Hawaii with Red Hill. It’s been doing it for decades. Native Hawaiians are fully justified in their rage about the military’s use of various parts of Hawaii for bombing throughout the years. But good governance is always first and foremost transactional. When you take something, you replace something. When you break something, you fix something.

When my father was the commander of the U.S. Air Force 633rd Medical Group at Andersen AFB, Guam, from 1990 to 1992, one of the things that the U.S. military did to enhance relations with the locals was giving every commander the responsibility of “adopting” a village. 

That meant that my dad and his fellow airmen – along with other units – would go into the community and build free infrastructure for them, clean up debris and trash whenever necessary and provide free food, medical care, and around this time of year, Christmas presents.

In other words, the federal government recognized its responsibility to take care of people who couldn’t take care of themselves, and worked to add value for local residents so that they wouldn’t have to be responsible for all the heavy lifting or hardship themselves.

Revolutionary concept, I know. Some of my conservative friends may characterize that as “handouts” or “social welfare” but it’s not, it’s called taking initiative and setting an example so that people can have a functional government.

To be honest, the federal government, and the U.S. military in particular, needs to be as generous and helpful in Hawaii as they were when we were trying to court foreign countries as allies during the global “war on terror.” We built schools, clinics, running water systems, sewage treatment and did all that for the countries that hosted us. Imagine if we did the same here on Oahu. 

We the people are not your last resort to pay for other people’s mistakes.

We have a good start with Red Hill, but we need the federal government to take a bigger role in protecting and preserving and supporting the environment and the people who live here.

“Why should the military pay, Danny?” They should pay because it’s the right thing to do. It is morally despicable to make impoverished locals pay to clean and source their own drinking water when they’re not the ones who contaminated it. (And I seriously question the patriotism of bureaucrats who refuse to take a proposal to raise rates off the table.)

It is reprehensible to make struggling locals entirely responsible for reversing ecological damage that the Federal Government has brought to the Hawaiian islands. Sure, they didn’t do all of it, but they did enough of it, and the Pottery Barn rule applies.

When we start demanding that the right people and the right entities pay and take responsibility, we’ll set an example for our own citizens and keiki to follow. We the people are not your last resort to pay for other people’s mistakes.