Editor’s note: For Hawaii’s Nov. 8 General Election, Civil Beat asked candidates to answer some questions about where they stand on various issues and what their priorities will be if elected.

The following came from Joshua Montgomery, candidate for Hawaii County Council District 7, which covers a portion of Kona and South Kona. The other candidates include Zahz HewLen, Wesley Moore, Rebecca Villegas and Jennifer Wilkinson.

Go to Civil Beat’s Election Guide for general information, and check out other candidates on the General Election Ballot.

1. What is the biggest issue facing your district, and what would you do about it?

Like the rest of the Big Island, District 7 lacks core services like sanitary sewers, reliable drinking water, clean parks, safe roads and timely planning and permitting.

The failure to provide core services — planning and permitting for example — have resulted in skyrocketing housing costs, spikes in insurance rates and an exodus of local youth who don’t see a future for themselves here in Hawaii.

So how do we fix them? How do we make core services work in our community? 

As a Core ‘24 candidate I’m running with a group of like-minded candidates who are committed to bringing focus to Hawaii County. The county needs to stop getting distracted by resolutions on peace in the Middle East or regulating bicycle tours and instead spend their time and effort making core services work.

That means fully staffing our departments by fixing the hiring process, providing real oversight of critical services, increasing funding for infrastructure and holding leadership accountable for their performance.

We will also be implementing a countywide feedback system for continuous assessment from our citizens. This will help us to improve services and, for the first time ever, be responsive to our community’s needs. 

2. Overtourism can degrade the environment, threaten biodiversity, contribute to wear and tear on infrastructure, generate traffic and disrupt neighborhoods. What do you think about the amount of tourism on the Big Island and how it’s managed?

Tourism is our state’s export. In return for exporting aloha to visitors, we are able to import automobiles, cancer medications, food, furniture and building materials — all of which increase the wealth of our community.

To misquote Winston Churchill: Tourism is the worst industry except for every other industry man has invented from time to time.

The problem with tourism is that too many tourism dollars are re-exported back to the mainland. The average visitor flies in on a mainland-owned airplane, rents a car from a mainland-based rental company and stays in a mainland-owned hotel. We pay the costs in the form of infrastructure spending, overcrowding and noise while mainland corporations take home the profits.

If I were to change one thing about tourism in Hawaii it would be to create policies that encourage entrepreneurship and level the playing field for local small businesses. I want tourists to spend their money in locally owned short-term rentals and rent cars from local rental car operators. 

It is amazing how your viewpoint on visitors shifts, how tolerant you become, when visitors are putting hundreds of dollars a day into your family’s pocket.

3. What needs to happen to relieve traffic congestion in and around Kailua-Kona and along the Puna-Keaau-Hilo corridor?

Congestion in Kona is primarily driven by static stoplight timing. There are now several companies that provide integrated traffic management software which can dynamically time lights based on instantaneous traffic data. We should hire one and properly implement their solution.

The Puna-Keaau-Hilo corridor needs additional capacity in the form of both a lane expansion and a second road. The real question is where to put the new road? That is something that the affected communities need to decide for themselves through a public process.

Of course, the long-term solution for our urban areas is comprehensive high-frequency public transit, separated bike lanes and safe, well-lit walking paths. The best time to start building that infrastructure was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

That is why the Core 24 platform includes significant investments in infrastructure paid for by the federal grants. I think it will surprise no one who has been paying attention to find out that Hawaii County’s Research and Development Department isn’t even bothering to apply for most of the federal money that is available to us. We plan to change that and make sure that Hawaii County bids for (and wins ) every single grant our community is entitled to.

4. The cost of living on Hawaii island is rising rapidly. How are working and middle-class people expected to buy a house or pay the rent as well as take care of other expenses? And how can the county government help?

High housing costs are a disease that infects every level of our economy. Bringing down the costs of housing will echo through our economy and drive down the costs of nearly every other good and service on the Big Island.

The University of Hawaii Economic Research Office has clearly documented the solution to this problem: Build more housing. Period.

So, how do we do that? By overhauling our planning and permitting process to reduce or eliminate regulation. That’s it. If we do that, the private sector will step in and build the housing our community needs.

Once housing supply catches up to demand the price of entry level housing will drop and this will ripple through the rest of the economy.

5. Do you support the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea?

As the Hawaiian community made clear in 2019, the way the TMT project was being pursued wasn’t acceptable. This has now been widely acknowledged by the astronomical community.

Astronomy is an important part of our economy and our culture. Whether your ancestors arrived here 1,000 years ago from Tahiti or 200 years ago from Portugal, they navigated by the stars.

It looks like the organizations responsible for the TMT have acknowledged their missteps, reached out to the local community, listened to their feedback and are in the process of developing a collaborative plan. I am hopeful that they can work together to find a compromise that benefits everyone and allows astronomers and scientists to continue discovering amazing things here on the Big Island.

The reality is, however, that unless the astronomy community can come to a consensus with the Hawaiian community, the funding for the telescope won’t be available. The National Science Foundation isn’t going to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars unless the cultural and historical issues are resolved.

So regardless of the opinions of state agencies and elected officials, it is the Hawaiian community who will decide whether to share the Mauna. I hope they choose to do so, but ultimately it is up to them.

6. Homelessness remains a problem statewide, including on Hawaii island. What would you do to come to grips with this persistent problem?

We wouldn’t treat stray dogs as badly as we treat the homeless.

The homeless community can be divided into two groups. The chronically homeless and those who are homeless by circumstance.

Reducing housing costs and funding transitional housing programs will help to reduce or eliminate homelessness for families who find themselves temporarily without shelter. These programs work and with modest increases in funding we can create enough capacity for our kamaaina community.

The chronically homeless, however, are a much more serious problem. They nearly uniformly suffer from addiction, a disease which causes them to resist treatment. This resistance to treatment causes many to choose a homeless lifestyle over a life of sobriety and stability.

The Core ‘24 platform addresses the problem of homeless addicts by expanding drug treatment programs while simultaneously giving law enforcement a mandate to enforce laws restricting loitering, trespassing, public intoxication and drug possession.

This gives the chronically homeless a place to go and strong motivation to go there.

If you talk to addicts who have recovered and re-entered society you’ll find that it was usually a combination of accountability ( “hitting bottom” ) and treatment that allowed them to recover. That is what works. Let’s do it.

7. Half of Hawaii’s cesspools are on the Big Island, some 49,300. Seepage from cesspools can make people sick, harm coral reefs and lead to a variety of ecological damage. By law, cesspools must be upgraded to septic systems by 2050. What can be done to help people who may not be able to afford the conversion?

Let’s start by applying common sense. There is a significant difference between a cesspool that is 100 feet from the ocean and one that is 3 miles inland and at 4,000 feet of altitude. We can greatly reduce the number of required cesspool conversions and cut the costs by billions of dollars by conducting a rigorous study of their effects and exempting cesspools that really aren’t a threat to the environment.

For cesspools that really do pose a threat to the environment, we plan to expand the sewer system to give more homeowners access. This is especially true in neighborhoods that are clearly suburban, but for whatever reason were built without sanitary sewers.

For properties where this is impractical we plan to implement a program where Hawaii County pays the up-front capital costs of the conversion and amortizes them over a 30-year term with a special tax assessment on the property. This allows families to upgrade to septic systems without the burden of a large up-front capital investment.

8. What is the first thing Hawaii County should do to get in front of climate change rather than just reacting to it?

First things first: Hawaii County should look at its own operations and address the obvious problems. Too often here in Hawaii the government creates mandates and bureaucracy for everyone else, then exempts itself from them because they are too costly or burdensome.

Trucking all of Hilo’s solid waste over Saddle Road to the leeward landfill seems like an obvious problem we can address. Opening up a landfill on the windward side would be a good solution.

The county can also fix the EV charging stations in the parking lot of its own offices. They have been broken for more than two years. 

Other internal actions Hawaii County can take are restricting new county vehicles to EVs where possible, restricting the purchase of new buses to EVs and converting all county facilities to grid-connected solar/battery systems.

The county can also get aggressive in its pursuit of federal dollars and deploy comprehensive EV charging infrastructure throughout the island. That money is just sitting there waiting for us to go after it.

Finally, Hawaii County should end its hydrogen program. The funds can be better spent expanding our infrastructure using proven technologies like lithium iron phosphate.

9. Should the Hu Honua biomass energy plant be allowed to start operating? Why or why not?

The decision is not whether to start Hu Honua. The decision is whether or not to continue burning liquified dinosaurs in our oil fueled power plant.

To maintain grid stability during peak hours and in cloudy weather we need to have some kind of power plant that operates independent of wind and solar. Geothermal is the obvious answer to this problem here on the Big Island, but we don’t currently have a geothermal plant fully constructed and ready to go.

In the meantime even minor disruptions to power production have caused HECO to implement rolling blackouts.

From a carbon perspective the Hu Honua plant is much better for the environment than the oil-burning plants we now use. The eucalyptus trees take the carbon out of the air and it is returned to the atmosphere when it is burned. The only significant ecological impact is trace gasses, particulates and ash which are handled with modern scrubbers. We should absolutely hold the Hu Honua operator’s feet to the fire to ensure these scrubbers are online and working as designed.

So if the plant can come into compliance with their building permits and, ideally, figure out how to get the cost down, then we should allow it to move ahead.

10. How would you make the county administration more transparent and accessible to the public?

Customer feedback is one of the most important planks of the Core ‘24 platform. In today’s world even a mom-and-pop boutique jelly business sends a customer satisfaction survey to the customers who purchase their products.

Hawaii County serves hundreds of thousands of customers across multiple touchpoints, but has no system for following up and collecting feedback in a timely manner.

We’re going to change that. We plan to implement customer feedback for every single citizen touchpoint from the trash transfer stations to the DMV to the planning department. Citizens will be asked to review their experience, leave feedback and provide constructive criticism.

We will aggregate and publish this feedback. Where county workers are doing a great job they’ll be rewarded. Where the public finds their performance lacking, we’ll provide more resources and focus on improving the experience.

This is an easy win. There are thousands of tools out there that can be purchased and implemented off-the-shelf and I think everyone will be surprised how quickly the customer service culture at Hawaii County changes once we start publishing performance metrics.