When it comes to getting things done, Hawaii has a NASA problem.

Because of mechanical difficulties with the shuttle two astronauts who were supposed to stay up at the International Space Station for only eight days are now going to be there for eight months.

NASA takes offense at the idea that these astronauts are stuck or stranded. Nothing to worry about. Calling them “stranded,” or “stuck,” NASA officials think, is too dire. 

The two space travelers are simply lingering, doing good stuff as they wait for the plan.

Simply lingering? Maybe so, but that’s a long time no see for the astronauts’ families who expected them back in a matter of days not months.

Worse yet, what if the problem can’t be fixed? NASA officials have a plan, but there’s always that chance.

So besides delay, “lingering” has a sense of dangerous abeyance about it, an uneasy feeling of a lurking, ominous disaster. 

It’s not just rocket science, though. Hawaii has so many political issues that linger, that our state motto could be “The Life the Land is perpetuated in delay.”

In Hawaii, too, there’s a prevalent concern, based on hard experience, that a long lingering issue might never get done or get worse rather than better. We have been trained to hope for the better but expect the worst.

A couple of weeks ago Department of Education officials announced at the last minute that hundreds of Hawaii students would not have school bus services at the start of the school year. This also had happened the previous two years. It of course wasn’t supposed to happen again.

I know: “I thought they already fixed it!”

Lingering issues are the poison pen of Hawaii politics. They are what people think about when they say that Hawaii government doesn’t work. 

So, let’s identify just five Hawaii lingerers and ask some questions about them. 

Then, I will have some suggestions on how to make things better.

5 Lingering Issues In Hawaii

HART CEO Lori Kahikina’s contract renewal: After a good deal of nasty public conflict, the HART board has agreed to offer Kahikina a new contract.

That was just a few months ago, which may seem like a nanosecond in Hawaii political time and too short to be considered lingering. But it’s not.

With HART no news has all too often meant bad news. Considering HART’s general history and its specific employment problems, that is a major space-capsule linger. 

Hey HART folks, it’s not about the Middle East, for Pete’s sake. Lock yourselves in a room with your lawyers and plenty of Keurig coffee capsules and don’t come out until the deal’s done.

Homelessness: No one needs to be told how lingering this issue is. There cannot be a quick fix.

But Mayor Rick Blangiardi just introduced a new plan that he touts as a step forward but may be an old linger wrapped in new linger clothes.

The plan appears to take advantage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision giving cities more leeway in getting homeless out of public spaces.

Despite the hype and promises, I can’t see how his new plan differs from what the city has already been doing. Others have wondered the same.

Is it bright plumage camouflage? What’s new, and how real is that difference?

New prison: Do you remember the plan for a new prison? Of course you don’t because that issue lingered for so long it has disappeared from human consciousness.

Easy come, easy go. If you stall long enough, a problem goes away on its own. Except that it does not, like that lesion on your body you ignored until one day it festers.

Hawaii’s prisons are as overcrowded and awful as they were in the past. What is the plan for bringing the project back? What if the Justice Department decides to sue?

Rail and stadium red flags: Talk about lingering disasters. Aloha Stadium began to self-destruct in the ’80s, and rail has been around for a quarter of a century. 

Now both have awarded huge contracts — progress! But they went to bidders who faced no competition — uh-oh!

A second potential stadium bidder pulled out with a “sudden exit for unspecified reasons.” For rail, other potential bidders also pulled out.

Single bids are the upside-down flags of public policy. What Jeff Portnoy, a former member of the UH Board of Regents, said about the stadium bid just as easily applies to HART. The lack of bidders was a “setback” putting the projects in “a very tenuous position that could cause delay.” Or worse.

Up to now, the response to this has been “Don’t worry. We got this.” That’s as weak an antidote for linger worries as bleach is for Covid.

What do officials see as possible red flags and how will they keep them from happening? Don’t know.

We need to ask more questions more often. These should not be complicated questions, just straightforward and commonsensical: who, when, why, how?

We need more venues for discussing these questions. The Legislature is one place, but the kinds of inquiry I am talking about go well beyond legislative oversight.

Public officials should be required to have regularly scheduled public meetings where these questions would be discussed. Like a Q&A with the school superintendent and his people. Or a heart-to-heart about HART.

These meetings and venues would not focus on who is at fault, accountable or liable. Of course, those are important, but so are other approaches that focus on how things can be done better where both the officials and the public open themselves up to the possibility that there are better ways.

At the same time, the lay people attending need to back off a little. Think of “help me understand” as the opener rather than “who is the doofus responsible for this screwup.” I know, I know.  I live in the same world you do. But if you are looking for answers, don’t assume you know them already.

This makes public discussion more central to our lives. That means more active citizen engagement.

 It also means taking the power of voting off a pedestal. 

The lingering problems about lingering show just how inadequate voting is as a way to bring about accountability.

I know the theories. I used to teach them. And theories that link voting, accountability and democracy are right, kind of, but only as far as they go.

Dealing with the nuts and bolts of public policy like lingering takes much more than checking off some boxes on a ballot and putting them in the mail.

Compared to the kind of citizen work it really takes to get things done, voting is the low hanging fruit.

Voting is like the astrophysics theories acting as the basis for bringing those astronauts home. 

While citizen engagement is the actual hard work that makes those theories work.