Hey, Mr. Mayor! Your football days are over. You’re not in the locker room anymore.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s recent rant before the City Council about the Department of Planning and Permitting’s new but not really working permit process reminds me of the mandatory post-game press conferences that football coaches hate and dread.

A coach is on the hot seat and the press has questions. You can see his repressed anger, the way his eyes squint and his face tightens. But he holds back, says a few terse sentences, mouths a couple of “one day at a time” cliches and exits the room. Whew!

Usually. But sometimes he just can’t hold it in and it all comes out — anger, martyrdom and of course blame. Shoot the messengers for creating a negative atmosphere and asking unfair questions.

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Sports journalists love this moment. ESPN shows the clip over and over. A meltdown whine fest.

But really it’s a no-win hell on wheels.

Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting began using new building permit software last month to speed up construction approvals. It’s gone bad, very bad. Fewer permits have been issued than a year ago.

A rebuilding year threatens to turn into a de-building year.

OK, stuff happens. It’s hard to introduce new technology, and DPP is still badly short-staffed. In fact DPP’s director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna is right. IT rollouts are tricky, complicated and unpredictable, no matter how much prep time.

But my goodness, Mr. Mayor.

Expectations Should Have Been Managed

“If you were on our side of the fence,” he said, speaking directly to council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, “you would see the degree of difficulty this represents and how far we’ve come and how certain we are about the road ahead and what we’re going to get done — which is unprecedented — you never would’ve said what you said.”

So, let’s see. If you led people to believe rebuilding had begun, yet you start with no wins and bad losses, it’s not about the team, it’s about the naysayers?

The process “deserves respect. It deserves patience,” he said. “It deserves people not just jumping on us anytime that they feel like they’ve got a good story to print.”

I don’t recall the mayor urging caution and patience about what he calls bumps in the road.

Let’s take a step back from his anger and self-pity. Who created the early success story in the first place?

I don’t recall the mayor urging caution and patience about what he calls “bumps in the road.”

When it comes to innovations, political leaders have two jobs. One is to create expectations. Gin things up. Make people see the need for something and convince them that there are excellent reasons why this need can be met.

The other, harder, and too often ignored one is to dampen expectations when necessary, to give the public a dose of realism: “Things won’t happen as fast as we hoped. Here’s why.”

Sometimes it is only fair and necessary to bite the bullet in a way that doesn’t sound like excuses. Here is a message people ought to hear but never do: “We can’t be sure. New software is full of tricks and bad surprises. We’ll keep you regularly posted.”

Saying that takes courage. At the very least it takes candor. The mayor was pretty good at this during his first term. With planning and permits, definitely not.

Keeping The Publicʻs Business Private

The mayor was especially ticked off because City Council members had the audacity to hold meetings with people complaining about the slow process of the roll-out.

As Civil Beat’s Christina Jedra reported: “With a raised voice and pointed finger, Blangiardi chastised Dos Santos-Tam for talking to Hawaii News Now about the new system’s shortcomings and for calling city permitting officials to a public meeting.”

Keep it in house! You should have come to me! Why? Because he could have fixed things? No way. He could have appeased them? Maybe, but so what?

In what universe does a mayor try to foster cooperation by angrily telling City Council members that they are misbehaving?

Bottom line is that the general public would not know much about what was going on because the “bumps” would be concealed.

The mayor is not some billionaire owner of a National Football League franchise. He’s an elected official among other elected officials who quite properly have their own agenda and responsibilities. It seems odd even to say something so basic and elementary.

In what universe does a mayor try to foster cooperation by angrily telling City Council members that they are misbehaving? A beleaguered football coach fantasy universe, that’s where.

Blangiardi also lost his cool with embarrassing results when he stuck his nose into the selection process for the acting Honolulu Police Department chief. He’d been very unhappy with Joe Logan, who had resigned, and with the Honolulu Police Commission. Me too.

But the problem is that his passion led him to essentially select the acting chief even though the rules clearly state that the Police Commission makes the choice. Crystal clear. Like sending 13 players out on the field when the rules only allow 11.

This Makes Me Worry About Him

The problem right now is not the DPP’s understandable delay. It’s the mayor himself. He’s beleaguered, impatient, angry and lashing out. But a losing streak is a losing streak and talking in public as if he’s giving a halftime speech to a junior varsity team that cluelessly farted around the whole first half isn’t going to do it.

There are good ways to counsel patience and there are bad ways. Blangiardi chose the worst way. His dramatic from-the-hip-to-the-lip response made people less assured and the media more wary of his explanations.

His anger was much more a red flag that things were worse than a green light that things would be better real soon.

After all, this is Hawaiʻi, home of failed projects and delays that last forever.

People here are cynical. But they are not stupid. They know a pothole may never be fixed (the mayor calls the DPP planning difficulties “bumps in the road,” which is what a manager of the Honolulu rail called them until the day he was fired.)

The behavior seems all so bush league.

This makes me worry about him. Anybody doing the mayor’s job is going to feel beleaguered, sorry for herself, and angry sometimes.

But displaying this is not a good look. Doing so makes a leader less likely to succeed, not more.

The mayor can’t lose his job, and because of term limits he can’t keep it either. But if he were a coach instead of a politician, he might soon be looking for assistant coach opportunities at a junior college.

This story has been updated to clarify that a paragraph about Blangiardi’s appearance before the City Council was pulled from a previous Civil Beat story.

Permit Pileup

In this ongoing series about Honolulu’s notoriously troubled permitting department, we seek to explain the failures, inequities and inefficiencies in O‘ahu’s permitting process and explore solutions that would make the system work better for everyone.

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