Mayoral candidate Kirk Caldwell has picked up the endorsement of a union representing more than 3,000 local workers, according to a news release today.

Caldwell says he is “very honored” that the IBEW Local 1260 wants to support him. 

“I believe Honolulu needs a mayor that manages the city instead of running it on auto-pilot, a mayor that understands all the important issues and a mayor that offers people real solutions instead of just complaints,” he said in a statement.

Check here to see who is endorsing who this election. 

— Nathan Eagle

Honolulu is getting serious about going paperless. In March it was online camping permits.

Now, the city is getting ready to close its building permit counter at Kapolei Hale and move all of its dealings online. 

Hawaii News Now reports that one-fourth of all city permitting is already done online:

The Kapolei building permit counter will close later this year as the city Planning and Permitting Department expands its on-line and electronic building permit initiatives, city officials said. 

“These initiatives have saved the department thousands of man-hours, as well as providing the public improved services and avoiding waits in long lines,” said Art Challacombe, chief of the Department of Planning and Permitting’s Customer Service Office. 

…

“Training for staff is currently under way and we expect a late-summer public roll-out date,” Challacombe said. 

Retired Honolulu firefighters will formally endorse Ben Cayetano tomorrow morning, according to an announcement today.

Donald Chang, the head of the HFD Retirees Association, says the group is backing the former governor for mayor because he “took care of his father for many years” and understands the challenges of living on a fixed income.

Look here to see who is endorsing who this election. 

— Nathan Eagle

Hawaii labor unions expect some serious change from supporters of mayoral candidate Kirk Caldwell. But not in the sense of doing something different. 

A fundraiser is scheduled for this evening with a $4,000 suggested contribution per person.

Not sure how many “working families” will be having tapas and wine at the event that is supposed to benefit them.

— Nathan Eagle

City Council Chair Ernie Martin just gave Managing Director Doug Chin a serious tongue-lashing. Midway through budget deliberations, relations between the executive and legislative branches of city government seem to be in tatters.

The generally congenial Martin said he felt disrespected by a May 4 letter from the mayor that could be read as a threat to the council if it doesn’t reinsert funding for the Agricultural Liaison, Office of Economic Development, and the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts.

Martin said the letter came days after members floated amendments that would reinstate some of the mayor’s requests, which shows the administration doesn’t understand how the budget works. Martin said the “threatening overtures … demean the whole process” and undermine the administration’s credibility.

Martin said previous threats from the mayor resulted in veto overrides, and that Carlisle should have learned the lesson to communicate directly with council leadership or, at the very least, send senior members of the administration like Chin or Budget Director Mike Hansen to meet with the council on his behalf.

“The man has no confidence in you,” Martin told a visibly stunned Chin. “It questions his leadership abilities.”

Budget Chair Ann Kobayashi said the mayor and Martin are equals, and that the council does not work for the administration.

“I think I got the message,” Chin said.

Mayor Peter Carlisle has called a 2:30 p.m. press conference to announce he’s signing a plastic bag ban for Honolulu into law.

The Honolulu City Council passed the bill 7-1 last month. Tulsi Gabbard, one of the measure’s supporters, will join Carlisle today.

The ban takes effect July 2015.

Budget Committee Chair has indeed agreed to reinstate nearly $300 million of bond-financed construction money on the condition that HART doesn’t encumber any of that money until an FFGA is complete.

There’s still a small discrepancy between the $274 million Kobayashi wants to give and the $292 million is requesting. It’s a function of which bonds are used to pay for construction.

UPDATE: Staffers from HART and the Budget Committee huddled and apparently determined the capital budget balances with the $292 million of bond construction.

Testimony on Bill 32 now.

Tulsi Gabbard is proposing to cut three information specialists from HART’s operating budget.

She said having four PR folks — plus others who are technically employed by Parsons Brinckerhoff and InfraConsult — is unnecessary and is one area of redundancy that Dan Grabauskas should look at if he wants a “lean, mean machine.”

Cutting three positions could save more than $200,000.

Deliberations on Bill 31 continue.

I didn’t stick around in Kaneohe late enough last night to hear the hours of testimony on the proposal to limit commercial activities at Kailua beach parks.

Hawaii News Now did. Here’s the nut of their story:

The Honolulu City Council moved closer to banning commercial activity at Kailua Beach Park and Kalama Beach Park Wednesday, but it appears almost certain the proposed ban will be amended to allow some business to continue to operate in the park.

The council passed the second reading of Bill 11 by a unanimous 8-0 vote during its full council meeting at the the Pali Golf Course. The bill now goes to the council’s Committee on Parks and Cultural Affairs. If it passes out of that committee, it will go back to the full council for a third and final reading (vote).

Read and watch the full story here: Bill to ban commercial activity at Kailua Beach advances, with conditions

Here’s the agenda.

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s support for rail, like public support for the project, appears to be wavering.

Abercrombie was interviewed this morning on Hawaii News Now and expressed concerns about what the project has “evolved” into.

“The difficulty right now is the rail that’s proposed has nothing to do with what was stated before — going to the university, going into Waikiki, the transit-oriented development,” Abercrombie said.

He said it’s his job to make sure the entire state is taken care of, and said the issue needs to be settled by Oahu voters in August. Ben Cayetano has promised to kill rail if he’s elected mayor.

Abercrombie said today he’s been a rail supporter for 40 years. He fought for federal funding when he was in Congress and signed the project’s environmental impact statement within days of taking office as governor (that’s Mayor Peter Carlisle making the announcement in the photo above).

“We have to have alternative transportation from the west side of Oahu,” he said.

Read and watch the full interview at Hawaii News Now: Abercrombie questions status of rail

First reading. Only reading.

Tom Berg’s proposed HART-repealing charter amendment is dead. His colleagues took the rare step of killing Resolution 12-59 on first reading. It needed the support of a two-thirds supermajority at three separate hearings to make it on to November’s ballot.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the creation of HART in 2010, with stronger support than steel-on-steel rail received in 2008. Ikaika Anderson called the proposal “a step backwards.”

Berg said the semi-autonomous rail authority is out of control. He acknowledged his reso was just a symbolic measure and wouldn’t actually stop rail but would let the people put rail back in the Department of Transportation Services.

Berg was joined by Ikaika Anderson, Tulsi Gabbard, Romy Cachola and Ann Kobayashi, who said they wanted to advance the measure for discussion purposes. The other four members voted no.

The rail line of credit bill is up for public hearing and second reading this afternoon in Kaneohe.

It seems very likely that the council, with rail supporters still representing a majority, will pass Bill 37 in some form. The remaining question is whether it makes any changes, and the administration is continuing its push for approval without amendment.

In a memo received by the Honolulu City Council Tuesday afternoon, Budget Director Mike Hansen answered some of the council’s questions about the proposal.

The response I found most interesting was to a question about what happens if HART is unable to make good on its debt to the city. Hansen does a bit of a dodge and writes that’s unlikely to happen. But he explains that’s because whenever the council is asked to approve a pull on the line of credit, it can ”limit HART’s use of commercial paper to HART’s capacity to pay the debt service and retire the bond.”

In other words, he’s saying council members can reserve the right to ask about HART’s payback mechanism — whether it’s farebox, TOD-related revenue, concession sales or something else entirely — and only approve as much as they feel HART is capable of making good on. It’s like a small business coming into the bank for a loan.

Hansen also writes that the terms and conditions for how HART would pay back the loan should be included in a future agreement and not in the ordinance currently under consideration. The reason: because the federal government says so.

“Conceivably, the terms and conditions could be in either the MOU or ordinance. However, the FTA believes that the terms and conditions should be in theMOU and not in the ordinance. Therefore, in order to meet the FTA’s requirements and obtain the full funding grant agreement the terms and conditions for the pay back of any general obligation bonds should be included in the MOU.”

With the election just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about charter amendments. 

I already told you about Tom Berg’s repeal-HART proposal, which will get its (and potentially only) hearing today in Kaneohe.

Here’s another one on today’s agenda that has flown under the radar and is already up to its third (and final) reading. That means if it passes with two-thirds support, it’ll be on the ballot come November.

Reso 12-44 would ask voters to create a Grants In Aid Fund designed specifically to give money to nonprofit organizations so they can “provide services to economically and/or socially disadvantaged populations or provide services for public benefit in the areas of the arts, culture, economic development or the environment.”

The rationale is that the city’s primary mechanism to fund those programs is Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The CDBG allocation from the feds has dropped about $2.5 million in recent years and could drop further, the council worries. And, of course, there’s that whole $8 million snafu with the senior facility in Wahiawa that could hamstring the city even further.

The current version of the charter amendment would put 1 percent of real property tax revenues — about $8 million, according to the administration — into the Grants In Aid Fund every year. A proposed amendment to be considered today would make it 1 percent of all general fund revenues — about $10 million — every year. Both versions would require that at least $250,000 be spent in each City Council district.

The administration had been largely mum on the proposal until Tuesday, when Mayor Peter Carlisle sent a strongly-worded memo outlining his many concerns. Here are the key ones, from my reading:

• (3) The charter amendment presumes that CDBG funding and other federal or state funds will never recover from its decreased levels, or that funds from private sources will never fill the gap.
• (4) The charter amendment permanently reduces the city’s flexibility to consider its financial circumstances and various priorities from year to year — including direct services, infrastructure, fiscal stability, unfunded liabilities, public safety and recreation, to name a few — and to appropriate property tax or general fund revenues accordingly.
• (6) The requirement that a minimum of a quarter million dollars be “expended annually in each council district” is vague and unenforceable.

Carlisle also points out that nonprofits already get significant help from the city in the form of $26 million every year in property tax exemptions. In the end, he writes:

While we may respectfully disagree as to whether addressing the recent shortfall in CDBG funds is best addressed in this manner as a matter of policy, I do not dispute the city council’s prerogative as the legislative body to place measures such as this on the ballot for voters to decide. Where I feel particularly compelled to speak up is when I believe the implementation of such a measure will significantly and negatively impact city operations or its fiscal stability. This is the case here.

New HART chief Dan Grabauskas says Honolulu’s rail plan is “amazing” because it calls for all construction debt to be paid off shortly after work is done. That’s different from other systems, like the Boston system he ran previously.

Read Civil Beat’s Fact Check of that statement. We looked at Boston, New York and Chicago. Is Grabauskas right about the debt service?

FACT CHECK — Grabauskas: Debt Ate 30% of Boston Transit Budget