Business owner challenges council vice chair for Molokai seat | News, Sports, Jobs

Four years ago, Keani Rawlins-Fernandez unseated a longtime incumbent as several progressive-backed candidates earned a majority on the Maui County Council. 

Now, as the incumbent, Rawlins-Fernandez is defending her seat against a candidate who’s pulled in just over $140,000 in his first run for office. 

“I see how much money has been invested in my opponent and the other candidates, and it’s obvious that it is in response to the legislation and direction that we have taken to stand up for our community and protect our home,” said Rawlins-Fernandez, who’s raised nearly $40,000. 

“I think that all the candidates, they all mean well. A lot of us are saying the same things and we all agree. It’s how we get to the destination” where they may differ, she said.

John Pele, a property manager and restaurant owner, is one of the top three fundraisers among council candidates this election cycle and one of the candidates that the high-spending super PAC Be Change Now has been focusing its advertising funding on. Pele emphasizes that he can’t control what a super PAC does – they’re unable to coordinate directly with candidates – but that he has “vowed to run a clean race.”

Rawlins-Fernandez

“We’ve got to be honest — there’s money on both sides of the coin, right?” Pele said. “There’s money, and I worked my butt off calling people, talking to people. If people believed in me and they wanted to donate to my campaign, I humbly accepted it. . . . I don’t agree with the negative ads. I never have and I never will, and I don’t think you’ll ever find a negative ad coming out of my campaign.”

JOHN PELE

Pele’s run for office was inspired in part by the struggle of many local parents — watching their homegrown kids move away for lack of housing. 

His daughter graduated from Kamehameha Schools and Chaminade University, but when she tried to look for a house in Hawaii, “the opportunities just aren’t here,” she told her dad. “It’s too expensive.”

“So she moved, and I’ve never gotten over that. I’ve lost that chain of my family. . . . And I know I’m not alone,” Pele said. “Thousands of families are going through this in Hawaii and I just think we need to start planning out solutions so that we can keep our residents here if they want to be here.”

Pele points out everybody is saying the same thing when it comes to the housing crisis — government has to help with infrastructure costs to make housing more affordable for developers to build and sell to residents. He recognizes the need to mitigate costs while still being careful with taxpayers’ money.

Pele supports leasehold options like what the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands does, as well as land trust options like the model that Na Hale O Maui uses. He wants to partner up with experts like Na Hale O Maui so the county can learn how to best help them build and facilitate housing, whether that’s through funding, land acquisition or other assistance.

“I don’t think government is made to build homes, right?” said Pele, who served on the Molokai Planning Comission for five years. “I don’t know if we should be in the business of building homes. We should be in the business of facilitating the building of homes, in my opinion.”

When asked about the council’s decisions on housing, Pele said that “I don’t think it’s my place to criticize anybody.” He credits the council’s passage of Bill 107 to adjust affordable housing price guidelines.

“I think they’ve been working hard trying to get things done,” he said. “The results will be in how many houses we can get built for our residents.”

Part of the reason Pele was able to afford a home, pay his bills and send his daughter to college was because of 21 years of employment in the tourism industry, in which he’s been everything from a bus boy to a hotel general manager. While he recognizes the importance tourism plays in the local economy, he points out that as a planning commissioner he voted against short-term rentals in residential areas. 

“I’ve always taken the stance that we build tourist destinations, and we should have our tourists stay in those destinations,” he said. 

His primary focus in tourism management is making sure it doesn’t impact residents’ way of life, and he wants to see more enforcement of illegal vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods. He also wants to sit down with representatives of the tourism industry to discuss concerns and potential policies.

Even as the county looks to diversify its economy, “I don’t think you have to end one industry to start another industry,” Pele said. Operating Hiro’s Ohana Grill on Molokai with his brothers, Pele sees local businesses as “the backbone of our economy” and wants more investment in helping them grow. He said he’d back funding for organizations like the Kuhao Business Center on Molokai. The entities to help businesses are in place, he said, but some entrepreneurs just need to be pointed in the right direction.

“Molokai, we have just some real smart, smart business people, you know, that have a vision, but they just don’t know how to obtain that vision, right?” Pele said. “Maybe they don’t have a retail space, or they don’t know how to do a startup, or they don’t know how to write a grant.”

Ultimately, if elected, Pele hopes to be someone who brings everyone to the table to solve an issue they mutually care about.

“Every candidate has talked about housing opportunities. That’s important to me. It’s important that we address those concerns and this crisis that we have on our hands,” he said. “And I think it’s going to take all entities involved to get that accomplished. . . . It can’t happen without everybody sitting at the table, with our unions, with our developers, with our environmentalists. Everybody needs to sit at the table and say, how do we get this done?”

KEANI RAWLINS-FERNANDEZ

In the race to solve the affordable housing crisis, Rawlins-Fernandez sees a key solution in an unlikely place — tax reform.

“I think my biggest accomplishments in the last three and a half years have been my work on protecting generational families from being priced out through different property tax policy,” said Rawlins-Fernandez, the council vice chairwoman and head of the Budget, Finance and Economic Development Committee.

In 2019, her first year on the council, she chaired a temporary investigative group that led to the creation of three different rates for homes that owners were actually living in — one tier for properties valued at $800,000 and below, another for values of $800,001 to $1.5 million and a third for values above $1.5 million. Another category with higher rates was created for non-owner-occupied homes. The goal was to ease the burden on residents and make sure local homeowners weren’t paying the same rates as owners of luxury second homes.

Keeping existing homes affordable for local families was also the focus of a bill that Rawlins-Fernandez introduced to allow owners of property designated as “aina kupuna” land to pay minimum property taxes. It was geared toward longtime residents living in homes where values have skyrocketed as luxury developments were built around them.

“All of these initiatives stem from keeping our generational families home and providing housing without having to build, build, build,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “We know we have a lot of housing units, and this approach is one way to provide housing by ensuring that we don’t just continue building. We learn from the past. We’re not just continuing to build and then let those houses either flip out of affordability, become an investment property or become revenue generators through the commodification of our housing inventory.” 

While the council has denied some housing projects over some members or residents’ objections, Rawlins-Fernandez pointed out that the council has also approved multiple projects and land acquisitions. Last year, the county closed on a $10.5 million purchase of about 500 acres in Waiale that included a 23-acre donation from Alexander & Baldwin to develop residential housing behind Target and Lowe’s. She said the council has also quickly approved projects that did not have major opposition, such as the 89-unit affordable rental Kaiaulu O Kupuohi project in Lahaina and the 202-unit Kuikahi Village project in Wailuku. 

“I think this council has done a really good job at ensuring that . . . not just any housing development is approved, but that the project is responsible and is taking into consideration everything that the community members are asking them to do,” she said. 

If reelected, Rawlins-Fernandez said some of her priorities include monitoring and adjusting the new tax policies the council has introduced.

She also wants to focus on funding programs that increase food security on Molokai, seeing through a climate change plan for Molokai, making sure the county implements its Comprehensive Economic Development Strategies and managing tourism. The council has tried a number of different ways to curb tourism’s impact, including two bills — one of which Rawlins-Fernandez introduced — to put a moratorium on building permits for hotels while it works out long-term tourism management strategies. 

The council has also raised property taxes on tourism industry properties, lowered short-term rental caps in most districts — including a cap of zero for Molokai — and is considering a bill that would put a cap on transient vacation rental units. 

When asked about the county’s increasing reliance on visitor industry taxes at a time when the county is trying to diversify its economy, Rawlins-Fernandez said that “the tourism industry was created to provide economic development and revenue for the county, and I don’t think that they were paying their fair share in the past, and now with the direction the council has taken that we are ensuring that they are paying their fair share.”

She added that it’s mutually beneficial for all sides to better manage tourism. 

“While resort owners and hotel developers and their lobbyists may not appreciate or they may not understand the value of what it is this council is doing, I think it’s good for them and it’s good for our county as a whole,” she said.

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.

Pele Rawlins-Fernandez

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