Watch enough of Gov. David Ige’s press conferences and the recurrence of three little words—“I do know”—sometimes broadened to “we do know,” becomes ear-ticklingly noticeable.
On transitioning to renewable energy: “I do know that it does require a different model than the traditional utility model.”
On the recently passed minimum wage bill that passed this year: “We do know that those earning the minimum wage are living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck and certainly will be spending those funds in our economy.”
On the housing crisis: “I do know that homelessness is related to housing, and we haven’t been producing housing in the numbers that our community requires…”
More than just an incidental turn of phrase, it is, perhaps, a reflection of how the departing two-term governor processes and communicates the myriad complex issues that cross his desk, his mind and, often, the vast channels of public discourse through which he wades each day.
Ige often uses the framing to bridge an explanation of current conditions and potential outcomes or the best information with a course of action that he intends to take. By doing so, he makes transparent to his audiences his priorities, his thought processes and his rationales. This, thus this. It also qualifies his assertions with a suggestion of what isn’t or what cannot yet be known.
So what of the man himself?
Ige’s last day in office is Dec. 5. The book on his eight years as governor is all but closed. The facts of his achievements and shortfalls and everything in between are matters of record. They are what we know.
The full measure of his impact, the unintended consequences of his decisions, his ultimate place in Hawaii history? Less so.
And what lies ahead for Ige, who turns a still politically prime 66 in January? Even he doesn’t know.
(He will not, he insists, run for Congress, as some have speculated.)
On a brisk, bright day after Thanksgiving, Ige sat in the executive conference room of the State Capitol and reflected on eight years of tumult and triumph he could never have predicted.
The career politician steamrolled into office in 2014 as the first candidate in state history to defeat an incumbent governor in the primary. Ige more than doubled Neil Abercrombie’s vote total in that primary, then won handily over former Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona and former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann in the general election.
His first term was not without challenges—hardening battle lines in the fight over the future of Mauna Kea, for one—but largely he was left to advance his platform of making the state government more efficient, building more affordable housing and promoting renewable energy with little fuss.
But 38 minutes on Jan. 13, 2018, nearly squandered whatever public trust and goodwill his administration had earned to that point and put into question an assumed re-election that November.
The infamous text alert that a North Korean missile was headed toward Hawaii, and the 38 minutes it took for the administration to publicly confirm that the report was false, first panicked, then enraged many in the community. In the days and weeks that followed, as national news outlets picked up the story, Ige was criticized as ineffectual and slow to act. And even as the facts of the incident were uncovered (a 10-year Hawaii Emergency Management staffer sent the alert, believing that a drill that was conducted during a shift change was an actual event) and corrective measures taken, hostility toward Ige lingered.
Yet, the incident occurred in part because of Ige’s philosophy of getting ahead of problems.
“We really felt that with North Korea firing missiles twice a month that we needed to be better prepared,” Ige says
But as freakishly as a reputation may be sullied, so, too, may it be restored.
In the months that followed, a pair of devastating natural disasters hit the state. In April, intense storms resulted in severe flooding on Kauai and Oahu and triggered landslides that covered sections of Kuhio Highway and left Hanalei isolated from the rest of the island.
Two weeks later, lava from Kilauea Volcano began a ruinous four-month eruption that would destroy over 700 homes and other structures and leave nearly 14 square miles covered with lava.
Ige hewed close to trusted principles in dealing with the disasters.
“First and foremost, it’s about communication,” he said. “Whenever there’s a crisis or emergency, it really is about trying to provide truthful and honest information and establishing that so that the public can count on and know that they are getting truthful, timely information. That’s really important. Beyond that, it’s about being focused on, what is it that we need to do? What is in the best interests of the people and how can we execute it in the best way possible?
“We had the those 14 landslides on Kauai that washed out a lot of Kuhio Highway and isolated that people of Hanalei—they really had no way in or out at that point in time,” he said. “Those two single-lane bridges were virtually impassible due to the storm damage. So it really was about trying to respond to the needs of the community, but communicate as best as we could and then make the repairs that would be necessary so that, you know, people could get back to normal activity.”
In retrospect, Ige said his administration’s response to the immediate dangers and long-term investments in securing infrastructure and rebuilding the local economies helped the public view his administration in a broader, more positive light.
“Our response and the fact that people felt that those emergencies and crises were handled well, I think helped to restore the trust of the people,” Ige said. “And I know that it made a difference in the outcome of the election.”
Ige prevailed over Colleen Hanabusa in a tough primary, then cruised to a convincing victory over Republican challenger Andria Tupola in the general to earn a second term. Taking his reelection as public affirmation of his administration’s agenda, he moved forward with initiatives on affordable housing, sustainability and climate change.
“When you’re in any elective position, it’s really about asking the voters for the privilege of continuing to serve,” Ige said. “The campaign is all about focusing on I wanted to serve a second term and asking the public to, to make that decision. At that point in time, we had begun to make progress on homelessness—the housing program was really starting to move a lot like how we had hoped it would—Hawaii become becoming a worldwide leader on sustainability and fighting the climate crisis.”
And then.
“So COVID happens and, you know, it’s all COVID all the time, for three years now,” Ige said. “So all the best laid plans got set aside. The economy crashed. We still continued to implement the priority areas but … we were talking about layoffs and furloughs. It definitely changed the whole second term, to be focused on COVID and the actions that we needed to take to be able to keep our community safe and get through COVID.”
The initial response to the mysterious and deadly virus was unsurprisingly messy. While some residents chafed at the school closures, mask mandates and social distancing requirements and others criticized the administration for not doing enough, Ige found himself embroiled in a broadly speculated upon conflict with Lt. Gov. Josh Green, who had leveraged his credibility as a physician to assume a prominent role in educating the public about the virus via his popular white-board video sessions. Ige drew criticism for excluding Green from pandemic-related meetings and decision-making.
The two reportedly hashed things out during an hour-long meeting in March 2020, but other internal issues were brewing. That September, amid a public outcry about inadequate testing and contact tracing, as well as the state’s handling of a COVID-19 outbreak at the Oahu Community Correctional Center, Ige announced the resignations of both Department of Health Director Bruce Anderson and Department of Public Safety Director Nolan Espinda.
As rocky as the first months of the pandemic in Hawaii might have been, public health measures that might have seemed extreme at the outset soon became a positive model for the rest of the country with buy-in from the community. Through much of the pandemic, the state ranked among the safest, with relatively low rates of hospitalizations and other key metrics.
The Commonwealth Fund, which promotes health equity and health care quality, efficiency and access, evaluated state health care systems on their COVID-19 responses from February 2020 to March 2022. Hawaii ranked No. 1 on the list based on 56 categories, including vaccination rates, hospital capacity and mortality.
“The one that I’m most proud of is Hawaii was the only state in the country that had zero days where our hospitals were overwhelmed,” Ige said. “The national average was 50 days last year. We’re different in that we can’t divert people who are sick to some hospital across the border or anything like that. We’re 2,500 miles away. If we ever got overwhelmed, we knew that there would be a lot of people who would potentially die. So we were focused on that.
“We are in constant contact with the hospitals and the industry and we anticipated worker shortages,” he said. “Hawaii was one of the very first to act in in all of those measures that resulted in us never getting overwhelmed. I do think that was, just another instance of when we all work together, we can take on the biggest challenges and have good outcomes.”
Ige said receiving $1.6 billion in federal funds via the American Rescue Plan Act enabled his administration to avoid furloughs and layoffs and help keep the residents financially afloat. Half of the funds went to unemployment insurance repayment. Another $214 million was devoted to hospitals and the public health response. The balance was allocated as emergency funding for essential services, the visitor industry, education and infrastructure.
Ige knew economic recovery would be tied to the visitor industry, and the Safe Travels program was key to his administration’s efforts to help the industry survive and eventually rebound.
“We knew that requiring mandatory quarantines was what we needed to do to keep our community healthy and safe, but if we don’t have trans-Pacific travelers, then we don’t have any economy,” Ige said. “So starting up Safe Travels, working with the airlines to create this network of trusted partners so that they could get tested and allowing people who were negative to travel initially really did accelerate the economic recovery.
“Once vaccinations became available, then allowing those who are vaccinated to be able to travel to Hawaii without being subject to the quarantine further accelerated our recovery,” he said. “If you go back to two years ago, everybody expected that we would not recover from the pandemic, you know, until ‘25, or ’26 or ‘27. If you look at where our economy is today, we’re pretty much recovered. There’s still some unemployed but I do think that Safe Travels helped accelerate that recovery.”
This past year, projected tax revenue increased by a shocking 15%, with collections expected to exceed $8 billion for the first time. The resulting $1 billion surplus allowed the administration and the state Legislature to restore programs and invest in new initiatives to support universal broadband access, renewable energy, climate change mitigation and other priorities. This year’s legislature appropriated $600 million to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to clear its notorious backlog of lease applications, settled the decades-old Kalima et al. v. State of Hawaii suit, set a new annual payment to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs from Public Land Trust revenue, directed $300 million for affordable housing, and provided for a $250 million tax refund while still setting aside $500 million to help replenish the state’s rainy day fund.
The final state budget that Ige approved included $350 million to replace Aloha Stadium, which Ige has publicly declared should move forward without the proposed entertainment district community that was to have been developed via public-private partnership.
Ige said that given the cost of a new stadium against the roughly $600 million annually the state spends on construction, he has always favored extending the life of the stadium as much as possible.
“Unfortunately, the legislature had different plans,” Ige said. “They stopped funding repairs on the facility, kind of forcing us to, to construct a new one. I’ve had to deal with the issue and I’ve seen the legislature flip-flop several times. They never (allocated) sufficient funds to be able to construct a new facility until this past session and they changed directions a couple of times, you know, having (the Department of Accounting and General Services) do it and assigning it to (the Hawaii Community Development Authority) and then finally to (the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism).”
According to Ige, the $350 million allocation does not include public-private partnerships, which he said are rarely successful, especially without ties to a professional team.
Ige acknowledged that while it will be up to the next administration to tackle the issue, he is “trying to get (the project) in motion to express to the new administration that this is the best way to move forward.”
Ige is also leaving office before the other significant challenge of his second term, the Red Hill water contamination crisis, is fully resolved. However, the governor said that he is confident that the Department of Defense is working in good faith to defuel the facility and prevent further contamination of the local water system.
“I do feel comfortable that in the discussions I have with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. John Aquilino that they are committed,” he said. “They recognize that they that they failed and the fact that fuel got into our water was unacceptable. We are working together because we want to do it in a safe way that doesn’t put the aquifer or put the community at risk. We still have more than 120 million gallons of fuel in those tanks and we want to make sure that we drain those tanks in a way that doesn’t put our community at risk.
I do think that we are pushing them to meet the obligations that they have to our community to defuel, but we also recognize that we want them to do it in a way that is safe, and that doesn’t put the community at risk.” he said. “That’s the challenge. How quickly can they do it?”
One of Ige’s earliest and boldest commitments could ultimately prove to be his most enduring legacy.
In 2015, before the false missile alert and COVID-19 and Red Hill, before the better of 41 declared emergencies and natural disasters, Ige signed off on what is widely recognized ad the most aggressive clean-energy commitment in the country: Energy independence via 100% renewable energy sources by 2045.
“I am very active in the National Governors Association and my colleagues were saying, ‘You must be crazy to think that you’re going to commit to complete energy transformation,’” Ige said. “Energy has been generated by fossil fuels for as long (as it’s been available). Iolani Palace was electrified before the White House, so Hawaii has been on the front-end of that. But I knew that as an island community, we had to be very specific on long-term goals because we didn’t want to end up getting diverted or sidetracked by other issues.”
To Ige, the commitment to renewables is eminently practical.
“We still buy $4 billion of oil every year,” he said, “and that means we—you and I—in various kinds of fees and purchase of products, are taking $4 billion out of the state and sending it overseas. If we’re 100% clean, renewable energy, that $4 billion gets invested right back in the state to create jobs.”
Ige said the state has seen a “tremendous acceleration” of clean-energy projects, driven in part by reductions in the cost of photovoltaic panels and batteries.
“We’re beginning to see how the consumer will benefit from out staking out such an early position,” he said. “I thought it was very important that the government and the governor really set clear goals. I always believe in leading by example, so we wanted the state to be aggressive in energy transformation. We’re committed to net zero for our airports, our public schools, the university facilities because I believe that if it’s going to be our policy, the state should lead.”
Ige’s last day in office is Dec. 5. The following day he and wife Dawn will head to Washington state, where two of their three children reside, while renovations to their home are completed. That’s as far as Ige, the eternal long-range planner, has planned.
He says he intends to stay involved, “in some way,” in the causes he has championed as a public servant.
I would like to see the initiatives that we’ve started continue to have impact,” he said. “That’s certainly something that I care about and this is the decade to make a difference for climate change. We’ve got to keep accelerating the transformation.”
Other political roles is not out of the question, although, again, despite much speculation, Ige said he is not interested in a run for Congress.
“It’s a hard enough life being a public servant and a representative,” he said. “Having to travel back and forth to D.C., I give our congressional delegation credit for being able to do that. It’s really just very disruptive, so I am just not interested in doing that.”
Michael Tsai covers local and state politics for Spectrum News Hawaii.