Governor stands by decision against trailer parks on Maui

thing on the topic of Maui and just the overall cost that uh you know the the rebuilding and Recovery effort is going to cost the state uh there was some criticism by members of the Ways and Means Committee last week that questioned uh you know a number of things including the request by the administration for an additional $412 million to go towards uh the recovery efforts uh at some of the Senators said that they were caught unaware by this that they were surprised by the ballooning of this nu

mber uh and also questioned the decision to go for uh the hotel rooms for those victims rather than looking at other Alternatives have you had a chance to speak to lawmakers and those who questioned uh the this new request for this additional funding sure uh it's hardly a new request I've been talking about it for months with any number of people from leadership on down uh they probably don't watch your show I guess because I think we've talked about that here uh but I talk about it pretty much

everywhere I go everyone knows from the whiteboards as well how many people we have uh involved and truth be told if anyone has dealt with a crisis of this magnitude which I don't expect uh them having had to do before but if you've dealt with these kind of Crisis you know that they are Ever Changing UH responsibilities and that's not to push blame on anybody it's just one day a family needs help in one way then the next day they may need more help in some other way these are people who lost eve

rything they lost their home and you can't just build tent cities and expect there not to be Mayhem if you look at the literature and the experiences of other states when they've just built like a tent city which was recommended in that Senate hearing what you end up doing is you uh marginalize people you put them in very very dangerous situations people end up committing suicide they have profound difficulties interfacing with others you're mixing some individuals that have unfortunately a sket

chy past with young families these are just not things you do if you have the experience and also when you build these uh these trailer parks like they did in other in the in the other states that have had these disasters what you find when you talk to them and that's what I did when I talked to the other Governors you find that five and 10 years out you're still looking at trailer parks people descend into deep poverty and they never recover so those are all bad ideas and I'm going to continue

to care for our people compassionately much of the cost will be handled by the federal government there is going to be some cost that we handle we can go over these numbers later but just so people understand you know the the nature of the legislature is sometimes to cherry-pick different um numbers and then cause a bit of panic but nothing was mentioned about the $ 1.5 billion that we negotiated that's being covered by the feds for the Army Corp to remove the debris nothing was mentioned about

the $292 million of SBA Loans that we got nothing was mentioned about the Hawaii Community foundations 180 million or any number of other things that we have gotten coverage for and then of course the feds cover everything for people who are eligible which is still the majority but without a doubt it will be expensive to rebuild Maui and to care for our people and I'm just never going to turn my back on anybody so it was disappointing to hear a few just a few legislators not many a few of them s

ay such terrible things about how we should treat our people well following up on this idea of trailers there is some back and forth on that just today Senator Jared K Oho CLE just was saying that you know why build kale for homeless but trailers for fire survivors what what's your thoughts on that well though boy uh we just put a cal Village which is very effective it drops the cost by 73% per person when they're in a Cali but that's permanent trailers are impermanent and the impermanency of tr

ailers is not great also the trailers that were proposed I it's too bad that Jared didn't do his homework but the the trailers that were proposed cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a lot of the time when you try to ship that in from the mainland we're building Cala units at $166,000 a pop plus we're getting a lot of philanthropic support for them uh the idea that had we decided early on to bring trailers in which by the way are illegal in the state of Hawaii just so you know although under em

ergency Powers I suppose we could force some of these things through uh they would not have been here they would not have been here quickly and it's better to build permanent housing which is what we're doing so we authorized the 450 units of permanent housing which is going to go into uh the community that has been described as Le El uh they're calling the the ultimate housing project Kola which is going to be 450 units plus 169 units but that housing will be much more stable and actually less

expensive than trailers so you know it's interesting the the legislators do an important thing they uh listen to their Community they manage the budget but they don't manage the breadth of a crisis they're not in the hundreds of meetings that I'm in and have to deal with and navigating both the federal government the president the county and now um some of these lobed hand grenades so it's okay you know but I would think that our people would be more compassionate than that and building out 2,00

0 housing uh units which is really what my goal is is the right thing to do that's what we're proposing uh if Jarrett and others are supportive of housing the people that were displaced in Maui then they definitely should authorize uh funding for 2,000 units of which I will get a lot of help from the feds