In fact, the trend had been toward greater transparency in the face of abuses by law enforcement at all levels, with body cameras required in some jurisdictions and community members helping to set policing standards and find common purpose. 

Masks, by contrast, are the uniforms of bank robbers, street thugs, assassins, and other criminals who don’t want to be held accountable for their actions. We have also seen them throughout history in countries whose governments unleashed goon squads, secret police and thugs on segments of their own populations. 

Remarkably, in just over a half-year, heavily armed and masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agency have become commonplace across this country, including in cities and small towns here in Hawaiʻi. In video after video on social media, agents are shown acting with excessive force, without regard for due process, and with the confidence that the law does not restrict them. 

Those are the trappings of authoritarianism.  

For anyone who has lived in authoritarian countries, what stands out is the normality of daily life – on the surface. However, civil bonds unravel on the edges of society where the most vulnerable are taken away in the shadows, and behind the cloak of darkness or by people hiding behind masks in clear daylight. 

It was against this backdrop that Hawaii Business Magazine’s I.C.E. Map began playing a role in the state. 

When 44 people were arrested in Kauaʻi earlier this month, Hawaii Business Magazine’s I.C.E. Map (Hawaiʻi Ice Map – Hawaii Business Magazine) received numerous alerts to the sightings of agents. We host this map in order to give businesses, their employees and others in the community the necessary information to stay informed. 

By now it’s become clear that the Department of Homeland Security and it’s I.C.E. agents are not limiting arrests to violent criminals and suspected terrorists – the originally stated targets.  

Just over a week ago, President Donald Trump again stated in a “60 Minutes” interview that I.C.E. agents were only targeting dangerous criminals. News reports and scores of videos taken by citizens show a different story. They document arrests of farm workers, restaurant employees, teachers, and others simply walking through retail parking lots. Agents have mistakenly raided the wrong homes.  

Instead of presenting judge-signed arrest warrants, or telling suspects their rights and following normal procedures, agents are caught on video in acts of racial profiling. They confront Hispanic-looking “suspects” and others on the streets or other public spaces asking, “Where were you born?” Even people with valid passports proving U.S. citizenship have been detained.  

I.C.E. has targeted courthouses where some immigrants are going through the legal steps to seek citizenship. Immigration lawyers say those arrested are often denied legal representation or contact with family members before they are deported or sent to other facilities. 

In a blurring of the legal boundaries of government-sanctioned and illegal acts, some criminals have begun impersonating masked and unidentified I.C.E. agents to perpetrate kidnappings or muggings. Who’s to know the difference? 

California has taken the lead in setting standards on transparency and accountability. But the Trump administration sued in an effort to block implementation of newly passed laws, the “No Secret Police Act” that would restrict law enforcement officers in the state from wearing masks except in certain situations, and the “No Vigilantes Act” that would require law enforcement officers not in uniform to wear visible identification. 

The federal government says it has no intention of adhering to the state laws which would take effect in January. So the tug-of-war between states and the federal government over fundamental rights will be decided in the courts. 

Fern Holland, a Kauaʻi County Council member who witnessed the arrests on that island this month, later told Hawaiʻi Public Radio’s producer DW Gibson on The Conversation:

“I want to make sure all those people get due process. And I want to make sure that our rights and the liberties that this country was founded on are respected all the way through the process, and that those people are treated humanely and have dignity in the way that their case is presented, get the opportunity for a fair trial and whatever they’re entitled to. And at the same time, I want our law enforcement to ensure that we are taking criminals and potential gang associates out of our community.” 

It’s an important distinction. The U.S. Constitution requires that all suspects be entitled to a fair legal process so that criminals can be removed from the community and the innocent can be protected. Authoritarian regimes short-circuit that process; functioning democracies cannot afford to do so.  

PART I: HOW EMPLOYERS DRIVE WOMEN AWAY

The “problem employee” label has followed Claire from office to office, year after year.

She got that reputation when she threw away an old collection of adult videos from a public space at her agency. The material was clearly inappropriate for a professional workplace, but no one had ever objected before, she says. And her colleagues, all men, were angry about it.

Friendly rapport turned to icy silence. Claire says she had navigated the rough-and-tumble of the workplace with a quick laugh and an occasional well-placed verbal jab, but this situation was new.

“I became public enemy number one. This was the start of me speaking out, and then getting just absolutely crushed for it,” Claire says. She asked that her real name not be used for fear of further retaliation.

“My hairstylist said my hair had started falling out,” she recalls. “It’s like one of those things where you see stuff and maybe it’s not a big deal early on, but over time, whether it’s people not taking you seriously, or not listening to you, or getting dismissed, it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

Just as the stress of being ostracized began taking a toll, she was promoted into a new position and arrived at the job in the exurbs of Honolulu, hoping for a fresh start.

But news of what she’d done had traveled throughout the organization, and the response was mostly harsh: she wasn’t a team player, she wasn’t like them, she didn’t belong. And they’d keep making her feel it.

Claire eventually hit her breaking point and transferred into a completely new role with the agency.

“Quiet Firing”

Claire is now a mother navigating solo parenting. Recently, out of the blue, the agency’s leadership team informed her that she needed to take on extra shifts, including in the dead of night.

“They’re well aware of my situation. They know there’s no one at home to watch my child,” says Claire. “It’s unreasonable. It’s almost like quiet firing.”

She pushed back. “I said, you guys talk about family first, but what do you act like? What you’re asking of me is cruel.” While friends have volunteered to stay at her house when she’s called out at night, the arrangement is unsustainable, she says.

Claire sees a therapist and a naturopath to deal with the years of chronic stress, and she’s trying to get another position that doesn’t demand overnight work. She regularly contemplates leaving the agency, but giving up the generous retirement benefits feels like a bad financial move, particularly with years of parenting ahead.

“People have asked me if I’m going to stay, because it’s been so toxic for so long. But as a single mom, you’re not really free to leave because you’re walking away from your financial security.” She says she may leave anyway.

Unequal, and Often Unfair

Claire’s work life has become an endurance test of impossible demands and a profound lack of care and respect from her colleagues. As one of just a handful of women in a large department, her treatment feels targeted and linked to her gender.

“There’s no doubt we have systemic sex discrimination in Hawaiʻi,” says Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara, a senior partner at the Honolulu law firm Fujiwara and Rosenbaum. “It’s a matter of degree and how dangerous your job is as far as physical safety, and just emotional safety too. How much can you take before you quit, or before you get fired, because you can’t function anymore?”

Her description of gender-based discrimination matches what Claire has experienced: “Say you stay on the job and start suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re not sleeping. You’re suffering every time something reminds you of what happened. And then you go home to your family and function there when you’ve been treated like hell all day. It’s a nightmare.”

In her decades litigating civil rights and discrimination cases, Fujiwara has seen clients dealing with bias, lower pay, inadequate maternity leaves, sexual harassment, rigid work schedules and a lack of affordable childcare. Some of the issues are grounds for lawsuits, and others just everyday hassles and heartaches.

Employment conditions, in fact, are driving women out of the workplace. From January to June 2025, the national labor participation rate among women ages 25 to 44 with a child under 5 dropped from 69.7% to 66.9%, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released on Aug. 1 and reported in a Time magazine article.

Much of that drop was attributed to return-to-office policies and the loss of flexibility that the Covid era gave to many workers. The loss hit mothers particularly hard.

Men earn significantly more than women in Hawai‘i, at every level of education. The average lifetime earnings of a woman with a master’s degree still fall below a man with some college experience but no degree. Listed amounts are average lifetime earnings, in 2022 dollars. Source: UH Economic Research Organization, “The Gender Pay Gap in Hawai‘i” by Rachel Inafuku, March 12, 2024.

The Motherhood Penalty

In Hawaiʻi, data about working women, including mothers, is similarly concerning. From 2015 to 2022, the average male in Hawaiʻi out-earned the average female by 50%, according to American Community Survey data reported in a UH Economic Research Organization blog post in March 2024. Nationally, the gap is even larger, at 69%.

That same UHERO post showed that women in Hawaiʻi needed at least a master’s degree to match the lifetime earnings of a man with some college experience but no degree. The largest gap in pay happens at the highest levels, with women working as chief executives, financial managers and pharmacists earning significantly less than men.

And getting to those top roles remains difficult. While women make up 47% of the state’s workforce, only 63 women occupied the top-most executive position in Hawaii Business Magazine’s latest Top 250 list of the state’s largest organizations. That’s about 25% of all chief executives on the list. When looking at the list’s 100 largest companies – those reporting gross annual revenue of $81.6 million and up – just 9 women occupied the most senior position. That, of course, is just 9% of those elite chief executives.

According to the UHERO post, the wage gap between Hawaiʻi men and women starts in their mid-to-late 20s, at which point men’s income grows much more quickly than women’s and continues over the course of their careers. The divergence happens at the same time that women begin having children – 27 is the average age of a first birth in Hawaiʻi – and accumulates as a lifelong hit to their financial well-being, nicknamed the motherhood penalty.

In Hawaiʻi, the median annual earnings for working mothers with full-time jobs is about $56,000 a year. For fathers with full-time jobs, that number is $72,000, according to a May 2025 report from the national Institute for Women’s Policy Research. About 66% of mothers with children under 18 worked full time, year-round, in Hawaiʻi, as opposed to 82% of men, according to that same report.

The motherhood penalty can start as soon as a baby is born, given that only 32% of working people in Hawaiʻi said their employer offers paid family and medical leave, according to a 2024 survey commissioned by the Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network. In the 2025 legislative session, a bill to enact a statewide paid family-leave program died, as have similar bills repeatedly over the past decade.

HCAN’s survey also found that 63% of Hawaiʻi residents have taken time off to care for a newborn or sick family member, or because of a serious illness or injury. Of those, 30% took unpaid leave, or quit their jobs altogether.

Beyond pay and policies, sexual harassment remains a problem in Hawaiʻi workplaces. According to an article on Fujiwara and Rosenbaum’s website, more than 60 sexual harassment complaints are investigated each year by the state Civil Rights Commission and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but that number is considered just a small fraction of actual cases, most of which go unreported.

A Culture of Silence

Soon after she stepped down as director of the state Department of Human Services in 2016, Rachael Wong filed a sexual harassment complaint against then-Hawaiʻi House Speaker Joseph Souki. The Hawaiʻi State Ethics Commission, after hearing complaints from Wong and other women, called for his resignation.

While Wong went public about her experience, none of the others who filed complaints did. And they still haven’t.

“I thought my job was to keep the door open, to pave the way so that others could come forward. And nobody has,” Wong said in a recent interview. “It really, really surprised me. I’m fifth generation here, and I hadn’t realized the extent and depth of the culture of silence. Don’t stick your head out. No make waves.”

She co-founded the organization Safe Places & Workplaces to shine a light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and to advocate for safer, more respectful workplaces.

A survey about sexual harassment in Hawaiʻi that her organization conducted in 2019 found that 52.2% of women and 42.4% of men said they experienced sexual harassment at work. But only 18% told an HR representative, and just 9% filed an official complaint.

In addition to cultural norms about sticking out, attorney Fujiwara attributes some of the fear to Hawaiʻi’s anemic labor market. The high cost of living means nearly everyone needs to work, yet there’s not an abundance of jobs. Many women, worried about losing their jobs, will say nothing.

Even heavily protected state workers are afraid to speak up, she says. “You can’t get more protection than the state Constitution, and union and civil service protection, but they are still afraid. They need the job.”

Strong Laws, Troubling Realities

Fujiwara grew up in New Orleans, at a time when it resembled “an apartheid state” for Black people and women had few opportunities. She rebelled and left for Hawaiʻi, where she earned a master’s degree in social work from UH Mānoa and a law degree from the William S. Richardson School of Law.

In 1986, she founded her own practice focused on civil rights and employment law and has since helped push forward some of the nation’s strongest laws protecting women, and workers in general.

For example, jurors in Hawaiʻi are asked to use a “reasonable woman” standard, rather than a “reasonable person” or “reasonable man” standard, when evaluating sex discrimination, sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination cases. That shift in focus means that deciding whether or not touching is harassment depends on a woman’s perspective, she explains.

Legal language around equal pay was recently strengthened to better ensure Hawaiʻi women are fairly compensated, says Fujiwara, and a law preventing employers from asking about salary histories was passed to prevent lowballing women and other job-seekers.

In June, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled in favor of a city worker who had asked for a new boss because her current one was discriminating against her based on gender and disability. She claimed her employer then retaliated against her with a demotion. The court found her request for a new boss was a reasonable accommodation that should have been honored.

But what the law says and what a person experiences can be very different things. Fujiwara sees rampant problems, particularly in lower-paid service and hospitality roles.

Hawaiʻi’s tourism economy, for instance, “is based on the sexualization of women,” she says, with the expectation that “they’re supposed to be smiling all the time at the customers, even if they’re sexually harassing them.”

Employers routinely fail to protect employees from hotel guests, she says, despite a legal requirement to address this kind of “third-party harassment.” Additionally, Fujiwara says that in cases where the harasser is a male coworker, the unions often protect the men.

But most women never get anywhere near a courthouse. They’re often afraid to even speak with a supervisor or file an internal complaint for fear of retaliation, which can take frightening dimensions.

Fujiwara has seen women working in commercial kitchens who were threatened with knives. In an extreme example from decades ago, one of her clients, an apprentice in a union job, was almost thrown off a rooftop by male coworkers who didn’t want her working there.

Other clients couldn’t find another job. “They have literally had to move to the mainland because they feel like they’ve been blackballed,” she says.

More often, retaliation plays out in slights, taunts and the slow poisoning of a person’s work and life. “Even if she isn’t fired,” says Fujiwara, “her employer and her co-workers know how to make her life miserable.”

“Pure Punishment”

When Naomi looks back on the difficult year of 2022, she says she wishes she had never filed a sexual harassment complaint. The blowback in her small office at the state Department of Defense left her isolated for months, growing increasingly depressed, with only “menial tasks” assigned to her.

“I definitely got to the point where I just was so miserable every day. I hated everything about being alive and having to go into work,” says Naomi, who asked that her real name be withheld for privacy reasons.

“You can’t escape thinking about how you got there, with you being alone in an office all this time,” she says. “It truly felt like pure punishment.”

She started the job in 2021 and wasn’t concerned about working with the all-male team, who she expected “will always have my back,” she says. On her first day at work, her boss quickly disabused her of that idea by making references to the male anatomy and sex with his wife.

“That set the tone for how things were in the office,” Naomi explains.

One of her coworkers, meanwhile, needed constant attention, she says. He liked to troll people on Reddit and make her read his comments. He insisted she taste the food he brought for lunch. He once asked over and over if she would play ball games with him and, when she declined, he demanded that she clean up the office instead.

His lack of boundaries made her deeply uncomfortable. But this co-worker was best friends with the boss, who instructed the team to deal with his idiosyncrasies, help keep him organized and never make him mad.

Finally, the coworker asked Naomi if he could give her herpes, and annoying behavior turned into harassment. She told her boss that she needed him to do something to stop the behavior. Soon afterwards, her boss referred to her as a “bitch.”

Naomi filed an official discrimination complaint with the HR department, and her boss and coworker were moved into another building during the investigation.

Nearly all of her allegations were confirmed, including sexual harassment on the part of both men, as well as racist comments directed to a Black coworker, ethics violations for asking Naomi to do work for her boss’s daughter, and a breach of confidentiality during the investigation on the part of a female HR employee.

One of the “corrective actions” required, she says, was that the entire team had to retake sexual harassment training, herself included. “I used the system as they asked me to and now, as a result of that, I needed to prove that I have learned, once again, how to use the system that is not going to work for me.”

After mediation and training sessions, her boss and co-worker returned to the office, while Naomi landed another job with another agency. She says she’s happy to work with a professional team where no one calls her the “little gal who works on social media.”

But she would be very hesitant to file a complaint again. “If I were ever in that situation again, I would probably think really hard before saying something, because I am a woman who went through that situation and got no help.”

PART II: WHAT SUPPORTIVE EMPLOYERS DO DIFFERENTLY

When she was in her 20s, “I couldn’t imagine the life I have now, with the company I have now,” says Nicole Velasco, who works in business development in the Hawaiʻi office of NORESCO, a national energy company. She’s worked there for nearly a decade.

At the moment, she’s at home with a new baby, and with a toddler in tow. After the births of both her sons, she was given three months of paid time off from the company, and she’s currently negotiating to extend her leave beyond that.

But back then, before she switched to the corporate world, Velasco was a stressed-out city employee, trying to extract herself from a bad relationship and trapped in a workplace grind that seemed to never let up.

The pace ended abruptly in 2017 when she was fired from her job as executive director of the Honolulu Office of Economic Development. Looking back, she believes the official reasons were spurious, including being on her phone too much, despite handling the office’s social media. She thinks the unspoken reason was that she failed to conform.

“It came down to not fitting a particular expectation that had been established before I walked through the door. … They saw me as a young local girl, and it was a ‘She should just know to bring donuts and coffee’ thing,” Velasco says.

“Then I arrived, and I proved to be ‘difficult’ because I said I’m not going to be a ‘yes man,’ I will push for innovation and question things, and I want to know why I have to clean up your messes. … I really cared about my team as people, but I operated a little differently.”

The rupture from her job was “heartbreaking,” she says, but also a “blessing in disguise.”

“Had they not fired me, I probably would still be there because I believe in our people and in our community and that we want things to be better,” she says. “But it was actually killing me, and I don’t say that facetiously. I had been whittled away from a health perspective. I was developing cancer and just turning 30.”

Her medical treatments were successful, and she soon landed a job that supported her in ways she never expected. “This is a different environment – it took me by surprise,” she says of the Massachusetts-based company. “It’s people forward and team forward.”

In her first meeting with her boss, Velasco says he asked her what she wanted from the job. “I told him to be able to take care of family, to take care of my health, to live a life and not feel guilty about it. He looked at me like that’s pretty basic.”

She says her employer has assisted her at every critical juncture in her life since that talk. When she was being stalked and felt threatened, the company immediately changed the office locks. When her grandmother was dying, she was given time off to care for her. When her children were born, she got company-sponsored paid leave.

And when she returned to work, she could do it from home, and with no pressure to return to the office. “I’ve never once been made to feel guilty,” Velasco says.

The difference in workplace cultures continues to amaze her and makes her question why often-touted local values can be absent in the workplace.

“How did I get trained to believe my needs were too much?” she asked. “By the same culture that prioritizes ʻohana. Let’s reevaluate our collective contract with each other and ask ourselves if we’re satisfied with certain infrastructures and systems. And the answer is probably no.”

She still remembers a city employee who needed to leave early to pick up her son from elementary school. The father had forgotten the boy, and it was getting late. Shortly afterward, an HR director chastised Velasco for letting the employee go, thus squandering the “public asset” of required work time.

“We need to have a long, overdue conversation to think about how we got here. Why are we more concerned about recouping one-and-a-half hours of wages and not about a small child left on the roadside?”

Evolving Workplaces

For all the social changes of the past decades, workplaces can often seem stuck in the past. Schedules are fixed, with office hours often conflicting with school hours. Remote options from the pandemic have been clawed back by many employers. Family leave remains one of the stingiest in the world.

Some of the problems spring from lack of awareness, says Wong from Safe Places & Workplaces and the executive director of the professional development organization One Shared Future. Many leaders simply don’t know much about their employees’ lives.

“There’s one of your reliable team members, who’s making choices for their livelihood and not able to be there for their child or their aging parents,” she says. “And it’s never dawned on you that a policy could totally change productivity, culture, the bottom line, everything because you’re an old-school guy and have a really supportive family structure, and you don’t think about those things.”

Other impediments to changing workplace cultures reflect how society is structured.

“We’re still in a patriarchal culture of male leadership looking a certain way and then female leadership trying to look that way as well, versus what does female leadership uniquely look like?” says Kerrie Urosevich, the executive director of the Early Childhood Action Strategy and a founder of the ʻOhana Workplace Alliance.

The alliance looks at disparities between men’s and women’s experiences in the workplace, and ways to close the gaps. One trouble spot is women’s lower pay, which Urosevich attributes partly to men’s more assertive negotiating skills.

She shares a revealing example from her own experience on the hiring committee for a head of school. The committee’s male pick asked for $30,000 more, which they offered. When he ended up declining the position, the group selected a female candidate the following year and offered her the original salary. She accepted.

“We all started celebrating,” says Urosevich. “Then one of the women on the committee says, ‘Absolutely not. We need to offer her $30,000 over because she’s more qualified than the guy we interviewed last year.’ And I felt so ashamed. The funny part was that when we offered the candidate $30,000 more, she was really taken aback.”

Evaluating Companies

Urosevich and her team advocate for policies such as pay parity audits, remote work options, mental health programs and childcare subsidies, or even having companies develop their own childcare workforces and pay living wages.

The group is in the early stages of devising a grading system that evaluates an employer’s family-friendly policies, which they could use to attract new hires. What a family-friendly workplace looks like will vary from employer to employer, and even employee to employee.

Urosevich, the mother of three, now in their late teens and early 20s, says that many workplace policies are based on models from the 1950s and ’60s, and they’re hopelessly outdated. She particularly dislikes the idea that people in roles like hers need to be at specific workstations, at set times.

“The context is just so dramatically different now. With technology, we can be much more flexible and actually retain staff because of that,” she says. “You’re not making employees choose between their own health and their work, or their family and their work. They can take care of it all more holistically and meet deadlines and be an awesome employee.”

For Ben Treviño, the father of a young daughter and an alliance member, and the network coordinator of the Omidyar Fellows Program, work-from-home options are invaluable, but the physical workplace can be equally so.

“It’s an important space,” he says. “In the same way that we invest in our homes as a place we want to live in, how do we make workplaces a place we want to be, to be a shelter when home can’t be that?”

Another scoring system is now being developed by Llasmin Chaine, executive director of the Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women, and Aleeka Kay Morgan, executive director of the Nurturing Wāhine Fund.

Their planned gender-equity scorecard will measure organizations in areas such as compensation, hiring practices, women in leadership roles and flexible work arrangements. The scorecard is being developed based on models used elsewhere.

The goal is to recognize organizations doing good work, spotlight best practices and provide support so everyone can improve, says Chaine. “If we’re not giving folks the tools to implement policy and shift things in a positive direction, then we’re missing half of what’s needed. Ultimately, we want everyone to thrive.”

Examples of Sexual Harassment

• Using sexist slurs such as “bitch” and “slut”

• Talking about body parts inappropriately

• Making sexually explicit comments

• Demanding a date in exchange for a job or promotion

• Repeatedly texting or calling in a harassing way

• Sharing sexual content without permission

• Following someone in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable

• Purposely touching in an unwelcome way

• Offering inappropriate gifts

• Forcing a sexual act without permission

DESIGNING BETTER WORKPLACES: FOUR APPROACHES

Med-Quest: Rare Telework Options in the Public Sector

Hawaiʻi Medicaid Director Judy Mohr Peterson takes a refreshingly simple and direct approach to the job of leading about 250 employees and serving more than 400,000 Hawaiʻi residents in the Med-Quest program.

“We focus on getting the work done, and we try to be as flexible as possible while recognizing that people are trying to be good parents and raising a family and living their lives,” she says.

Some employees need flexibility to deal with family obligations. Some can do their work mostly or completely at home. Others need or want to work in the office.

To meet those divergent needs, Peterson has kept the telework model from the pandemic days, despite pressure from legislators and other state officials who want to see “butts in the chairs,” she says.

Currently, about half the team works remotely at least part of the week – more than any other division in the state, she says. And their productivity has risen because of the arrangement, she says, and continues to: “People have actually gotten more productive over time.”

“Telework really aligns with our mission and vision,” says Peterson. “We’re about promoting health and wellness, and having healthy families and healthy communities. You can’t have that if you’re not treating people with respect.”

As the mother of two adult daughters, Peterson is empathetic to her team’s struggles, especially the female managers with young kids who feel guilty about falling short in their jobs and at home. She reminds them that “this idea that women can do everything is false.”

She also tells them that fathers are rarely in similar positions, “because whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not, women bear the brunt of the caregiving … and nothing else gets moved off their schedules,” she says.

Flexibility about where and when the work gets done helps employees stay in their jobs. “Our division has a reputation for, one, being mission driven, but also we’ve been able to retain people.”

Since she arrived in Honolulu from the Oregon Medicaid office a decade ago, Peterson has introduced innovations such as medically tailored meals for diabetic patients and programs that link health care and housing.

She’s now preparing for the challenges ahead, as new Medicaid work requirements threaten to strip away people’s health insurance. Her division is looking at how to get clients into jobs, job training and volunteer opportunities so they can keep their coverage.

“Our team believes in what they’re doing. They know that they’re making a difference for hundreds of thousands of people,” says Peterson. “We try to create an environment that is supportive of the team, that values them, no matter where they are in the organization.”

Hawai‘i Foodbank: When Focusing on Pay Really Matters

The Hawaiʻi Foodbank distributed more than 21 million pounds of food and served 154,000 people a month in fiscal year 2024 – the same number of people as at the height of the pandemic and twice as many as in 2019.

The enormity of the task keeps the organization’s president and CEO, Amy Miller, focused on practical matters. For her team of 70, that means meeting their immediate need for better pay.

When she arrived in 2021, many weren’t earning a living wage, she says. Employee surveys showed overall favorability scores were 59%, compared to an average score of 71% among food banks nationwide.

“It was pretty awful,” Miller says. “There were people who work here that needed food assistance. It wasn’t right for us to be contributing to the problem. People shouldn’t have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.”

She immediately lifted the lowest pay from $14 to $17, and now $19, which she says is still too low given escalating living costs. The rest of the team got a wage bump as well.

Next, she conducted a compensation survey to benchmark the nonprofit against similar ones across the country, and to map specific roles against similar roles in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. Data came from local organizations and the national Feeding America network.

While she didn’t find discrepancies based on gender or ethnicity, she says she did find that some positions needed “equity adjustments,” which they got. The organization also launched a $50 monthly “wellness stipend” and distributes fresh produce to the team each month.

Favorability metrics rose to 73% in 2024 – a 14% jump from 2021. Retention rates have also risen, from 67% in fiscal year 2023 to 77% in fiscal year 2024, and to 85% now.

At the moment, there’s a “baby boom” at the food bank, she says, with several women and one man at home on leave. The organization works with them to take paid time off, and to ease back to the job with part-time hours or work-from-home days.

“You can’t be a stickler who says, ‘You have to be back in the office five days a week on day 91 after you gave birth,’ and then that person ends up leaving,” Miller explains. “You’re hurting yourself if you’re creating a situation where good people leave.”

Because of the nature of their work, many warehouse workers and drivers have set hours. But she encourages flexibility for those who can take it and creates paths for people who want more flexible jobs, in part by removing “weeding mechanisms.”

“Every single one of our positions will ask for a bachelor’s or equivalent experience,” she says. “We have directors who don’t have college degrees and they’re fabulous in their roles.”

MacNaughton: Diverse Viewpoints Lead to Better Decisions

At this small real-estate development company, decisions are made after open discussions and listening to everyone’s ideas. “Sometimes it takes a little more time, but the positive results are quite enduring,” says COO Emily Porter.

“Sometimes I’ll say something in a meeting that’s a bit off the wall, out of the box, and probably not the right answer,” she says. “I do it because I want to make sure the room is large enough that people feel like they can share their opinion fully.”

In her varied career that included working as a litigator and in operations for a Bay Area tech company, Porter says she’s “experienced feelings of not belonging as a woman.” She’s sensitive about letting others know their voices count, and says the payoff is better, more innovative ideas.

As an example, MacNaughton bought and manages several boutique hotels in Waikīkī. The question of whether to keep or disband the valet and bell service at one of the hotels elicited a lot of emotions and conflicting opinions.

“Financially, it didn’t make sense anymore, but that team was a big part of the operation and interfaced well with other members of the front desk,” she says. After much back and forth, they cancelled the service, but employees were offered jobs at other hotels, and in some cases at other companies that MacNaughton works with.

By talking and learning about the feelings involved, “we made a good business decision in a very human-centric way that cared about the people,” she says.

Another example is working on hotel bathroom renovations. In those cases, Porter says the leadership team taps the perspectives of men and women, young and old, who have different ideas about the need for privacy or how comfortable they are sharing hot tubs and saunas. The feedback helps clarify when to provide separate or unisex facilities.

Because the tone from the top matters, the company has added two more women to the leadership team and two as general managers of hotels. It regularly reviews compensation to make sure it’s equitable, promotes people based on merit and offers flexibility in where employees work.

For Porter personally, she appreciates being able to serve on boards and work on community projects, such as a K-12 healthy relationships curriculum that she’s now developing. “I love that MacNaughton supports me to volunteer with community organizations, even during work hours,” she says.

American Savings Bank: Improvements Started with Hard Conversations

When Beth Whitehead joined American Savings Bank in 2008, she found a “great, solid, profitable company” with abysmal employee engagement scores, below 50%. As the “self-appointed guardian of the culture,” she took it as a personal challenge.

Today, engagement scores have shot up to the high 80% to 90% levels. She attributes the transformation to “the democratization of the employee experience” as the company sought answers from the entire staff about what a great company would look like to them, and where ASB fell short.

The responses led to dramatic changes, she says. The bank immediately revamped its family-leave policies to offer three months of paid leave, with the option to work part-time with full-time wages in the first month back on the job.

It runs annual, mandatory training on respect in the workplace, with lots of role-playing. “We’re trying to make sure that we are empathetic toward each other. … If we want to be collaborative and work together, we have to understand and respect each other,” says Whitehead.

She says the bank’s leaders undergo extensive cohort-based training in how to seek out feedback and accept the responses, which can be uncomfortable. In the end, she says, “I think we all have work to do on getting outside our definition of ourselves and our perceptions of greatness, as in our company is great, so how can you say something bad about us?”

And they act on feedback to fix problems. In one instructive example, Whitehead says surveys identified serious discontent with the way the operations staff communicated with the tellers and other frontline staff. She spearheaded efforts to improve the internal website and email communications, only to receive another low score on employee surveys.

“We spent a year fixing the wrong problem because we didn’t dig in deeply enough and listen enough,” she says.

The core problem was people wanted conversations, not memos. “Once we started bringing them together to talk about issues that needed to be solved, the communication score went up by 20 points.”

Four of the nine bank executives are women, including Whitehead, who is an executive VP and chief administrative officer. The bank develops talent and mostly promotes from within, including CEO Ann Teranishi and Executive VP Dani Aiu, who started as a teller 30 years ago.

“We do a really great job of nurturing talent and making opportunities available,” Whitehead says. “The culture here is one of being inclusive and welcoming and trying to make sure everyone feels valued.”

UNDERSTANDING HAWAI‘I’S EMPLOYMENT LAWS

Protection from Discrimination

It is against the law for employers to refuse to hire, bar or discharge, or discriminate against any individual because of race, sex including gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion, color, ancestry, disability, marital status, arrest and court record, reproductive health decision, and domestic or sexual violence victim status. The law applies to employers with at least one employee. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2

Sexual Harassment

State law prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace, which is defined as unwanted sexual advances and other forms of verbal, physical and visual harassment that affects a person’s ability to get or keep a job, or that creates a hostile workplace. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-1 and Hawaiʻi Administrative Rule 12-46-109

Nondisclosure Agreements

Employers are not allowed to use NDAs to prevent employees from discussing sexual harassment occurring at the workplace, or to retaliate against them for talking about it. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.2

Equal Pay

Employers are prohibited from paying lower wages to employees in protected categories, compared to what others are paid, if they are doing similar work, requiring equal skill, effort and responsibility. In addition, employers cannot stop their employees from discussing their wages. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.3

Salary History

When inquiries are made about hiring and when negotiating employment contracts, employers are not allowed to ask about an applicant’s salary history, or to rely on that information to determine wages, benefits or other compensation. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.4

Pay Transparency

Employers with 50 or more employees are required to disclose an hourly rate or salary range in job postings. Exceptions include internal transfers or promotions and public-sector positions where pay is determined through collective bargaining. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.8

Victims of Domestic or Sexual Violence

Employers are required to allow employees who are victims of domestic or sexual violence, or parents of children who are victims, to take unpaid leave to seek medical attention or counseling, relocate residences and related activities. Employers must also make reasonable accommodations, such as changing locks, modifying work schedules or screening calls. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-81 and 378-72

Pregnancy Discrimination

Hawaiʻi administrative rules prohibit employers from excluding a job applicant or firing an employee because of pregnancy. In addition, they cannot terminate an employee for taking “disability” leave due to pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. The leave must be for a reasonable period of time, as determined by the employee’s physician. Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules 12-46-107 and 12-46-108

Family Leave

The Hawaiʻi Family Leave Law says employees “may be eligible” for 4 weeks of unpaid family leave for the birth or adoption of a child. The law applies to employers with 100 or more employees, and employees must have worked at least 6 consecutive months.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for parents. The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees, and employees must have worked 1,250 hours with the employer during the 12 months before they start leave.

Breastfeeding on the Job

Employers must provide reasonable break times for employees to express milk for one year after the child’s birth. In addition, they need to provide a location, other than a restroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-92

Note: The summaries above describe some of the Hawaiʻi employment laws that are most relevant to women and caretakers. For the full wording of laws in the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes, go to bit.ly/3UJSTh4.
Be advised: These summaries should not be substituted for the advice of an attorney or HR expert.

The good news: 83% of those surveyed say their lives overall are either “Great” or “Good.” The bad news: 24% say they are worse off financially than before the pandemic.

Each of the 410 respondents in the 808 Poll of the general public in Hawaiʻi was asked to rate aspects of their personal lives and their communities. In addition to the percentage results, an average score was also calculated. The higher the average score, the more positive the overall perception; 4.0 would be a perfect score and 1.0 is the lowest score possible.

The 808 Poll asked the same questions in October 2024; for the most part, the variations in scores between that poll and this one were small and within the margin of error for a survey of this size. The one exception was the perception of local government overall, which fell from an average score of 2.77 last October to 2.38 this April.

Your Finances: Pre-Pandemic vs. Now

Each respondent in the 808 Poll of the general public was asked: The pandemic hit in early 2020. Compared with just before the pandemic, how much has your financial situation recovered?

Few things are as inextricably tied to Hawaiʻi’s culture as a fragrant and colorful lei. They’re stacked high on the shoulders of graduates, slipped over the necks of wide-eyed visitors, or draped on community leaders at official events.  

Lei making has a rich and vibrant history across the Islands. Yet over recent decades, the bulk of the lei-making industry has moved offshore, to foreign lands where growers and lei-makers string flowers into strands and sell them back cheaply to us here in Hawai’i. 

Now, the Lei Poinaʻole Project hopes to turn that around. The project created by the nonprofit BEHawaiʻi aims to revitalize and strengthen the local lei industry through community engagement and advocacy. The main mission of the group is to uplift local flower growers and lei makers to preserve the traditions of lei in Hawaiʻi. 

Launched three years ago, the program has engaged propagators on each of the main islands in hopes of building pilot projects into a statewide network of flower growers, lei-makers and vendors that can flourish as it did in the past.  

“You think about Hawaiʻi, you think about a lei,” says Brook Lee, secretary of BEHawaiʻi, who helped focus the nonprofit’s attention on the needs of struggling lei flower growers and lei makers.  

So far, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has connected with 26 existing growers, 22 new growers and 7 propagators. The goal is not just to support the big farmers, but small and medium-sized growers so that a cottage industry can thrive once again.

Sylvia Hussey

“The objective of the project at the end is to have the Lei Poinaʻole Coalition,” adds BEHawai‘i Executive Director Sylvia Hussey. “The lei project is a mechanism in which to form the coalition” that will carry on even after initial startup efforts cease. 

Lee remembers the idea for the Project stemmed from a conversation she had with a lei store owner who told her in 2020 that the lei industry was in decline and needed help. That conversation stuck with her, and when BEHawaiʻi began considering projects to fund, the memory resurfaced. The idea to support a statewide lei network blossomed. 

Lee explains: “There are a lot of people in the community who just didn’t have a touchpoint or a place, or the space, to be able to think about the idea of stewarding this thing, because it’s farm to table, which is important, but that has been the whole sort of agricultural space here in Hawaiʻi for a very long time. And it’s necessary, but we’re just trying to follow in their footsteps and expand the conversation around.” 

In 2022, the group was awarded a three-year grant from the Federal Administration for Native Americans. The grant supported eight existing and 16 new farmers across the state. While the group knew the grant couldn’t solve the problem in just a few years, it helped them start the conversations needed to build the coalition.  

Lee says they aim to help growers who have been quietly maintaining but are at a breaking point and need support. Besides foreign competitors, farmers are facing agricultural diseases and beetle infestations that are devastating long-established farms. When they contacted the USDA for help, she says, some farmers said their concerns were dismissed and they were told to simply burn the trees. 

“We’re hoping to be able to set people up, because we can’t fund it forever, but we wanted to just sort of try to piece it into a way that they can know that they’re certain CTHAR will help,” Lee says, referring to the UH Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. 

CTHAR has been holding workshops to teach people how to plant certain flowers. Experts take the participants on a walking tour of their properties to assess what their problems may be or what they should focus on.  

After the assessments, some farms are encouraged to propagate flowers in locations that have suitable growing conditions.  

Meanwhile, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has been expanding connections between lei-making families and farmers. They’ve had to overcome obstacles, too, including some growers who were hesitant about sharing details about their sites and growing practices.   

“One of the first things we explain about the project is that the project takes none of the production. We just want to help them, if it’s more plants, if it is knowledge, pest control,” Hussey says. Their focus, she says, is: “How can we help them keep all of their production and how they want to distribute that, whether it’s commercially or [through] family.” 

The Project representatives also ask growers how the group can support them through policy changes or by assisting with general practices. Everyone in Hawaiʻi farms differently, Lee says, and each person will favor certain flowers that are culturally based and close to peoples’ ohana or have a special connection to wherever they’re living. 

“A lot of times they don’t like it when people come in and try to tell them how to do something that they are doing for a very long time, there’s some cultural sensitivity around it, right?” Lee says. “Because, of course, they should know how to do it. They’ve been doing it for generations. Yeah, that’s their kuleana. And no one’s here to tell you that your kuleana is wrong or bad. You’ve been doing it. You’ve got the proof. The boots are on the ground.” 

While respecting current practices, Hussey says the farmers in the program also share their knowledge with the next generation and in the process gain a scientific grounding in how best to grow their flowers.

Insight from a New Grower  

The propagation site on Hawaiʻi Island may be furthest along among the pilot projects. It is coordinated by David Fuertes, executive director of the nonprofit Kahua Paʻa Mua. On a five-acre property in the North Kohala community of Kapaʻau, Fuertes has cuttings of a diverse range of flowering plants that, once they sprout roots, are distributed to five families to plant on their own land. 

Flower varieties in the mix include crown flower, pikake, puakenikeni, ʻākulikuli, ʻōlena as well as more common plumeria and orchids. 

Under a makeshift greenhouse, a watering system emits a spray of water for 20 seconds every hour, keeping the plants moist. The team meets regularly to discuss best practices for dipping the cutting stems into homemade root hormone mixtures that enhance root growth. They take measurements and share data so they can replicate the results that are most favorable. 

The first batch of cuttings have been transplanted, and flowers should be ready within a matter of months. 

“The families will supply local lei makers, and they can make their own lei as well,” said Fuertes. “It’s a community-based economic development program. After the initial group of growers are established, we can expand to the next generation of families.” 

Fuertes has a special connection to lei making. His late sister, Nancy Fuertes Ueno, was an award-winning lei maker on Kauaʻi. 

On the one-year anniversary of her death in September last year, Fuertes inaugurated the Aunty Nancy Lei Aloha Garden on his land in her memory in hopes of preserving the art of lei-making. 

At the launch ceremony, Fuertes told a gathering of about 100 people that while the vast majority of lei makers’ flowers come to Hawaiʻi from foreign countries, he hopes this program will help rekindle an interest in lei-making in the Islands. 

“Here in Kohala, we want to make the change. If we can get everybody to grow flowers and get farmers switching or intercropping with flower lei, we can bring the price down for lei,” he said.  

In his blessing to dedicate the site, Kahu Kealoha Sugiyama explained the social and spiritual role of lei. 

“When you pick a flower, it’s a memory between you and the receiver,” Sugiyama explained. “It starts out with one memory, one flower, and you keep adding and adding until the lei is completed. And what was just a single memory, now it becomes a story, a story between you and the lei maker. That story is precious.” 

When Hussey enlisted Fuertes to join the state-wide effort, she already knew his background — he had been her former high school teacher. 

“I was born and raised in Kohala. I’m a Kohala high school graduate, and so when we were looking for a propagation site in Kohala, there was no question who it needed to be. It would be my former ag teacher from high school who has a farm,” Hussey says. “And that’s an example of leveraging relationships to be able to find in the community those propagator sites.” 

Fuertes remembers Hussey developed an early interest in agriculture when she was one of his students.  

He said he recalls Hussey started a paʻu unit in Kohala, the ceremonial equestrian groups that ride in parades, with both the horses and female riders adorned with elaborate lei displays. 

“That was one of her first involvements with lei back in high school,” Fuertes says. 

History of Lei in Hawaiʻi 

Lei making traces back to the early Polynesian settlers in Hawaiʻi, and besides the decorative appeal, lei also served as a tribute to the gods and in some cases signified social rank in society.  

Early lei included nuts, shells and bones as well as a variety of plants and flowers. The maile lei, an open string lei woven with fragrant leaves from vines that grow in cool mountain forests, is considered among the most cherished types of lei. 

Demand for maile lei has soared in conjunction with official events and celebrations. And with the arrival of tourists, and the preference for fragrant plumeria and other brightly colored flowers, lei making became a cottage industry across the islands. 

“So what we have heard from conversations from lei sellers is that the supply is getting harder and harder to get and everybody knows, just by experience, maile as an example right there, very rarely can you get a maile of Big Island, maile of Kauaʻi, fresh maile. It’s being replaced by ti leaf,” Hussey says. 

Different lei carry different meanings with the color, flower and occasion. The maile lei was once revered by aliʻi and is given as a sign of love, respect or a blessing. 

“One of the differentiators is that it is not the demand side of lei,” she says. “There will always be a demand. It’s on the growing side and the mitigating [efforts] helping more growers there, and anybody, not just commercial growers, but family growers, school growers, backyard growers, more lei flower growers.” 

Matching Price with Value 

Another goal of the project is to change consumers’ understanding of how much labor goes into lei. More than just its price, lei hold the spirit of the farmers and those who sewed it together.   

“We know that monetizing or valuing lei is not just in a price point,” Hussey says. “We all know family members at a wedding, even graduation or Mother’s Day, that someone has given you a lei, that they have grown, they have sewn themselves, is worth so much more than when you purchase.   

“And that also influences the price point. People complain, ʻOh, the pikake is $15 a strand. My gosh, if you knew how much effort it was to grow that pikake and how valuable, you wouldn’t complain. You would value and mahalo the lei seller and the lei grower for that value.”  

The Lei Poinaʻole Project is seeking help to quantify the financial importance of lei in Hawaiʻi, starting with a baseline estimate of current local production. 

Every island has its own relationship to lei making and sewing. Oʻahu has lei stands at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and many lei shops on Maunakea Street in Chinatown.  

One shop in Chinatown is the family-owned Lin’s Lei Shop.  

Manager Tony Ngyuen says that it is difficult to measure how much work goes into a lei since everything is handmade. Some flowers have a special way to be plucked and processed, and can be sewn in different ways. The cost of the lei reflects the input of farmers as well.   

The most popular lei are usually the white fragrant flowers like pikake, puakenikeni, ginger and tuberose. Ngyuen explains that when picked, tuberose has a brownish tint on the outside, so it is cleaned to be white and peeled to be used in lei.  

Lin’s Lei Shop purchases pre-made orchid flower lei from Thailand since the labor is cheaper and they sell for less.  

“They create a product that is long-lasting and economical,” Ngyuen says. “It makes sense, and it provides a strong supply for the demand here.” 

One pre-made orchid lei in the shop’s lineup, already made in Thailand, is the famed Christina style lei. The Christina lei was designed in 1990 by Beth Lopez and created to honor the memory of her daughter Christina who died from lupus when she was 22. The design uses a needle and thread to sew together over 500 orchid centers. 

“Imagine the amount of work involved to make this,” says Ngyuen. “They just take a single petal from a single flower, and they create this,” he said.  

Some orchid lei have a negative reputation for being cheap or imported, but Hawaiʻi Island used to have its own honohono orchid that was specially farmed.  

 “We don’t want people to get a bad rep that lei orchids are bad, like orchids are part of our history and our culture as Hawaiian people,” Lee of BEHawaiʻi says. “But these are a different type of orchid that are mass produced in Thailand brought in by the pounds of loads.”  

Other than the orchid lei, Ngyuen says that all of the other lei he sells are handmade in Hawaiʻi, and in the back of their Maunakea Street store, family members can be seen making lei. They get their flowers from multiple farms and hobbyists across Hawaiʻi. 

While most lei are made in-store, sometimes they purchase pre–made lei from people who have trees in their backyards. Ngyuen pointed out a traditional lei made from hala, the fruit of the pandanus tree, that was made by a recreational lei maker. He said that it’s an older style of lei that isn’t usually sold anymore. 

Many lei shops, including Lin’s Lei Shop, sell flowers and lei to the mainland for graduations and other celebrations.  

“It seems like the lei culture is spreading,” he says. “So now, especially on the West Coast, it’s very common for people to receive lei for graduation. The whole West Coast, right from Washington to California, they all use lei, I think it’s good. Do I have a problem with them selling at Costco? No, not really.” 

“Support local if you can,” he says. “But other than that, enjoy a lei, enjoy the craftsmanship, enjoy the artistry. And yeah, support the industry.” 

A year of corporate profits in Hawai‘i was overshadowed by a massive loss at Hawaiian Electric Industries, parent of the utility at the center of litigation over the deadly Lahaina wildfire that killed 102 people in August 2023.

Once among the state’s most profitable companies, Hawaiian Electric reported a more than $1.42 billion loss in 2024 – driven largely by a $4.04 billion wildfire settlement with thousands of Maui residents and businesses.

Plaintiffs alleged the utility failed to shut off power lines despite high-wind warnings that preceded the fire. The company, which supplies electricity to about 95% of Hawai‘i’s population, agreed to pay nearly half the settlement amount.

The state, Maui County and other defendants, including Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Co., Hawaiian Telcom and Spectrum/Charter Communications, also agreed to contribute to the settlement.

Hawaiian Electric’s 2024 loss was greater than the combined total annual profits tallied by 53 companies and organizations in the state during the same period, according to the annual ranking by Hawaii Business Magazine of the most profitable companies in the Islands. The list includes all the local companies whose data is publicly available or was submitted to us.

Hawaiian Electric president and CEO Scott Seu said in the company’s annual report that the Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling earlier this year to allow settlement funds to be released helped “to move the settlement forward and provide more clarity for our company’s path toward reestablishing financial stability.”

The amount of Hawaiian Electric’s loss was also seven times the size of the company’s prior year profit of nearly $200 million.

To help pay for its portion of the settlement, Hawaiian Electric sold 90% of its stake in American Savings Bank to independent investors for $405 million in cash.

“Importantly, the proceeds from this transaction support our efforts to rebuild our financial strength while creating flexibility for how we finance Maui wildfire-related obligations and key utility initiatives, such as wildfire risk reduction,” Seu told shareholders.

“We are deeply committed to advancing our wildfire mitigation efforts, and since launching an expanded wildfire safety strategy in the wake of the Maui wildfires, Hawaiian Electric has rapidly advanced efforts to reduce the risk of wildfires ignited by its equipment.”

We asked that question and others about inflation, the Trump administration, insurance and more in surveys of local business leaders and members of the general public.

Among the general public, groups that are most worried are males, people age 18 to 34, those 65 and older, Native Hawaiians and the least affluent respondents.

Impact of Federal Decisions on Your Life

In both surveys, respondents were asked:

HAVE YOU OR YOUR FAMILY’S FINANCIAL OR EMPLOYMENT SITUATIONS BEEN AFFECTED BY ACTIONS TAKEN BY PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S NEW ADMINISTRATION, INCLUDING THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY, OR DOGE?

How Are You Dealing with Inflation and Higher Interest Rates?

In the BOSS Survey, business owners and executives were asked:

IF THEY TOOK ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ACTIONS TO PERSONALLY COPE WITH INFLATION AND HIGH INTEREST RATES.

Respondents could say yes to as many situations as applied to them personally.

Higher Cost of Home and Hurricane Insurance

Respondents in both surveys were asked about the:

PERSONAL IMPACT THAT THE HIGHER COST OF HOME AND HURRICANE INSURANCE HAS HAD ON THEM AND THEIR FAMILIES.

Each of the 341 participants in the BOSS Survey were asked:
The pandemic began in March 2020. Compared with late 2019, how much has your business revenue and profit recovered?

Of course, businesses that failed since 2019 are no longer around to answer the BOSS Survey.

Companies that said they had hired people in the last year were asked
which best describes their hiring process:

Each respondent was asked:
How often, if at all, do you choose local suppliers, even if the cost is 10% or more higher than other suppliers?

Survey methodology

Hawai‘i Business Magazine contracts with Anthology Research to conduct the BOSS Survey and 808 Poll twice a year.

In the BOSS Survey of local business owners and senior executives – conducted by phone and online – the sample of companies surveyed is stratified based on number of employees. Businesses with one to nine employees are designated as “very small” and those with 10 to 49 employees are designated as “small.” Medium-sized firms are those with 50 to 99 employees; companies with 100 or more employees are classified as “large.”

A total of 341 random interviews were conducted from April 15 to June 30 on the four biggest islands. The data is weighted to reflect the proper proportions of each company size based on its number of employees as reported by the Hawai‘i Department of Labor.

A sample of this size has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.31 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

A secondary goal was to interview businesses that derive relatively significant proportions of their revenue from the construction industry. A total of 72 were surveyed in this segment.

In the 808 Poll of the general public, 410 online surveys were conducted from April 11 to 30. Respondents were screened to ensure they were at least 18 years old and full-time residents of Hawai‘i.

The margin of error for a sample of this size is plus or minus 4.84 percentage points with a 95% confidence level. The data is weighted to reflect population estimates of adults in Hawai‘i based on ethnicity.

Want your voice in the next BOSS Survey?

If you are the owner or a senior executive at a business operating in Hawai‘i and want to provide your responses for the next BOSS Survey, email stevep@hawaiibusiness.com.

This article was updated on September 2, 2025.

Hawai‘i isn’t often at the forefront of national policymaking, but its 2018 ban on a widely used but controversial pesticide set the stage for other states, the federal government and even the European Union to follow suit.  

With much fanfare, then-Gov. David Ige signed the bill into law in June of that year after a heated public debate in Kaua‘i. Residents there had raised alarms about seed companies spraying the pesticide chlorpyrifos on fields near schools. 

Now, a soft-spoken Kaua‘i pediatrician who helped focus state lawmakers’ attention on the health risks of chlorpyrifos back then is again sounding the alarm. 

This time, the showdown is over a seemingly innocuous 71-word section of the appropriations bill that the U.S. House of Representatives will take up this month following their summer break.  

“It’s a sleeper poison-pill,” says Dr. Lee Evslin, describing the provision that opponents argue could prevent Hawai‘i and other states from again setting their own pesticides restrictions.  

“Hawai‘i’s children and families live closer to pesticide spray zones than most Americans,” Evslin wrote in an appeal to the state’s congressional delegation. He urged them to scrutinize the measure, warning that it “would lock in outdated federal determinations, preventing timely updates that could save lives and protect vulnerable populations.” 

Opponents of the provision say it would also shield chemical companies from lawsuits by people harmed by pesticide use and would limit research that might document hazards posed by chemicals already on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s approved list, such as glyphosate, the prime ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides. 

“It’s so much under the radar,” Evslin says of the section of the bill, which has been overshadowed in Washington by higher-profile debates involving tariffs, tax cuts, immigration enforcement and Jeffrey Epstein files.  

“Tilting at Windmills” 

With lawmakers returning to Washington, one of the first orders of business will be to debate and vote on the appropriations bill. From his island outpost in one of the western-most reaches of the country, Evslin is hoping his single voice can add to a roar that is heard in Washington. 

He has sent letters to Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation, written articles and talked with those in his profession, hoping to convince anyone who will listen. 

“It’s huge, how [the health risks] can be so well documented, and there’s so little publicity out there,” he says.  

U.S. Representative Jill Tokuda, who represents the Neighbor Islands and much of rural and suburban O‘ahu, strongly opposed the measure. “This provision is a blatant giveaway to powerful pesticide manufacturers, shielding them from accountability while leaving families, farmers, and workers to bear the harmful consequences of toxic exposure,” says Tokuda, a Democrat, ahead of the vote. 

But the math is against Democrats in the House, where Republicans outnumber them.  

Evslin, who seems more at ease combing through academic journals or giving measured medical advice to a patient, muses at how he keeps getting pulled into the political arena despite his natural tendency to shy away from the limelight. 

“To some degree I feel like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills,” Evslin says with a chuckle. “There’s a part of me that’s unbelievably passionate about it, and there’s a part of me that looks at myself from a distance.  

“It’s a battle that I think is vital, and I understand that it’s daunting, and I tell myself, just do your best, take one step forward at a time.” 

Evslin’s work to raise public awareness caps a career that included roles as CEO of Kaua‘i Medical Clinic and later Wilcox Hospital, Senior VP at Hawai‘i Pacific Health as well as private practices as a general pediatrician and sports medicine/wellness clinic physician.  

He has drafted testimony for the American Academy of Pediatrics, has written columns for local newspapers and was a keynote speaker at the 2022 U.N. General Assembly Science Summit. 

Evslin says he tried to pull away from medicine during a stint as a small-scale farmer on the Garden Isle after he retired, but science kept pulling him back. He says he was drawn to an increasing number of studies that showed medical hazards from chronic exposure to chemicals that are used in Hawai‘i at much-higher levels than on the mainland. 

That’s when he bumped into less familiar territory of politics, where even the immutable laws of science are often treated merely as cards that can be traded in fungible transactions for personal, professional or partisan gain. 

“At times I say to myself, ‘Am I nuts? I’m happily retired and have nine grandchildren. Why am I even doing this?’ But it feels so right to me, and I’ve become moderately knowledgeable. I feel that I should speak out.” 

Evslin says he was at first a reluctant traveler in the campaign to ban or restrict certain uses of pesticides. He didn’t focus on pesticides – a catch-all category that also includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides – until reading two papers in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reported on the health threats of chronic low-level exposure to pesticides. 

“I’ve always been interested in why some people are healthy and some are not,” Evslin explains. “That’s been a thread of my career and looking at what you can do about it.” 

“So, when these papers came out, that was a game-changer to a certain degree to pediatric thinking.” Up to that point, he says, pediatricians were taught to treat acute poisoning – accidental spray exposure or consuming a pesticide.  

“If someone called me and said they took something, the first thing I would do is call the poison control center because they had the data at their fingertips” and could most quickly treat the immediate symptoms. 

He adds: “The idea of chronic, low-level exposure to pesticides being dangerous just hadn’t been something I or most pediatricians thought about.” 

That was about to change. 

Three Growing Seasons a Year 

Hawai‘i has played a critical role in the development of crop seeds that are sold by major companies around the world and become, literally, the source of much of the food consumed on the planet. That’s because those multinational seed companies – through complicated genetic engineering and hybrid techniques – need to test their creations before receiving regulatory approval. Currently, that means they need to show the seeds have performed through three growing seasons.  

Because of its geographic location and benevolent climate, Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States that offers seed growers such favorable conditions. Companies such as Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF Plant Science were drawn to the ideal farmland on Kaua‘i to develop new seed strains, while Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, concentrates its farming operations on other islands. 

In 2012, the companies operating in Kaua‘i “were reportedly spraying or applying 18 tons of restricted use pesticides in a relatively small footprint,” says Evslin. “It became a huge issue with activists on Kaua‘i.” 

Evslin says the seed companies explained they had to use large amounts of pesticide because insects in the tropics were worse than on the mainland.  

“So, if you compare our usage of chlorpyrifos, which is a very toxic insecticide, with the usage on the mainland, we ended up using about three times” mainland amounts, he says. 

Shortly after Evslin had shifted his focus to chronic, low-level pesticide exposure, members of the Kaua‘i County Council introduced legislation to limit the use of chemicals in the fertile fields of the island’s west side. 

“I wrote testimony for the hearing,” Evslin says. “At that point in my career, I was in my practice on Kaua‘i, which had a lot to do with wellness, so it was in my alley.” 

About 15 other physicians and medical practitioners on the island signed the testimony he read to the hearing, which was packed with hundreds of people representing both sides.  

Not comfortable in front of big crowds, much less emotionally charged ones like this, Evslin remained clinical, explaining that from a scientific perspective, it was important to think about the health risks from long-term, low-level exposure to the chemicals that were being sprayed in the community’s fields. 

“All they were asking for was that they wanted no-spray zones around schools, they wanted stronger right-to-know language so that people would be informed about what was being sprayed where,” Evslin recalls.  

Long story short: The council approved restrictions, the seed companies won a legal appeal that said only the state could impose such limits, and the state Legislature later followed up with its own law imposing a phased-in ban on chlorpyrifos on state agricultural lands. 

Other states followed suit. Federal government attempts to bar the use of the pesticide followed a similar on-again, off-again pattern as the issue – and control of the EPA –bounced between shifting political camps and agendas. 

Today, long after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the EPA’s effective ban on chlorpyrifos, use of the pesticide still faces restrictions but is not banned at the federal level.  

New Evidence of Harm Emerges 

Coincidentally, a study published this month in the journal JAMA Neurology links prenatal exposure to the insecticide with enduring widespread molecular, cellular and metabolic effects in the brain.  

Researchers for the study, from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, and the Keck School of Medicine at USC, also linked the chemical exposure to poorer fine-motor control among youth. 

“A study like this is a powerful argument for the ban that Hawai‘i enacted in 2018,” says Evslin, who had served on a state-county joint fact-finding task force on this issue, and it provides evidence about “the danger of the federal government saying that even a blockbuster study like this could not even be analyzed [under the pending legislation] until the next formal review of the chemical,” a process that occurs about once every 15 years. 

That’s why he says Section 453 in the appropriations bill is so potentially dangerous.  

“What they’re saying is that if new data comes along, they can’t spend money reviewing it to see if they should modify” existing rules, Evslin says. “So theoretically what that would mean is only every 15 years could you do research and point out issues and make a difference about the danger of one of these chemicals.” 

Section 453 as Political Strategy 

Environmental and other non-governmental organizations advocating for restrictions on certain pesticide uses have ramped up efforts to block section 453, which opponents say plays into the strategy of chemical companies. 

After losing heavily in recent court cases, companies like Bayer/Monsanto have sought relief from state legislatures and courts, with limited success, according to Jay Feldman, executive director of one such group, Beyond Pesticides. Next, they turned to Congress. 

“They do it in a very circuitous route,” he said. “They do it through an appropriations bill, where they basically say to EPA, ‘you can’t change the label [on pesticides] unless you do an extensive health assessment,” which can take over a decade. “So, they’re not directly saying you can’t sue manufacturers, they’re saying the EPA cannot allow a change in a label without these tremendous hurdles that are very time-consuming. 

“The manufacturer then goes to the court, and says ‘Judge, we couldn’t change this label [to provide better warnings to consumers], because this is the label EPA gave us and Congress has precluded the change in label, so we can’t be held responsible for failure to warn.” 

The sort of Catch-22 routine blocks the last avenue for litigants seeking relief for damages, he said. The irony, Feldman adds, is that the pesticide companies are the ones who helped write the language in the bills. “Whether that would even hold up in court, it remains to be seen, but it’s been done before,” he said. 

In a statement, Bayer responded: “We agree that no company should have blanket immunity and, to be clear, the language in section 453 of the appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior would not prevent anyone from suing pesticide manufacturers. Anything to assert otherwise is a distortion of reality.

“As part of our multi-pronged approach, we support federal legislation alongside more than 360 agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products – determined safe for use by the EPA. Other measures include the support of legislation at the state level and a Supreme Court petition.

 “Legislation at a federal level is needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority….”

In court filings, Bayer unit Monsanto has argued that because the EPA has approved glyphosate-based product labels without cancer warnings, plaintiffs cannot sue under state laws for failure to include such warnings.

Even so, with the application of Roundup on farm fields around the country, lawsuits alleging health damage from exposure to the chemical also began piling up. After initially winning some of the lawsuits by claiming research showed the chemical was safe, Bayer started losing, big-time, and the losses and legal costs piled up.

As of August 2025, Bayer had settled about 100,000 Roundup lawsuits for about $11 billion, but another 61,000 cases remain active.

In a statement on glyphosate, Bayer said it “stands behind the safety of our glyphosate-based products which have been tested extensively, approved by regulators and used around the globe for 50 years. The EPA has an extremely rigorous review process which spans multiple years, considers thousands of studies and involves many independent risk assessment experts at the EPA.”

Political Twilight Zone 

After the Kaua‘i hearings, the fact-finding recommendations and the County Council vote to restrict pesticide use around schools, Evslin says, he was stung by the seed industry representatives’ comments that he was “fear-mongering” and “unscientific” – the antithesis of his self-image. 

“And that’s when I was struck by this kind of Twilight Zone. It was as if they weren’t looking at the same scientific information at all.” 

A representative of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, which represents the seed companies, did not respond to Evslin’s assertion but in a statement said it supports the House measure.

The section, it said, will “help ensure that our hard-working agricultural producers across the country can rely on consistent agricultural labeling based on well-established and thorough scientific protocols.” 

Peter Adler, a conflict resolution consultant and chair of the joint task force charged with finding common ground among the feuding sides, recalls the role played by Evslin. 

“He did a lot of careful rounding up of studies,” Adler says of the task force debates. “It wasn’t just an opinion jamboree. It was much more based on trying to understand what the data was [concerning] the use of some of these pesticides.” 

Adler says the task force sought to sort out which claims were real and which ones were exaggerated or imagined, what could be confirmed, and what couldn’t. 

Evslin “was really good about pulling in a lot of data and groups of studies,” he says. “It was bringing evidence to the table. We’re not in a court of law, but we’re trying to work out [a solution in] a highly charged political environment. He was very fact-centered.” 

Evslin’s concerns intensified when he later started digging into the scientific studies on glyphosate, the active pesticide ingredient in Roundup and many other herbicides. 

“It was so obvious that the scientific literature had so much data about how dangerous it was, and all you hear from these industry places was, ‘no, it’s safe, it’s one of the best studied ones in the country, no regulatory agency has banned it, and on and on,” Evslin says. 

“I began to babble about it to my wife, and she said, ‘stop talking about it and write a book’.” 

So, he did, published in July 2021: “Breakfast at Monsanto’s: Is Roundup in Our Food Making Us Fatter, Sicker, and Sadder?”  

While conducting research for his book, Evslin said, he came across what he said was convincing scientific evidence that glyphosate was pervasive in our food supply and was causing damaging health effects. 

Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Changed Seed Science 

If chlorpyrifos proved a moral victory for Hawai‘i advocates hoping to limit chemical exposure that can cause developmental delay in children, the presence of glyphosate in food posed a greater challenge.  

In plant and crop genetics, one of the most profound changes in agriculture has been to genetically alter seeds so they become resistant to toxic chemicals in glyphosates. That is the primary ingredient used in Roundup, which is produced by Monsanto and has become the world’s most heavily used herbicide in history.  

By using seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, farmers can spray their fields with the pesticide, killing everything but the intended crops, and saving millions of dollars on weed control.  

After that discovery, use of Roundup and related glyphosate-based pesticides spread like, well, weeds.  

“We in the United States use 30-40% of the glyphosate in the world, and we have much less restrictive guidelines” on it, Evslin says. So, everything from soybeans to corn to canola to wheat – many of the ingredients used in our highly processed foods – are often sprayed with glyphosate herbicides and leave traces in the resulting food products that we consume.  

Tests, meanwhile, have shown that 80-90% of Americans have glyphosate in their bodies, which dissipates over time but can also be replenished if a steady diet of food and water contain the chemical. And pesticide opponents say they do. 

After examining hundreds of scientific studies on glyphosate and glyphosate formulas, Evslin says it became clear to him that there was powerful evidence suggesting links to cancer and other detrimental health effects.  

Glyphosate’s Role as an Antibiotic 

Amid piles of studies, Evslin thinks he’s found the regulatory Achilles heel for glyphosate. 

“It’s definitely an antibiotic,” Evslin says, “And it affects the microbiome – the bacterial content of our intestines and our skin and our respiratory tract. The vital role that it’s playing is only beginning to be fully understood. 

“We have more bacteria cells in us than we have human cells. They are an unbelievably integral part of everything – how we think, how our immune system works, how we digest foods.” 

Studies, he says, are showing links to obesity, inflammation, DNA changes and liver disease, among other disorders. 

But regulatory agencies don’t consider chemicals’ effects on the microbiome, he says.  

“What I’ve been trying to do with that is say, yes, I understand,” he says. “But we do regulate antibiotics in food and it’s an antibiotic, and we need to accept that fact. It seems to me it’s an Achilles heel, because it is an antibiotic, we regulate antibiotics, and that should be a short way to get it out of our food.” 

Prospects for Section 453 

What are the chances that Section 453 of the appropriations bill will be approved? 

Rather likely, it turns out. Few Republicans have gone against the party line in any recent votes. 

Hawai‘i congress member Tokuda stood firm in a statement ahead of the vote: “Hiding dangerous information on pesticides endangers everyone but especially workers, pregnant women, keiki, and vulnerable communities. It is another win for corporate interests and their priorities and yet another reckless, shameful, and immoral effort by Republicans. No corporation should be above the law, especially when lives are at risk.” 

The state’s other representative, Ed Case, also opposed the bill. In a letter to Evslin, he wrote that section 453 and other parts of the bill “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing environmental and public health regulations related to clean water, clean air and hazardous waste and pesticide laws.”  

He said he also opposed a 23% cut to the EPA’s budget, “which severely impacts its capabilities to protect human health and the environment.” 

Says Evslin: “In terms of what will happen with the bill, my guess is that the House will pass it, and there may be more of a fight in the Senate if it crosses over. The provision is so buried, though, that I don’t think it will get defeated unless there is a dramatic increase in public awareness.” 

Either way, after the vote, Evslin will glance out at the tropical land where he once considered gardening, and then he’ll turn his attention back to the latest medical studies examining health effects from long-term exposure to pesticides.   

Movies and TV shows about cops emphasize the high-stakes drama of police work: murder investigations, gang busts, armed robberies. But that’s only part of the job.

“When I was a patrol officer, I’d be doing one thing, eating lunch or relaxing, and the next minute a call comes in and it’s zero to 60,” says John McCarthy, a former Honolulu deputy chief of police. “There’s been many medical studies on police officers working at that high intensity all the time. It’s known to cause a lot of PTSD and anxiety disorders in individuals. Many officers will just constantly be on high alert waiting for a terrible call to come in.”

McCarthy retired as deputy chief of HPD in 2021 after 45 years of service.

Traumatic experience

“One of the most shocking cases I’ve dealt with was when I was working the midnight watch, just about to get off and I get a call about a suicide in the park,” McCarthy recalls.

“I got to the public park and … the sun was just coming up, I was kind of blurry-eyed from working all night. It was pretty slow before this. I get to the scene and it’s this young man hanging from a tree, mouth open, and there’s flies coming out of his mouth, so I knew he’d been there awhile. Situations like that stick with me. Again, you think the shift is going one way and then it ends with me doing a DOA for this young man.”

Recruiting difficulties

Long hours, emotional strain, constant paperwork and other dark sides of the job help explain why fewer people enter the profession today and so many police departments are understaffed. Four of the largest metropolitan police departments were collectively down over 5,400 officers during 2022 and 2023, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reports. “Further, law enforcement is experiencing a drastic decrease in the number of recruits – 27% to 60%, depending on the area.”

What it takes to recruit

Police work requires mental strength and the ability to stay calm under pressure. To attract more recruits, McCarthy says, police departments need to offer more than just a good paycheck.

“Other compensation such as better retirement benefits and medical insurance for spouses after retirement are two of the benefits once provided that have since been taken away,” McCarthy says. “Making the perks long term might make it more attractive. Otherwise, compensation alone hasn’t worked.”

Officers put themselves in danger daily, so long-term support and security for their families in case the worst happens can be just as important as the salary, he says.

High-stakes decisions

Police officers must be both physically and mentally resilient – or face permanent psychological scars, McCarthy says.

“Either you deal with things, such as the first shooting I was involved in, my first gun case, the first case where I had to use force. You don’t stand there and think, ‘OK what was I taught in recruit class? What’s the force continuum? What level of force can I use?’ You either react or you don’t react. That’s been my experience. You can’t let these things bother you or eat at you because it’ll be the downfall of you.”

He suggests it’s difficult for most people to understand how police officers deal with these high-stake situations because they never experience anything similar.

Women on the force

Many more women serve on police forces in Hawai‘i and nationwide than a generation ago. Could they be the answer to staff shortages?

“I’m not sure how to attract more women when they can’t even attract more men. The job has lost its glamour. The short and contentious term of Chief (Susan) Ballard may make it harder to recruit and retain women,” McCarthy says. He suggests recruiters could concentrate “in areas where younger females are active in job searches” or places such as schools where they’re already looking at life in the long term.

But the state is planning and building a new network of opportunities and support intended to reinvigorate Hawai‘i’s agricultural sector.

“It was generally thought that when sugar and pineapple plantations shut down, former plantation crop land would be cultivated with numerous smaller crops,” wrote UH economists Sumner La Croix and James Mak in 2021. “Instead, much of it lies fallow.”

So true, but after decades of decline and stagnation, conditions may be ripe for a rebound in diversified agriculture.

The department’s back

The state Department of Agriculture was renamed the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity on June 27, marking a new era for the agency, with new responsibilities and increased collaboration with other state agencies. Director Sharon Hurd says the legislation that passed this year prioritized biosecurity and the deterrence of agricultural crimes, like theft of crops, livestock and equipment, and increased access to capital for agricultural entrepreneurs.

The department’s kuleana is massive. “All those readers at the supermarket, we check those. We check gas [pump] meters. We check taxicabs. We check scales at the farmers markets. Any measuring device is under our purview, in addition to biosecurity, land and water for agriculture, loans, marketing.”

Last year, Gov. Josh Green signed Act 231 to create 44 positions for entomologists, plant quarantine inspectors, environmental health specialists and others. It was one of the most significant expansions of the department in 30 years.

The increase was driven by increased public awareness of invasive species statewide. “Biosecurity was less important when it was only impacting agriculture,” explains state Rep. Kirstin Kahaloa, former chair of the House Agriculture & Food Systems Committee. “As soon as it started impacting families in their yards, when it impacted schoolkids on their playgrounds, and now the beautiful landscape of our coconut trees across our street, now it has elevated to the level that we’ve needed for many decades.”

Ironically, these positions existed over a decade ago, but the 2009 Legislature reduced the Department of Agriculture’s budget by 19% and devastated institutional memory and expertise. As a result of the reduction in force order, 96 of the department’s 214 general-funded positions were eliminated.

Following the 2009 layoffs, the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, Ulupono Initiative, UH’s Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response team and Ant Lab, and other organizations, struggled to fill the void.

But the crippling of the department’s biosecurity functions continues to reverberate. “We’re still coming back from that,” laments Hurd. “These 44 positions that the Legislature was so kind to give us last year just bring us back to where we were in 2009. Now we have a chance to build from there.”

Among the species the department needs to target are the coconut rhinoceros beetle, coqui frog, little fire ant, rose-ringed parakeet and two-lined spittlebug.

But, Hurd declares: “The department’s back. We’re back to where we were.”

A two-legged stool

“There is an old saying that beginnings are delicate times, and with the pace of our modern world, that statement is even more valid,” wrote Bart Jones in 1994, when he was a member of the Honoka‘a Farmers Cooperative of East Hawai‘i Island. That was when the Hāmākua Sugar Plantation went bankrupt and closed, part of the overall decline of sugarcane in Hawai‘i.

Jones knew establishing a new agricultural regime would prove harrowing. “It is very easy to kill a seed, and it is easy to destroy a seedling, and it is very difficult to establish and maintain all the elements that are necessary to develop a new crop,” he wrote at the time.

1994 was also the year the state Legislature declared: “Within the next decade, 75,000 acres of agricultural lands and 50 million gallons per day of irrigation water are expected to be released by plantations. The downsizing of the sugar and pineapple industries will idle a valuable inventory of supporting infrastructure including irrigation systems, roads, drainage systems, processing facilities, workshops and warehouses.”

Transferring fallow agricultural lands and their infrastructure to new uses was the primary mission of the Agribusiness Development Corp., which was established that year.

However, multiple reports have criticized the ADC, including research reports issued by the Legislative Reference Bureau in 1997 and 2007 and a scathing performance audit in February 2021. “More than 25 years after its creation, we found an agency that is generally unaware of its unique powers and exemptions, and has done little – if anything – toward achieving its statutory purpose,” the state auditor reported in 2021.

When longtime ADC Executive Director James Nakatani died in April 2023, the beleaguered agency was at a critical juncture. Four months later, Wendy Gady got the job.

Gady exudes a dogged, collaborative and transparent attitude. Since September 2023, she has publicly released weekly reports, which function as briefings on the ADC’s work. (Find them at dbedt.hawaii.gov/adc/reports.)

Furthermore, the ADC has made efforts to address historic sources of criticism. In November 2024, the state auditor’s office found the ADC had fully implemented 30 of the 36 recommendations in its 2021 audit. The other six were no longer applicable.

Gady says the agency’s agenda is to find partners who align with its mission of building a new statewide food system: “We’re looking for radical collaborators. We’re looking for talent. We’re looking for farmers. We’re looking for food entrepreneurs.”

To much of the general public, the Agribusiness Development Corp. – part of DBEDT – appears at first glance to duplicate the role of the Department of Agriculture, but Gady explains the difference. “They are regulatory, so they handle everything from plant quarantine to invasive species.”

The Department of Agriculture also works with small, beginner farmers. Its “agricultural parks are designed for people that are just starting out.”

Once a farmer is more firmly established, the next step is the ADC, Gady says. “When you’re ready to graduate, you’re graduating to ADC. And that creates new room in the agricultural park for a new entrepreneur to come in and hopefully get birthed into the ADC.”

To use a business term, much of ADC’s mission today is to bring fledgling agricultural businesses to scale. Providing long-term licenses to operate on ADC lands – up to 35 years – provides stability for farmers who may be working on month-to-month leases under private landlords.

And stability for farmers means stable food systems for consumers and a foundation for Hawai‘i’s food security. “We have to make things work here. We can’t count on the white horse to come in on a ship,” Gady says.

Much of ADC’s current focus is the maintenance of irrigation infrastructure on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu – infrastructure that creates the capacity for irrigated agriculture. The Kekaha ditch system supplies the East Kaua‘i Irrigation System and the Waiāhole water system on O‘ahu feeds the Wahiawa Irrigation System.

“The future of agriculture consists of infrastructure facilities around application and irrigation,” explains Dane Wicker, deputy director of the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, which includes the ADC.

“All of those are high-cost [investments] that no farmer alone – or collectively – can support financially. If the state is going to be serious about food security and resiliency, then the state needs to make investments in land acquisition,” and then plan, design and build those key facilities, Wicker says. “That’s the future of agriculture.”

The vast majority of ADC’s portfolio is focused on O‘ahu and Kaua‘i. Kaua‘i alone accounts for about 80% of the ADC’s inventory of land, though there is interest in expanding capacity on Hawai‘i Island and Maui. It’s a matter of time, money and available parcels suitable for cultivation, acknowledged Wicker and Gady.

The state’s budget for the fiscal year 2026 sets aside $39 million to buy 1,000 more acres on Kaua‘i. There are also plans to spend $17 million to build a small animal processing and storage facility on O‘ahu, which would lead to more Hawai‘i-raised meats for consumers.

Two relatively new facilities help turn ag produce into sauces, snacks, jams, cookies and more: The Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center, opened in April 2024 on O‘ahu, and the Maui Food Innovation Center, opened in November 2022 in Kahului.

The Local Food Coalition, an alliance that includes the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, UH’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, the Ulupono Initiative, Hawai‘i Farmers Union United and the Hawaii Food Industry Association, emerged as a key proponent for this network. “Value-added manufacturing plays an indispensable role in bolstering both our agricultural sector and the broader economy,” testified the coalition to the Legislature on April 1. “Establishing a network of open-access food and value-added product development facilities is not merely an aspiration but a necessity in our quest for agricultural and economic sustainability.”

Among the coalition’s goals is to add incubators on other islands, like those in Wahiawā and Kahului.

“These spaces are where small businesses can safely and affordably produce value-added products, like jams, jellies, sauces, pickles, dry goods – anything coming from local agriculture and something that can now have shelf life,” says Kahaloa, who represents the Kona district of Hawai‘i Island. “There’s been a lack of access to certified kitchens. It’s very expensive for agriculture to be able to create their own facility for one value-added commodity. What this does is really break barriers, especially in our rural communities and former plantation communities across Hawai‘i.”

The state is trying to increase demand and generate a market for local ag products, beginning with vendors across government departments. A 2019 law committed Hawai‘i to doubling food production by 2030. In 2021, a farm-to-school program was established within the Department of Education; it mandated that 30% of all food served in public schools consist of “locally sourced products” by 2030. Another law set goals for every “principal department” in state government to procure a certain level of locally sourced products when it contracts for services.

The future of local agriculture appears heavily contingent on sustained government investment. As Gady explains, “ADC was created to step in as sugar and pineapple stepped out. We were a three-legged economic stool [in the past]: We had ag with sugar and pineapple, we had tourism, we had the military. When you take sugar and pineapple out, your stool is really unbalanced. You only have two legs.”

Restoring the stool’s third leg would still require agricultural interests to navigate competing demands for agricultural lands, including solar projects.

Most Ag Lands Are Pastures

The Hawai‘i State Data Book estimates that 1.93 million acres of land is zoned for agricultural purposes. That’s a lot – almost half of the land in Hawai‘i. The landmass of all the Hawaiian Islands together, except for Hawai‘i Island, totals only 1.54 million acres.

The 2020 Update to the Hawai‘i Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline found that only 886,211 acres of land – less than half of all agriculturally zoned lands – presently are used for agriculture.

Most of that land is set aside for pastures. Only 120,632 acres – less than 7% of all agriculturally zoned lands in Hawai‘i – were under crop cultivation, according to the land use update. With so much agricultural land unsuitable for cultivation due to soil quality, lack of water, isolation and unsuitable terrain, there is a natural question: How do we effectively use all of Hawai‘i’s agricultural lands?

While agencies like the Agribusiness Development Corp. are working to bring more agricultural land into cultivation, solar energy facilities have been permitted on agricultural lands that meet certain classifications.

That pits agricultural projects against solar projects and clean energy goals. House Bill 778, passed this year by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor, calls for an integrated land use study to inventory all of the grand goals set by the Legislature through the years.

The new law states that “multiple climate and sustainability statutory targets have been enacted in the State, including developing at least 22,500 affordable rental housing units, doubling food production, increasing food exports, requiring the Department of Education and University of Hawai‘i to become net-zero in energy use, requiring that all of the electricity generated in Hawai‘i comes from renewable sources, sequestering more atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gases, requiring all state and county facilities to use reclaimed water, and requiring the mandatory upgrade of all cesspools.”

It is a daunting list of targets. For the next two years, the law requires the state’s sustainability coordinator, Danielle Bass, to facilitate conversations and collect “data-based estimates on the amount of land required” to meet the needs of these competing uses within agricultural districts. To do so, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development must compile and analyze existing data while working with farming groups, counties, community members and state government entities.

The goal is to “clearly define and prioritize the protection of productive agricultural lands to prevent further encroachment from nonagricultural developments, including developing measures to ensure agricultural lands designated for agriculture production are not compromised for short-term development needs.”

Balancing the state’s multiplying mandates is a crucial overdue conversation for state planners. “We have our urban growth boundaries. We have our general plans. We have our sustainable community plans,” explains Bass. “But what are we doing? We’re still being reactive instead of being proactive in terms of land use.”

The Office of Planning and Sustainable Development’s study could set the trajectory of any agricultural resurgence, says Wicker, the DBEDT deputy director. “Until we know what lands are critical for food production, we cannot piecemeal and say ‘OK, solar farm you go there,’ or ‘Biofuel, you go there,’ because [these uses] may not be able to coexist with the land we’ve identified for crop production.”

Coordinating competing uses is the goal, Bass says. “When I see these three big buckets of housing, energy, agriculture, it’s less about the competing uses of the same land.” Instead, coordination among stakeholders is key. There could be enough land to balance these competing needs and even rezone certain agricultural lands for conservation, but such work would have to be coordinated.

The Challenges Ahead

Perry Philipp, a UH College of Tropical Agriculture professor, wrote in 1953: “It is evident that many of Hawaii’s diversified agricultural industries show promise for expansion and that such expansion would materially strengthen Hawaii’s economy. To bring it about [Hawai‘i needs people with] vision, enterprise, venture capital and capacity for hard work.”

As Governor Green signed several pieces of agricultural legislation into law on June 27, Philipp’s attitude returned to my mind.

“Farming and ranching are a tough business,” Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau, said at the event. “Land use, water, labor, energy, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters: These are issues that our farmers deal with every single day.”

True in 1953, true today and true, undoubtedly, into the future.