HONOLULU — The Honolulu City Council unanimously adopted Wednesday a nearly $4.7 billion budget package slated to bolster police and fire services, upgrade city parks and develop more affordable housing for the 2025 fiscal year, which begins July 1.
The Council’s vote approves a $3.63 billion executive operating budget — a 6.4 percent increase over the city’s current $3.41 billion budget — that will fund city salaries and city employee benefits, including nondiscretionary costs such as health care, retirement and other post-employment benefits, the city says.
The spending plan pays for the city’s public safety and public health agencies — police, fire and emergency services departments — which represent roughly 17 percent of the proposed operating budget, or $626.7 million, the city says.
The adopted budget mirrors Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s proposed spending plan his office introduced for Council consideration March 1.
“I think the budget does reflect our and the administration’s shared values and priorities, mainly public safety,” Council Chair Tommy Waters said prior to the vote.
According to Council member and Budget Committee Chair Radiant Cordero, the new budget allocates “$5 million in grants for affordable housing incentives, setting aside $115 million for hazard pay for our first responders, improving parks and sewer infrastructure, and acquiring six new ambulances.”
“Additionally, we prioritized public safety by appropriating an extra $400,000 for Community Policing Teams across all eight police patrol districts islandwide,” Cordero said via email after the meeting.
But O‘ahu resident Choon James — a mayoral candidate for the 2024 election — criticized the new city budget’s multibillion dollar expense.
“I know you have all worked very hard … but I have always wondered why is it that we cannot ever come up with a budget that is lower than before? It is always higher, and higher and higher,” she told the Council during public testimony. “There must be a way for us to have the mindset to contain that tax and spend.”
She added, “I can tell you people are afraid, people are worried, people are actually suffering.”
In response to James, Council Member Calvin Say said “like any household in Hawai‘i, O‘ahu primarily … it’s very difficult to control our expense side.”
Say noted “a budget is never static” and that it will “always have to increase,” particularly with regard to upcoming “collective bargaining increases for all of our first-responders.”
“Your police, your fire, your ambulance, your opala, your sewer system workers, et cetera, et cetera,” Say said. “They are all deserving of what they negotiated as part of collective bargaining. Is that static? No, it’s going to increase, and that’s why you have these automatic increases in (the) county government budget.”
The Council also OK’d the city’s nearly $1.05 billion capital improvement program — roughly $29 million less than the city’s current $1.34 billion CIP spending plan — to fund park upgrades as well as improvements to bridges, roads, street lighting and other transportation-related projects.
The funding will renovate or build new public buildings including Honolulu Police Department facilities, the city says.
In addition, the CIP includes $500,000 to plan and design the Ocean Safety First Responder Center for the North Shore Ocean Safety district.
“So I feel like today is just getting it across the goal line, and with your support we’ll get to this project,” Pupukea resident Denise Antolini said before the vote.
The city Emergency Services Department shared statistics over “the need on the North Shore” for a Waialua EMS station, she added.
“In the last five years, the demand has gone up by 30 percent,” she said. “The number of incidents on the North Shore (in the Pupukea area) is 15 round trips a day, from ambulances all across the island.”
At the same meeting, the Council, under Resolution 149, voted to reprogram $8 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds toward more hazard pay for city workers employed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That action worked as an amendment to the city’s adopted operating budget — or Bill 12 — to change the use of federal money previously slated for the city’s Office of Economic Revitalization’s Food System Grant program.
In recent years Hawai‘i’s government worker unions, including the Hawai‘i Government Employees Association, United Public Workers and the State of Hawai‘i Organization of Police Officers, have pressured the state and its four major counties to pay back their respective memberships for pandemic-era work.
In a May 24 memorandum to the Council, city Managing Director Mike Formby said, “The total loss incurred by the city, as calculated by the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services in accordance with U.S. Treasury guidelines, vastly exceeds the number contemplated by this proposed reallocation of $8,000,000, even in addition to the $80,000,000 currently reallocated to (Other Post-Employment Benefits) and the $27,000,000 the City Council approved via (Resolution 199) for OPEB.”
Formby added “through this U.S. Treasury permitted revenue replacement process, we can create capacity in our operating budget to address hazard pay claims through negotiation and/or arbitration.”
Meanwhile, the Council adopted respective budget bills for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, charged with constructing the nearly $10 billion Skyline project to Kaka‘ako by 2031.
Under Bill 16, the panel passed HART’s $138.3 million operating budget, a 27 percent increase over its current $109.2 million budget.
And under Bill 17, the Council adopted HART’s $574 million capital budget for next fiscal year, totaling a nearly 1 percent increase over the current $569 million capital budget, according to the rail agency.
The mayor is expected to sign the city’s budget bills later this month.
