Volcanic Ash

City Council members have taken criticism for scheduling the special election for Honolulu mayor along with the primary election, with one of my colleagues calling them “ninnies” for not waiting until the general election so we could get to know the candidates better.

But I’m totally down with the Sept. 18 date, which follows the precedent of the 1994 special mayoral election to replace Frank Fasi, which was also held with the primary and worked fine.

Mufi Hannemann resigned July 20 to run for governor, giving mayoral candidates two months to make their case.

The four major candidates — Kirk Caldwell, Peter Carlisle, Panos Prevedouros and Rod Tam — have all been in the public eye for a long time and are known quantities who started campaigning even before Hannemann stepped down.

The Star-Advertiser did excellent profiles (links here), as did several TV newscasts. The candidates who could afford it have run their ad campaigns and numerous debates and community forums have been held.

What more do we need to know? Nothing would be accomplished by extending the contest another six weeks except to suck hundreds of thousands more out of the economy to hammer the same advertising themes and unnecessarily extend the limbo of interim city leadership.

We’re ready to settle this one.

This entry was posted on September 2, 2010 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Volcanic Ash. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Election 2010