When our economy is truly healthy, and everyone rises with the tide of prosperity, then issues such as the lack of affordable housing, homelessness, and hunger are greatly diminished.
David Ige
I stand here today - in the shadow of my parents' and grandparents' accomplishments - because of their willingness to sacrifice and look to my future.
I do know that homelessness is related to housing, and we haven't been producing housing in the numbers that our community requires - a lot of the escalating costs of housing is related to the fact that supply is way short than demand.
I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.
I have reached the conclusion that Hawaii does not need LNG in our future.
We are asking the question: What makes the most sense for public-private partnerships for affordable housing.
I think it's really important as we position Hawaii as the policy leader in renewable energy.
There will be no name-calling when I disagree with anyone, no disparaging remarks toward anyone, no taking sole credit for collective achievements or blaming others when things go wrong.
I challenge the leaders of public education to stop issuing mandates from the state office and to focus on empowering schools and delivering resources to the school level.
I ask you to find your voice and use it not only to choose your elected officials but to shape the issues that will shape our lives.
I have been looking at a number of things in affordable housing because I do know that the price of housing has gone up a lot.
It's about grass-roots campaigning, meeting voters face-to-face, and above all, listening to what they have to say.
Loss prevention experts report that professional shoplifters calculate the value of the merchandise they are stealing to keep it under the threshold amount to avoid serious penalties and prosecution as a felony.
We have more endangered species here in our islands than any other state in the country.
I've always been one to believe in leading by example - the state has a lot of land and assets along the transit route, so I think we ought to be looking at what plans we can make available.
Any time and money spent on LNG is time and money not spent on renewable energy.
As a new governor, I intend to assure our partners that we appreciate them and will continue to work with them to strengthen the cultural, social and economic bonds we share.
As I prepare to take over the reins of your government, I ask each of you to join me in the process of governing.
The voters of Hawaii have said loud and clear that it's not money that wins elections.
When it was first proposed, I was willing to support it as a 'transitional fuel' because it had some clear advantages for Hawaii. Much has changed since then. LNG will no longer save us any money.
LNG is a fossil fuel. LNG is imported.
There were many in the party that did not want me to run.
I think it would be more beneficial to protection of species if we could focus our efforts rather than paint a broad-brush area that is so enormous that active management is very, very difficult.
I believe that those closest to the children should be making the decisions about how funds should be spent, what the curriculum should look like, and what's the best way to help our students.
We want the people of Japan to know that the people of Hawaii welcome them to the Hawaiian Islands.
Japan and Hawaii enjoy a special connection, and I want to honor this enduring relationship.
Japan and Hawaii already have strong economic, cultural and education ties, and we intend to build upon those ties and relationships as we look toward the future.
As leaders, our job is to engage people so that they will want to participate in this grand experience in self governance.
Our job is to help people take ownership of the process of electing their government. As leaders, our job is to inspire others and not discourage them.
It's time to focus all of our efforts on renewables. We will oppose the building of LNG facilities.
I just think it gets confusing for our communities when the federal law is different from the state law.
I think that we're trying to look at all of our assets and figure out what's the best use and where we need to make investments in infrastructure to enable the projects that we want.
