HONOLULU (KHON2) — Hawaii’s mayors are updating the public about the state of their respective counties, including Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, who is scheduled to give his State of the City address on Tuesday, March 18th.
Mayor Blangiardi says the majority of his address will be forward-facing.
“Well, public safety is our number one overall priority because fundamentally, you know this, everybody knows this, people wanna feel safe. First and foremost, they wanna feel safe, and so we’re trying to do the very best we can. So we’ve put added monies into that, hundred million into housing, like our initiatives on homelessness, all these things that we’ll talk about.”
Uncertainty looms as the Trump administration continues to make cuts at the federal level, but Blangiardi says that the City and County have contingency plans in their recently released 2026 budget.
“We’re now in an environment where I’ve gotten asked so many questions about what’s happening with the federal government, how will it impact us? We’ve tried to provide for that with contingencies. At the end of the day, what I’ve said is I’m not gonna overreact to anything. We will adapt once we find out what we’re dealing with,”
After his State of the City address, Mayor Blangiardi and his cabinet will embark on a seven-stop series of town halls across Oahu. It’s another round of keeping an ear to the ground, as he did in 2024, which taught him lessons that informed some of his leadership.
One of the things that’s a common denominator, you know, across all nine districts is our parks, how people play. Parks and recreation is a big deal. So that’s important. Again, public safety, a big issue. Concerns about the police officers or what we could do and so on,” Mayor Blangiardi said. “Candidly, the thing that really kept coming up, and I’m not sure when I learned the word out-migration, but, boy that’s on the top of people’s minds. Families being sort of separated because of the cost of housing and goods, leaving Hawaii not wanting to do so, doing so reluctantly. I can’t tell you how that inspires, motivates, and challenges us to really be in the game of housing.”
Another topic that the mayor has encountered out in public is the proposed landfill in central Oahu that has become controversial due to its proximity to the island’s aquifer.
“I feel very confident with the technology that we have today of being able to put an aquifer out in North Wahiawa, eight hundred feet, that we were actually going to use in today’s technology. And in fact, we never had a spill in the thirty-five years we’ve been out at Waimanalo Gulch with old technology,” Mayor Blangiardi said. “Our confidence that we did everything we could making a decision on Wahiawa, we’ll see what happens on this legislation if they determine you cannot put one over an aquifer. But I wanna say it again: We would never do anything that would be toxic or dangerous to anybody living here or future generations.”
Mayor Blangiardi’s State of the City address will be broadcast live on KHII on Tuesday, March 18th at 6:00 pm. Click here for a full list of Mayor Blangiardi’s town hall meetings.