Episode 17: Town Hall Wrap-Up

This week, Mayor Rick Blangiardi joins host Brandi Higa on the One O‘ahu Podcast to reflect on Memorial Day, as well as his town hall tour that just wrapped up. Mayor Blangiardi provides an assessment of those eleven town hall meetings and an update on when we can expect the next round of meetings in communities throughout O‘ahu.

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Memorial Day

On Monday, May 29, 2023, the 72nd Mayor’s Memorial Service was held at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

“We wanted to provide a ceremony that would honor those people who were there, those Gold Star families who had lost people who were buried at Punchbowl,” said Mayor Blangiardi. “I felt that we really put our best foot forward when it came to honoring the essence of Memorial Day, the military (members) that were there, and certainly, most certainly, the families that were there.”

The Mayor’s Memorial Day Service included oli, presentation of wreaths, a performance by the 94th lei court, the Royal Hawaiian Band, the playing of taps, and an F-22 aircraft flyover.

Town Hall Tour

On Thursday, May 25, 2023, Mayor Blangiardi wrapped up a series of town hall meetings which included eleven meetings over ten weeks, an undertaking he believed was very much a success.

“I think that the very fact that our Cabinet, again, whether it’s a director or a deputy and on some nights, it was both of them there, people sacrificed their time knowing that they might not even get asked a question, and a number of them never did,” explained Mayor Blangiardi. “But they certainly got sensitized to the community at large (and) what was of interest to those communities specifically.”

The final town hall meeting, which was held at Pearl Harbor Elementary School, included passionate testimony from community members on everything from pay raises for City workers to safety measures for tow truck drivers. Mayor Blangiardi went on to disclose that the next round of town hall meetings can be expected within a year.

Agriculture Grants

On this episode, Mayor Blangiardi also reacts to the rollout of $3 million in grants to small farmers, ranchers, and growers on Oʻahu. He was able to make that announcement on May 30, 2023 at ‘Ma Farm in Waimānalo.

The Office of Economic Revitalization (OER) has begun awarding a total of 66 grants, ranging from about $10,000 to as much as $49,000, to those who qualified for the $3 million agriculture grant. The complete awardee list is available at oahuaggrants.org.

OER and its partners held nine “how-to-apply” workshops in the fall of 2022 to encourage applications from small agriculture producers who suffered financial hardship during the pandemic. Applications were available in English, Cantonese, Hawaiian, Ilocano, Lao, Samoan, Tagalog, Thai, and Tongan. A total of 127 farmers, ranchers, and growers applied, including a completed application entirely in Hawaiian.