Honolulu Weekly

This was supposed to be a story about the Waikiki War Memorial Natatorium. It was going to be a look at the weeks to come following a City-appointed task force’s recommendation to demolish the 82-year-old structure, detailing the process that led to that recommendation.

But sometimes the reporting of a story becomes more interesting than the story itself. After all, the results of the vote came as no surprise. Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s desire to see the Natatorium torn down has been clear since he scrapped a restoration project that was underway at the site during his first week in office in 2005. And he’s not alone. The World War I memorial has been the source of local controversy for the majority of its increasingly dilapidated existence. The debate has raged for so long that taking a stance on whether it ought to stay or go has become a sort of mayoral rite of passage.

So in May, when Hannemann selected community leaders to sit on a task force and consider the Natatorium’s fate, it made sense that it might be a coalition including many of those who would back his demolition-based agenda.

Late last week, they did. The voting members of a 17-person task force decided 9-3 that the Natatorium be destroyed. But their decision–one that was expected all along–is nothing more than a headline, really. For the Weekly, covering the latest chapter in the Natatorium’s story has become more of a metaphor for municipal politics as a whole, highlighting the kind of access that the people of Honolulu really have to the decisions being made on their behalf, and the local media’s place in all of it.

It was in early May that the Weekly began requesting comment from Mayor Hannemann about the Natatorium. Daily phone calls for a period of weeks, repeated e-mails, visits to Honolulu Hale. Time and time again, the requests were deferred or outright ignored.

The mayor’s spokesman, Bill Brennan, said Hannemann had merely wanted to wait until task force members had a chance to assess the situation for themselves–a standard and reasonable political tactic. “You know him,” Brennan said of Hannemann on Monday afternoon. “He talks. We never say ‘no comment.’” As promised, after Thursday’s task force meeting, Hannemann did speak to the recommendation, saying he planned to carefully review what was discussed over the past several months.

To be fair, repeated requests aside, there doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of pressure on Hannemann to speak candidly about his position. Too many local reporters have accepted canned quotes and City-commissioned figures at face value–not scrutinizing proclamations that the City was committed to carefully reviewing every possible option for the memorial when, in actuality, Hannemann’s administration has only spent money to explore demolition-based options. This means that members of the task force were forced to compare a decade-old restoration plan that Hannemann himself halted with newly reconceived demolition plans, which led to repeated confusion–at best–over cost estimates. To make matters worse, the majority of the local press corps turned out in force only for the final task force meeting last Thursday.

It’s understandable that, on the daily list of coverage options, a Natatorium task force meeting wouldn’t make the cut for any number of cash-strapped, understaffed local news outfits. Besides, this story has played out in the pages of local newspapers over and over and over for the past half-century. Every time, it goes something like this: Some believe the Natatorium ought to be torn down and replaced with a beach; others say the memorial ought to be refurbished, reconstructed or otherwise saved; still others suggest throwing a couple of dolphins in the pool and converting it into a marine resources center.

Maybe a City Hall that’s increasingly empty of reporters–Weekly reporters included–makes for a culture of municipal politics in which leaders don’t always expect to be subject to scrutiny. Veteran reporters can tell you that elected officials are no longer accustomed to the once-common practice of journalists staking them out and demanding comment. And politicians who aren’t regularly asked tough questions end up balking when reporters do challenge them directly. Here’s an exchange that took place Monday on the steps of Honolulu Hale, where Hannemann told me to meet him so that I could have less than five minutes of his time to ask him Natatorium-related questions as he walked from his office to his car:

Honolulu Weekly: Mr. Mayor, did you hand-select everyone on the task force for the Natatorium? Were they all your personal picks?

Mayor Hannemann: Well they were based on recommendations that groups gave me, staff gave me, just tracking these issues through the years.

HW: OK, so it seems like it was–

MH: It was a very fair, responsible group of people.

HW: –stacked with people who would go with an agenda to demolish. Is that right?

MH: [Silence]

HW: Why are you so committed to demolishing the Natatorium?

MH: What’s your name?

HW: Adrienne LaFrance

MH: You write very biased stories. You’re ill-informed and you should just talk to Bill Brennan. I don’t spend my time talking to biased writers.

HW: I’m not biased. I want you to comment.

MH: You’re biased and you’re very rude. Put that on the record. You are biased and you’re very rude. Bye! [Enters car. Slams car door]

I’ve interviewed a lot of public officials and asked a lot of direct questions, but I’ve never been on the receiving end of an accusation like that. Brennan, the mayor’s spokesman, explained that Hannemann was merely caught off guard, that he is usually better briefed about the nature of questions reporters have for him and that he still hasn’t forgiven the Weekly for covering him critically in the past. That may be true, but it’s also true that elected officials must expect to be asked tough questions–by reporters and by members of the public–at any given time, and particularly at Honolulu Hale during work hours. More importantly, elected officials must be willing to answer these questions.

The mayor’s reaction surprised me, not least because Hannemann is famously media savvy. I expected a simple, “No,” to my question about the make-up of the task force. I expected him to explain his commitment to demolition as a facet of protecting taxpayers from the potential burden of a multi-million-dollar restoration of a structure that, due to its exposure to the elements, would need yet another restoration sooner rather than later. Those would have been legitimate responses to earnest questions and we would have printed them for the readers who are wondering the same things. Instead, Hannemann had no answer. And perhaps a conversation-ending outburst is not technically the same as “no comment,” but it’s not good enough for Honolulu.

We’ll keep asking.