State Rep. Chris Lee / Newly-elected State Rep. Chris Lee, who represents Lanikai and Waimanalo in District 51, is ready. Having prevailed in a tough race to replace Tommy Waters, Lee is outspoken about his agenda and has a vision for a Hawai’i with a vision. He spoke to Honolulu Weekly about budget priorities, education policy and his own plans for the future this week as he prepared for the opening of the legislative session on Jan. 21.

Are you excited?

Yeah, you know, this year of all years, we’ve got our work cut out for us. The day after the election we were busy here in our office at the capitol, getting to know not just what’s going on in my district, but also what’s going on at the larger state level, in the various departments. We’ve been trying to get a complete picture of what impact the economy is having on various programs, and to see what kind of cuts we’re going to have to make.

Is that pretty much the word on everyone’s lips? Cuts?

The governor’s budget is out, and there’s a whole lot of red ink in there. It’s going to have a big impact on our community. Especially on non-profits and other service providers…they are dealing with severe cutbacks, and some are even facing total shutdown. So there’s a lot going on and we’re trying to figure out how to save these things. It is going to be tough this year.

The good news is that it’s an opportunity to focus on things that have been on the back burner for years. Why not go back and look at things that haven’t been done and need doing? Let’s look at some of our old or existing laws and fix or improve them. We did that in 2006 with the penal code, cleaning up a lot of the old language.

An even bigger opportunity, I like to think, is that we’re at a turning point, in deeper trouble than we’ve been in for decades. We have to figure out not just how to get out of these problems we’ll face over the next decade, but also about where we want to be in 20, 30, 50 years from now…how do we create solutions to the problems of today that will build toward those things?

How do we do that?

A lot of people don’t do it. For a lot of people, it’s common sense to focus on the short term. During the election and having sat through a lot of hearings and talking to a lot of people, many of them are focused on the near future. So that may not just be a problem with government, it may be our nature. And so it might be on government to force people to think further out, to ask, as part of the solution to every problem, “Where do we want this to be in 30 years?”

Is it just about asking questions?

It may be more than that. Times are tight. We may have to force people. We need a plan, and we need it to look far more than five years down the road. It’s a paradigm shift in the way the legislature operates. We’ve had Hawai’i 2050 and other projects, but a lot of these things aren’t being taken seriously the way they need to be. Hopefully, as a new generation comes to the fore, they will be.

You seem to favor an up-not-out approach to new housing development?

I support a smart growth strategy, which is based on re-development of the urban core. It also involves something bigger than that, which I didn’t talk about in the campaign, and that’s recreating the structure of our city and our towns. We have these suburbs on O’ahu that are completely car-dependent. What the nation and the world are moving toward are walkable suburbias where everything you need–grocery store, restaurants, theaters–is within a six-block radius. One thing I want to introduce is a Complete Streets bill, which would mandate that new development follow that sort of model. Tyson’s Corner, Va., is spending half a billion to redevelop itself as a mixed-use walkable community. So we face a lot of the same challenges on an infinitely denser scale.

You talked a lot during the campaign about educational policy and mentioned often that a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work. Are you in favor of breaking up the statewide system along the lines Republicans have long advocated?

Education isn’t a partisan issue. For whatever reason, that approach [breaking up the statewide board of education into smaller boards] hasn’t been working. The community hasn’t been supporting it. That’s a dead issue. What we need to do is look at giving schools a little more autonomy. They know better than anyone what they need. The intent of the student weighted formula was to give schools more autonomy. In some cases they are now on par with some charter schools. I’ve even heard that some charter parents are considering going back to the DOE [Department of Education], which is definitely a first. Some of the charters don’t have the extra staff, etcetera. There’s a lot of room for growth…charter schools are supposed to be experimental. Ultimately what I’d like to do is take the best from the each school land put it together as a model we can use for the entire DOE. The thing that defines success, I’ve found, is the involvement of parents. So the question is, how do we keep the parents involved, and keep the kids in the classrooms?

You’ve talked about graduate school. Are you interested in a career in politics?

The opportunity presented itself. These kinds of things are sort of right time, right place. I don’t have a lot of other commitments, no kids, not married. This is the time to do it. Having worked at the leg before. It’s easy–once you get involved in politics as a career, you come to depend on the job…what I’m trying to do is rely on nothing. Once you start to rely on this, you start to get away from the mindset you need to do this job. This is the only commitment I have for the next two years. I’ll take it one year at a time.

Are you just in politics to get revenge on Punahou over Obama?

Somebody’s gotta stand up for ‘Iolani!

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