For Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, Maui wildfire is ultimate leadership test -

As the coronavirus raced around the globe in 2020, the public face of Hawaii’s aggressive response was a political leader with rare credentials to tackle a health crisis: then-Lt. Gov. Josh Green, an emergency room doctor who had once practiced medicine in rural Hawaii.

Green’s calm but firm performance as Hawaii’s covid-19 liaison, marked by his frequent video updates before a whiteboard, was widely credited with both keeping death rates low in this isolated state and propelling the Democrat to the governor’s office, which he easily won in November.

Now Green’s deep crisis-mode experience is being tested by an emergency far different from a viral pandemic or a hectic E.R. shift. The Maui wildfire that destroyed Lahaina last week has taken at least 99 lives, caused $6 billion in damage and dramatically compounded a housing and homelessness problem that Green had already declared an existential emergency for the state. His performance as both commander of the response and grief counselor is likely to shape not only the future of Lahaina, but also Green’s political fortunes.

“He brings a doctor’s examining room ‘let’s get to whatever the problem is and try to fix it right away’ thinking, and it has been very successful for him as a politician,” said Richard Borreca, a veteran political journalist and columnist for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

But this “is not just a housing crisis; the existence for a few thousand people has just vaporized,” Borreca said, referring to people displaced by the fire. “And how Josh Green can handle that is going to be what defines him for the next two years at least.”

As search teams continue to scour Lahaina’s ashes for human remains and as frustration mounts over the speed of the government’s response, some critics have begun to point to Green’s pre-fire decree to suspend regulations to speed housing construction — and fundraising prowess that includes donations from developers and many out-of-state contributors — as evidence that the historic town is at risk of falling prey to developers and distant speculators.

Power lines likely caused Maui’s first reported fire, video and data show

Green has, so far, remained cool, offering more updates with the whiteboard and made regular assurances that Maui’s cultural and historical wealth will be protected.

On Monday, Green said he was considering a moratorium on sales of damaged or destroyed properties and vowed to take legal steps to “allow no one from outside our state to buy any land until we get through this crisis and decide what Lahaina should be in the future.”

That sort of promise will be closely watched in a region where few issues are more sensitive than land use, said Keli’i Akina, president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a nonprofit policy organization. “If the governor fails to help current owners get the capital they need so they can rebuild as quickly as they can, we don’t know what can happen,” he said. “He has to protect local landowners over developers.”

Green centered his gubernatorial campaign on the need for affordable housing, particularly for Native Hawaiians, in a state that has the nation’s highest cost of living and hemorrhages 20 residents a day, mainly because of housing affordability. Just weeks before blazes laid waste to West Maui, Green issued an emergency proclamation — the sort typically used during natural disasters — that suspended several state and county laws to eliminate red tape and streamline the construction of 50,000 homes.

Supporters called it a brave and innovative prescription for a long-standing problem. Critics called it an alarming exercise of executive power that could compromise natural and historical resources while doing little to ensure housing for low-income residents.

Green has not been “the most receptive to challenges or criticism,” said Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club’s Hawaii chapter, who added that his concerns about the proclamation have been “met with a defensive rather than reflective posture.”

The governor has indeed pushed back, saying the scale of the state’s housing problem — and a shortage of critical workers — require an emergency approach.

“If you need a firefighter in an emergency, they may be on their second or third shift back to back, because we have too few of them here in the state,” Green said in mid-July. “If anyone says this isn’t an emergency or this isn’t a crisis, they are not aware of what’s going on in Hawaii.”

His identity as a physician has been central to his political career. It has also made the governor a “maverick” among lawmakers but burnished a public “image as a caring, competent doctor,” said Colin D. Moore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.

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Green was raised in Pennsylvania, where he was an accomplished high school tennis player and a class valedictorian. He stayed in-state for college at Swarthmore and medical school at Pennsylvania State University, during which he spent a year working in hospitals in Swaziland, now called Eswatini. After graduating, he headed to Hawaii on a National Health Service Corps scholarship and practiced primary care in a vast, rural swath of the Big Island.

The poverty, housing shortages and addiction he saw during that time inspired him to run for office, Green has said. In the state legislature, where he served as a representative and senator for 14 years, he was known as a team player but hardly a party insider, Borreca said.

“A lot of politicians in Hawaii who are successful over a long period of time are with the money committees — the ways and means or finance committee, or judiciary. And that hasn’t been Josh’s experience at all,” Borreca said. “But he’s always been a very good campaigner” and skilled fundraiser, he added.

In 2018, those politicking skills landed him the job as lieutenant to Gov. David Ige (D), and by early the following year, he was spending most of his time focused on homelessness, he told the Star-Advertiser. While in office, he worked weekends in the emergency room of a small hospital, and in 2019 he mobilized a 76-person team that vaccinated nearly 37,000 people in Western Samoa in two days, he told Forward. It was, he said, “the experience of a lifetime.”

Then covid-19 hit. In the early days of the pandemic, Hawaii Civil Beat reported that initially Ige sidelined Green, who had called for stronger restrictions and labeled the administration’s handling of testing “a total fail.” But Green reestablished himself as the leader of a coronavirus task force and the state’s public face on the issue.

Green helped drive Hawaii’s protective response: vaccination mandates for teachers and state employees, indoor mask mandates for businesses, and proof of vaccination or quarantines for travelers to the islands. Small protests were staged outside his condo, and Green said he was subjected to ethnic slurs from opponents. Green, who is married to Jaime, a Native Hawaiian, and has two teen children, is Jewish.

But in Hawaii, which is strongly Democratic, the pushback was relatively minor. Polling in 2021 found just 22 percent of voters approving of Ige’s performance, while 63 percent approved of Green’s. Green won the governorship with nearly two-thirds of the vote.

“I’ve become like a part of the family for most of the state,” Green told The Washington Post in 2021. “It appears that I’ve formed a bond with people. Not just the Democratic Party electorate, or the primary electorate, but everybody.”

As governor, Green is no longer allowed to practice medicine. But critics and supporters alike note that his medical training is never far from his public persona.

Over the course of one month this spring, local news outlets reported, the governor rendered aid three times to ordinary people in medical crisis. In one case in June, Green was on his way to a bill signing when he saw a man ejected from the bed of a pickup. He conducted a neurological assessment, calmed the man and made sure he was breathing, the Star-Advertiser reported.

“I would prefer that nobody ride in a truck bed, because people need to be belted in,” Green said in a statement at the time.

Whether his ability to aid and advise Lahaina — not to mention build affordable houses across the state — will come as naturally remains to be seen. Green’s housing push was the first real test of his leadership as governor, and debate over it had only started to unfold when the Maui inferno began to rage.

“He doesn’t have much time to prove that it will deliver results for local families,” when it comes to affordable housing, Moore said.

A complex natural disaster will further test Green’s skills — and constituents’ trust in him, he added.

“I think Green recognizes that the response to this tragedy in Lahaina will define his legacy,” said. “If he wants a second term, he will have to deliver results for Maui.”

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