2025 State of the City Address
Mayor Rick Blangiardi — March 18, 2025
In front of a packed audience at the Mission Memorial Auditorium in Honolulu, Mayor Rick Blangiardi delivered his annual State of the City address on Tuesday, March 18, 2025. The speech primarily focused on the issues which Oʻahu residents identify as the island’s most pressing issues — issues like housing, homelessness and public safety. Click here to watch the full speech!
The Sky’s the Limit: Skyline Will Run to the Airport This Year
Skyline will begin operations through the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and into Kalihi starting October 1, 2025, an announcement made by Mayor Rick Blangiardi during his State of the City Address.
The airport is one of several critical new stops that will come on line as the second segment of Skyline becomes operational, including Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (Makalapa), Lagoon Drive (Āhua), and the Middle Street Transit Center (Kahauiki). These stops represent crucial employment, residential, and economic hubs that will provide public transportation opportunities to thousands of Honolulu residents on a daily basis.
Segment 2 represents 5.2 miles of rail guideway running from Hālawa to Kalihi. Vehicle train testing is currently underway.
Construction on the third and final rail segment, through Downtown Honolulu and into Kakaʻako, will start this year. The entire system is slated to open in 2031.
Skyline also represents a transformative opportunity to create high-density, mixed-use communities, where people will choose to live along the rail line.
Transforming Iwilei With Transit Oriented Development
The City’s leadership team has an inspirational vision to transform the Iwilei Center Complex into a mixed-use community with at least 2,000 housing units, with Skyline’s Kūwili Station serving as the catalyst and anchor for a neighborhood that has long been underserved.
The plan is to break ground on this development by 2028, as stated in Mayor Blangiardi’s State of the City address. The City is currently accepting proposals from developers to create the world-class community that our residents deserve, with features including affordable housing, commercial and retail space, government services, educational facilities, recreational opportunities, and more. Making all this possible is the City’s 2024 purchase of the 3.8-acre parcel.
Iwilei Center will not sit idle awaiting development. The facility is now home to Kumu Ola Hou, a groundbreaking new homeless shelter that focuses on brain and behavioral health. Kumu Ola Hou is compassionate housing, steeped in Hawaiian principles, that focuses on restoring cognitive function through neuroscience and architecture. It is the first of four separate homeless shelters that will open inside Iwilei Center this year, adding a total of 100 more treatment beds to the City’s inventory.
North Shore First Responder Hub
In the State of the City address, Mayor Blangiardi stated that the City is working diligently toward creating a first responder hub on the North Shore of Oʻahu, which will serve as a base of operations for our Honolulu Ocean Safety Department lifeguards. The facility will also feature a new ambulance station, dramatically reducing emergency response times.
The new facility could also provide additional resources for other first responder agencies, including a helicopter landing pad that could be used for air rescue or aerial firefighting operations. The facility would be designed to include conference rooms and meeting spaces, allowing for better coordination of emergency response situations on the North Shore of Oʻahu.
Critical to the project’s success is the purchase of a highly-coveted piece of land across the street from Shark’s Cove. These plans are subject to a negotiated sale price with the current landowner, but could be transformative for our North Shore communities.
This effort is the result of countless conversations with community members, public safety officials and Honolulu City Council Vice Chair Matt Weyer.
Meanwhile, the Blangiardi administration is committed to investing in the City’s brave lifeguards, who have proven time and again their willingness to put their lives on the line to save others. The City anticipates spending millions over the next four years on the planning, design and construction of improvements to existing Ocean Safety facilities, as well as on the construction of new facilities.
Exploring an EMS/HFD Merger
Public safety is the overarching priority of City operations. Keeping our communities safe requires a steadfast dedication and a relentless commitment to continuous improvement.
That is why we are establishing a task force to determine whether the Honolulu Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services, which operates our ambulance units, would be better off as a single, integrated department.
Fire-based EMS programs can be found all over the country, and with the number of 911 calls for emergency treatment on Oʻahu skyrocketing, we need to find out whether a consolidation of fire and EMS can improve response times and EMS operations. Equally as important, we need to study the impact it will have on the morale of our first responders.
In 2021, our first year in office, we took operational control of EMS from the state. We were confident that we could run EMS more efficiently. In that effort, it became quite apparent that EMS needed to focus specifically on medical response, and that Ocean Safety had earned the right to be its own first responder agency. That is why we worked diligently and successfully toward making Ocean Safety its own department.
Meanwhile, EMS continues to innovate. The department is working with Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center to start a brand new training program in Leeward Oʻahu, so that residents interested in becoming paramedics or EMTs will have easy access to training, facilities and instruction without having to drive all the way to Kapiolani Community College.
Generating New Housing Opportunities
The City and County of Honolulu is unveiling a bold new housing strategy – focused on spurring the development of housing and transit oriented communities – with the sense of urgency that is required to address the affordable housing shortage on the island of Oʻahu.
The Blangiardi administration has submitted to the Honolulu City Council a resolution to merge the Office of Housing with the Department of Land Management to create a new “Department of Housing and Land Management.” The move will bring together the City’s real estate and housing experts into a single, unified operation. A singular question will be driving all decisions: “Will this help us create housing?”
Key components of the new housing plan:
- The creation of a development division that will spearhead collaborative efforts with development partners to aggressively create new housing units on City lands. Already, at least 10 under-utilized City-owned properties have been identified that would better serve the public if they were transformed into affordable housing. These ten parcels have the potential to add nearly 2,000 units to the housing market on Oʻahu. Solicitations for the development of five of those properties are already out.
- The creation of a finance division that will explore innovative financing, including the potential use of multi-family taxable revenue bonds and the provision of low-cost construction equity financing. The City has already made progress when it comes to financing; nearly $670 million in bond allocations have been awarded to developers, including $140 million in awards scheduled to close later this summer to help finance more than 400 new public housing units via the recently reactivated Private Activity Bond program.