On Sunday, the 14th of December, Civil Beatʻs Deputy Ideas Editor Richard Wiens penned an article about “The Silence of The Senate” and how leadership is “not talking”.

Reading the piece, it became clear that while the article identifies the silence—something any observer of the Hawaiʻi Legislature readily recognizes—the deeper analysis of why that silence exists was largely absent.

This writer understands why.

Public exposure to the Legislature is increasingly shaped by how information is consumed rather than how it is produced. For many residents, that means summaries—a short evening news segment, a headline, or a quick online update. Media outlets, responding to audience expectations and attention patterns, operate within those limits. The result is not a failure of reporting, but a structural environment in which sustained, adversarial engagement becomes harder to sustain.

That task has become more difficult in a rapidly changing media landscape where Hawaii no longer has a large corps of reporters stationed full-time at the Capitol. Coverage is concentrated among a small number of outlets juggling multiple beats, even as public expectations for information remain high.

This creates notable coverage gaps—and it is within these gaps that the perception of silence takes hold. Let’s explain.

The traditional media relies on a stated set of practices in order to get a story. From getting quotes to exposing disagreements and policy tension, and obtaining transparent statements that expose, are key practices for journalists to get the story.

However, if one is paying very close attention to how politicians are acting these days, one can very much see that they “get” the press, and have chosen, instead, to flip the narrative from allowing the press to speak on the issues, to the politicians speaking on them, themselves.

Senator Donovan Dela Cruz, who is the Chair of the powerful Senate Ways and Means committee, has refined his control of the narrative to the point where he could probably do a TEDx talk about how politicians can control the narrative.

Senator Dela Cruz does this by communicating his positions through a regular newsletter distributed to subscribers via his website. Published roughly weekly, the updates often respond to prevailing public discussions, allowing him to address current issues while maintaining full control over the framing and content.

And if the savvy political pundit were to think this out, it makes complete sense that the conversation between the Senator and his constituents is probably the most important to him. After all, focusing on oneʻs district is literally the job.

The other benefit for the Senator to keep communication at this level is that he is in total control of the content, which is one-way and non-adversarial.

That this material often receives limited media scrutiny is not necessarily a failure of leadership, but a reflection of how accountability mechanisms have shifted. In fact, again, if the pundit thinks this out, indeed, the Senator is discussing topics that the press wants to hear about. For instance, in July, Senator Dela Cruz came out with an article entitled “Legislators of the People and For the People,” where he speaks about the topic of the time – that of conflicts of interest and drilling down into the rules as to what constitutes a conflict of interest.

While the piece was not focused on him, the fact that his office wrote it should have piqued the ears of the press, telling them that to scrutinize the Senator, one needs to read his materials and not wait for him to do a 60 Minutes type interview in which he tells you everything.

And this should be the clearest example of how the media still assumes that accountability still flows primarily through access—that politicians must submit to interviews and press conferences for scrutiny to occur.

That may have been true in an earlier era. It is no longer how power communicates.

Today’s legislative leaders are not silent. They are prolific. They publish newsletters, issue statements, highlight projects, and frame reform on their own terms. The material is there. The task now is not to wait for a return to the old rules of press-politician interaction, but to interrogate what is already being said—what is emphasized, what is omitted, and how narrative control itself shapes public understanding.

Accountability doesn’t disappear when access does. It simply requires a different kind of scrutiny.

Sometimes, to figure out what is really going on, one has to look at alternative sources of information other than the news or even legislative briefings. While all of those can be informative, they are to a point.

When it comes to, potentially, actually looking at an issue and seeing what the leaders really say, one source to find that, on occasion, is the Neighborhood Board minutes.

This blogger, who was a member of a neighborhood board several years ago and sat in on even more of them while employed at the Honolulu City Council, understands that sometimes city leaders, needing to speak about a specific thing, will let the public know more in these forums.

That was the case when a review of the October 27, 2025, minutes of the McCully-Moiliili Neighborhood Board No. 8 was released, and the City’s Homeless Coordinator made a presentation. While you can read the minutes and the reader can come up with their own perspective of what was said, here is the perspective from Politics Hawaii.

Roy Miyahira is the City and County of Honolulu’s Director of Homeless Solutions. He started his service in the City under this office earlier in 2025, when this blogger was first introduced to Miyahira by the City Councilmember of the district, Scott Nishimoto. In a one-on-one discussion with him, Miyahira said he would be making a presentation to the Neighborhood Board on homelessness and what was being done to address it.

Being that he was going to present in public, it was figured to just wait to see what was said and then comment on it if there was anything worthy to report on.

The assumption by this veteran of the Neighborhood Boards was that the representative would present a “administration-friendly” report that glossed over the issues, emphasized the positives, and try to play down the negatives.

With the homeless, though, as a side note, positives and negatives are all about the visual, meaning how many homeless are on the streets (or parks), how many have been served (processed in homeless centers like IHS or the Punawai Center, how many were sent back to the Continent, how many were able to get stable housing.

Negatives, of course, are still seeing homeless people in the parks, on the streets, etc, who either don’t want or have not been provided services.

With that, Miyahira presented a report that didn’t try to weigh the discussion on the positives or negatives but just tried to lay it out in a factual way to the audience.

According to the minutes, Miyahira started with a discussion of the (then) current deployment of the Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered Persons (HONU) worksite at Old Stadium Park (Isenberg St. area). He noted that while 50% of the people who interact with HONU accept help, 40% will eventually return to the street.

(So to describe this in mathematical terms, for every 100 people HONU interacts with, for instance, 50 of them will accept services, at least initially. Of the cohort of 50 clients, 40% will eventually return to the street, so 20 people. Therefore, HONU is successful in moving 1 in 3 homeless off the street, using Miyahira’s report.)

Further in his presentation, it became clear that the current “treat everyone the same” model was not yielding better results.

Miyahira then noted that the current programs are achieving outcomes like prior deployments of HONU, confirming what many in the community see when it comes to treating homelessness at the government level – that results are holding steady, thus no measurable improvement is being reported.

From this pundit’s perspective of seeing officials come and try to dress up mediocre results, saying that things really have not changed is a nice sign that the City government is “getting it” when it comes to truthfully addressing an issue to the people.

To potentially address the shortfall, Miyahira explained a new approach to addressing the population by becoming more granular as to the types of services and where people can go. For instance, Miyahira rolled out a plan that is akin to “market-segmentation” in which homelessness is seen as a “consumer needs” issue, rather than a “treatment only” issue. This segmentation, if fully drawn out, would provide clients with a menu of services that they can choose from.

For instance, specialty beds would be designated for specific issues, like behavioral health, de-toxification, medical respite, and “stabilization pods”. The challenge is that right now, adding all the beds up as “just a bed”, there are not enough beds overall, let alone specific ones for these specific needs.

The other issue that Miyahira brought up was the practice of taking homeless clients on bus tours to shelters so that it feels less intimidating to the clients and, theoretically, increases acceptance to enter one. While it helps to instill confidence in going into a shelter, it also shows the trust gap that many clients have with the current shelter system.

(And if you have ever been to the shelters, like this blogger has in the past, even when it is calm and relaxed, shelters are not fun places to be in.)

If there is one thing to say about anyone taking on the homelessness portfolio at either the city or the state, it is that they take on a complicated portfolio in which the approach to the public can either sink or swim, whatever plans are put forward to address the issue. For Miyahira he presents a “new sounding plan” that has not been rolled out before, and addresses the fact that the current program is only holding the issue steady.

Rolling out a plan and acknowledging where the issue is now is one thing; it will be the follow-up by Miyahira that will tell whether the new plan put forward is the solution we’ve all been waiting for.

Or another plan, started in good faith, that just didn’t pan out, thus sending the City back again seeking other solutions.

Politics Hawaii with Stan Fichtman would not have existed without its co-founder, Brandon Dela Cruz, who, back in 2016, encouraged me, Stan Fichtman, to take ownership of the politicshawaii.com domain. Since then, the blog has published many pieces, yet Brandon chose to write only one himself.

And it will be the only one we will be able to show, as he passed away suddenly on November 10, 2025.

Brandon was a master of food. He understood it, celebrated it, and helped elevate it—particularly through his work with L&L Drive Inn (now L&L Hawaiian Barbecue), which grew into one of Hawaiʻi’s largest restaurant brands under his watch. Fittingly, the one piece he wrote for Politics Hawaii was about food, its history, and L&L’s place in that story.

As part of our in memoriam for Brandon, and in recognition of his role in the creation of this blog, we reissue his original piece here, faithfully reproduced.

Please enjoy.

A Celebration of Hawaii Casual Cuisine – L & L at 70

By Brandon Dela Cruz

In a get-together with the esteemed owner of this blog, I brought up the fact that L & L turned 70 in 2022. In his typical, “heh, now ain’t that somethin”‘ response, he casually asked me to provide some retrospect into it. I told him that I’d oblige his request with something better – I’d write about it.

In thinking about my tenure with the company which spans from the early 2000s and the legacy Hawaii brand known as L & L, it is incredible what has occurred. L & L has ushered a way for the cuisine of Hawaii to be enjoyed by the masses and has made a way for “Hawaii Fast Casual Cuisine” to become a thing internationally! To start, it behooves me to pay homage to the lineage of how the cuisine has gotten to where it is now. It is a cuisine that has changed, grown, added-onto, influenced, inspired, and evolved over many years to how it is L & L presents it through its roughly 220 locations in the present day.

Before the arrival of Captain Cook, Hawaii’s cuisine was primarily that which was offered by the indigenous people of the islands. Native Hawaiians cultivated their cuisine from many natural sources that spanned from the land to the sea including coconut and seaweed. From these sources, they would create a variety of dishes such as pork cooked from an underground oven called an “imu” that we now know as kālua pork. Pork and poi which was their main staple made from the Taro root. Perhaps the most well-known Hawaiian cultural cuisine offering is poke, or raw fish seasoned with a variety of condiments like sea salt and limu (a type of seaweed).

In the mid-18th century, Hawaii was discovered by explorers from the west and became influenced by their customs and practices. Eventually, western business and commerce entered the area and ushered in Hawaii’s agricultural age. During the time that shaped this era of the islands, an influx of immigration from a variety of places around the world would occur to support the various opportunities in the bustling industry. Immigrants from China, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other parts of the world converged in the mid-1800s through the early 1900s to work in sugar and pineapple plantations providing labor support.

Plantation work was physically intense and required workers to have proper nourishment. Many of them would bring their lunches in portable tin containers featuring the ethnic tradition of their origin. For example, the Japanese would have teriyaki-based meats while Filipinos would have dishes like chicken adobo. What was common among the largely Asian labor force in terms of cuisine was that many of them included rice with their meals. Naturally, the people who worked together shared their meals and with that their lives. Many of them became family to one another, being away from the loved ones of their place of origin, many thousands of miles away.  The celebrations of life extend beyond the workplace and include gatherings of the families of the workers, becoming the impetus of Hawaii’s large number of people who are of multiple ethnicities. Not to be remised, the gatherings of the workers became the extension of the sharing of the cultures, which many times included food. The rich Hawaii tradition of comingling various ethnic foods on one table found its true footing during Hawaii’s agricultural years.

Hawaii’s agricultural economy eventually saw a shift towards other economic opportunities as western culture, particularly that of the United States of America came into the mix. Still, the collective heavily Asian-influenced society at the time remained with the local island culture, especially with its food traditions. The urbanization of Hawaii ushered in economic opportunities, especially in the form of restaurants. A popular type of restaurant that emerged from this was the okazuya restaurant which became the marketplace for the “evolved” version of the cuisines shared among the local island communities. Okazu, meaning “side dish” in Japanese provided a variety of offerings that customers could choose from to create their own custom meals. Similarly, eateries like okazuya restaurants would offer “pre-packed” offerings in the form of bentos, taking a page out of the Japanese tradition of the bento-box, but with a Hawaii-influenced twist. While Hawaii’s local community continued to transition into the new post-agricultural economy, American influence, especially through Hawaii’s role in World War II, became more prevalent in many facets of Hawaii life. The local Hawaii cuisine was also subject to this as its cuisine would pop up in the form of hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, and what is now known as Hawaii’s favorite food – SPAM®. In addition to the already established okazuya restaurants, other eateries that took on the American “drive-in” concept emerged.

While many drive-in restaurants offered popular American treats, these places also offered a new take on popular Hawaii cuisine, that affectionately became the plate lunch. Back then, one could find hearty mash-up flavors like chili on top of spaghetti with a hot dog alongside more traditional and basic dishes such as roast beef on the menu. Plate lunches would vary on side accompaniments, but rice and macaroni salad remained the most popular serving with the main entrée of choice. The plate lunch menu evolved the Hawaii tradition of blending various flavors that had something for everyone in the community.

There were many drive-in restaurants around Oahu. One of them was a small shop called L & L. Primarily known for its milk offerings as L & L Dairy that started in 1952, the outlet eventually transitioned out of the dairy business and into a local eatery that served Hawaii’s collective ethnic & American cuisines fused in plate-lunch form.

In the mid-1970s Eddie Flores and Johnson Kam took over L & L and, in the years following, would make innovations to the plate lunch such as offering smaller “mini plates” as well as offering “healthier options” that replaced the carbohydrate-heavy white rice and macaroni salad with green salad brown rice. The duo also duplicated their successful restaurant formula across many of the islands, eventually overflowing into the continental United States in 1999 under the name “L & L Hawaiian Barbecue.” The “Hawaiian Barbecue” term was coined by Eddie Flores, Jr. who shared with me in my early years with the company that he created the term to help people identify with the food easier.

The bold move by Flores and Kam to introduce a regionally known cuisine, mainly confined to Hawaii to the continental United States didn’t come easy. Flores masterfully led L & L’s branding and franchise business approach at the corporate level in Hawaii while Kam courageously led the on-the-ground effort, taking the risk to open in unestablished cities and markets; eventually splitting his time between Hawaii and the areas where he opened locations.  To support the growth of L & L, Flores and Kam found others who were interested in the franchise opportunity they co-founded.  They became the franchisees of L & L who open and spread the presence of L & L franchised restaurants across multiple locales and states.

In many of these areas such as San Diego, the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., L & L found a cult-like following of many Hawaii local “kama‘aina” turned transplants to the continent who longed for a taste of home. In fact, their affinity to Hawaii and the L & L brand is an integral part of the success of the brand; and they still are L & L’s most loyal customers to this day. They are also our greatest ambassadors, constantly sharing freshly cooked, large-portioned plates with friends and family who are not familiar with the flavors of Hawaii.  But let me tell you, once they get their friends to bite into a SPAM® musubi (a block of sauce-flavored white rice topped with a slice of SPAM® and wrapped with a piece of nori seaweed), or a loco moco (hamburger and gravy topped with egg covering a bed of rice), they’re hooked!

L & L Hawaiian barbecue outside of the islands offers “Hawaii fast-casual cuisine” with a similar menu to that of its Hawaii counterparts such as the BBQ mix plate, chicken katsu, and kalua pork. Eventually, the SPAM® musubi was added after strong demand from local kama‘aina (the term referring to residents who live/once lived in the islands) who yearned for their favorite Hawaii snack. Eventually, L & L would grow from a single outlet in Los Angeles and find its popularity among many cities throughout California and beyond.

The trail that L & L blazed through the early 2000s to now continues to be the inspiration for a variety of restaurants that have developed their own Hawaii-influenced cuisine to follow. Still, L & L continues to be the leader in sharing Hawaii’s quintessential local Hawaii cuisine with the world. This includes celebrating the history, traditions, and years of diversity, and community that is an integral part of it. And reflecting on the 70-year history of the brand that started as a local island dairy to becoming the most well-known vehicle for introducing Hawaii cuisine to the world, it has been an honor of the ride that continues the commitment to bringing authentic, Hawaii-rooted, intricately infused multiethnic flavors with the world with a spirit of Aloha; celebrated with every delicious plate lunch that is brought into the world to enjoy!  Cheers!

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Brandon Dela Cruz is the Director of Marketing for L & L Hawaiian Barbecue.  He has been with the company since the early 2000s and has seen the growth of the company from several dozen to over 225 locations throughout several U.S. States and Japan.