JOSEPH PONTANILLA
Running for: State House District 9 (Kahului, Wailuku, Paia, Spreckelsville)
Running against: Gilbert Keith-Agaran
Birthplace: Puunene, HI
Profession: Maui County Council member
Electoral Win/Loss Record: 5/0
First electoral victory: Maui County Council (2002)
Supports: Land development, organized labor, county funding for the Maui Visitors Bureau
Opposes: Separating affordable housing units from luxury housing units, applying the state’s Sunshine Law to the Maui County Council
Gets campaign donations from: Developer Kent Smith, Planning consultant Chris Hart, Castle & Cooke VP Ralph Masuda, Maui Lani Partners, IBEW Local 1186, Central Pacific Bank PAC
There are elected officials who give eloquent speeches. There are others with tremendous legal minds who put forth all sorts of visionary legislation, and those who’ve mastered political maneuvering and get their colleagues to support just about anything. Then there’s Joe Pontanilla, who basically just votes for what the big developers and unions want. Born in the Puunene plantation hospital in 1942, he grew up in a segregated workers camp, did a stint in the army, and worked at GTE for 34 years. Pontanilla has also never lost an election. In fact, Pontanilla was part of that infamous little dinner that Alexander & Baldwin threw at Mama’s Fish House back in 2006. It was an informal (and unpublicized) gathering for some of A&B’s top executives and their sympathetic friends on the Maui County Council (those members who weren’t invited treated the snub as a kind of honor in its own right). Pontanilla later told a Maui News reporter that he had paid for his and his wife’s meals and that conversation merely concerned banal subjects like “Las Vegas, community service, home life, vacations.” Whether the termed-out Pontanilla can translate his Maui political strength into a run for a state House seat remains to be seen.
Comments
comments