HILO — Mayor Harry Kim injured his arm and missed an important hearing in Honolulu on Monday, sparking renewed concerns about his health.
But Kim, 78, is fine, his wife and colleagues said. Kim was traveling to Honolulu and couldn’t be reached for comment by press time Thursday.
The “coconut wireless” in the small town that is the Big Island fired up quickly, speculating that Kim was hospitalized, that he fell, that he may even had another heart attack. All not true, said Kim’s wife, Bobbie.
“Don’t worry about Harry. He’s fine,” she said. “It’s not a big thing; it’s just one of those quirky little things that happened.”
Kim apparently tore a muscle in his upper arm over the weekend and visited first the emergency room, and then his regular doctor. He’s elected not to have surgery, Bobbie Kim said.
“He said, ‘I have two other muscles there,’” she said.
Kim is no stranger to the hospital. He’s had three heart attacks, bypass surgery, multiple bouts of meningitis and hepatitis and surgery on discs in his back and neck. But he’s bounced back, and said during last year’s mayoral campaign that his doctor told him it’s as if he never had heart problems.
His last heart attack was in 2008, but it was still brought up by other candidates during the 2016 campaign.
Managing Director Wil Okabe represented the county Monday during the annual mayors’ session before a joint meeting of the state House Finance Committee and Senate Ways and Means Committee. It’s not common for mayors of the four counties to miss this session, where they tell the legislative money committees their priorities.
Okabe was thrown the task with very little notice, but he said he got the message across using Kim’s speech as talking points.
“It was a challenge,” Okabe said.
Kim’s prepared speech sought an increase in the county’s share of the transient accommodations tax, a “reasonable” increase in the required county contribution to retirement costs for employees and a review of cuts to the Hawaii Health Systems Corp. for public hospitals.
Kim and Okabe have said the county’s problems with poverty and having the highest per capita homeless rate need to take priority.
The state Legislature has resisted returning more of the transient accommodations tax, also called the “hotel tax,” back to counties. The counties’ share was reduced during the recession and not returned to prior levels.
Legislators have said counties have their own ways of raising revenues, such as hiking property taxes or putting a surcharge on gas taxes. That message was iterated Monday.
“Harry doesn’t want to raise taxes,” Okabe said. “They’re not going to fix the situation by asking the counties to raise taxes. To put more taxes on the people is only going to make the problem worse.”
Not raising taxes, offering free bus fare and providing free water stations in all districts are Kim’s top-listed priorities in his speech.
