HONOLULU — The United States Conference of Mayors will return to Hawaii next year, the first time the annual gathering has been held in Honolulu in five decades.
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell has been trying to get the mayors conference to hold its annual meeting in Hawaii since being elected in 2012, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported.
Caldwell said excerpts of President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights speech from the 1963 meeting in Honolulu were played at last year’s gathering in Miami, which he thinks helped bring the event back to Hawaii.
The 2019 meeting will be held at Hilton Hawaiian Village — the same location as gatherings in 1963, when Kennedy spoke, and in 1967.
The conference is composed of the 1,400 mayors or other top elected executives of American cities and municipalities with populations of 30,000 or more residents.
About 300 mayors, and between 1,000 and 1,500 people including staff, family, resource people and speakers, are expected to come to Honolulu to attend.
The group meets each January in Washington, D.C., and again each June in a city hosted by one of its members. This year’s conference is in Boston.
“You have some of the best and brightest mayors from major cities, and forward thinkers in the country, coming together,” Caldwell said. “I do think that the great ideas in our country and around the world come out of our cities, and it starts with the mayors in many cases.”
I bet this is a real drunkfest on the tax payers dime.
So, now we’ll have a larger number of politicians that are wasting their voter’s money by flying to Hawaii. Great – why don’t they learn to have local meetings and teleconference since those tools have been available for decades. And we keep supporting the antique/expensive way to conduct “business,”
Great – just great.
Teleconference, that’s how we roll in the private sector, of coarse if we are responsible for our actions and spending!!!!!!!!!
KD – I”m with you on using technology!