WAILUKU, Maui — When she first jumped into public life as a councilwoman, Mayor-elect Charmaine Tavares used as inspiration her late-night talks with her father, Hannibal Tavares, who served as Maui mayor throughout the 1980s.

Both Tavares and her dad, who died in 1998, were night owls who would stay up to the wee hours talking about county affairs and politics. "I loved seeing that kind of passion," she said.

Now she is pursuing her own passion to improve government services and make daily life a little easier for Maui County residents.

While aware of community needs through her council duties, Tavares said that during informal coffee meetings and other campaign events with voters, she learned just how important the county's consumer-oriented services, such as permit processing, trash collection, motor vehicle registration and driver's licensing, are to residents.

"They really care about day-to-day life and how living on Maui is a challenge," said Tavares, a five-term council member who defeated Mayor Alan Arakawa in Tuesday's general election.

Her ideas include a triage system for construction permit applications, which are now subject to a lengthy backlog due to the high volume of applications, inadequate staffing and a "first-come, first-served" policy that has proven costly to homeowners, small-scale builders and major developers alike. Under a triage system, permits for simple projects such as a residential rock wall would be sent to a separate desk for quick processing, while more complex projects would be sent to different desks for varying levels of scrutiny depending on the scale of the development.

Hiring more staff also would help speed the process, said Tavares, who takes office Jan. 2.

"There has been a hesitation to grow government to keep up with the economy because if there's a downturn, then what do you do with all the employees you've hired? Well, when was the last downturn on Maui?"

That would be in the early '90s during the first Gulf War, but even then Maui weathered the drop in tourism much better than the rest of the state and rebounded more quickly.

TRAINED TO BE TEACHER

Tavares, 63, was born in Hana, where her father was serving as a police sergeant. He later became an educator and member of the Board of Supervisors, precursor to the County Council. After graduating from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, Tavares worked as a health and physical education teacher in public schools on O'ahu and Maui for 15 years before deciding she'd had enough. "The fact that everything had to go through Honolulu drove me nuts," said Tavares, whose no-nonsense attitude appeals to many voters.

While working toward an advanced degree in public administration at the University of Nevada-Reno, she was contacted by Maui Community College to see if she would be interested in leading the Upward Bound program. Tavares accepted and ran the program for six years before her father, the mayor, asked her to take over the Department of Parks and Recreation for the final 18 months of his second term.

She was asked to stay on by her father's successor, Linda Lingle.

It was a stressful position with long hours, and after 6 1/2 years, Tavares decided to retire in 1996, knowing she would have to wait for six months to meet the age qualification for benefits. During that time, she was approached about running against Upcountry council incumbent Bob Monden.

Recalling the series of late-night chats with her father, Tavares accepted the challenge, but only if her campaign workers agreed there would be no roadside sign-waving ("Too dangerous," she said) and no telephone canvassing or door-to-door campaigning ("It's an interruption of people's personal time.")

Following family tradition, Tavares ran as a Republican and beat Monden, a Democrat, by a little more than 1 percent of the vote.

The county switched to a nonpartisan system in 2000, and Tavares said she is not active in the GOP and has not paid party dues since then. "As an elected official in a nonpartisan county, we should try to walk that walk. I'm going to be nonpartisan because that's the most efficient way to work in the community," she said.

Tavares has been a top vote-getter in countywide council elections, often running unopposed, which she said she hated. "I didn't get invited to go anywhere and I didn't like that at all. I didn't have an opportunity to go to forums" to explain her positions or meet voters, she said.

The county's five-term limit for council members meant Tavares would have to leave office after the current term, but that was no reason to run for mayor.

"I figured Alan was good for two terms, and by time he stepped down I would have been out of office for two years and no one would remember me," she said. But during the past 18 months, voters became disenchanted with Arakawa and his relationship with the council deteriorated, Tavares said.

In addition, the councilwoman said she was disappointed that not more was being done to provide affordable housing for working families and on the renewable-energy front, one of Tavares' pet causes.

Her candidacy gained more momentum with a primary win over eight other candidates including the incumbent and former mayor James "Kimo" Apana. Then came an unsolicited endorsement from U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, the state's most revered Democrat. While mayor, Tavares' father had worked with the senator on various projects, and Inouye told her he considered the councilwoman "a chip off the old block."

She was floored by Inouye's support, which Tavares said will open doors for her at the Democrat-controlled Legislature and in Washington, D.C.

Tavares added another restriction: She limited campaign contributions to $2,000, half the amount allowed for the mayor's race.

Tavares accepted donations from all-comers, and while developers and big corporations contributed, there was even greater grass-roots support from those in the "under $100" category, she said. Endorsements from the Sierra Club, the Maui Contractors Association, trade unions and other diverse groups are evidence, Tavares said, that she plans to run an open, inclusive and collaborative administration.

Councilman Michael Molina of Makawao predicts harmonious relations between the council and the mayor-elect.

"She's a great consensus builder and I think there will be less tension between the council and mayor," he said.

IMPROVING SERVICES

In addition to improving government services, the mayor-elect's to-do list includes finishing the state-mandated update of the county's Water Use and Development Plan, which has been languishing for years in the Department of Water Supply. Her administration also will draft rules for the newly passed Residential Workforce Housing Policy that Tavares supported as a council member. The measure establishes a formula for hotel and large developers to include in their projects housing that is affordable to families earning between 100 percent and 160 percent of the county's median income of $65,700 for a family of four.

She will have to patch up hard feelings with some developers and others in the business community who criticized the housing policy as too burdensome.

Tavares also will have to jump feet-first into collective-bargaining negotiations and budget preparations. She must submit a spending plan to the council by March 15.

Filling her cabinet can't wait until Jan. 2, and Tavares is accepting resumes at her campaign office until Dec. 1. She hopes to make decisions on some appointees by mid-December, although Tavares said she's not in any rush to hire all the top positions before she assumes office.

The appointments will include naming a director and deputy director to the new Department of Environmental Management, which will oversee solid waste, recycling and related fields. Voters in last week's election approved a charter amendment to split the Department of Public Works and Environmental Management into separate agencies. The change will take effect at the start of the new fiscal year in July, allowing the new mayor time to plan for the separation.

"Public works accounts for 25 percent of the county's total budget, and it's too huge for one deputy and one director to manage," said Tavares, who introduced the charter amendment proposal that ended up on the ballot.

Having worked with three mayors while on the council — Lingle, Apana and Arakawa — Tavares said she aims to avoid one of the pitfalls of higher office that she's observed during that time: the urge to build a legacy.

"I don't care who gets credit. It's whoever or whatever it takes to get it done, that's what matters. No one person does anything around here," Tavares said.

Reach Christie Wilson at cwilson@honoluluadvertiser.com.