Cliff Slater: A Hawaiian Hero

I was sad to learn that my friend, Cliff Slater, died earlier this week at the age of 92. Cliff was a genuine hero who worked hard to improve life for people in Hawaii and in particular devoted thousands of hours and lots of his own money fighting the Honolulu rail boondoggle.

Cliff Slater does battle with the rail transit cabal in this political cartoon by John Pritchett. Used with permission.

Born in England in June, 1933, Cliff grew up in Chingford, a suburb of London. After serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force, he moved to Hawaii in his 20s. In Maui, he met Jack Ackerman and Larry Windley, who had started a tourist diving company called Maui Divers. They had also discovered black coral beds and were making some of the coral into jewelry.

In 1962, they put Cliff in charge of the jewelry company, and he quickly grew it to eclipse the diving business. Until 1982 the company manufactured coral jewelry that it sold wholesale to other jewelers, but in that year he opened the company’s first jewelry stores. Today, Maui Divers is the largest retail jeweler in Hawaii with more than 30 shops around the islands.

Cliff had moved jewelry manufacturing to Honolulu, so he was acutely aware of proposals to build an elevated rail line in Oahu in the 1960s. The first Honolulu streetcars were built in 1901. In 1933 the streetcar company bought its first Twin Coach buses, the first buses that were both less expensive to buy and less expensive to operate than electric streetcars. The company completely replaced Honolulu streetcars with buses in 1941.

In the 1960s, increasing traffic in Honolulu led some people to argue that new rail lines could solve the city’s congestion problems. Shortly after Cliff moved jewelry manufacturing to Honolulu, the federal government gave the city $340,000 to fund a 20-month rail transit study. Ominously, the study’s costs soon grew to more than $1 million and delays postponed its completion for several years. When it finally came out in 1968, the study proposed a 29-mile rail system that would supposedly attract so many riders that fares would cover all of its operating costs.

Many people, including the CEO of Honolulu’s bus system, questioned the need for rail, and Cliff joined the opposition in about 1983. By 1990, the system was projected to cost $1 billion, which would have made it one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in the state’s history. Despite its high cost, an opinion piece in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin argued that the project wouldn’t relieve traffic congestion. The article was by Cliff Slater, who predicted that the rail project would become a “fiscal black hole that we and our children will regret for years to come.”

In 1991, the projected costs of the rail line grew to $1.8 billion, but Cliff and other rail skeptics convinced the Honolulu city council to kill the rail proposal in a 1992 vote. Unfortunately, there is so much money to be made from such megaprojects that they never truly die, so it is no surprise that Cliff had to keep fighting rail transit over the next couple of decades.

One of the arguments frequently used by rail advocates is that streetcars only disappeared because of a General Motors conspiracy to force people off of transit and into automobiles. This idea was promoted by an attorney named Bradford Snell, who wrote a 1973 paper supposedly documenting the conspiracy. Several academics have debunked this idea, but none so well as Cliff, who wrote a 1997 paper responding, point-by-point, to Snell’s paper and showed that, if there was a conspiracy, it was only to take market share from Twin Coach, whose products had already persuaded the streetcar industry to switch to buses.

When the Honolulu rail plan was revived in the early 2000s, its projected cost had grown to $3 billion. Cliff, who had retired as CEO of Maui Divers in 1998, let the movement against the rail project, writing dozens of op-eds and other articles showing why rails made no sense for Honolulu.

By 2010, the projected cost of the rail line had grown to more than $5 billion, but the city council voted to build it anyway. I told Cliff that I thought the city’s environmental impact statement was legally inadequate because it failed to consider a wide range of alternatives. Cliff hired some of the most expensive environmental attorneys in the country to challenge the EIS, and they won, but lost. The court agreed that the range of alternatives wasn’t wide enough, but only ordered to city to consider one slight modification of the rail alternatives considered, not a full bus alternative.

Of course, we now know that the project is going to cost at least $10 billion and won’t be done for more than a decade after its originally planned completion date. Rail advocates tried to blame the cost overruns on Cliff, but we know it is just another example of optimism bias. As Cliff predicted in 1990, the city’s residents are already regretting the project and will continue to do so as long as they have to pay higher taxes to repay the bonds sold to fund it.

Despite losing this battle, Cliff kept working on transit issues. In 2023, Booklocker published his book, Transit: Its Growth, Decline, and Pending Demise, a 360-page review of the history of mass transit. As I wrote in my review, Slater’s book tells “the full story of how we got here” including many historical details I wasn’t familiar with. To help researchers, Slater posted all of the book’s 779 footnotes on line with links to any on-line publications so that readers wouldn’t have to search for them.

Besides rail transit, Cliff worked on a variety of other issues, including education, pension reform, the Jones Act, and the COVID lockdowns. He was a prolific writer, penning close to 200 articles for one newspaper alone, the Honolulu Advertiser.

Cliff was also an accomplished landscape and wildlife photographer, and in 2015 many of his photos were displayed in Honolulu’s Pegge Hopper Gallery. Photography took Cliff to such places as Alaska, Kenya, the Galapagos Islands, the Southwest, and Yellowstone. Looking at his pictures, I wish I had been able to join him on one of those trips.

Democracy is “is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for,” P.J. O’Rourke once wrote. “But — like other precious, sacred things, such as the home and the family — it’s not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead.” For democracy to work, we need people like Cliff Slater to keep the politicians honest and to safeguard the public treasury. Even if they don’t always win, heroes like Cliff leave the world a better place.