HSTA speaks out against misleading TV ads targeting Sylvia Luke’s LG campaign

As you consider who to vote for in the upcoming primary election, you may have seen some misleading TV attack ads targeting Sylvia Luke, who the Hawaii State Teachers Association supports in her race for lieutenant governor.

We feel it’s important that you understand these ads use a mishmash of disconnected facts to attack Sylvia’s integrity and confuse voters.

A political action committee funded by the Hawaii Carpenter’s Union is running the misleading ads as retribution against Sylvia. That’s because in 2017, as chair of the House Finance Committee, Sylvia refused to saddle taxpayers with a permanent tax increase to fund the Honolulu rail transit project.

Publicly available media logs show that the carpenters’ PAC has committed to spending $565,000 for TV and radio ads on behalf of lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Ikaika Anderson. That is two and a half times more money than Anderson’s campaign has raised on its own. Anderson is the only candidate on the carpenter PAC’s website and he is the one candidate the PAC has endorsed.

Over the last decade, this PAC has spent millions of dollars attacking candidates for their opposition to rail.

In fact, Sylvia Luke should be praised for guarding taxpayers against facing higher taxes forever because of the rail project.

We know that Sylvia has been a strong supporter of public education and educators. Among her most recent priorities:

• Ensuring teachers are paid for their years of service,
• Fighting for much-needed teacher housing,
• Creating a stipend program to encourage university students to teach in public schools, and
• Giving more support to the agency that plans and constructs educational facilities.

Sylvia is the only candidate for lieutenant governor who really understands every department of our state government. During her 20 years in the House, and the last decade chairing the House Finance Committee which oversees the state budget, she has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the state that none of her rivals can match.

Don’t let smears and disinformation distract you. Attack ads like those targeting Sylvia disgust voters and turn people off about the election process.

Please be sure to vote for Sylvia Luke in the Democratic primary, and urge your family and friends to support her as the best-qualified candidate for lieutenant governor.