Though he is the mayor of Honolulu, Peter Carlisle offered a “prosecutor’s answer” to the question of what needs to be done about billionaire real estate mogul Genshiro Kawamoto’s many Kahala Avenue properties.

In a mayoral debate last week, Carlisle — who was Honolulu’s prosecutor for 14 years before he was elected mayor in 2010 — had this to say when Hawaii News Now’s Keahi Tucker asked if Kawamoto “must be stopped or [is] misunderstood:”

“The guy is a colossal pain in the neck who puts on a blight on the whole area. He’s doing this because he’s a very strange and odd person and he needs to be stopped. He needs to start following the law and stop being a blight to his neighbors. … A prosecutor’s answer, by the way.”

Kawamoto owns dozens of properties in the affluent neighborhood, and many of those properties are abandoned and dilapidated. (Civil Beat wrote extensively about the situation in Kahala in a three-part series last week.)

In the past seven years, the city has charged Kawamoto with 56 property violations, and he has paid $38,000 in penalties as a result. But that figure seems to be insignificant to Kawamoto, who is known to pay several times market price for his multimillion-dollar properties on Oahu. Carlisle says Kawamoto “needs to start following the law,” but what about enforcement?

Many of Kawamoto’s neighbors in Kahala have complained that existing laws lack teeth with the city Department of Planning and Permitting. For its part, the department is reluctant to put Kawamoto’s violations into a larger context. A DPP spokesman told Civil Beat that the department won’t characterize “any property owner, or compare one with another.”

Perhaps that will change now that its boss told a statewide television audience that Kawamoto “must be stopped.”

But the department has faced complaints about enforcement in the past. As Civil Beat reported last year, city officials estimated there could be thousands of illegal rental violations but barely two dozen citations for such violations in a one-year period. Yet the city’s lawmakers have turned to the Legislature for guidance on how to proceed with Kawamoto’s presence in Kahala.

District 4 City Council member Stanley Chang — like Carlisle, an attorney — said he testified in strong support of a state measure to hold property owners personally liable for “a property nuisance on residential property that causes injury or damage to the person or property of another person.” That bill stalled in committee this year.

So where does that leave the people of Honolulu?

With a mayor who complains about Kawamoto — but in the capacity of his previous office — and a council member who turned to the state to assuage the complaints of his constituents. The greater question is this: If Kawamoto’s conduct is within the law, and if public officials speak openly against it, what will they do to change things in Kahala?

Put another way: Carlisle owes the people a mayor’s answer — and perhaps a mayor’s leadership to back it up.