KAHULUI — Sitting Maui County Council Member Alika Atay appeared headed toward defeat and Mayor Alan Arakawa lost his bid to reclaim his old Kahului residency council seat.

Former council member and former county Housing and Human Concerns Director Alice Lee garnered 22,917 votes, or 47.3 percent, as of the third printout to Atay’s 20,180, or 41.7 percent, in the race for the County Council’s Wailuku-Waihee-Waikapu residency seat. Atay narrowed a nearly 4,000-vote gap in the third printout with only one precinct unreported. The second printout showed Lee with 15,797 votes, or 51.6 percent, to Atay’s 11,556, or 37.7 percent.

Social justice organizer Natalie “Tasha” Kama led Arakawa through the night to win convincingly by 10,178 votes. At the third printout, she had 27,191, or 56.1 percent of the votes to Arakawa’s 17,013 or 35.1 percent. At the second printout, Kama had 16,796, or 54.9 percent of the vote, to Arakawa’s 11,127, or 36.3 percent.

“I wish I could say it was all me, and I’m so good and I’m so smart,” she said. “But it wasn’t. It was his own doing. A lot of it was his own doing. If he was a really good mayor, it would’ve been tougher. I don’t have to give him credit for that, but I have to acknowledge that.”

Kama’s total ballots are more than double what she received in the Aug. 11 primary, when she led Arakawa by about a thousand votes.

“Right now, I feel like it’s that feeling where you want something so bad and then suddenly you get it, and you’re like, ‘Oh wow it’s here. It’s happening,’ ” she said. “I’m sure it’ll settle in tomorrow when I wake up and say, ‘I am the new Kahului council woman.’ ”

Shortly before the third printout, Lee was still anxiously waiting for more results.

“I have no idea which precincts came in and which precincts are outstanding . . . Without that kind of information, it’s like who knows what is waiting out there,” she said.

Lee was taken back by the number of blank votes in the election.

“People don’t realize that if you don’t like a particular candidate, maybe you should sit down and find out more about them, instead of just assuming things,” she said. “From my experiences, being on the campaign trail all these years, I can’t think of one person that doesn’t have Maui County’s best interest at heart. You may not like how they look, or you may disagree with them on one of two things. (But) generally speaking, most candidates are open to discussion and just give them a chance. We really need people to come out and vote. Otherwise, the future of Maui is going to fall into the hands of a few.”

When asked if she thought that Atay’s various controversies affected the votes in the race, Lee said “I would hope so.”

She pointed to one specifically: the barring of Atay’s executive assistant, Brian Bardellini, from the seventh floor of the county building where the offices of Council Services and County Clerk are located. The issue arose over violations of the county workplace violence policy.

Lee, a County Council member from 1989 to 1998 and director of the county Department of Housing and Human Concerns from 1998 to 2006, said she knows the staff on the seventh floor, and they asked her to come back.

She said the employees told her: “We are afraid to even ride in the elevator with this guy.”

“I’m thinking, they made me feel so bad. They know I would never allow that, period,” Lee said.

Bardellini also was subject of a council committee review regarding a county grant awarded to him to put on events honoring Queen Ka’ahumanu’s 250th birthday in March. Vendors complained that they were not paid. The county eventually terminated the contract.

The state Campaign Spending Commission also fined Atay’s campaign and the candidate $2,700 for violating campaign spending laws, including two counts of unauthorized handling of campaign funds.

Lee said she not only ran against Atay, but also against nine others, referring to the ‘Ohana Coalition-backed candidates, of which Atay is a member.

“I think that’s what they wanted,” she said of the coalition.

She said the goal was to have the whole slate to be elected.

“It appears that, to some extent that worked,” she said.

Atay has served a single term as a council member. Two years before he was elected in 2016, he came to the forefront publicly as a leader in the SHAKA (Sustainable Hawaiian Agriculture for the Keiki and the Aina) Movement. SHAKA led the effort to gather enough petition signatures to get an initiative for a moratorium on the farming of genetically modified organisms on the 2014 general election ballot. It passed but later was overturned by a federal judge.

Calls to two phone numbers for Atay and an email sent to his campaign were not returned Tuesday night.

This will be Kama’s first stint in elected office. Previously, she lost campaigns to unseat then-Speaker of the House and Wailuku state Rep. Joe Souki in 2008 and Council Member Dain Kane in 2002. Kama shocked many with her performance at this year’s primary, which paved the way for her victory in the general election.

“The timing was different this year,” she said. “I think people were disgruntled with the 2016 election, and I’m sure that had a lot of impact on the turnout this year.”

Arakawa has taken heat for several issues over his three-term tenure as mayor from lawsuits to community backlash over public comments. He also turned heads Tuesday night after he called mayoral candidate Elle Cochran an “idiot” to a KITV reporter on live television.

Multiple attempts to reach Arakawa were unsuccessful.

Kama thanked her supporters as well as those who voted for her — even if it was a vote against Arakawa. The Kahului race had the least blank votes of all the council races with 4,228.

“If their vote was against him, thank you very much because they could’ve just said neither and that would’ve been worse,” she said. “They made a conscious decision that I don’t like what’s going on here, and I want to vote for this. That’s sufficient for me because it tells me they didn’t want to continue with his administration or even his programs. It tells me they wanted a new direction and they wanted change.”

Kama said her primary focus entering the council will be on housing. She spent time working for Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Center and more recently as lead organizer of Faith Action for Community Equity.

“We got to get those units built or something,” she said. “People are suffering. They really, really are. Unless you’re working with the population, you don’t see it.

“It’s going to be weird, but only for a short time because you can’t afford to feel weird for a long time,” she continued. “You have between now and the end of December to get through the weirdness. I want to prepare and get some understanding under my belt about the functionality of the county and do a lot of talk story.”

Kama also provided suggestions to Victorino as the new mayor and hopes he will look to promote directors and deputies from within the departments rather than “hiring all these people from all over the place.” She asked that he foster a good environment and not disrupt departments too much.

“You want to add to them and enhance them,” she said. “All those people in the departments are going to be a lot more loyal to our community and the mayor if they come from within and not from outside.”

* Chris Sugidono can be reached at csugidono@mauinews.com and Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.