In November 1999, former Honolulu reporter Rick Daysog, now at the Sacremento Bee, wrote about the former Bishop Estate’s attempts to derail federal reforms in nonprofit laws.
Ousted trustees of the Bishop Estate paid former Gov. John Waihee to lobby top White House officials in an effort to protect their hefty paychecks, according to internal trust documents obtained by the Star-Bulletin.
Waihee met with President Bill Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, at the White House in late 1995 to discuss the so-called intermediate sanctions law, which penalizes trustees of charitable trusts who receive excessive pay….
And while the trustees’ lobbying eventually fizzled, critics said it demonstrates the lengths to which the ousted trustees went to protect their compensation, and lays bare the 115-year-old charitable trust’s political connections in the nation’s capitol.
I mention it here because the name of Denis Dwyer pops up. Dwyer was the “mystery man” among a Honolulu rail delegation to Washington last week headed by Mayor Peter Carlisle.
A Sept. 22, 1995, memo from Waihee and Verner Liipfert staffer Denis Dwyer indicated that the estate initially sought to “kill” the bill but was unable to do so due to a barrage of negative stories about nonprofits in the national media. That year, longtime United Way President William Aramony was convicted of defrauding the charity.
Waihee and Dwyer later developed a backup position to “minimize the adverse impacts” on the estate.
The trustees successfully lobbied for the elimination of the so-called exit tax, which gave the IRS the power to charge hefty fines to charities that convert to a for-profit corporation.
The trustees also pushed unsuccessfully for a provision that would have set their compensation according to state law. Under that rule the trustees’ salaries would have been protected from the overview of the IRS or other federal agencies.
According to the estate’s documents, Verner Liipfert’s lobbying team consisted of 15 lawyers and consultants, including Waihee and former state official Norma Wong.
The campaign included dozens of telephone calls, letters and meetings with Sens. Robert Dole, William Roth and David Pryor and House Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer.
The Verner Liipfert team also enlisted the assistance of Goldman Sachs Group to lobby former New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. Bishop Estate is a large shareholder in the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm.
“It appears that the former trustees lobbied everyone but the pope himself on this issue,” said Deputy Attorney General Hugh Jones.
But Dwyer wasn’t a newcomer to Hawaii politics in 1999.
Seattle Times writers Frank Greve and Mark Fazlollah reported in May 1991 on an island-hopping trip arranged by Dwyer for top federal transit officials, including the top mass transit administrator (Brian Clymer) and the communications director (Nancy Butler). Dwyer was then lobbying “in regard to mass transit” for the city of Honolulu, or the State of Hawaii, or both. At the time, an earlier version of the city plan, pushed by then-Mayor Frank Fasi was already on the drawing boards, to be paid for by a combination of federal, state, city funds, the article reported.
Expense accounts obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the UMTA officials spent a night at a plush Maui beach resort, another at a hotel on the island of Hawaii and two nights at Honolulu’s Sheraton Waikiki, where the suite Clymer occupied usually goes for $525.
Thanks to lobbyist Denis Dwyer and cooperative Hawaiian politicians, no day’s lodging costs on the Monday-through-Friday tour exceeded $97, the maximum daily reimbursement for federal officials in Hawaii on business.
The story went on:
Dwyer, who picked up the visitors at the Maui airport and accompanied them all week, said his effort was “nothing more than trying to put your best foot forward.”
Dwyer said Butler picked the team’s destinations. Dwyer enlisted aides to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii to make hotel reservations. Hotel personnel said Inouye aides or other civic leaders pushing the rail plan requested discounted rates.
The rate breaks were offered “by the hotels, in their sole discretion,” Brown said, and UMTA officials were unaware of them. Moreover, “substantial official business” was done each day in Hawaii, he said.
In 1992, Dwyer was hired by then-Gov. John Waihee to push legislation to return the island of Kahoolawe to the State of Hawaii, according to the account of an attorney involved in the process.
It’s no surprise that over the years Dwyer has been a contributor to Hawaii candidates, including then Congressman Neil Abercrombie, the Democratic Party of Hawaii ($2000 in 2002), Sen. Dan Inouye ($2000 in 2004, $4,400 in 2008-2009), and DANPAC ($5,000 earlier this year). You can check his federal contributions directly on the FEC web site.
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Gee whizzers…and Carrie Okinaga said she didn’t know who Dwyer was…amazing. Let’s see…Carrie’s the head of HART, right? Huh, hard fo’ figgah.
Those little Hawaii taxpayers are just so easy to bamboozle, aren’t they?
Nice for me to know a real pro like Daysog landed on his feet after the demise of Advertiser last year. He was among best diggers — up there with Jim Dooley.
Journalists like you, Ian, with local experience and local history is hard to come by. Look at the presumptuous Civil Beat Editorial’s http://www.civilbeat.com/posts/2011/09/09/12769-did-city-mislead-public-about-rails-impact-on-congestion/
Just because Civil Beat says so does not mean it is right.
Civil Beat just a 1-year-old baby and it thinks it knows all about the rail process and history.
Come on. Most of the Civil Beat staff are from mainland big cities. They are used to the grime and noise of rail. We don’t want Hawaii to become a New Jersey or Denver Colorado.
Civil Beat is losing its credibility. It’s so overtly pro-rail and pro-development.
Civil Beat is technically correct.
The City always officially claimed in its written statements (like in its official rail website honolulutransit.org) that rail would not decrease the level of traffic; in fact, the City always claimed that traffic levels on the west side of Oahu are going to increase even with the establishment of a rail system.
The City always stated in its written documents that the Honolulu High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project would limit that inevitable increase.
It has been observed, however, that in public meetings and other spoken forums, that City officials did claim to west-side residents that the rail system would help to thin out traffic.
Also, much of the public lobbying for the rail project has not been conducted by the City, but by public relations experts in social media sites (like this blog), and by other non-experts (laymen, union representatives). Much of this informal discussion did seem to involve presenting the rail system as something that would alleviate traffic (an argument that seemed to become more important as evidence arose that few people would actually use a rail system on the west side of Oahu for their daily commute).
Civil Beat does fail to mention these unwritten and unofficial pro-rail voices in their article.
Ben C
Thank you for your basically even handed discussion of the history of the public conversation on rail.
However, your characterization that “evidence arose that few people would actually use a rail system on the west side of Oahu for their daily commute” does not match up with the Final Transit EIS Figure 3-9 which shows 8,690 Honolulu bound passengers passing the Leeward Community College station going to downtown Honolulu during the peak two hours in the morning in 2030.
Of course, that really is not evidence, is it? Nobody actually has any evidence about what people in Ewa and Waianae will do once the system is running all the way to Ala Moana. That won’t come until 2019 at the earliest.
Until then, we have to use projections based on survey results, assumptions, comparables etc.
However, in comparable settings around the U.S. in recent years, actual usage has been quite robust on many new transit systems.
@ Lopaka 43 “However, your characterization that “evidence arose that few people would actually use a rail system on the west side of Oahu for their daily commute” does not match up with the Final Transit EIS Figure 3-9 which shows 8,690 Honolulu bound passengers passing the Leeward Community College station going to downtown Honolulu during the peak two hours in the morning in 2030.
Of course, that really is not evidence, is it? [‘
Definitely not! These bureaucrats and consultants are wizards in manipulating and making sure the public records look conforming. Never ever trust these types of government records.
Just remember folks…long before it was a jobs program, before it was a transit oriented development program, rail was conceived because people complained about traffic congestion. People wanted a plan to reduce traffic congestion.
$5.3 billion and it doesn’t do what the people really want it to do. ‘Nuff said.
This is one deceitful web of lies. It’s down to healthy living. See what Senator Donovan Dela Cruz is saying.
“In Oklahoma, they put this city on a diet in every aspect,” Dela Cruz told DC808. “A lot of it was land use: How they designed their community, redeveloped their community. When you design a city, or a main street or a community, it has to deal with walking and biking, not a car. They had people put in bike stalls instead of parking lots. With rail, hopefully you have the kind of development where people walk to the station or walk from the station.”
Can you guess which web he is weaving? It sounds like he thinks people live like animals. Put them all in a cage and they will not go any where else.
Hey Donovan Dela Cruz, do you own a bicycle today?
Did you read this from Heen, Cayetano, Slater and Roth? Ouch! That know-it-all Micheal Levine from New Jersey(?) needs recheck his work and attitude towards their love-affair with this senseless rail.
“We don’t mind having Civil Beat fact check our statements. In fact, when Civil Beat took the “aircraft carriers in the sky” metaphor literally — and actually went to the trouble to compare the measurements of three classes of aircraft carriers to those of the planned rail stations — we were amused. But we could not even smile when Civil Beat insisted that it is neutral on the issue of heavy rail. We believe that statement should be “fact checked.”