Yesterday’s short entry concerning the absence of opinions by the Office of Information Practices this year drew a quick reply from Director Cheryl Kakazu Park.

Hi, Ian,

Attached is a 2009 letter to you from former OIP Director Paul Tsukiyama that responded to an article similar to your June 26, 2012 blog about the number of OIP formal opinions. As Paul’s letter indicated, formal opinions are generally limited to novel or complex legal issues on matters with widespread application. Having already established a significant body of formal opinions, OIP now has sufficient precedent to use in issuing more informal opinions, correspondence, and attorney of the day advice. Please note, too, that very few cases warrant a written opinion. Of the 85 cases closed by OIP in calendar year 2012 to date, the vast majority were requests for assistance or other matters that did not require written opinions.

Thanks to your suggestion in 2009, OIP has been placing summaries of its informal memorandum opinions on its website, which is where you will find the summaries for four Sunshine Law memo opinions and three UIPA memo opinions written to date in 2012. Several more memo opinions will be finalized this month and added to the website in July, after the parties receive and have a chance to understand them. As your blog did not specify that you were speaking only of formal opinions, and thus gave the misleading impression that OIP had not issued any opinions in 2012, please pass on this distinction to your readers and let them know that OIP has written at least seven informal opinions in the first part of this year, with more to come.

Moreover, please note that the first part of the year is always busy with legislative duties, especially when OIP is proposing legislation as we successfully did this session. Besides trying to catch up on our backlog of cases, we have also drafted administrative rules and updated our Sunshine Law online training guides, training video, and power point presentation to reflect the new legislation that was passed. Our website at hawaii.gov/oip is nothing fancy, but it has been updated and is full of useful information that is accessible to the disabled and is increasingly being used by the general public and government personnel for training that was previously not readily available to them 24/7.

OIP has received many positive comments about OIP’s increased services since 2011, including OIP’s first continuing legal education seminars, timely communications through What’s New e-mails and website articles, the additional training materials that have been posted to our website, and the specialized training that our attorneys are freed to provide now that the basic training is online. Most people find it surprising that OIP can assist all state and county agencies and boards (in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches) with only 3.5 staff attorneys, 2.5 support staff, and 1 director. As our resources permit, we plan to do more proactive training and new initiatives in 2012.

Thank you for this opportunity to provide you and your readers with a better understanding of how OIP is doing more with less in order to efficiently administer Hawaii’s open records and open meetings laws.

Cheryl Kakazu Park
Director
Office of Information Practices