My Civil Beat column this week takes another look at the role that Hawaii’s lukewarm application of the state’s public records law played in the mess Hawaii County Mayor Billy Kenoi finds himself in (“Ian Lind: Kenoi Had Good Reason To Think He Could Misuse Funds“).

I know that others blame some character flaw in Kenoi himself, but those kinds of flaws are a dime a dozen in the population and among those in elective office.

But if the public’s right to know were actually being enforced, then Kenoi would never have assumed that his indiscretions would remain out of sight and out of mind.

My point was relatively simple. If public officials were accustomed to operating in a climate of transparency and openness, Kenoi would never have started putting personal expenses on his purchasing card account. Sunshine would most likely have kept him out of trouble.

But in our current political environment, far too many requests for disclosure of government records are met with veiled hostility and behind-the-scenes resistance from agency employees, who understand that their elected bosses are not champions of transparency.

Elected officials often pay lip service to openness, but in practice are loath to let the press and the public in on their secrets. Under those circumstances, the mayor thought he was safe from public scrutiny. And he was, for years.

And the way these things work is that getting away with the risky once or twice encourages the behavior to continue and usually to escalate.

If Kenoi had been encouraged to stay on the right side of that thin edge of ethics by the understanding that his spending records wouldn’t stay secret for long, he might have made different choices, and would now be looking at a run for higher office instead of a high-profile criminal trial.

One important point didn’t make it into the column. The Uniform Information Practices Act, which governs disclosure of government records to the public, requires the disclosure of “Government purchasing information, including all bid results, except to the extent prohibited by section 92F-13.” See section Section 93F-12(3).

And since none of those exceptions appear to apply to the pCard records, it would not appear that there were valid grounds to avoid disclosure for years, as was the case here.

In any case, check out the column if you have a chance.