Here’s a bit of history.

Another random box of my papers yielded a copy of the 1989 report, “Playing Favorites“, written when I was working as “senior advisor” to then-City Council Member Neil Abercrombie.

The report was an analysis of the city’s automated golf course reservation system, which had come under fire during a hearing in Neil’s Human Services Committee, where testimony was received alleging corruption in assignment of prime tee times. I wrote it with assistance from Pat McCain, another member of Neil’s city council staff. You can use the link above to download the report.

I don’t recall the report getting much traction at the time. Reading it now, though, it’s pretty devastating. The city’s parks department denied any irregularities. But this report showed how implausible that denial was.

The problem was that there was overwhelming demand at that time for prime times on city golf courses. To deal with the demand, an automated lottery-style system was set up. Reservations were accepted one week in advance beginning at 6:30 a.m. All calls were routed through the automated system in batch of 50, with a single call in each batch automatically selected and put through to a reservation clerk, if one were free. The other 49 callers in that batch would be disconnected and forced to try again.

We obtained reservation data from the city covering several months in mid-1989, and focused on calls to the system during the first 30 minutes the reservation lines were open, between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m.

One one day we sampled, there were 29,627 calls logged before 7 a.m. seeking reservations at the Ala Wai Golf Course. Of those, just 75 got through to a reservation clerk.

And groups of golfers were scheduled to tee off each 6 minutes, with one tee time per hour kept free for “administrative purposes.” We focused on the first three hours, 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. There were only 27 slots available daily at those times at each course.

I created a graphic to illustrate the odds.

The large block of dots represents the total number of phone calls received by the system before 7 a.m.

The smaller block represents the number of calls that were put through, one for each batch of 50. The smaller block represents those callers that were able to successfully make a reservation. And the smallest block represents those who got tee times at 9:30 a.m. or earlier.

It should have been impossible for anyone to consistently get through the “1 out of 50” lottery soon enough to get one of those prime, early morning times.

But when we examined the actual reservation forms, we found that there were groups at each of the city golf courses that regularly got prime spots. For example, one group at Ala Wai obtained prime time reservations 20 days in July 1986, all between 7:24 and 7:42 a.m. And they weren’t alone in somehow beating the system.

We also discovered an unwritten policy that allowed members of the mayor’s cabinet to hit the golf course whenever they wanted, bypassing the reservation system altogether. That appeared to be a violation of the city’s own ethics rules.

We concluded this overall situation could not have occurred without favoritism or corruption that provided an end-run around the automated system. The numbers made it very difficult to avoid that conclusion.

I have to say that this report did a pretty good job at documenting the problem. As I recall, the city didn’t do as well at fixing it.

But I’m sure everything at the city is totally different today, right?