by Ian Lind
Published in Honolulu Weekly, February 6-12, 2008

Citizen activists and internet sleuths now have a previously unimagined set of tools literally at their fingertips for keeping track of the actions of state government agencies and public officials, from the governor and her individual departments to members of the Legislature.

Take the state calendar, which I consider one of the most under appreciated tools around. You’ll find it hidden in plain view in the center of the state’s official Internet portal, www.hawaii.gov. Click on any day and you’ll see a list of public meetings currently scheduled, each with a link to the meeting notice and agenda. Select a specific agency from a drop down menu and its next meeting date will be shown on the calendar. No special skills needed.

Getting this kind of information used to take either regular checks at the State Capitol, where official meeting notices are filed and then posted for public review, or required getting on the mailing list for every agency you wanted to follow, and meeting notices would then be mailed to you six days before the scheduled meeting date, often arriving days later. The online calendar is a great advance.

But problems remain. A check of the calendar last weekend listed meetings of the Land Use Commission on Maui on Thursday and Friday, February 7-8, with an agenda that included an item with staff recommendations regarding LUC’s position on land use bills pending at the Legislature. A quick check of the LUC’s own web site, initially to see of more information about the agenda items might be available, turned up a notice that the Maui meetings have been cancelled. Other agency meetings, such as the Board of Land and Natural Resources, are missing from the central calendar, and with well over 100 state boards and commissions it’s difficult to know whether agencies ignore the main calendar or provide only the minimum six day notice required by law.

On the other hand, the land board agenda does appear on its own web site along with the full staff recommendations and background material provided on each agenda item. These staff submittals are invaluable to anyone following a particular issue since they track the history of the issue and prior board actions. There’s little consistency between state departments, but there are gems to be found.

The Campaign Spending Commission’s new online filing system is another key resource for anyone interested in how government works. Candidates for office, and elected officials serving their terms, file regular reports listing anyone contributing more than $100 to their campaigns, as well as a list of all expenditures of campaign funds.

You can learn a lot about your legislator, county council member, or any other public official by examining where they get the money to run their election campaigns and whether they are beholding to certain special interests, and the commissions now makes this easy to do. Just go to the commission web site (www.Hawaii.gov/campaign/) and choose the link to “View candidates’ contributions and expenditures.” Request a standard report and you can then select a candidate by name, select from a list of candidates for a particular office (State House, Senate, Mayor, etc), or simply browse a long list that includes elected officials and unsuccessful candidates for all state and county offices.

Select a name, and you’ll be able to view an overall summary report, followed by lists of contributions, expenditures, other receipts, loans, unpaid bills, and durable assets. Ask for a special report on the same candidate, and you can select from a donor’s list sorted by employer, occupation, address, or amount. Expenditures and other items can also be sorted by type, date, and so on. This used to require retyping data from printed reports into a spreadsheet or database but now all the work has been done for you.

Once again, though, problems remain. Some candidate reports don’t display properly and may instead return unintelligible programming errors, making it difficult to determine whether the report is missing or simply caught by technical errors.

Despite these occasional shortcomings, Hawaii’s campaign reporting system puts the public at the forefront of disclosure. Candidates file their reports via the web and they are immediately available to the public, a major advance from the days of paper reports, stacks of file folders, and reporters standing in line at key deadlines to see how much was raised by major candidates. In September 2008, non-candidate committees, including political action committees, corporations, and unions, will also file online reports, adding another dimension of information to an already rich library.

Details of the personal finances about public officials, rather than their campaign finances, can now easily be found at the State Ethics Commission web site (www.hawaii.gov/ethics). Select the link to “Public Records”, and financial disclosure statements are at the top of the list. At least once a year, all state elected officials, from the governor down to the Board of Education, disclose the sources of earned income of themselves, spouses, and dependent children, along with any businesses interests, stocks of local companies owned, positions held in businesses or nonprofit organizations, real estate owned or transferred, and outstanding loans. Abbreviated reports are filed by candidates while they are standing for election.

Lobbyists who ply their trade at the State Capitol and the interest groups that employ them are also required to register with the Ethics Commission and disclose what they spend on lobbying. While disclosure is often less than complete, these lobbyist reports add to our ability to follow the influence of money on policy.

Put all this together and you’ve got more information about government and politics, more readily available, than at any previous time. It’s just waiting for citizen activists to use it to its fullest.

-Ian Lind (www.iLind.net)