It wasn’t too long ago that court reporter Ken Kobayashi took Gannett’s buyout offer and retired along with several others. Now he’s back covering courts for the Star-Bulletin. Today’s byline may not be his first in the S-B, but it’s the first I’ve noted during my early morning rounds. And in the continuing musical chairs, Diana Leone is reportedly leaving the Star-Bulletin to become Kauai correspondent for the Advertiser.

A reader flagged comments about the Honolulu Symphony’s financial crisis last week by Sid Quintal, director of the city’s Department of Enterprise Serivces, which runs Blaisdell Concert Hall.

Here’s what Quintal had to say, according to the Star-Bulletin:

In his letter, Quintal said that the city had offered to arrange for a lump-sum financial contribution from “Lion King” producers to the symphony, but the symphony turned it down. “You’ll have to get the details from the symphony, but I think emotion might have played a role,” said Quintal.

But this reader provided a bit of behind-the-scenes perspective.

One of the stranger statements made during the recent discussion of the woes of the Honolulu Symphony was the report by Sid Quintal, Director of the Department of Enterprise Services, the City agency responsible for running the Blaisdell Concert Hall, that the Disney Corporation had offered a 6 figure amount to the Symphony to compensate them for being kicked out of the Blaisdell for the Lion King and the Symphony had inexplicably turned them down!!!

It turns out the actual offer was much less attractive than represented by Mr. Quintal. According to Symphony insiders, Disney offered to sell all the first night tickets to the Symphony and allow the Symphony to sell them at a higher rate and pocket the difference. The theory was that the Symphony would create an Opening Night Gala event and make money. The Symphony organization declined the offer because they felt that they didn’t have the staff or expertise to do something like that and it was unclear how much money, if any, they would earn after the cost of selling the tickets and putting on the event had been covered. All the risk was on the Symphony and they might have actually lost money if they did not find enough Symphony supporters willing to pay a premium for first night tickets.

Given that the Disney Corporation grossed over $14 million from Lion King’s run in Honolulu and the Symphony suffered a $600,000 loss because crowds in other venues did not match what they expected to earn at the Blaisdell, it would seem that the Disney organization could have offered to give the Symphony the profits from the first night production!!

I haven’t seen any indication that local reporters followed up to find out why the Symphony would turn down a “six figure offer” from Disney, or have asked Disney how they feel about reports that the Symphony was unable to pay their musicians’ salaries at Christmas time because of the impact of the Lion King on the fall concert schedule.

Another reader responded to yesterday’s post concerning Central Pacific Financial.

RE your post: “the question is whether investors (and by extension the media) were
deliberately misled by the bank’s statement denial of “any credit exposure” to the subprime market.”

I think you need to clarify if Arnoldus first statement was referring to direct or indirect exposure to the subprime meltdown if you’re going to conclude that he misled investors.

As far as I can tell, the bank didn’t make subprime loans to uncredit worthy borrowers nor did they make predatory subprime loans. They made commercial loans to 33 homebuilders in mostly in Southern California, which in my mind is entirely different.

The homebuilders in California have been hard-hit by the downturn turn. Even to conventional buyers are having a hard time qualifying these days, especially on jumbo loans, due to the higher interest rates and tougher lending restrictions these days.

So it’s an exposure to an economic problem and not to the sleazy subprime lending problem.

I’m not sure whether “direct vs. indirect” is the point. When the bank said there wasn’t any exposure, that seems to be a definitive statement. It wasn’t qualified. And I have to wonder whether indirect exposure was anticipated? If everyone was clueless, then failure to disclose probably isn’t an issue, although shouldn’t regulators at least have to check it out? And it wasn’t as if there weren’t a lot of people out there predicting a housing collapse because of liberal loan policies. If neither lenders nor reporters were paying attention or trying to dig deeper to get ahead of the issue, that’s still a problem.

In any case, we’re in Day 4 of an attempt to shift our cats away from a “food always available” policy to a “no snacks between meals” policy. This is a long-term diet move, as I’m worried about Duke’s weight, and most of the others are pudged out as well, although perhaps not to the same degree. My advice–start such a transition during the work week so that you’re not home when all the fussing starts. We shut off the food spigget and stopped leaving food out all day at the end of the week, but then were home over the weekend. Not a good idea. Cats are very good at the begging department. In the case of Mr. Leo, they’re also quite good at demanding.