I just noticed an important opinion issued by the Office of Information Practices back in July (Opinion 2008-2).

The opinion, prompted by questions concerning Honolulu’s Mass Transit Technical Expert Panel, came to a two-part conclusion.

First, according to OIP, a board created by resolution (rather than state statute or county ordinance) is generally not subject to the Sunshine Law.

This follows directly from a plain reading of Section 92-2(1):

“Board” means any agency, board, commission, authority, or committee of the State or its political subdivisions which is created by constitution, statute, rule, or executive order, to have supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power over specific matters and which is required to conduct meetings and to take official actions.

But OIP then took an important additional step, finding that sunshine requirements will apply when a board or agency which itself is subject to the Sunshine Law creates a “task panel or other body” which is delegated some part of the agency’s duties or powers.

…we believe that allowing Sunshine Law boards to create subordinate groups that may meet in private on matters that the Sunshine Law board delegated and which the board would have had to deliberate in an open meeting, would provide a means for boards to circumvent the open meetings requirements of the Sunshine Law.

OIP cautions that such situations will be reviewed on a case by case basis in order to determine whether “the surrounding circumstances show that it is, in fact, acting in the place ofa baord that is subject to the Sunshine Law through a delegation of that board’s powers and duties.”

What this all appears to mean is that while a task force or sub-group can be created by resolution without triggering the need to follow the Sunshine Law, the sunshine requirements may kick in if it is delegated specific authority, powers, or responsibilities of the agency.

This is an opinion which will probably be referred to a lot in the future.

While we’re looking at boosting bus fares and lunch prices in Hawaii schools, perhaps a bit more spent in math might be appropriate, judging from at least one fuzzy calculation in Sunday’s Advertiser story on the subject.

The story relied on numbers, dollars, and there were lots of them. But many didn’t add up.

Take the long discussion of school bus finances.

It was just like one of those word problems on a math quiz. According to the story:

Currently students pay $119.60 a year. But it costs the state more than $600 per rider to operate the DOE school bus system.

That sounds easy. So the formula to figure out the share of the overall cost paid by student fares would be:

STUDENT PAYS / TOTAL COST PER STUDENT = Percent paid by student fares

With real numbers: $119.60 / $600 = 0.1993, or just a hair under 20 percent. So let’s use 20 percent as the rough figure.

The story goes on.

In other words, of the approximately $47 million that the DOE spent to operate its bus service last year, only about $2 million was paid for by fares.

Whaaat? Using the simple formula, student fares should have paid 20 percent of $47 million, or approximately $9.4 million, not the $2 million cited in the story.

Going in the other direction, if the 40,000 student bus riders paid a total of $2 million in fares, each student would have paid $50, not the $119.60 quoted.

The inconsistencies jumped out at me, and left me confused.

It’s not clear where the errors crept into the story, whether they resulted from the quoted costs or a calculation error, or even whether they originated in the DOE or at the Advertiser. But the errors should have been caught in the process of editing. As it is, they undermine the credibility of the Advertiser’s analysis.