Now that we’re wrapping up a short mainland trip, I had on my list to recommend the complaints data compiled by the Aviation Consumer Protection Division of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Click on the link to “Air Travel Consumer Report” and you’ll get a list of years, which take you in turn to monthly reports containing details on flight delays, lost luggage, over booking, and other complaints.

Dig around and you’ll learn that 19,330 United Airline passengers “voluntarily” gave up their seats after the airline overbooked their flights during the first three months of 2009, while another 1,550 lost their seats involuntarily.

Hawaiian Air, by contrast, bumped just 14 passengers and enticed 82 others to give up their seats voluntarily.

I don’t know whether reading through recent reports before booking flights is a good idea or not. It could be pretty discouraging.

If you missed Bill Moyers’ Journal on Friday night, I would encourage you to go back and check it out. He interviewed Wendell Potter, former head of public relations for one of the country’s major insurers, who described, among other things, the way the health industry set out to discredit Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, which Potter now describes as an accurate portrayal of the health care landscape.

Sunshine news. Over in Hilo, Nancy Cook Lauer reports:

Looking at just one month’s worth of e-mails for six County Council members could cost you $2,300. One month’s worth of e-mails for four administration officials would cost $1,675.

That’s according to estimates sent to Hamakua resident Shawn James Leavey, who has been requesting county records as part of his political science studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

When I requested and obtained a week of email from the Governor’s office last year, electronic files were provided without charge, as I recall. Of course, they were in a format that made it difficult to extract the information, but I managed.

Another sunshine moment. PBN reported recently on the appointment of Pono Shim as the new head of Enterprise Honolulu.

In a follow-up, which I haven’t located online, it was reported that the organization declined to disclose Shim’s salary. But that’s pretty short sighted since, as a nonprofit outfit, they’ll have to make the information public sooner or later.

For example, here’s the most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 filed by Enterprise Honolulu. It covers 2007, and shows then-CEO Mike Fitzgerald was paid $300,000 annually with an $8,050 expense account.

That disclosure is required by federal law.

The tax return also showed Enterprise Honolulu lost $208,003 during 2007 and spent 57.4% of its $1.4 million on administration and fundraising, with only 42.6% on program activities.