Just a couple of items to kick the primary election hangover and get rolling in the new week.
My old friend Chuck Smith (Of Two Minds Blog), a graduate of Lanai High School now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, had some caustic comments after seeing a recent Honolulu Magazine feature on expensive homes.
His comment: The featured homes “reflect an economy based on financial speculation whose wealth is concentrated in a parasitic financial sector.”
His lede:
The glossy Mid-Pacific yuppie advert vehicle Honolulu Magazine recently ran a cover story (the September 2010 issue) of irresistible real-estate pornography titled “The 25 Most Expensive Homes in Hawaii” that unintentionally revealed the true nature of the U.S. economy.
The homes, valued in the $30 million range, were typically located in exclusive coastline enclaves: no big surprises in either the locations or the bubble-economy valuations.
What might surprise anyone who still clings to the quaint belief that America’s great wealth is generated from actually producing goods or services of global value is who owns the vast majority of these villas: investment bankers and hedge fund managers.
There’s lots more. Chuck always provides an insightful read. Check it out.
And on a completely different note, the Sunlight Foundation last week recommended a series of reforms that would increase openness in Congress. The Foundation is an excellent resource and has developed several very useful applications of digital technology to the task of increasing accountabilityIt’s an interesting list.
• Post public ethics filings online. These documents—which include personal financial disclosures, travel reports and recusals, as well as congressional ethics reports—should be made available free to the public and digitized in a structured data format.
• Strengthen congressional ethics. The Office of Congressional Ethics annual budget should be doubled, and its written reports to the public should be posted online. Additionally, all House Ethics Committee meetings should be open to the public unless it pertains to specific allegations against an individual lawmaker.
• Post bills online for 72 hours. The House has routinely followed the 72-hour rule, but it should be required for all non-emergency legislation and Conference Reports.
• Create an Earmarks Database. All earmarks, earmark requests and related documentation should be posted online in a centralized database.
• Open Congressional Committees. The following committee information should be posted online: vote records in XML files; official transcripts within 21 days of a hearing and unofficial transcripts within 24 hours; advance notice of hearing schedules; and committee reports, among others.
A one-pager describing Sunlight’s recommendations is available here and the full list of more than 60 recommendations is available here.
How would these recommendations be adapted for our Legislature?
• Legislative travel reports and recusals should be made public and posted online.
• Post bills, including proposed drafts, online for 72 hours.
• Post district CIP requests by legislators online, as well as budget provisos that direct spending.
• House and Senate Journals should be published in draft form and available online as soon as available or within 48 hours, and final corrected versions, with remarks inserted, within 21 days.
This will be an interesting conversation to start when the new legislature is seated, won’t it? Perhaps these are issues to be inserted into the campaign.
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The Legislature should be required to follow the State Sunshine Law. If they find it too obstructive they should fix it. But (at least) the same rules should apply to the Leg as to the many volunteer bodies that have far less impact on our lives and who have far less support to try to adhere to a 70s regime that didn’t imagine the Internet, online communities or electronic communications.
Frankly, I’m not sure there are qualified people in all 76 offices to provide this information. It’s not that they are corrupt – they don’t have the necessary skills.
Furthermore, I also am concerned that there wouldn’t be enough money to hire qualified House & Senate staff to work in the two Clerks’ offices oversee the materials.
How many members of the public – including the media – would actually want to have access to this information. I know that when I’ve needed information about CIP requests made by a particular legislator, I could get it within a day or two.
Granted, if I wanted to compare/contrast the requests made by all 76 legislators based upon their union endorsements or their personal & political relationships to leadership, then it would be a major hassle.
Perhaps the issue could be raised with the leadership in the high tech industry – start off with Jay Fidell for example – and work out a cost/benefit analysis before heading on down to Legislature to present these suggestions.
There’s also one other factor to consider and that’s the capability of people like me with limited tech skills and even more limited access to the necessary hardware & software. These kinds of electronic restrictions are not confined to the folks in charge of The Status Quo either.I often find myself getting angry over some of the progessive webservices which assume that everyone on their side of the table is as advanced technologically as they are.
I don’t know hard it would be– hasn’t the State Senate moved to paperless as much as possible– with testimony online for the Senators and the general public? scanning of information and testimony could be put online fairly easily, I would expect. You certainly can get at the budget worksheets a lot sooner now than you used to (and even the House and Senate budget conferees get to see the worksheets now before voting on the budget).
looking at this file from the elections office:
http://hawaii.gov/elections/results/2010/primary/files/media.txt
For the 46th, 47,th, 48th, & 49th (the ones i’m looking at), this file only seems to report up to the *-04th precinct, while some have five or seven in those districts.
For example, the 46-07 is about 1/2 of Laie (or was, at least). How did they vote for Mufi?
Have precincts been consolidated since 2002?
Is the office of elections 9/19 data post incomplete?
Anyone know?
TIA
i might have just answered my own question, if the precincts were consolidated when the polling places got shut down. must be.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for the Senate to adopt Ian’s proposals, except the posting of proposed drafts of bills for 72 hours — usually drafts are being worked on until the very last minute. There are some committee chairs that post proposed drafts ahead of time for substantive changes to major bills but the best they can do is 24 hours before the hearing.
Written or otherwise, I believe the Senate has made it a policy to include a link to any proposed drafts to a hearing notice. With the need for prior concurrence for any substantive change to a bill, I believe proposed drafts during the “meat” of the legislative session would be given the 72 hour treatment as a result of being an initial hearing.
Of course this would not be pssible during conference.
I truly believe the public has changed the culture at the legislature in the past few years, at least with respect to the appropriately named “gut and replace”. I think that unless a House and Senate committee G&R a bill for its own version of what is essentially the same measure, G&R is frowned upon without appropriate notice.
Mahalo for the recommend, Ian. If I may be allowed one more snarky comment about the $30 M manses–the vast majority are unredemptive architecturally–nothing remotely creative or unique to Hawaii. This may reflect the lack of creativity of the speculator-owners. Vladdy Ossipoff and his confreres have truly been forgotten….