I ran into an interesting comparison this weekend regarding differences in accessing county public records, specifically, information drawn from real property tax data.
The Office of Information Practices has ruled at least twice that information about property ownership, drawn from real property tax records, is public information. There was an opinion written in 2002 when Honolulu was considering a proposal to make certain information confidential. OIP concluded this was not permitted. Another opinion this year returned to the question of addresses of property owners when the tax bill is sent to an address different from the property in question. Again, OIP said property tax records are generally public, with a few privacy exemptions (such as social security numbers, dealt with in the 2011 opinion).
Honolulu makes its real property tax records available online at www.HonoluluPropertyTax.com.
The system generally works quite well, with one glaring exception. You can easily find information on any piece of property on Oahu using the street address or tax map key. But you can’t search by name, whether individual or corporate.
So, for example, you can’t find out what properties are owned by Alexander & Baldwin, which just announced that the company is being split into two, with one surviving company primarily in real estate. Might be interesting to see their Honolulu properties as part of reporting the story. But you can’t get there from here.
Here’s a bit of the screen showing search options. Address and ID number (TMK) are pretty much it.
![[text]](http://ilind.net/images_2011/hnl-search.jpg)
It isn’t that names of property owners are confidential. This is still public information. But the city administration simply decided not to make it generally available to the public. I believe this change took place during the Hannemann administration. If Keith Rollman is out there, perhaps he can clarify the timing.
Of course, because the information is still considered a matter of public record, commercial database operators include it as a search option in their commercial offerings. I subscribe to one database in order to be able to do company and individual searches, which are often quite politically relevant.
I know I’ve complained about this situation here before, but just couldn’t find the relevant entry when I went looking this morning.
In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Maui County doesn’t constrain access to its real property records, which are also available and searchable online.
![[text]](http://ilind.net/images_2011/maui-search.jpg)
In the Maui system, searching by owners name is one of the main options, readily available. No issues.
Give it a test run and check it out.
Isn’t it time for Honolulu to give the public access to the full range of legally public data? Should they revisit the administrative decision to strip out owner information?
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Hawaii County made owners’ names unavailable on its property search website during the tenure of Harry Kim. He defended this by saying that he did it to protect the safety of police officers.
I was a reporter at the time Hawaii County changed its rules, which happened not long after I wrote an article in the Tribune-Herald about the recently acquired expansive real estate holdings of a relatively new and publicly prominent resident of the Big Island .
I was told at the time that the reason for the switch was because the county was receiving complaints from absentee landowners about privacy concerns — a connection that never made much sense to me. Harry also assured me that it was only the on-line access that was being changed and that if I went to the real property tax office in person I would be given the information. I may have been remiss, however, in not testing that before I was fired illegally from the newspaper.
As a real estate agent (on the Big Island or Kauai), I can access all public records for every TMK in the State.
Exactly. But through a third-party system for realtors, not through the county system.
But when we access it, it says “Public Record Information”, so either it is (public) or it isn’t. Sounds like perhaps the ‘public’ information is being sold to 3rd parties, but the ‘public’ can’t see it for free!
I seem to recall that the change came about after a state judge complained that name searches enabled criminals to find out where they lived. Name searches were restricted first in Honolulu then on Neighbor Island systems.
Even though restricted in Honolulu and Hawaii County, much of the information is available thru the Bureau of Conveyances website where you CAN search by name. Altho a TMK is not always provided in those online records, where one is made availbale, one can then use that to search records on the two counties’ werbsites.
Of course, while that helps, it should be unnecessary because, as you say, the records are public information. If the point is to protect, e.g., police officers and judges, then make a narrowly tailored exception for them; don’t just draw a curtain across the whole system. I’m notcertain I would support such an exemption, as a matter of public policy, but at least it would be an improvment to using a meat axe where only nail clipper is necessary.
Thanks. I hadn’t thought of pairing conveyances with the city system. Good plan without added cost.
Honolulu, as much or more as any where in this tightly knit state, seems to be offending the public (us guys) by resisting openness.
My thought: The OIP needs to be empowered by more than words twisted by recalcitrant county attorneys. Maybe state grants in aid could be withheld from counties that refuse to comply.
The Business Registration Division does the same thing, they will not let you search by a person’s name to see how many nonprofit boards the person is a director or officer of.
That’s one that makes no sense at all. How could serving on a board entail any privacy interests??
ftp://gisftp.hicentral.com/ArcGIS/Attribute_Tables/
grab the ownerdat.zip. has what you are all looking for.
Good one, at least for those with the processing power and know-how.
CCH scrubbed owners’ names from property records during the Harris administration.