I stopped by the city clerk’s office on Wednesday to get copies of the financial disclosures filed by the three major mayoral candidates–current Mayor Peter Carlisle, former Governor Ben Cayetano, and former managing director and acting mayor, Kirk Caldwell.
I had to pony up $5.75 at the cashier’s window before I could get the copies. Fifty cents for the first page, 25 cents each for the remaining pages.
So here’s my $5.75 gift to you–copies of these financial disclosures, free of charge.
It’s interesting to see what you can learn from what is reported, and also from what is not reported.
Mayor Peter has little to report beyond basic sources of income. His wife earned less than $25,000 in 2011 as an account representative for Maersk, the shipping company. The mayor also reports one child working as an attorney for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, another as a beach boy in Waikiki.
Carlisle reports that he and his wife have no mortgage or any other debts. No business interests or stockholdings. No organizational positions in any organizations, whether businesses or nonprofits. No real estate holdings except for the family home.
It’s hard to get a sense of community connections from these largely blank pages.
Well, it seems that the retired governor is doing quite well. He reports annual retirement income from his state pension and social security of between $100,000 and $150,000, while his wife earns $400,000 in her position as CEO of United Laundry Services.
The couple owe a total of $1.3 million on a mortgage and a second mortgage from First Hawaiian Bank, and own a $5 million home in East Honolulu, and a $1 million house in Mililani.
Apart from Vicki Cayetano’s position with United Laundry Services, neither reports serving in a fiduciary capacity with any other organization.
First thing I noticed–is that really Caldwell’s signature?
Kirk reports earning between $10,000 and $25,000 from his law practice in 2011, along with a State of Hawaii pension in that same range. He also reports being paid $150,000 to $200,000 as a director of Territorial Savings Bank, as well as owning stock in the bank valued at $300,000 to $400,000.
Caldwell’s wife, Donna Tanoue, reports earnings of between $700,000 and $800,000 as an official of Bank of Hawaii, and between $12,000 and $45,000 in rental income from three properties.
The couple reports a mortgage with an outstanding balance of between $800,000 and $900,000, and Caldwell reports a Hawaii State FCU loan of under $25,000.
Unlike the other two candidates, both Caldwell and his wife report being active in a variety of businesses and community organizations.
Caldwell reports being a director or advisory board member of Malama Manoa, the International Dyslexia Association, and Mental Health America of Hawaii, as well as director of Territorial Savings. Tanoue reports serving as a director of PBS (that’s the national organization) since 2006, president of the Bank of Hawaii Foundation, director of Kaneohe Ranch Mangement, trustee of the Queen’s Health Systems, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii Preparatory Academy, and Bishop Museum. Whew. Now that’s what you call connected!
One other observation. The city toyed with posting financial disclosures online through its Can-Do Honolulu site, but stopped after one round of 2010 forms were posted. As far as I can tell, neither the Can-Do site, nor the city’s newly expanded Open Data project, contain any of the financial disclosures filed by city officials.
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Thanks for the disclosure(s), albeit a little late in the game since absentee ballots are already out for the primary! This should have been done at the beginning of the election by the SAd, imho, since the City declined to put them online.
Being from the Windward side, the fact that Caldwell (via his wife) has any connection whatsoever to Kaneohe Ranch makes my skin crawl. If he wins (and I hope he doesn’t), gonna be hard not to try connect the dots in almost anything he tries to implement while in office. I think there is such thing as being ‘too connected.’
This is a Little Red Riding Hood tale:
http://www.ilind.net/2012/07/27/reviewing-financial-disclosures-of-the-main-mayoral-candidates/?
Peter Carlisle is too unconnected and shows no business acumen.
Kirk Caldwell is too connected. This guy paid only $300 a year for property taxes on his beautiful Manoa Home.
Ben Cayetano is just right.
“I had to pony up $5.75 at the cashier’s window before I could get the copies. Fifty cents for the first page, 25 cents each for the remaining pages.”
Why? Didn’t you request these under the FOIA? What am I missing?
Nope. These are public records. Copy fees relatively standard.
My understanding is that the public only pays after the first $30. When I requested copies of contracts, the city calculated the cost to pull up the documents, added the per copy cost and then deducted $30. I also requested an additional waiver of $30 because I share the information with the public, so the only time I’ve paid is when I’ve gone over $60.
Thank you for ponying up for the disclosures. All I know is, I wouldn’t trust the island’s future to the guy who told Oahu what’s quoted below from a November 2, 2008 TV news story, two days before we voted on that long, strange rail question. Rail supporters on several local forums continue to deny that any elected official ever said what is proven to have been said below.
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/9280937/city-releases-draft-eis-on-rail-transit-groups-still-clash
“Caldwell said the report confirms all that they’ve been saying, and more. “The draft EIS says traffic congestion will be reduced by 20%. Previously we thought it was going to be 11%.”
But today, many of us know that traffic in the future is going to be worse than now even if rail is built. He didn’t even do that thing where you use the word “future” in the sentence and pretend that everybody should know you mean traffic is going to be worse than now because you used the word “future.”
I never thought that made much sense. For example, the afternoon westbound zipper lane is supposed to reduce traffic in the “future” after it’s completed in a couple of years. And for the zipper lane when they say “reduce traffic” they mean as in make traffic better than it is now. I don’t know why Kirk Caldwell and some others are so careless when they explain about rail and traffic. They use “future traffic” in a way that allows the concept of “reduced traffic” to be understood in more ways than one. Why not explain in a way that can only be taken the way you mean?
To me, if you say traffic is going to be “reduced” the default/conventional understanding is you mean that traffic is going to be reduced from what it is at the present. If that’s not what you mean you should explain better. Why confuse people?
Even Diane Ako, the reporter who covered this 2008 story, sounds like she got fooled. She wrote in the second paragraph of the story, “The city says you’ll see more than 20% less traffic with the help of rail transit.”
And she presented the opposition’s view this way:
“Opponents said it’s just not true. Said Slater, ‘We’re going to spend billions of dollars and traffic is going to get worse.'”
It doesn’t sound like Diane Ako thinks Caldwell and Slater both hold the position that “traffic is going to get worse.” To me it sounds like Diane Ako thought Caldwell and Slater held opposing viewpoints. And since Slater’s position that “traffic is going to get worse” is true, what does that make the opposing viewpoint?
In 2008, “Yes” to steel wheeled rail got about 15,000 more votes than “No” to steel wheeled rail. If half of those roughly 15,000 votes plus one more vote had gone the other way this elevated rail fight would have been over then and there and hundreds of millions of dollars would not have been spent with more committed to be spent in the future. But, for around 7,500 voters too many, that promise of 20 percent less traffic congestion than what many of us suffer through now was too much to vote “No” to. It’s a shame that Kirk Caldwell had his fingers crossed behind his back when he said it. He managed to change the course of history in doing so.
So, let’s see. The Caldwells made a minimum of $872,000 in 2011, and if I added correctly, up to as much as $1,470,000. Shoot, you didn’t include the value of their historic home, Ian. I was going to figure out their estimated net worth.
In any case, this is the same Kirk Caldwell that up until just recently paid a whopping $300/year in real estate taxes. Hmmm.
Funny how ya’all gloss over Ben’s 5 Million Dollar home but zero in on Caldwell as though he is Warren Buffett……Ben makes more in State pension alone than 95% of America. He must have been a pretty good saver making less than 6 figures most of his political life….just sayin.
I am pretty sure Ben was not receiving a subsidy from taxpayers for his real property taxes.
As I recall when I requested some papers verbally from a state office, I had to pay for them. So I asked OIP, and was told that if I ask verbally, the request to waive fees in the public interest doesn’t apply.
I guess if you went there with an OIP form in your pocket, you could have saved the $5.75, but on the other hand, they might not have turned over the goods right away because they could have taken the 10 days to do it. They still could have taken 10 days, but there you were, with quarters in your pocket.
Maybe keep a form in the car?
Asking for payment for each page is a clear disincentive. While $5.75 isn’t much, for another request it could be a lot more.
Thank you for that clarification, Larry.
Carlisle having no investments to report is a crock. His freely dispensed financial advice.for decades has been “Never invade principal!” Obviously, he is earning $ off investments so, what are they and how much do they pay?
There is an ethical question of whether personal information about a newsworthy individual is relevant.
For example, if a concert promoter is in the news because of a fraudulent concert, is that person’s financial history of bankruptcy and foreclosure relevant? It would seem not to be the case. What would be more relevant is this promoter’s history of failed concerts, which a second party (say, a public university) should have known about. The real issue is what the second party should know and if the second party did such due diligence.
Another example is this site’s study of the biofuel company Aina Koa Pono leadership. I thought that they would mostly be engineers. They are mostly local lawyers and public relations people who have no background in alternative energy. That’s very telling about the local drive into alternative energy. Biofuels are widely regarded as greenwashing, since it often takes an equivalent or greater amount of energy from petroleum to produce biofuels. But the local utility is pursuing biofuels in order to appear to be switching to green sources of energy in order to avoid fines that will be imposed if it does not meet a deadline established in the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. It’s a scam. However, iLind.net looked further into the personal and professional lives of one of the company managers. At that point it’s irrelevant.
At a certain point, it becomes gossip, not news. That’s unethical. But there’s another risk.
I once read a column by Lee Cataluna on the politician Rod Tam. She insisted that Rod Tam is not a “crook”. He took his wife to cheap restaurants and charged the City. He was cheap and sloppy. Truly corrupt politicians live in multi-million dollar houses and no one really knows where the money came from. They don’t pay taxes. They have spouses who are otherwise totally ordinary people but who make millions by sitting on the boards of major corporations, or who have a number of part-time jobs where they never show up to work. According to the Ethics Commission and the IRS, all of this is perfectly kosher. Now that’s corruption. Those politicians end up in the US Congress.
A remarkable thing was the comments to Lee Cataluna’s column. I remember one woman wrote “This Lee Cataluna has one nasty tongue in her mouth.” There’s an irony there. Cataluna was not engaging in malicious gossip, but was rather being rather forgiving. She was going for a ‘big picture’ analysis. But to some people, any kind of broad analysis is incomprehensible and misinterpreted as ‘not being nice’, whereas gossip is seen as a force for morality. Objectivity is seen as cold-hearted, whereas the personalization of issues is seen as familiar and moral. And perhaps there is some of this in the ‘birther’ debate about Obama’s citizenship status. No one is more objective than Barack Obama. He is kind of a robot, much more than Al Gore was. In the so-called Red States this does not go over as well as did George W. Bush’s personalized, familiar style (e.g., giving everyone he met a nickname!). Obama really is kind of a space alien as a person (namely, Mr. Spock on Star Trek). But at least there is a future with such a coldly logical (and responsible) President. The Red States have no future.
So there is the danger of losing the big picture in journalism, of not keeping a kind of ‘sociological imagination’ where personal problems are situated within a social and historical context.
This leads me to address your recent challenge to discuss the ‘big picture’ of ‘corruption’ in Hawaii and how it can be defined.
When economies, like that of contemporary China, first industrialize and modernize, the growth rate is explosive. This is a perfect storm for political corruption. Institutions are still weak, so politics is based on personal relationships. People are relatively poor and desperate for a way out of poverty. Elites are largely unaccountable and immune to prosecution, holding huge power. And there is a gargantuan amount of money swirling around, often for poorly conceived projects, public and private. For the first 30 years or so, there is double digit growth and massive corruption (in Japan, this started with the Korean War in the 1950s; for South Korea, the Vietnam War of the 1960s; for China, the 1980s). But as the economy grows and matures, the growth rate slows down. In the “lost decade” of the 1990s, Japan’s growth rate slowed to 1 to 2% (still very respectable considering it was the second largest economy in the world). Likewise with China today.
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/editorial/op-ed/china-slows-down-and-grows-144
As growth slows and the economy and political system matures, outright corruption lessens.
What might be a more interesting question at this point is economic diversification, not corruption.
Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan argued that investment bubbles were necessary for innovation. Only in the hothouse of a bubble can innovation happen. The job of the Fed, he argued, was to sustain bubbles and clean up the mess when they inevitably burst (by keeping down interest rates in both cases).
Silicon Valley always resisted Greenspan’s opinion. They argued that the most successful companies (Apple, Microsoft) and the best products (iPod, iPhone, etc.) from Silicon Valley actually emerged during recessions. Adversity is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t need pets.com. Bubbles are destructive to true creativity.
By this logic, arguably, as major economies mature and slow down, innovation is enhanced.
One issue here is Japan. Sony was once one of the most innovative countries in the world, but no more. In a sense, Apple – with its perfectionism, minimalism, aesthetics, quality – is a Japanese company. One argument is that Japan is still a dynamo of innovation, but at the entrepreneurial level, not the corporate level.
What about Hawaii? As the economy matured, Hawaii might have become less politically corrupt, but is there an increase in innovation, at either the corporate, entrepreneurial or government levels? (I don’t know….)
Another issue is dependency.
Noel Kent’s history “Islands Under the Influence” uses “dependency theory” to understand Hawaii’s development.
In a sense, dependency theory asserts that as a country develops, it becomes a colony of rich countries and remains permanently subordinate, with an increasing dependence on “core” countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory
The classic colonial relationship is that the mother country (England) takes raw materials from its colonies (Africa, India, China, Ireland), uses these raw materials to produce manufactured goods and then forces the colonies to buy these products. (China was a special case because it was self-sufficient, so the British destroyed the Chinese navy and forced the Chinese to buy opium from India.)
Is this still true today?
Today it is China that imports raw materials and exports finished products, and at an enormous scale. In fact, it was the Chinese military, after a disastrous invasion of Vietnam in 1979, that insisted that China modernize. In 2010, the Chinese government announced that China is now basically safe from being pushed around by foreigners. Embracing the market economy was for China a way of lessening vulnerability and dependency. Likewise, although Ireland’s economy is in recession, since the high-tech boom of the 1990s, Ireland is now permanently among the ranks of economically advanced nations.
Moreover, countries like North Korea and Cuba that have avoided the market economy have not prospered as they thought they would, and they have in fact become dependent on foreign aid.
But what about Hawaii? Has Hawaii’s economic dependency increased or decreased since Kent wrote his book?
So the big picture might point to lessened political corruption in Hawaii as the economy has matured — as would be expected.
But the kind of increases in innovation and economic diversification and reduction in dependency – qualities that seem to accompany economic maturation in other places — might not have happened in Hawaii. Hawaii’s development might be heading in the opposite direction. Why would that be?
One reason might be the latitude that political independence provides. All countries that have industrialized historically have done so with tariffs of 50% on imported manufactured goods. They have embraced the market economy through exports, but have also engaged in import substitution to some degree (a combination that dependency theory does not allow for, seeing them as mutually exclusive). Perhaps the same is true for non-industrial economic growth.
Another reason might be the motives for embracing the market economy.
In all these societies, economic growth was a matter of national self-defense. For example, the country with the highest growth rate today is Vietnam, because the Vietnamese are desperate not to become vulnerable to a powerful China (Vietnam was a part of China for 1,200 years). This, and not prosperity in itself, is the primary goal of modernization in these countries.
One correlary to this might be the role of education in society. In the Western political tradition, there were always strict restrictions on who could vote on the grounds that poor, uneducated people are extremely dangerous and likely to vote for whoever promises them the greatest indulgences. Only the upper classes have the independence and education to vote wisely. This changes with Thomas Jefferson’s notion of the independent farmer. It also changes with the example of an independent, self-made, self-educated businessman like Benjamin Franklin (who as a young man would work all day and study all night, sleeping only a few hours a day). Today, we talk about educating people so that they can become happy middle-class consumers. But the point of the western (and American) political tradition is that a middle class is needed to have educated, independent citizens who are informed and can think. The value system has become inverted under the influence of consumerism.
Again, in parallel to this, one does not economically develop a society so its “citizens” can max out their credit cards in order to buy one-third of a trillion dollars-worth of stuff from China every year. The main purpose of economic development is national self-defense.
So in talking about ‘corruption’, there is more than outright political corruption. Values and ways of thinking can be corrupted, much the way that computer code can be ‘corrupted’. Moreover, the old Western and American way of thinking — in terms of independence, both national and individual, for the sake of democracy — that supposedly held sway in the United States and has been supposedly corrupted and eclipsed, maybe never really had any kind of real existence in Hawaii to begin with.
Interesting comment about Caldwell’s signature. Psychologically speaking, an illegible signature nullifies the document it’s supposed to validate.
I share aikea808’s concerns re Kaneohe Ranch.
At a recent neighborhood meeting at Aikahi Elem School, there seemed to be agreement between the two mayoral candidates that needed repairs to water and sewer lines will cost $5-6 B each. An elderly lady asked Caldwell how we are going to pay for those if we spend so much on the rail system, and she stated that retired people such as her self, on fixed incomes, won’t be able to afford the necessary tax increase and will have to move away. As several other oldsters nodded their heads in agreement, Caldwell said: “What’s wrong with that?”
He also stated, when asked about his wife’s involvement with Kaneohe Ranch, that “she works very hard for the Ranch.” A cynic might suggest that, as she “earns” $700-800K a year from Bank of Hawaii, reportedly “without portfolio,” she can afford to work hard for the Ranch, which is viewed as the villain by many in the Kailua community, as they are trying to turn Kailua into a tourist destination.