Here’s the story of the Office of Information Practices reduced to a single chart. In this case, it’s a long-term look at the OIP budget from it’s inception in 1989 through last year after being adjusted for inflation. The chart is taken from the agency’s latest annual report.

Clearly, OIP has never recovered from the long, steep decline in resources stretching through the years of the Cayetano administrate (1996-2002).

The number of authorized staff positions has dropped by 50 percent from a high of 15 in 1993-95, to 7.5 in 2012.

Civil Beat’s Alia Wong did a summary of the report which is worth reading (“Hawaii Open Records Agency Barely Makes a Dent in Backlog“).

And I’ll plug my column today on Civil Beat (“Hawaii Monitor: No Teeth For Ombudsman But ‘We Can Gum Them To Death’“). A long telephone interview with Ombudsman Robin Matsunaga left me quite impressed. More later.