The secret Navy laboratory set up by the University of Hawaii five years ago, which was sold as a way to tap into a lucrative stream of defense-related contracts, has instead turned into a money pit draining resources from the rest of the UH system.
At least that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Professor Bev Keever’s story about the Navy Applied Research Laboratory on Civil Beat today (“UH Set to Sign New Contract for Fought-Over, Mostly-Secret Military Lab“). It’s also consistent with scuttlebutt heard on the Manoa campus. Apparently the cost of facilities and basic administrative overhead far exceeds the amount of funding the secret research lab has generated. “Apparently” because although UH claims no classified research was involved, neither the university nor the Navy have been forthcoming with responses to Freedom of Information requests for contracts and related details.
Using available records, though, Keever concludes the lab may have landed only about 13% of the dollars it was projected to bring in during its first five years.
Keever writes:
UH responded to my request for copies of its ARL contracts or “task orders” (Navy language for assignments) by telling me to contact a Navy representative in Washington, D. C. There, my Freedom of Information Act request to the Navy, dated Feb. 19, 2013, received a response three weeks later.
That response cited “unusual circumstances” in going beyond the 20-day legal requirement for releasing a requested U.S. government record. It stated that under President Executive Order 12600 the Navy gives notice to contractors, asking them “to review contractual information and to identify portions considered to be propriety.” The response added that a decision about releasing my requested records will be made “in the most prompt manner possible.” None has been received.
Does Hawaii’s public records law allow the university to fail to respond to a request for public records and instead punt to a third-party, especially when the third party then delays because it kicks the whole request back to UH? At best, it’s unclear.
At worst, it feels like this is another in a long series of examples of UH miserably failing the to live up to standards of transparency mouthed in public by the president and other top administrators.
Keever’s reporting suggests another question. If this secret lab failed to land significant amounts of work while Senator Inouye was alive and pushing for it, what are its odds of turning that around in the absence of his seniority and political clout? And that’s sidestepping the continued opposition on the Manoa campus to the whole project.
In any case, the UH administration really should be providing a relatively full accounting before committing resources for another contract period.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It may be that Keever failed to ask for the info under Hawai`i UIPA and UH took advantage of it and referred it to the feds under FOIA. I wouldn’t put it past them.
I can’t address the expense on the UH-side, but I have some first hand experience as a private Navy contractor who worked for years to understand UARC (or whatever it’s called now), how to access any funding that may go through that office, and how to form research collaborations with UH faculty. My experience was that no one understood the UARC — the faculty didn’t know how to tap it to get research funding, private industry didn’t know who to even talk to if they had research they wanted supported by the UH and Navy, and most administrators at UH (Deans, etc) didn’t know how to use it either.
So the simple reason you’re not finding information could be because there’s very little information to be found in that there was a funding mechanism created that there was no understanding how to use and leverage so it went stagnent, except to pay for some office space and admin salaries.
One problem is that (then) President McClain removed UARC from Manoa and made it report directly to the Vice President for Research, so it was outside the scope of the Manoa Senate. Thus there was no effective professional/professorial oversight.