The Honolulu Ethics Commission has gotten itself into a bind after the Caldwell administration refused to renew a temporary personal services contract for its investigator, leaving the commission without investigative resources.

As Hawaii News Now reported this week:

The administration of Mayor Kirk Caldwell has refused to renew the contract of the city Ethics Commission’s only investigator, bringing some politically sensitive ethics cases to a halt at the end of June. City Managing Director Roy Amemiya refused to extend an 89-day contract for Letha DeCaires, a retired HPD captain who is the commission’s only investigator, but then OK’d a shorter 59-day contract that still has not been signed and officially approved.

For the last three weeks, that means there’s been no investigator to handle the 17 city investigations involving 45 to 50 witnesses, according to a staff report from the Ethics Commission.

On the one hand, personal services contracts have been used in the past to bypass the city’s civil service system and place politically connected people in city jobs. Past practice allowed many of those jobs to extend for years by simply renewing the temporary appointments whenever they would expire.

But at the same time, the city administration has been dragging its feet or outright refusing to cooperate with its Ethics Commission as it tries to investigate cases of city officials. Seen in that light, the refusal to renew the investigator raises concerns.

These dueling contexts make it hard to interpret the current situation.

Since 1997, the city has been required to published a quarterly listing of these contracts.

Here’s what I wrote about the system back in a July 2009 post.

Personal services contracts provide a way to fill temporary positions of less than a year without going through civil service hiring procedures, but bypassing standard procedures can open the door to abuse.

Resolution 97-319 expressed concern about favoritism in hiring and said disclosure of contract details, including the names of contract recipients, was “necessary for the Council to exercise its oversight regarding the appropriateness and effectiveness of the City Administration’s use of the personal services contracting authority….”

It followed the council’s passage and subsequent veto override of Ordinance 97-54, which set out even stricter disclosure requirements for all personal services contracts. Mayor Jeremy Harris’ administration objected, saying that the ordinance violated some provisions of the City Charter.

Resolution 97-319 was a compromise which provided for public disclosure without having to resolve the dispute over whether or not there was a conflict with the charter.

The resolution was introduced by then-Council members Mufi Hannemann and John Henry Felix, with the backing of Duke Bainum, then budget committee chair.

When transmitted to the council, the reports include the name of each contract recipient and other contract details, including job title, department, source of funds, salary or amount paid, whether full or part time, and whether the contract is new or a renewal.

There’s no doubt that the city has been paring down the rolls of personal service contracts and eliminating the positions or converting them to regular city jobs.

The report of personal services contracts for the period ending June 30, 2009, ran on for 54 pages, while the report for the same period in 2015 is just 13 pages, a reduction of 75%.

However, DeCaires, the commission’s contract investigator, was certainly not the only person with a contract that had been rolled over for years.

A quick comparison between the lists for June 2012 and June 2015 turns up quite a few names that survived the three year period between the two lists. Many departments, including the police department, Board of Water Supply, Customer Service, and Community Services all have positions showing renewals over this period.

It isn’t known at present whether the city has allowed these other positions to be renewed again.