Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s financial disclosure, the first due since he took office at the beginning of the year, is not among the 54 disclosure statements filed by elected and appointed officials, and available online for public inspection on the city clerk’s website.
Newly elected or appointed city officials are required by law to file their initial disclosures within 20 working days of taking the oath of office. With the Martin Luther King holiday in January, that deadline for filing was February 1.
The 54 disclosures currently available online for public review include those of council members, as well as the appointed directors and deputies in Blangiardi’s administration. The list is in alphabetical order, starting with Sarah-Jane Allen, appointed director of the Department of Community Services, and continuing alphabetically down to Wesley Yokoyama, director of the Department of Environmental Services.
Blangiardi’s name is conspicuously absent from the list of those with financial disclosures on file. Also missing are newly elected council members Radiant Cordero and Augie Tulba.
The disclosures of other council members are on file, including those filed as late as just hours before the February 1 deadline.
The mayor did file a financial disclosure as a candidate for mayor on June 8, 2020, but that does not fulfill the requirement that he submit a new disclosure statement covering all of 2020 once he was sworn in and became mayor.
The city clerk’s office is required to give “a notice of violation” to any city officer who fails to file by the deadline date, which then provides a new deadline of 10 days from receipt of the notice to avoid being penalized. And if that next deadline is missed, it can trigger a criminal penalty. Of course, I don’t expect the mayor to be in that situation, but it’s an indication that the responsibility to comply with the disclosure requirement is to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the mayor’s disclosure statement was filed but, for some reason, hasn’t been publicly posted by the clerk’s office. Perhaps it was filed late. Or maybe it has yet to be filed. The problem is that the public has no way of knowing.
I won’t be able to check with the clerk’s office until Tuesday, due to the Presidents’ Day holiday on Monday.
In the meantime, the public’s recourse for nondisclosure is, well, public disclosure.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Quote of the week, overheard in Hawaii Kai Costco: “Blangiardi talked a good game but has turned out to be Caldwell Light.”
And we all thought Amemiya was going to be Caldwell Junior…
Bruddah man has been in office for a month, hasn’t done anything to be like Caldwell as of now. Lets give him a chance.
It’s quite telling that when Blangiardi announced this week that he was hiring a former news reporter, from the TV station he used to run, to be his communications director he neglected to inform taxpayers how much this cozy arrangement was going to cost them. And none of the media outlets who reported on the announcement bothered to ask. The new guy starts on Tuesday and has pledged to communicate “in a positive, transparent and effective manner.” Hawaii News Now should obviously be the first to pose the legitimate question to both test the administration’s commitment and demonstrate its own independence and integrity.
While I agree we should be cognizant of the cost of government appointees, I think it’s also important to remember this isn’t a new position. I encourage you to submit testimony on the city budget when it comes up in March.
That’s really beside the point, although since there seems to be lots of discretion in setting some appointee salaries it would be interesting to know how this one compares to that of the previous administration.
Civil beat publishes all that info annually.
Blangiardi got some substantial campaign support after the 2nd to last reporting period. Was waiting for that information, since he spen $450k of his own money to run for Mayor.