Winter isn’t over here in Portland, with weather still dominated by cold, gray, and wet days. So a report that some area public officials have been flying to Hawaii once or twice a year at public expense on previously undisclosed trips makes for a good headline story!

See: “How Washington County sewer officials scored annual Hawaii trips and 5-star lodging.”

The Oregonian newspaper and OregonLive.com have been skewering the members of Oregon’s Washington County sewer agency for undisclosed annual trips to Hawaii.

At least eight people with ties to Washington County’s sewer agency have traveled to Hawaii for business conferences in recent years, staying at an assortment of five-star resorts across several islands offering breathtaking views of the beach and ocean.

Those trips aren’t accounted for in the agency’s annual budgets even though ratepayers of Clean Water Services indirectly footed the bill.

Three of the group trips to Hawaii cost a whopping $91,000 and, in some instances, government officials received first-class airfare, premium hotel rooms or fine dining, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found. Officials made four other trips at an undisclosed cost.

It’s not uncommon for government workers in agencies large and small to attend out-of-state conferences to learn about and keep tabs on industry best practices. But what makes the Hawaiian excursions unusual is their frequency, cost, lack of transparency – and that the recurring tropical location is the result of a local business decision made by design.

Washington County is part of the Portland Metropolitan Area, home to several cities including Beaverton, Hillsboro, and Tigard.

The county’s Clean Water Services department formed its own captive insurance company in 2016, and chose Hawaii as the new insurer’s headquarters due to the state’s captive insurance program that counts more than 270 captive insurance companies on its rolls.

These closely-held insurers are most often set up by corporations. In 2016, the year that the county established its “captive” ih Hawaii, Oregon law reportedly didhot allow “public entity not-for-profit captives,” although there is some dispute over whether that was actually the case.

But by establishing its captive insurance company in Hawaii, the sewer agency was required to hold their annual board meeting in the islands.

The Oregonian reported that Hawaii touts its location as a benefit.

“If you are forced to go to Hawaii once a year to have a board meeting that’s paid for by the company, it’s usually not a bad thing from most people’s perspective,” Ryan Keeling, a financial analyst with Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services, which oversees the state’s own captive insurance program, said wryly.

The story seems to have legs, as they say, and it has appeared in promotional emails by OregonLive throughout the week.

It makes me wonder how many other interesting stories might be found among Hawaii’s 270+ captive insurance companies.