Category Archives: Sunshine

The legislative session starts this week, but a lot of info is already available

4 Replies

[Note: The part of this post concerning broken links is incorrect, so please disregard. This is explained in a note added to a subsequent post on the same issue. Please read that for my explanation of the error.]

The 2020 session of the Hawaii State Legislature opens on Wednesday, January 15. But open hearings on various parts of the state budget are already well underway, with more scheduled.

You can find a list of upcoming hearings here, while a list that includes hearings already completed is also available online.

Many of the hearing notices for these department and agency briefings include links to the briefing materials submitted to the committees. These contain useful details about the public agencies and are important places to start if you are tracking particular issues or programs.

For example, there’s a joint hearing by the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the Committee on Energy, Economic Development, and Tourism to hear from the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. The hearing notice contains a link to the department’s briefing materials. Many of the other hearings, past and forthcoming, including similar documents.

There are also a number of reports filed by agencies and departments on a variety of topics. The list of reports is continually updated as new reports are filed. It’s definitely worth browsing the list to see if there’s anything available to date in your area of interest.

Among the reports of general public interest are things like the University of Hawaii’s Annual Report on Campus Safety and Accountability, which reports on the prevalence of sex offenses on the various UH system campuses, and results of a system wide survey of students (found in this list of UH reports). There’s an update of a 2011 report to the legislature on illegal fireworks (“Blast from the Past“).

Fair warning–Although this looks like there’s lots of transparency, in practice many of the links provided to these documents don’t work. For example, select the link to read a report from the Department of Land and Natural Resources, “Identification Of Rivers And Streams Worthy Of Protection.” It doesn’t work.

404 Not Found

The requested URL /dlnr/reports-to-the-legislature/2020/CW20- River-and-Streams-Rpt-FY19.pdf was not found on this server.

The links included in other DLNR transmittal letters are also faulty. It wouldn’t be hard for agencies to test out their links when sending out their notices, but that doesn’t seem to be done.

It’s not just DLNR. I tried the link to the Department of Public Safety’s “Report on Sexual Assaults in Correctional Facilities.” It also didn’t work.

Sometime perhaps I’ll have time to rate agencies in terms of how often they provide faulty links to their own public reports and documents.

It’s unfortunately not a new problem, and it recurs every year. The reports can often be found with a bit of digging through department websites, but I have not always been successful.

But despite these common flaws, there’s still an awful lot of useful information passing through the legislature. Do a bit of browsing, and you’re almost certain to find things of interest.

And feel free to report broken links that you discover.

Candidates differ in providing public notice of fundraising events

2 Replies

I noticed something potentially interesting while browsing through notices of campaign fundraisers that are required to be filed with the Campaign Spending Commission, and then posted online. You can find the list of fundraisers for current, past, and future election periods on the commission website.

Here’s the provision of the campaign spending law relating to fundraiser notices.

§11-342 Fundraiser; notice of intent. (a) No fundraiser shall be held unless a notice of intent to hold the fundraiser is filed with the commission setting forth the name and address of the person in charge, the price per person, the date, hour, and place of the fundraiser, and the method thereof.

(b) The person in charge of the fundraiser shall file the notice with the commission prior to the fundraiser.

(c) As used in this section, “fundraiser” means any function held for the benefit of a candidate, candidate committee, or noncandidate committee that is intended or designed, directly or indirectly, to raise contributions for which the price or suggested contribution for attending the function is more than $25 per person.

In any case, I was browsing reports of main candidates already in the 2020 race for Honolulu mayor: Keith Amemiya, Colleen Hanabusa, Ron Menor, and Kymberly Pine. Each has already held several fundraisers. In the list below, I’ve just included those held in 2019.

Keith Amemiya hasn’t been a candidate for public office before, but his campaign held the most fundraisers last year. And while he hasn’t been a candidate in the past, he has made a lot of campaign contributions. Campaign Spending Commission records show Amemiya and his wife, Bonny, contributed a total of $93,800 to candidates between 2010 and June 30, 2019.

Amemiya’s campaign seems to be aiming to file their fundraiser notices close to the time of the fundraiser. Notices for six of the eight fundraisers held in 2019 were filed no more than three hours prior to the beginning of the event.

Kymberly Pine held four 2019 fundraisers, and two of the notices were apparently filed late. One fundraiser notice was submitted the day following the event. A second was faxed to the commission at 5:21 p.m., according to the fax header in the copy posted online. That was just nine minutes before the event was scheduled to start, and well after the 4:30 closing of the commission office.

On the other hand, Colleen Hanabusa’s campaign generally filed notices days in advance, while Ron Menor’s fundraiser notices were often filed weeks before the events were to take place.

Providing short notice of fundraisers seems to meet the legal requirement. The law is vague, providing only that the notice must be filed “prior to the fundraiser.”

And it’s difficult to say whether minimal notice is sufficient to meet the intended purpose of the public notice without going back through the legislative history to determine just why such notice was thought to be important enough to be required by law in the first place.

If you have a better sense of why public disclosure of fundraisers is important, please let us know via a comment on this post.

But I’m wondering whether we would be better served if the law required fundraiser notices to be filed no later than when the event is announced or contributions solicited for it? That would eliminate the last-minute filings and better inform the public.

Get a head start on the impeachment public hearings

4 Replies

Check out the Lawfare Blog if you would like to get a head start on tomorrow’s start of public impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Lawfare Blog has read the transcripts of sworn testimony taken in confidential sessions, and prepared summaries (“ We Read All 2,677 Pages of Ukraine Testimony So You Don’t Have To”).

As of this morning, the testimony of the following witnesses has been summarized. Click on the link to the post (above), which includes likes to the relevant deposition transcripts.

Amb. Marie Yovanovitch

Michael McKinley

Amb. Kurt Volker

Amb. Gordon Sondland

George Kent

Amb. William Taylor

Fiona Hill

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

Taylor, Kent, and Yovanovitch are scheduled to be the first three witnesses to testify (and be questioned) in public, according to news reports.

Most Hawaii court documents moving online

1 Reply

The State Judiciary is in the midst of a major transition from paper documents to digital files.

The transformation has been done in phases, with Circuit Court Criminal and Family Court (Adult) Criminal cases, along with cases before the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals and Hawaii Supreme Court, making the move earlier.

Then in October 2019, District Court civil cases went online, followed by Circuit Court civil cases, which joined the digital domain on October 28.

You can access the eCourt Kokua system through a link at the top left of the Hawai State Judiciary’s main web page.

While all Circuit Court civil cases from the older Ho`ohiki system will be migrated to the online case management system, only new documents filed after that date will be available for online purchase and viewing. And you will still be able to view case dockets of older cases, even though those files won’t be available to view online.

As a document-based reporter, this is huge. Really. Put a stack of documents in front of me and I am usually able to tease out the story or stories they contain. If someone comes to me and tells me something they think should be the subject of news reporting, I’ll immediately ask them where documents might be found to confirm their tale.

And courts produce prodigious amounts of information to be gleaned from various kinds of court cases. Up until now, most of those court records have been stored in boxes in various courthouses, and after a few years, scheduled for microfilming. Reading through the records of a complex court case required determining which court would have the records, then going there in person, often flying to another island, then waiting awkwardly while the files were located and brought to you, and then sitting down and going through a few file folders at a time. Not always convenient, always time consuming.

So for me, the availability of court records online from anywhere is a huge event! It significantly changes the work flow for a documents-based reporter.

Before too long, the Judiciary’s eCourt Kokua system will be the gateway for access to traffic cases; District Court, Circuit Court, and Family Court criminal (adults); District Court and Circuit Court civil; appellate case information, along with Land Court and Tax Court cases. And federal court files have been online for a while through their PACER system.

The online system works very well. Documents can be purchased individually, but attorneys and other heavy users, such as reporters, will want a subscription. I think it’s now $500 per year for unlimited document downloads, and worth every penny.

The Judiciary has instructions for registering as a document subscriber, and for purchasing and using a subscription to view or download court documents.

The Judiciary made at least one serious attempt to scan paper filings and make them available online, but that soon collapsed and we were back to piles of paper. This time, they’ve gotten it right. Applause!

It’s akin to the Campaign Spending Commission’s migration from paper to online data. Back in the mid-1980s, when I started digging into campaign records, the source of all information were the reports filed by campaigns, political action committees, and both corporations and unions that took part in the political process. The Campaign Spending Commission in those years was in the basement of the state capitol. I spent endless hours there, reading through printed reports, taking notes and trying to discern patterns.

Now those are all online. If you have a computer and appropriate database software, you can download the raw data, in most cases going back to 2006. Alternatively, you can easily search for a candidate or political committee’s individual disclosure reports and browse at your leisure. Unlike the court records, these files can be viewed and data downloaded for free. Thank you, Campaign Spending Commission!