How are Congressional earmarks viewed by those involved in moving the funds to favored projects?
These excerpts from minutes of a 1989 meeting of the board of directors of the Native Hawaiian Culture and Arts Program provide an interesting glimpse of how the process looks from the inside.
The discussion revolved around funds earmarked for the Hawaii Maritime Center, with $1 million per year for three years set to go to the Native Hawaiian Culture and Arts Program and then be passed through to the Maritime Center.
Director Herb Kane argued that the earmarked funds put their own program in a very uncomfortable position, since the Maritime Center was not devoted to the preservation of Native Hawaiian culture.
Kane asked how they could respond if the diversion of Native Hawaiian funds to the Maritime Center were to be challenged by other Native Hawaiian groups.
The late Myron Thompson explained that Maritime Center representatives had gone to Washington and obtained a commitment from Senator Inouye for funding. The Native Hawaiian Culture & Arts program was selected as the vehicle for delivering the funding. Thompson said it was a matter between the Maritime Center and the senator.
Director John Dominis Holt said there had been government support for “rejuvenating the waterfront”, with a key role played by the Maritime Museum.
“It seems to me that was the tie in, and we were stuck with either accepting that or not having a program for arts and culture, as if it was a condition of our existing,” Holt said. “And it doesn’t look good, but we didn’t have a choice.”
Thompson underscored the larger context of Inouye’s efforts over many years to aid Native Hawaiians, at that point (1989) estimated at bringing in some $90 million.
Donald Duckworth, Bishop Museum director, boiled down the advice: “I would simply say when approached, ‘Look, don’t take to me, talk to the Senator….'”
These minutes are part of a larger unexpected discovery–a pdf file containing the very rough draft of a collection of articles from my Hawaii Monitor newsletter which was published from 1990-1993.
The newsletter ended when I took a job as investigative reporter with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin early in 1993, and at the time I hoped to pull together this collection as a wrap-up of the period. But the demands of the new job pushed this project into the background and, eventually, it was swallowed up by changing computer software, obsolete file formats, failed disk drives, etc., etc.
So I was delighted to find a readable remnant of the project. I’m now looking for a way to share the larger file.