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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/01/journalism-grant-will-pump-up-our-health-care-coverage/" target="_self">Journalism Grant Will Pump Up Our Health Care Coverage</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Thu, 17 Jan 2019 15:00:20 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('Health care disparities affecting Native Hawaiians, doctor shortages and access to care in more remote areas of Hawaii will be at the heart of a new yearlong reporting initiative we plan to launch this summer as part of a grant from Report for America. Civil Beat is one of about 60 news organizations that will receive funding from the national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities. Launched in 2017 and donor-financed, Report for America aims to create a new, sustainable system that provides Americans with the information they need to improve their communities, hold powerful institutions accountable and rebuild trust in the media. It is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit media organization with an established track record of training and supporting teams of emerging journalists around the world and in the U.S. “We’re excited and honored to be part of Report For America, a much-needed program aimed at strengthening local reporting and coverage of often-neglected topics,” said Jim Simon, Civi Beat managing editor. “The RFA reporter will allow Civil Beat to take a deep dive into Hawaii’s critical health care challenges.” The reporter will be based in our Honolulu newsroom but our health care coverage will be statewide. Travel to neighbor islands, especially rural areas, will be a key component as we explore the state’s public health concerns. We expect our new reporter to be on board by June 1. In fact, Report for America is still accepting applications to be a corps member until Feb 8. Click here for more information and the application form. Corps members typically have three to six years of experience, although the organization encourages accomplished recent graduates to apply. More than half of the current corps members have returned to their home states, Report for America says. Report for America currently has 13 reporters in Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, New Mexico, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia. The leap in 2019 to 60 reporters nationwide, and the goal of 1,000 reporters by 2023 speaks to the urgent need to close the local news reporting gap, the organization says. The program, funded by both private and public donors, pays for half of each reporter’s salary and the remainder is covered by the local newsroom and local benefactors. The post Journalism Grant Will Pump Up Our Health Care Coverage appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/01/6-ways-to-reform-hawaiis-government/" target="_self">6 Ways To Reform Hawaii’s Government</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Thu, 17 Jan 2019 10:01:46 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('Hawaii’s democracy is broken. It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve in elected office here in Hawaii, and I am therefore deeply troubled by the increasing lack of voter participation and competitive elections in our community. Hawaii has the lowest voter participation rate in the United States because we lack competitive elections. Of the major statewide and congressional races in the last election, none were competitive and nearly two-thirds of the legislative seats lacked a general election race because of no opposition. This lack of competition in Hawaii’s elections threatens the vitality of our democracy and makes our Aloha State electoral system look more like the “democracies” in Kazakhstan or Venezuela than the United States. This is a crisis that demands attention. The failure of civic engagement in Hawaii is making our government no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of the few, by the few and for the few. Those who value democracy must care about reforming this hollow system. 
There are six clear policy changes that will address this urgent crisis in Hawaii elections. No. 1 Top-Two Elections. Hawaii should join California, Louisiana and Washington as well as our local county governments in going to a top-two election system. All candidates should run together in the primary, regardless of political partisanship. If any candidate obtains more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary, he or she is declared the winner. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, then the top two candidates advance to the general election, even if they are of the same political party. This system works well in the heavily Democratic state of California as well as the heavily Republican state of Louisiana. It is time for Hawaii to join them. Early Voting electronic voting machines Honolulu Hale, August 2016. The author has policy suggestions to fix what he calls our broken political system.Cory Lum/Civil Beat No. 2 All Mail-In Ballots. We need to end the 18th-century system of election-day balloting. Instead, Hawaii should join Colorado, Oregon and Washington and move toward a 100 percent percent mail-in balloting system where all registered voters are mailed a ballot to be returned by election day. By making voting more convenient — eliminating the long lines at polling locations, the difficulty in determining the correct polling location and the inconvenience of having to take time off from work to cast a vote — we can encourage more voter participation. This policy has the added benefit of being less expensive than our current antiquated election system. No. 3 Establish Quarterly Contribution Reporting. To increase transparency, Hawaii’s campaign contribution system should require any candidate, as well as any super-PAC or special interest group that spends over $25,000 in an election cycle, to report his or her contributors and expenditures quarterly rather than bi-annually. Too much of Hawaii’s politics is clouded in obscure, dark donations that only come to light at the last minute. I advocate reporting campaign donations and expenditures on a quarterly basis. No. 4 “None Of The Above” Ballot Option. Hawaii should follow Nevada’s lead allowing for a “none of these candidates” voting option. Although this rarely alters the outcome of any race, it gives the people more control and choice in their vote. It sends a signal to the politicians in office, even when running unopposed, that the people may not be satisfied with their performance in office. The power of voting should always rest with the people and an option such as this helps effectuate true voting power. No. 5 Allow Only Individual Contributions. Big money from big organizations skews the competitive dynamic of a democracy. That’s why direct corporate and union donations are prohibited in all federal elections and in most states. It is time for Hawaii to conform with the federal rules that have already been in place for decades and limit candidates to accepting contributions only from individuals.  If a donation is not coming from an actual human being, candidates should not be allowed to accept it. No. 6 Let Gubernatorial Candidates Select Running Mates. At the presidential level, the party nominee selects his or her vice-presidential running mate. This system has been adopted for governor and lieutenant governor positions in 18 states including Minnesota, Montana and Utah. The time has come for Hawaii to do the same. I further propose setting the lieutenant governor’s salary the same as the salary for a state senator, but allow the governor to appoint the lieutenant governor to a cabinet position and lead a department with the pay of a cabinet member. New Jersey has adopted this system. These proposals for reform will go a long way to fix the terrible scoliosis that permeates Hawaii’s elections, and have all been vetted and enacted in some form in other states. I urge the new Hawaii Legislature to examine and adopt these proposals to build a more open, trustworthy system of government. The post 6 Ways To Reform Hawaii’s Government appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/01/budget-hawk-sylvia-luke-i-try-to-know-more-than-them/" target="_self">Budget Hawk Sylvia Luke: ‘I Try To Know More Than Them’</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Thu, 17 Jan 2019 10:01:40 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('It was hardly a warm and fuzzy welcome for Scott Kami, Gov. David Ige’s acting budget director. State Rep. Sylvia Luke, chair of the House Finance Committee was up on a two-tiered dais with dozens of her legislative colleagues earlier this month, interrogating Kami about the backlog of needed repair and maintenance work at Hawaii’s 256 public schools. The year before, Luke said, the Hawaii Department of Education said it had used legislative appropriations to whittle the backlog to $293 million from $720 million in 2001. But, she said bluntly, “that was a lie.” House Finance Chair Sylvia Luke has far more budget experience than her Senate counterpart, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Donovan Dela Cruz.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Luke said DOE officials had recently told her the repair and maintenance backlog actually was about $896 million. On top of that, she noted, Ige’s proposed budget had some big-ticket items, including a request for $125 million as a required contribution to a $345 million federal project to reduce the risk that the Ala Wai Canal will flood. “I want you guys to think about what you guys are doing to the future generations,” Luke told Kami and Ford Fuchigami, Ige’s administrative director, who had joined Kami at the podium so they could face the fire together. “I want you guys to be a little bit worried about new projects that you’re taking on – especially the City and County of Honolulu’s Ala Wai project, which isn’t even a state project.” It was quintessentially Sylvia Luke. First she made bureaucrats squirm with politely delivered questions no one aside from the wonkiest budget analyst could answer, then she seamlessly transitioned into a not-so-veiled threat to upend a project being pushed by her political nemesis, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. As a new legislative session begins, Luke will again be the key player on spending, this time promising to push an overhaul of how the state budgets money to force departments to justify every dime they ask for. “You know why the departments hate me?” Luke told Civil Beat. “Because I keep everything,” she said, holding an obscure 6-year-old document that she said raised questions about funding one of Gov. David Ige’s homeless programs. “And,” she added, “I try to know more than them.” Politician From An Early Age As chair of the House money committee, Luke spends a lot of time trying to know more than anyone else in the room. She is Hawaii’s chief fiscal watchdog and has a say over any bill that involves funding. Although Luke’s counterpart, Senate Ways and Means Chairman Donovan Dela Cruz, has similar power, Luke has far more experience and institutional knowledge. There have been three WAM chairs during Luke’s tenure, which started in 2013: Ige when he was in the Senate; former Sen. Jill Tokuda, and Dela Cruz, who has served in the position for only one full regular session. Luke’s power in the House is second only to that of Speaker Scott Saiki, with whom Luke has been friends since they were both students at the University of Hawaii Manoa. With 51 representatives serving constituencies spread over seven islands, House leaders must reconcile a wide array of interests, Saiki said. Rep. Sylvia Luke and House Speaker Scott Saiki have been friends since college at the University of Hawaii.Cory Lum/Civil Beat “You have to cut through everything and make a decision that in the end will move the whole state forward,” he said. It’s a challenge, he added, that he and Luke talk about “all the time.” It’s also something that Luke, 51, has been training to do for decades. Born in Seoul, South Korea, the oldest child of Yun Hoo “Paul” Chang, who owned an import-export busness, and Yun Ja Chang, Luke got interested in politics in her teens. The family moved to Honolulu when she was 9. Because her Korean name, Eun, means “silver,” her mother gave her the English name Sylvia. She said her mother also gave her a strong sense of civic responsibility, which led Luke to get involved in student government when she was a student at Roosevelt High School in Makiki. Family responsibilities increased after her father died when Luke was 16 due to complications from a debilitating stroke years earlier. “She took a look these special funds and said, ‘I don’t even know how much money the state has.’” — Tom Yamachika Luke stayed close to home after graduation, attending UH Manoa. Again, she got involved in student government and started building friendships with future political leaders. Among those, was Mark Takai, the late congressman. In fact, Luke beat Takai in the 1988 election for UH student president. “He always used to tease me and say that the best thing that happened to him was me beating him because it made him refocus,” Luke says. Takai was elected student president the next year. Also at UH, she met her future husband, Michael Luke, who was in student government. And there was Saiki, another budding politico who served on the Campus Center Board. “We called him ‘Mark’s shadow,’” Luke said of Saiki. “He was Mark’s hoverer.” Saiki laughs at the idea that he was Takai’s shadow, but confirms they all spent a lot of time hanging out together at the student government and Campus Center Board offices. A few years later, Luke met more future government leaders as a student at UH’s William S. Richardson School of Law, a training ground for state and local government officials. Although Luke went to law school at the University of San Francisco, she spent her last year as a visiting student at Richardson. There she met Doug Chin, who later became Hawaii’s attorney general and then lieutenant governor; Billy Kenoi, the future Hawaii Island mayor; and Blake Oshiro, who later served with Luke in the House. It was seemingly inevitable that Luke would go into politics, but first, after graduating from law school in 1995, she went to work for a Honolulu law firm. Luke The Attorney Sitting in his office at Cronin, Fried, Sekiya, Kekina & Fairbanks on a recent morning, Rick Fried, the firm’s founder, summed up Luke’s role there. “We rarely even see her,” he said. Luke’s law practice has taken a back seat to her legislative work since she was elected in 1998 to represent the district encompassing Makiki and Pahoa, where she grew up. Luke handily beat her Republican opponent, Chris Dawson, and is now beginning her 10th term. Luke’s compensation from Cronin, Fried certainly reflects that of a lawyer who plays merely a supporting role. A financial disclosure submitted under ethics laws for public officials shows she made from $25,000 to $50,000 for her legal work in 2017. Likewise, a search of the Fastcase legal database turns up no published court opinions in which Luke is the attorney of record, again suggesting that she plays at most a supporting role. “We cannot continue to provide services just because we’ve been doing it.” — Sylvia Luke Keith Young, another partner with the firm who frequently works with Luke, said she often helps with tasks like preparing witnesses for depositions and answering interrogatories from opposing counsel. But Young said Luke’s legislative responsibilities preclude her from taking the lead on the high-profile, complex cases the firm is known for. “Obviously, she can’t run with a case anymore,” Young said Still, political opponents have made much of the fact that Luke works for a firm that represents plaintiffs in personal injury suits. Among Luke’s critics have been proponents of a bill that proposed to let the state avoid liability for accidents occurring at places like rock-climbing sites as long as it posted signs warning of danger. Luke’s committee amended the bill at the 11th hour to get rid of the provision insulating the state, prompting the bill’s supporters to file an ethics complaint in 2014 saying Luke shouldn’t have voted because her firm stood to gain by suing the state on behalf on injured people. Luke said it was impractical to expect the state to post signs at every recreational site and that a permit system that required rock climbers to waive their right to sue the state made more sense. “Isn’t that a better way?” she asked. Eying $3 Billion In Special Funds While Luke denies she’s beholden to the trial lawyer lobby, there’s one partisan political battle she clearly takes a side in: the power struggle between the legislative and executive branches. At its center is the state’s budget, and, more broadly, who controls taxpayer money. Although the Legislature theoretically holds the pursestrings, that’s not always the case. And Luke has taken big steps to reclaim power over state spending. One example involves special funds, pots of money set up under the law for specific purposes. The idea is simple: Users of a government program cover its costs through fees, taxes or other payments into a special fund, which a state agency uses to to administer the program. In theory, such a fund is self-sustaining, and the executive agencies don’t have to keep going back to the Legislature every year for money. But after a special fund is set up, the Legislature loses control. “What we’ve been saying for years is that special funds reduce transparency,” said Tom Yamachika, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, a policy think tank. “There is no clear line of oversight by the Legislature.” And it’s an enormous amount of money — estimated at $3.4 billion for the 2020 fiscal year, almost 22 percent of the state’s budget. Luke admits that getting control of these funds is difficult and often thankless because the general public doesn’t know much about them. “It’s something that’s under-appreciated because it’s difficult to explain,” she said. One way to appreciate the problem it to understand its scope. In the 1980s, general funds — money controlled by the Legislature – made up about two-thirds of the state’s operating budget, the state Auditor’s office said in a 2015 report. Now general funds make up only about half of the budget, about $8 billion out $15.4 billion. Special funds have ballooned to become the second-largest source of state funding. It’s not just that the funds are hard to monitor. They often have surpluses – money left over after all program expenses have been paid – which lawmakers can’t touch for other purposes. In other cases, special funds become inactive as programs founder, but still hold onto money. Unlike unspent general funds, unspent special funds don’t lapse back to the state. Luke applauds as Saiki speaks Wednesday on the Legislature’s Opening Day.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Yamachika recalls that when Luke was appointed Finance Committee chair, she sought to ferret out and catalog all these pots of money. “She took a look these special funds and said, ‘I don’t even know how much money the state has,’” he said. Along with Ige, then Senate Ways and Means Committee chairman, Luke pushed through a bill making it nearly impossible to create new special funds and requiring rolling reviews of existing special funds by the auditor. According to a December audit report, the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ 18 special funds alone had $103.4 million left over at the end of 2018 after collecting fees and paying expenses. The audit said nine of the 18 funds should be dissolved because they no longer meet the legal requirements, one of which is that the program can’t be paid for through the general fund appropriation process. Balances in those nine funds totaled about $47 million. There were also three inactive funds containing $1.9 million — taxpayer money just sitting around. Suzanne Case, the DLNR chair, defended many of the special funds, including one that uses money from hotel taxes, proceeds from the lease of public coastal lands and other sources to pay to maintain and restore beaches. The auditor said the fund was no longer needed because the program could be paid for with general fund appropriations, and Case didn’t dispute that. Instead she emphasized its importance. To Luke, it’s about transparency and the Legislature being able to do its job, which includes prioritizing spending. And regardless of whether the beach restoration program is worthwhile, Luke says not all programs deserve never-ending sources of money that lawmakers can’t touch. “We need to make sure that they’re benefitting the public and not existing because they’ve existed for the last 30 years,” she said. Luke’s venture into special funds is just one of the deep dives she’s taken into complicated fiscal issues. She has sought to get control of temporary hires by departments, for instance. And she’s also pushed through legislation requiring rolling reviews of tax credits, exemptions and preferences, which are another form of tax expenditure over which the Legislature has little control once it sets a program in motion. Her positions aren’t always antagonistic toward the executive branch. During a recent budget briefing with the Department of Agriculture, Luke suggested relaxing job classification rules so the department could fill vacant posts, which represent about 30 percent of the staff every year. “I don’t think the department can function with one-third of your staff not being there every year,” Luke told the agriculture director. ‘I Don’t Like To Make Kirk Caldwell Happy’ Luke’s dry humor is as much a trademark as her fiscal toughness. Often at odds with Mayor Kirk Caldwell over funding for Honolulu’s woefully late and over-budget rail project, Luke once called the mayor out from the floor of the Legislature even as she agreed to help bail out the rail line by extending a tax surcharge to pay for it. “It’s a very difficult issue for a lot of folks, and for me as well,” she said. “It’s a difficult one for me as well for two reasons, because, No. 1, in 2005 I was one of those who voted in opposition to the surcharge, and No. 2 is I don’t like to make Kirk Caldwell happy.” “And he’s sitting there smiling, and that makes me very unhappy,” she continued. “When I see him he’s like that cat, he just rubs me the wrong way sometimes.” Luke has often been at odds with Mayor Kirk Caldwell, center, over funding for the Honolulu rail project.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Luke also can rub people the wrong way. Among them is Paul Alston, a lawyer whose firm worked on a recent class action against the state for failing to adequately support foster children. Hawaii hadn’t increased its allowance paid to foster parents in 24 years, and the plaintiffs contended that violated federal law. The Attorney General’s office ultimately settled, agreeing to pay $14 million for the state Department of Human Services for foster care support, $2.3 million in back payments to foster parents, and $1.1 million in attorney fees to Alston’s firm and others who worked on the case. But when the time came for the Legislature to put up the money, Luke and Saiki balked, saying the attorney fees were too high. Alston said the lawmakers should have approved the payments to DHS at least, even if they opposed the legal fees. “The kids became pawns and ultimately losers in a dispute over legal fees,” he said. “You hurt the lawyers. I get that. But why hurt the kids?” Luke says that wasn’t an option at the time. According to her, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wouldn’t drop the lawsuit without the attorney fees. The parties ultimately resolved the case last year, and the lawyers got about $850,000 instead of $1.1 million. “In the end, they had to give in,” she says. A Legacy In Zero-Based Budgeting? Luke sees rigorous political discourse — even stress and friction — as what leads to growth. Now she is talking about yet another major change — her most dramatic yet. Known as “zero-based budgeting,” the new system would require executive agencies to justify all expenses for every two-year budget period. Too often, Luke says the state keeps paying for programs simply because that’s what it has done in the past. “We cannot continue to provide services just because we’ve been doing it,” she said. Requiring each state agency to come to the Legislature every two years afresh to justify its allocation would bring more creative tension and debates over how to spend taxpayer money. Luke acknowledges such a change could take years to roll out. Ige said Wednesday he supports the idea, but it would require sweeping changes beyond even the needed revisions to Hawaii’s statutes. “It’s more complex than it would seem on the surface,” he said. “Any change in that system would have to encompass a whole range of things.” For example, Ige said, Hawaii’s antiquated financial computer systems also would have to be upgraded. “Until we can get to a modern platform, it would be very difficult to change the budgeting system,” he said. As usual, Luke welcomes a rigorous discussion of her proposal. “You have to have that challenge to make good policy,” she said. The post Budget Hawk Sylvia Luke: ‘I Try To Know More Than Them’ appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/01/neal-milner-why-is-hawaii-afraid-to-recount-votes-in-close-races/" target="_self">Neal Milner: Why Is Hawaii Afraid To Recount Votes In Close Races?</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Thu, 17 Jan 2019 10:01:01 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('Here’s a riddle: How is the Hawaii voter recount law like the new Hawaiian Telcom phone book? Answer: Both are pieces of junk that have just landed with a big thud. The phone book is as useless as Mike Pence in an improv group. The same goes for the state’s recount law, as the Hawaii Supreme Court’s convoluted and torturously long adventures with the election challenges of Tommy Waters and Matt Lopresti demonstrate. But here is another riddle: What’s the difference between the phone book and the recount law? Answer: The people who create the phone book want it to be used. The recount law was created to keep people from using it. Wrapped up in legal procedure and legalistic language, it provides obstacles rather than opportunities.  It builds a wall. Hawaii’s ungainly election recount law is resulting in the state’s final election result unfolding ever so slowly at the Supreme Court.Cory Lum/Civil Beat About That Phone Book “Throw it away,” my wife said last week before I even brought in the new Hawaiian Telcom 2019 directory that had just thumped onto our sidewalk.  As a writer in Slate put it, new phone books are now regularly “left to pulp out in the rain and abandoned in mountainous mailroom piles.” Why? Because the phone book doesn’t give you phone numbers, at least the ones you really need. There are no cell phone listings. That is prohibited by law. Social media has become a much better and available source of information in all kinds of ways for all sorts of reasons. Besides, those paper behemoths are such a colossal waste of resources. Factoid: it took almost 50,000 trees to produce the 2008 Portland directory. And phone books are hard to recycle. A number of cities discourage them phone book mass production. Verizon in New York City has pretty much discontinued producing them. The Recount Law Is Worse The recount law is more cumbersome and irrelevant than the phone book. The law is also a huge devourer of natural resources, but in this case the resources are people rather than trees, and time rather than paper. You want cumbersome? Consider what’s happened with the recent challenges. Hawaii voters cast their general election ballots Nov. 6 or earlier, but they still don’t know for sure who won a certain Honolulu City Council race.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Lopresti was behind in his state Senate race and Waters in his Honolulu City Council race Nov. 6 by margins of less than 1 percent. Both took their cases to the Supreme Court. The court has denied Lopresti’s request, but it took eight weeks. The 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election controversy was settled in half that time. And the Waters case is ongoing, preventing the Honolulu City Council from beginning the new year with a full complement of members. The phone book is unwieldly, but at least using it depends on a simple formula, which of course is the alphabet — Milner comes before Zilner. The voter law also uses the ABC’s as its guide, but here ABC stands for “Anything But a Challenge.” Hawaii’s voter recount law’s basic problem is that from the beginning it turns a simple math issue into a convoluted, inaccessible legal one. States with automatic recount laws make it initially simple and automatic. If the margin of victory is extremely close, typically within 1 percent, there is a recount. It’s based on your old algebra teacher’s still valuable adage: “check your work.” And that’s it. No questions asked, nothing about proof of corruption or malfeasance. No lawyers — of which, by the way, there are 46 pages of listings in the new phone book — are needed. Hawaii’s law requires a petition to the Hawaii Supreme Court to ask for a recount. Hoo ha, a petition! And the petitioner has to, as the statute says, “set forth causes” for granting it. I’m pretty sure that when us ordinary folks ask someone why they did something, we don’t ask them to “set forth causes.” But you’re in Legal Land now, baby, where things get messy, convoluted and wasteful, as the process takes you down a deep, dark tunnel. States with automatic recount laws make it initially simple and automatic. If the margin of victory is extremely close, typically within 1 percent, there is a recount. It’s based on your old algebra teacher’s still valuable adage: “check your work.” Don’t blame the court. It’s doing what the law requires. The petition puts the person (now officially the petitioner) in an adversarial situation because in effect he or she is blaming someone for messing up. That’s what “set forth causes” means. And your adversaries, say the county clerk’s office or the state Office of Elections, are going to do what any rival side in a legal case does — delay, cooperate as little as possible, and mount a full-on legal defense. Meanwhile, the votes don’t get recounted because everyone is arguing over whether they should even be recounted. Look, even a no-fault recount could ultimately turn into a big-deal legal case if a dissatisfied losing candidate wants to claim malfeasance.That is what is happening right now with the contested North Carolina congressional election, but that one is exceptional. But an automatic, publicly funded recount law is an easy first step. And it shows respect for government accountability rather than fear of citizen disruption. Leave It Out To Pulp In 1906, Jews in Trenton, New Jersey threatened to boycott Bell Telephone over a resort listing’s promise, “Free From Hebrews and Tuberculosis Patients.” Times change. Ads like that have disappeared. In fact over the years the phone book has adjusted to changing times. And it’s ironic that the next such adjustment will be the phone book’s demise. As for the recount law’s adjustment to changing times, we should be so lucky. And maybe we will be.   Last session the state Senate passed an automatic recount law, but the House took no action. It’s time to abandon the recount law and leave it to pulp out in the rain. The post Neal Milner: Why Is Hawaii Afraid To Recount Votes In Close Races? appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/01/federal-shutdown-claims-new-victim-katherine-kealohas-right-to-a-fair-trial/" target="_self">Federal Shutdown Claims New Victim: Katherine Kealoha’s Right To A Fair Trial</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Thu, 17 Jan 2019 03:59:10 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('The shutdown of the federal government has left an army of federal workers either furloughed or working for free, resulting in a spectrum of staff reductions from national parks and museums to agencies like the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which provides data on things like the U.S. gross domestic product. Now, according to a new filing in federal court, the shutdown has another casualty: Katherine Kealoha’s ability to get a fair trial and effective legal representation. Both are rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Kealoha, a former Honolulu deputy prosecuting attorney, is being represented by counsel appointed by the federal government as Kealoha faces separate trials for conspiracy and bank fraud. The problem, Kealoha’s attorney Cynthia Kagiwada says, is that the government has quit paying the defense team. Cynthia Kagiwada, who was appointed to represented Katherine Kealoha in an ongoing corruption trial, says she can’t afford to mount an effective defense on her own dime.Nick Grube/Civil Beat That means no money for attorneys, paralegals, investigators or expert witnesses. “I have been attempting to secure expert witnesses and other vendors to assist with trial preparation and trial,” Kagiwada wrote in a declaration filed with the court on Wednesday. “At least one vendor has definitely stated that his company cannot provide work, with no assurances as to when payment will be made.” In addition, as a sole practitioner, Kagiwada says she can’t foot the bill to cover all these expenses herself. So she’s asking U.S. District Court Judge J. Michael Seabright for a continuance for the first trial, which is scheduled to start March 18. Kealoha and her husband, former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha, were indicted in October 2017. They face federal trials for bank fraud and for an alleged conspiracy in which the couple allegedly used city resources and police officers to frame a relative who was engaged in a family dispute with the Kealohas over money. The conspiracy trial is the one scheduled for March. Four Honolulu police officers have also been indicted. On Friday, one of them, Sgt. Daniel Sellers, pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count as part of a deal with federal prosecutors in exchange for all other charges against him being dropped. He’s also agreed to cooperate with a continuing FBI investigation into alleged corruption in the police department and the Honolulu city prosecutor’s office. A fifth officer, Niall Silva, also pleaded guilty, in December 2016, and has been cooperating with federal investigators. The federal government’s widening investigation continues to ensnare government officials. Earlier this week, Honolulu’s top attorney, Corporation Counsel Donna Leong, went on paid leave after being notified by federal prosecutors that she is a target in the ongoing, years-long corruption probe. Mayor Kirk Caldwell said on Monday that he and Leong had mutually agreed that she would take a leave of absence with pay to avoid any distraction that could be brought by the target letter. Although Caldwell provided few details about the letter, he did say it involves a $250,000 severance payment made to Louis Kealoha. The chief retired in February 2017 with his full retirement pension, benefits and the severance check, which he is required to repay if he is convicted of a felony within six years of retirement. In addition, Katherine Kealoha’s former boss, Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro, also has received a target letter. The prosecutor has refused to talk about the investigation targeting him and has continued to stay on the job. The post Federal Shutdown Claims New Victim: Katherine Kealoha’s Right To A Fair Trial appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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