 It's 10 o'clock. It's Thursday. It's a think tech. I'm J. Fidel and we're talking to Tommy and Chica because we talk tax with Tom. This is talking tax with Tom. Welcome Tom. Welcome to you. Thanks for having me on the show yet again. We're talking about a recap on the tax foundation of Hawaii, their annual meeting and I like to drill down a little bit on what tax foundation of Hawaii is and does and why the annual meeting. Sure. We are a 501 C3 nonprofit organization and when we're supported by our members. That's that's for whom we have the benefit of our annual meeting. And every year at about this time, we have an annual meeting and not a whole lot of business just the essentials. But we do have usually a speaker or two to tell us about things in public finance or government or taxes that people don't probably aren't going to be able to get anywhere else. So this year was no exception. We had a virtual annual meeting for the first time, but we had two very special guests. We had a former governor's white haired Abercrombie. I know you're very much familiar with John. He does does a show on your network a lot. Neil is a little harder to pin down, but we got him and that show was a lot of the meeting was a lot of fun yesterday and not yesterday, but on Tuesday. Were they together or separate? Together. Oh my goodness gracious. That must have been interesting. Would you say they agreed on everything? Of course not. And then they weren't physically together. They were together virtually we have them on the same zoom screen. But it's just like how we're together right now. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So, you know, what did they tell you about what was the revelation, if any? Well, one of the things that we tried to zoom in on was what exactly is this crisis and, you know, how is, how do we best get through it? And we kind of talked about, you know, two aspects of crisis response, one being leadership and one being the structural response. The structural response you really can't do much with because a lot of it takes a while to build up and is very difficult to change. Leadership, however, is something kind of intrinsic to the person or people who are leading the effort. And one, you know, one story actually comes to mind, you know, which is what Governor Abercrombie said. You know, Governor Abercrombie said, somebody came up to him and said, well, hey, you know, your term is over. You know, aren't you glad now that, you know, you're not leading in times of this crisis and he goes, are you crazy? You know, during, you know, during good times, any fool can lead because the state pretty much runs itself. It takes something out of the ordinary like crisis where you can demonstrate true leadership. And so, you know, he said, you know, I was never one to walk away from, you know, bad times or a crisis. Neither was, neither was John Wahey, neither was Ben Caetano. And that's, I think, you know, very interesting to hear them tell it in terms of contrast. One thing that Governor Wahey said that kind of came to mind is, you know, when I talked about, or we tried to talk about, you know, hey, what's happening with this wave of cabinet defections? You know, we have people like Scott Murakami from DLIR, Rona Suzuki from Department of Tax, Bruce Anderson from Department of Health, and Espender from Public Safety, you know, they're all gone. And, you know, what's the matter? And, you know, Governor Wahey said, well, you know, this is basically six years into an eight-year term. You know, things happen. It's not unexpected for, you know, cabinet directors around this time in six years out of an eight-year cycle to think, well, geez, I only got two years left. You know, what am I going to do when I grow up? Right? There's, they have to do something when their term ends and hopefully, you know, not be unemployed and, you know, leave their families on the verge. Yeah, but this is a confluence of a number of them, all at the same time. And I might add, not to say that it's directly related, but Ikeika Anderson, city council chair, just resigned. Also, the city was not the state, but it strikes me that this has got to have something to do with COVID. It's got to have something to do with, you know, the trouble both the city and state are having politically over the moves that our leaders have made over COVID. That's the elephant in the room, Tom. Don't you think so? Yeah, and then I guess the issue then becomes, you know, when we look back at, you know, what Governor Eberhami said, you know, who's going to step up? Who's going to, you know, actually come up and lead us? And leadership sometimes means, you know, motivating people to do things they don't want to do. Because if, I mean, you don't need a leader to make people do things they want to do. So, you know, to be passionate, to be inspiring is, you know, something that's what a leader exhibits. And, you know, I think we kind of need more of that these days. Well, did either of them judge the leadership of David E. Gaye? I mean, either on or off the record? No, not directly. I mean, Neil kind of talked about, you know, having a conversation with Bruce Anderson early on saying, you know, we really need to do a contact risk. We need to do, you know, all of these things that CDC is recommending for us. And, you know, we need to ramp up, you know, the money's not an object, because you have these funds coming in from the, from Uncle Sam to pay for this, but we got to ramp up. We have to, you know, get the human part and the structural part down immediately. But, you know, that never happened. Why I don't know. And it may be, you know, part of, you know, the inertia of the state organization, which is a big organization, or maybe something else. But that I think is one of the things that John why he was referring to when he said, you know, part of the, you know, part of the crisis response is structural. Well, you know, I mean, without naming names, a lot of people out there have tried to give advice to the leaders of the Department of Health and have been rejected their advice has been bounced off. They haven't had any effect and they're walking around, pretty upset about that. Because if their advice had been taken it would be would be in a different spot. Like you said, it's a 20 20 hindsight. It's very easy to say, oh, you know, you could have would have should have but but did. Although I think it's beyond dispute that there are some things that, you know, the world organizations that the National Organization were recommending that we didn't do. Yeah, a lot of advice wasn't taken. You know, actually, I don't know what it is. I don't know whether you're meeting covered it but the numbers for reasons that I don't understand a reason, the numbers seem to be declining a little bit. You know, from 300 now down to 100. I don't know why. But could it be the message is getting through on on masks and social distancing. Could it be that the testing is the testing is not happening, because you know, taking an inverse on Donald Trump. If you test you'll find more cases. If you don't test you'll find less cases. It's a great way to control the public message to control the amount of testing you do. So if it's a number of cases we have is declining. What's the discussion about why. Well, well no I mean we kind of mentioned that we were in lockdown note again. But we kind of tried to dive a little bit deeper into, you know what leadership entails. And, you know, one of the things is that you cannot have corruption. Okay. And nobody says that there that there is any. You know, you have to have openness. And communication, you know, with with the public. So you know what's happening. Why they're being asked to do what they're being asked to do. And so they can buy into it. Here. You know it's it's beyond Cavill that the first response that our government did to the pandemic was to shut off communication. All of the meeting laws are suspended all. You know, farm information practices act suspended. You know, don't talk to us we'll talk to you. Isn't isn't that what a crisis manager would say professional crisis communications manager. Let's get the message straight. Otherwise, you know, we'll have multiple messages and great confusion and criticism. Well, but you also, you also need the public to buy in. I mean, people don't like being, you know, said, you know, or told, you know, do this and shut and shut up. I certainly like don't like being, you know, being talked to me that way. And I think it's, you know, very commonly held feeling. You know, you need to be open, you need to be honest, you need to tell people what's going on. You know, this is this is why we want to do what we want to do. And can you help us out. You know, I add it's also, it's also a question of context. What I mean is if a given leader in the past before the crisis did not engender trust. He did not work to build it. He did not achieve it. People did not trust him. And then the crisis takes place. It's very hard to do, you know, what people would compliment you for. They're going to look for distrust. They're going to look for mistakes. And so you have to work on that trust element all the time, not just in crisis. Yeah, no, we definitely went into that. It's a, it's a key element of leadership. You can't have leadership without trust. Yeah. I think that's a good discussion. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, leadership is getting people motivated to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do if they don't trust you why would they do it. Right. And in crisis and we're going to have more crisis going forward, whatever reason whether it's the weather whether it's pandemic whether it's things that emanate out of Washington that are completely irrational but we're still subject to it. And you need to have a better relationship a better trust relationship without local leaders. Clearly, it's not time for complacency now. It's time for them to engender trust and it's time for us to examine, you know, our trust relationship and be trusting of them. Right now what one of the solutions or possible paths to a solution that was that was brought forth and Governor Abercrombie brought this up was, you know, should should we be, you know, looking at more private public private partners. There are a number of them being proposed, all of the stadiums one of them. And they can perhaps come up with some solutions that you know that the state government in its current structural structural state can't. One of the reasons, I think, is that there is a lot of structural obsolescence in in the infrastructure that we have in our state. Talk about the Department of Health, you know, doing their entire contract tracing operation with two facts machines. What's going on with that. I mean, why don't we have, you know, email or apps or, you know, some of the more modern tools. And I think the answer is they don't have. So that means that between say February and now, they're tracing effort to whatever extent they actually did it, which I believe was like near zero. I'm doing it on fax machines, myself time I haven't actually handled or use the fax machine at either the send or receive end of it, you know, in 15 or 20 years. So I find it remarkable that the state in a crisis, when they need to communicate critically, they don't have a way to do it, except fax machines. I think I think I think fax machines are used primarily because there's been, you know, some security issues with email, which is I guess another very common way to communicate. Those issues are not present with faxing. But, you know, having a physical machine do it, I mean, I think that's, that's, you know, really, really in the dark ages these days. You could have an electronic or a computer, you know, listen to an incoming fax and it can basically receive the file and then, you know, put it in a place where you can, where you can grab it secure. So that's an interesting question to discuss. That is the fax machine issue with Neil Abercrombie because one of his big things, which sadly enough, he did not really achieve. He had a public-private partnership with Pierre Omidyar and it was somebody else, another wealthy fellow. And they wound up hiring Sonny Bagwalia out of GSA in Washington and bring him out here to evaluate, you know, the computer systems in the state. And it took him a couple of years and a lot of money and he then reported that the computer systems in the state were way behind. Unfortunately, it was never fixed. Neil Abercrombie wanted to fix it in the worst way. And he was concerned about things like finding a shop that was using faxes or old computers. And he must have been right on this issue in that discussion because it's one of his pet peeves. Am I right? No, he certainly was. He was talking about that a lot. That one of the priorities in his administration was to, you know, address the structural deficit by at least improving the technology infrastructure. That's been interesting, Media. How many members of your board? How many are there? And what kind of people are they? Are they nice? Are they come from the business community? Where are they from? Our board. Our board is, you know, drawn from all walks of life. You know, there are business leaders, there are non-profits. We have a former Lieutenant Governor Iona. We have some other non-profit heads. We have Dennis Brown, big brothers, big sisters. We have, you know, various companies being represented. We have accounting firms, law firms, those with interesting taxes. So, you know, you make examination analysis of various, you know, tax issues and fiscal policy issues. We talk about them and you go down and you talk to the legislators about it and maybe the executive do sometimes and try to, you know, advocate for one position or another. That's a good common sense legislation. Does your board get involved in that? Do you tell them in advance about what positions you're taking? Do they tell you in advance what positions they'd like you to take? Do you share between annual meetings or is it just a report at the annual meeting? I do report at the annual meeting. What happens is the board has approved a set of principles that would guide our positioning. And that's, it's on our website. The commentary on legislation that our testimony is drafted with that in mind. We typically don't have time during the session to reach out to the board on individual positions. It all comes up for hearing. You get notice of it, you know, two days before testimony is due one day before. So it's not a whole lot of time. In contrast to our weekly commentary, which goes out to the media every week, it is reviewed by the board. So they take positions on it and say, hey, time, you know, we don't agree with this or you shouldn't say this or sometimes get the other side of it. So I think a good check and balance on my otherwise unbridled passion, you know. Well, that's the way it should work, you know, you want them to weigh in. This is an interesting question you want to weigh in you want to express themselves and how they, and how they see the mission, you know, in the detail. You have interpretation of the mission. At the same time, there's got to be a chief executive who runs with it. I am reminded. In fact, I wanted to tell you this story. Okay, in the 18th century, if I were a C captain, before I left the port, the Admiralty would have a sealed envelope delivered to me with it with a wax seal on the outside. And now to see, I would, I would undo the seal, and I would look at my orders, my orders were in the envelope. Then the orders would tell me where I should go and what I should do in very, very general terms. No detail at all. And I as a ship captain was responsible. And of course, you know, under the rules of Admiralty, if I didn't like what a sailor was doing, I could have him hung from the yard or keel holds whenever the case may be. I was in the plank. Yeah, I was in complete control as a captain of that ship. It meant a lot to be a captain of that ship. I also had to avoid mutiny, by the way. I could only go so far. Now, today, you know, when the captain leaves, you know, the port with his with his warship and so forth, he's in constant contact by radio and other methodologies with the Admiralty. They tell him what to do. They want to know what he's doing every day, you know, where he is, how he, you know, how well supplied he is where he's going, every single thing. And he doesn't have the same kind of authority because they're going to obviously they're going to tell him what to do. And so there's a whole ship, the whole thing about how leadership has changed at sea. And I suggest that leadership has changed in in every way. When you have a board to which you are responsible where they do express themselves, but they leave a certain amount of discretion to you. So the question is how much discretion do you have and how much control do they have. And you have to find a balance something in every case for every board and every leader have to find a case in the case of David E. Gaye and, you know, COVID. You know, he's kind of a lame duck. So it's, it's, you know, the legislature could tell him a few things, but the public is not going to be able to tell him, except through the press, very much at all. And that accountability issue, isn't it. Yeah, and the, and the legislature is actually being more activist right now they're they're kind of jumping into things they're, you know, walking into the Department of Health and, you know, turning, turning over rocks to find contact as we've discussed in this show before. But your leadership now your leadership you, you pretty much have the discretion within the boundaries of the policies you've established with them to, to go from year to year. They're not likely to, you know, contact you by radio and tell you wait a minute, you know, don't hang that man from the yard. You get to do what you get to do. Right. Except when it comes to being an aircraft carrier reporting that you're that your ship is infested with COVID. That's a problem. Yeah, that could be a career ending. Right. So this was the first time, and I fully understand this because we're having the same experience that board of directors meeting for the tax foundation of white was organized by zoom. I assume they all showed up I assume they all had input but tell me how did it go. And what was the difference in you know in the Gestalt. This is this is an annual meeting it's a member's meeting. We have about 250 members. Okay, coming from all walks of life. Okay, you know some small business people some some big corporations. And that's, you know, their chance to come and see what the foundation's done. I do report on what we've done and how many, like how many hits on our website and so forth. We get 780,000 hits a month, which, which I think is not bad. But you're a popular fellow. So the members meeting not the same as the board meeting does the board meet meet more than once a year. Yeah, you know board board meets every months during session and every other month around. And just the members group elect new directors every year. I know that's done by the board. Okay. Okay, well if that's common for a 501 C three anyway. So how is this meeting on code on zoom different from earlier meetings that you've had over the years. Well, you know, when we had meetings at the Plaza Club for example, we asked you is we're able to fill up the place, you know, 150 people showed up. I guess, you know, some, some voluntary some not because you know company bought a table. So on this, on this virtual meeting we had, you know, 60 something people but you know, they were all engaged. And then there may be more. We may have had people in a conference from dialing in and they would show up as one person on our screen. So we don't know exactly how many people were in attendance but it seemed to be a little bit lower than anymore. But I think, again, it's because of the, the situation which we're in. So how did you allow them to speak that could they raise their hand and could you did you include them in the conversation either by video or audio or both. Well, we had them, you know, we had everybody who was on me could submit questions through the chat box. And we worked those in and I was moderating the discussion. And be sure that the questions in the chat box got asked. Well, last question time because we're almost out of time but you know, so given all of that. And given the fact that, you know, that that was a meeting in which 50 6070 people were engaged. And the fact that the legislature is scheduled to is meeting now, you know, informally the way they, they have followed things. And we'll start meeting formally again in January. How, how have your marching orders changed. What, what kind of new instructions are new. You know, new advice have they given you that you carry forward into the next, the next year. But I didn't really get any I mean what we're doing is the same as we've always been doing. We monitor legislation. We provide comments. We start reaching out to the public or to media. We go with what we find. If we find unusual things. Go on, like talking tax or, or other media outlets and say, you know, hey, we have a problem. Here's what it is. You might not necessarily be able to do anything about it but the voting public can. They have issues available, especially, you know, what's coming up in two months. Well, suppose I'm watching this show and I really am fascinated with the whole idea of having a tax foundation. I think it's an important part of, you know, the Gadfly and the government watcher and, you know, supervision. So question is how, how could I get to be a member. If I can be a member of the tax foundation for wife of that matter. What do I have to do to become a director of the tax foundation. Tell me now so I can, you know, follow through if I want. Sure, if you want to be if you want to be a tax foundation member, go to our website. And there's plenty of direction on how to do that there's like a donate but in the right hand corner. You can kind of start there. We have membership options of all kinds. If you want to be the director coffee, we're always looking for good people. Okay, and your number is on the website to write our contact information. Thank you very much Tom Tom Yamachika, President of the tax foundation of Hawaii. It's great to learn about your organization and the way it works. We'll see you next time Tom. Thank you Jay. Stay safe.