 Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kili Ikeena. And although I'm a trustee in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and president of the Grass Root Institute, the views that I express and my guest expresses today are completely our own and do not represent any organization or any government agency. With that said, I'm delighted today to have a young man who has come from the private sector and is making his views known publicly probably for the first time in any big way on an issue. Most people in Hawaii have heard that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs was recently audited by the state legislative auditor. It was a scathing audit. It has just been released and there are many, many reactions. Well, what's interesting is that the state audit caused someone who's been fairly quiet, who is a native Hawaiian beneficiary of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and an attorney to start to speak up. He recently wrote an op-ed in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. I'm going to talk a little bit about that with him today and welcome him to the program and talk a little bit about his heritage. Please welcome to our program today Samuel Wilder King II. Sam, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on the show. Well, you know, with a name like that, Samuel Wilder King II. You've got quite a legacy. I don't know if all of our audience knows that you are the great grandson of a Hawaii governor and you're the grandson of one of the most famous judges, Sam King. So what is it like to carry the heritage of such a profound name? Well, it's not a negative. It's fun. I mean, it's good to have. Oh, I didn't think it was negative at all. No, no. Well, I mean, to some extent, there's an expectation level of it. One of my friends pointed out, you know, I could accomplish a lot of things in life, but my grandpa did it all with one eye. So how impressive can you be in the end if you're a federal judge or anything? So there's always that expectation level. But on the other hand, I got to spend a lot of time with my grandpa, my parents, and, you know, my dad, also Sam King Jr. So that was a great honor to be able to hang out with him. We had brunch every Sunday and talk with him. And then, you know, it's always funny. You walk down the street and you meet my parents' friends. When I was a little kid, they all know who I am. I'm like, I don't know who we are, but they all know me because of grandpa. So. Well, one of the ironies is that Sam King, the judge, was very prominent in a movement that turned the Kamehameha school's Bishop of State around. And he wrote a book. I see you've got it over there called Broken Trust. Is there any particular reason you brought that with you today? Yeah, it was. It's by the way, he wrote it along with another mutual friend of ours, Randy Roth, Sam King and Randy Roth. It's a very relevant book to Hawaii and to Oha and to everyone that's concerned about the status of native Hawaiians and all the trusts that benefit native Hawaiians. It amazed me every time I asked my friends that they haven't read it, especially people in law school. They're always like, I haven't read it yet. And it's just it's so vital. And the story is so shocking and so humorous to the extent of how blatant it all was. And it came up again recently in one of the think tech interviews I think we talk about. Right. We'll talk about that in a bit. And that's one of the things that's interesting about Hawaii that newcomers sometimes don't know right away, but eventually learn that a phenomenal amount of money, billions of dollars of trust funds that really have come to us from the Hawaiian kingdom are available today for the advancement of native Hawaiians. And you and I are both part native Hawaiians. So in a sense, we're beneficiaries of that. And yet the administration of those trust funds has been a problem. Roth and King pointed out in broken trust that the Kamehameha School's Bishop of State had some very serious problems with regard to how they administered it. And one of the biggest tragedies is that a massive amount of money came in at the top, but didn't necessarily get to meeting, get down to the bottom of the funnel to meet the needs of native Hawaiians. We may talk a little bit about that with reference to the audit of OHA in a moment. But first I wanted to ask you, you know, how do you conceive of yourself as a native Hawaiian? There are many, many definitions. Your lawyers, you know, there are some legal definitions. There are some constitutional definitions. There's a difference between a small in native Hawaiian and a large in native Hawaiian. But just for Sam Wilder, King, the second, well, what does it mean to you personally to be native Hawaiian? You know, what it means is just to do everything with polno, you know, righteousness and try and do your best and work your hardest. I think what I've always thought about and I always conceptualize it as is if I work hard and I try and do my best and I do what I think is right for myself and my community, then I'm living what I believe are native Hawaiian values. I don't need to espouse a certain view in any certain way or, you know, believe certain belief structure. I just have to do my best and work my hardest and be the best person I can be. And that's what it comes down to. It's interesting that you use the word polno, which most people know as part of our state motto, umauke e oka aina i ka polno. The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Polno, that seems to be a family value for you in terms of your ancestors who fought so far so hard to make sure that things were right in terms of a legal sense. Absolutely. And that's those values. I hope they've been instilled in me over the many years. You know, we always, like I said, we're on every Sunday. We talked about not these kind of issues in a specific sense, because I think to some degree, my family always wanted the grandchildren, especially to kind of live their own life, do what they wanted to do. But you heard about the events going on. You heard about the way to approach and the way to think about those kinds of things and just thinking about what's best for the community, what's best for the native Hawaiians and the entire state of Hawaii. I mean, we're in this together. We're all living on this island together. So we have to work together. Recently, the state auditor released findings for an audit of the years 2015 and 2016 in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. And it may be good for us just to step back a moment and talk about what the purpose of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs is. Constitutionally, it's to advance the conditions of native Hawaiians. But there are lots of different views as to what it means to advance the conditions of native Hawaiians. What's your vision, Sam, as to what really is important about advancing the conditions of native Hawaiians here in Hawaii and across the world? I think it comes down to bread and butter issues, such as, you know, OHA has a research division and you look at their website and they have indicators that are good indicators, home ownership, median income, health outcomes, poverty levels, those kinds of things should be focused on. And if you can improve those kinds of issues for native Hawaiians and all native Hawaiians are going to be better off, they're going to be happier, healthier, we're all going to live more successful lives. That's really what OHA should be focusing on. Those are the kinds of things that I think everyone envisioned when OHA was created. It wasn't just something that was intended to be some sort of separate government that was excluded from everybody else. It was meant to be an expression of responsibility that the people of the state of Hawaii, which is why we put it in our constitution, decided to say, we really need to resolve this, we need to address this special group of people that were here, we bear responsibility for things. Not if they weren't treated, I mean, Hawaiians were mistreated in history. There wasn't all roses all the way through and there's a certain amount of responsibility we have for that. And so I recognize that and OHA can help Hawaiians in that way and it's a wonderful idea to be able to say, we can target this group, we can help this group, you know, you have to balance everything with the racial aspect. I think that's something very important to keep in mind to worry somebody. You basically refer to bread and butter issues, housing, jobs, education and healthcare. I noticed that you excluded political issues such as Hawaiian sovereignty and so forth. In fact, you had a little bit of a difficulty, didn't you, with the recent attempt by OHA to spend some money on establishing Hawaiian sovereignty through grants it gave to an organization called Na'i Aupuni. Well, what was your concern about that? Na'i Aupuni required everyone who signed up to the list to pledge their loyalty to some extent. The exact wording was chosen for a statutory reason to comply with some sort of administrative rule of the federal government, but it basically said, I do believe in the unrelinquished sovereignty of the native Hawaiian people. And whether or not you believe that is necessary or the case or you need it to create a tribe, I don't understand why anyone should be forced to believe anything to be a native Hawaiian. That was my fundamental objection. It required you to affirm a historical fact that you may or may not agree with. You will have a different perspective on, but you had to swear to it in order to be on the list as if you cannot be part of this club if you don't have this political view. And I just found that point. So you objected to the fact that in order to be a bona fide Hawaiian on a list of Hawaiians, you had to have a very specific and narrow political view when in reality you wanted to be on that list because you wanted to help advocate for bread and butter issues. That's exactly right. And I ended up, I show up in the lawsuit that was recently filed out. You were ordered a plate to draw on. And one of the motions I'm in the back is the only person who managed to get on the list without making that declaration because I wrote into them and I said, I object. Well, that's interesting. But for the most part, you've been fairly quiet. You've gone through a fine education. You have become an attorney. You're working in private practice. You're raising your family, lovely wife, and you're on one or two. One, one, one right now. One little child and so forth. But something recently happened that made you go public and submit an op-ed to the Honolulu Star Advertiser on the audit of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. What happened that pushed you to do that? To leave that rather tranquil, quiet life and all of a sudden become the center of some attention? Well, the audit of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs that recently came out was just shocking. I mean, I described it as jaw-dropping. And I had more colorful adjectives except I had to edit them out for the word count, which probably made it all better in the end. But you read through the document and you're just astounded by the fact that this money has been thrown around with this kind of reckless disregard as if, you know, I was, Aliyah, in the old days, they had to take care of the Makai Nana as if they were, you know, they were taking care of the land. They had to take care of them as siblings. And it seemed like when you read this Appendix A to the audit, which I recommend anyone do, you see this passing out of money to people on this random basis as if I met you on the street and therefore I want to take care of you, that on top of the fact that you read through some of the expenditures that they were making, the paying for a rodeo and things like this, it just, it was so amazing. I had to comment. And so it pushed you. It was kind of like a straw that broke the camel's back because I know that people have approached you in the past to try to get you involved in a more public way, even in the legal case and so forth. But you've kind of been quiet. What was it about this that was so deep that it meant, you know, you're gonna shatter that anonymity and quietness of your life? Well, I mean, to some extent, I've always, I've been trying to track the issues and learn about them and all of these things. But the audit was really just the, like you said, the straw that broke the camel's back because the, first off, a lot of the trustees, you know, they have great records, I'm sure they were all doing this with the best of intentions. And they pointed out that they were, you know, giving money to beneficiaries, they were trying to advance the cause, maybe they misunderstood it. And my fundamental point in the end was just, you've been there too long. It's time to change, the audit makes clear that, you know, it's time for a different approach. I think it's just time for a clean slate. There's been so much back and forth with the lawsuits and the suing each other, the animosity. And then you start digging into the audit. I mean, the first part of it, I was, I quoted a number, something like off the, you know, back the envelope calculations, 26% of OHA's expenditures go on administration. OHA is primarily a grant making organization. There's an organization called Charity Navigator that kind of tracks these sorts of things. And they have something called the expense ratio. And it's come under criticism, you know, some organizations that have more expertise, you know, professionals that are providing like a service directly through an individual that might have higher salary costs. But fundamentally what it comes down to is, if you were spending too much on your administrative costs, you're not providing money to the people you're supposed to be serving. And OHA's up in the 26% for a grant making organization. That's a score of zero out of 10. Well, we're gonna come back in a moment and look at some specifics that you wrote about. And I'll ask you what your concerns are and you can give us some examples. But thank you so much for joining us today. I am glad you're speaking out. My guest today is Samuel Wilder King II. And when we come back from this break, we're gonna walk through the recent state audit of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. And he's gonna share, from his perspective, both as an attorney and an OHA beneficiary. I'm Kaley Ikeena on Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Don't go away, we will be right back. You're the best, you can be chest, you can be Aloha and welcome back to Hawaii Together. That's a great thing, Hawaii Together. And there's a Hawaiian saying that has the word together in it called a pule kakou. It's set off in here at private and public functions and it simply means a pule. Let's pray kakou together. Well, one of the things that has been on my heart since coming into public life has been getting people to work together. So I coined a phrase called ahana kakou. Ahana kakou, let's work together. Let's work together for a better economy, government and society. Because divided there's nothing we can do but united nothing can stop us. And I think that's probably something that we need to be listening to a lot more today because so many issues fracture us as the people of Hawaii and as observers view from across the world. It looks as though we can get very little done. That's why I like Sam Wilder King because he brings together diverse views. He brings together diverse populations who all care about the life of the land and a word he used earlier called pono. I'm gonna go back to him now and we're gonna ask him for his views on the audit. Sam, recently your views in the Star Advertiser may have been lumped together with some other commentators and called fake news. Because you are endorsing the audit so to speak. You basically found that there's no reason to question the state auditor because he's competent and he has the jurisdiction with which to conduct the investigation he conducted and so forth. But just a few days ago there appeared a show on this very broadcast network, Think Tech Hawaii. And I'd like to encourage all of you who are out there to go ahead and look it up on the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network. That's ThinkTechHawaii.com. Look for it, just Google or look for the show of Governor Waaihei and CEO Crab talking about the audit. It's called audit the view from the other side. And when you watch that and rely upon your own observation rather than my paraphrasing, you're gonna see some arguments that are made. I'd like to, have you seen that, Sam? I have seen it, that interview was surreal. For starters, the implication in the interview that only native Hawaiians can criticize Oha was shocking to me. Well there was a statement in there and again I wanna refer our viewing public to the actual video in which this was discussed so they could see it themselves. But Governor John Waaihei and CEO of Oha Crab basically intimated that there was a problem with the audit because the auditor himself wasn't ethnically native Hawaiian. What are your thoughts about that? I mean it's just offensive to the extent that somehow and I think to some they, Governor Waaihei admitted at some point in the broadcast said, maybe somebody else has a better mousetrap or a better way to build a mousetrap that'd be recognized. And I've taken that as word that that's some of good ideas can come out of the audit. And that was my conclusion. The audit had made worthwhile observations and those observations were worth listening to and I as a beneficiary was listening to them and I found them to be shocking and Oha has not repudiated any of them. Well one of the major premises of that interview we refer to between Governor John Waaihei and CEO Crab of Oha is that most of the money that Oha manages does not come from the taxpayer or the legislators. Instead it comes from the Native Hawaiian Trust Fund which comes from the seeded lands. And therefore the auditor doesn't really have, it's not really the auditor's business to be telling Oha how to use it. Now that may make sense to a lot of people but what do you think? Well the auditor's role and the reason the auditor has a salary from a public institution is to watch out for fraud, waste and abuse to some extent in these organizations. And I as a citizen rely on state agencies such as the auditor to look out for that. Now when they provide me a report I can rely on that report. When the auditor is examining these organizations it's not just an organization he's examining the leaders of these organizations who are state public officials elected or appointed as it's the case of the CEO and elected as it's the case of the trustees. And each of them has the laws of the state the sunshine laws, the ethics laws, the Hawaii Revised Statutes as the standard by which they need to perform. Isn't the auditor simply making reference to these standards for the most part in comparing the performance of these actors these state agents to the standard that they should act by? I believe that's exactly the case. I mean it's possible that some people in Oha don't think that they're a state agency that they're not subject to the office of information practices regulations. I've been assured that they are subject to OIP laws. And I value the auditor's review of the leadership because one of the reasons the interview was surreal was Governor John Waihe was talking about how only, you know, this is our money. It's like I was if Hawaiians like only us are responsible for this money and therefore no one could speak to it. And I just was reminded, you know, in pages about 89 to 92 of Broken Trust. John Waihe described, my grandpa and Professor Roth describe how John Waihe appointed all the Supreme Court justices and then attempted to have them, at least the implication, appoint him a Bishop of State trustee. So clearly looking at the leadership of an organization is very important, not just the numbers, looking at how they go through their process is extremely valuable. Right, and these leaders of Oha, the trustees, were actually elected by the public voters and the voters need to be able to rely upon the state to auditor to tell them whether or not they're performing according to standard. Now, one of the things that was interesting is that Governor Waihe and CEO Crabb talked about Oha using a metaphor. They said Oha was a fourth branch of government. Now I'm not gonna hold them to that in a purely legal sense, but that term was thrown around quite a bit in the interview. What were your thoughts about seeing Oha as a fourth branch of government? I didn't understand what they were talking about. And in the end Oha is, it's fundamentally a state agency. And the only reason you can't say that with any confidence in general, because there's some sort of legal framework around it, but in the end it's created by the state and it's, like I said, it's an expression of the people of Hawaii's sense of responsibility for native Hawaiian. We've looked at it and said this is one way we can address the issues that are rising in this community. Yes, and while it is a state agency, it is true that Oha has a mandate that goes beyond that of most state agencies because it has a specific mandate to advocate for the native Hawaiians, which comes from the Constitution. Yet your argument is sound that the actual agents of the agency need to adhere to law and policy. Now we already talked about your first concern expressed in your op-ed and that was the inordinate amount spent on overhead in Oha, but there was a second concern and that was the grants process. One of the things you pointed out that the auditor made a big deal of is that through the regular grants process in 2015 and 16, Oha awarded through rigorous competition about $7 million in grants. And yet through a very non-rigorous process, some other way, Oha found that he could give $14 million twice as much to people outside of their rigorous process. Well, what's wrong with that? Well, why does that really matter? The idea that you can have discretionary funding that is non-budgeted of $14 million, double what you're planning for is absurd. They are, Oha has the ability and the capacity to budget for these expenditures. They can have a plan that says we will put a pot of money aside per year that you can apply to and we as a trustees can vote on it. But instead what they were doing was the CEO was apparently coming out and adjusting the budget on the fly over the objections of the staff, which, you know, at one point he said, the governor, hey, made a joke and said, oh, well, all your staff are auditors, which was an incredible insult to the Oha staff. But that aside, the fact that the staff are objecting and then the CEO is doing it anyway, I'm not sure how that process is supposed to work. I mean, the auditor was saying the process was not being followed. So to the extent a process existed, the auditor is telling everybody, yeah, that's great, but you're not using it. So what's the point? And there was an example they gave in their letter response where they said, you know, we've given money to the Lunalilo Trust for Kupuna's home, which is great. I'm just not sure why that couldn't have been budgeted. I don't know if, why that needed to be extraordinary expense. And it's a construction project. It was going on. They didn't know it was gonna happen sooner? You also were very concerned about the trustee expenditure accounts. Trustees get what, is that 22 or 23? 22,000, I think. 22,000 dollars a year to use at their discretion. And they write the checks and so forth directly. What was your concern about this? That was one of the, I think I stated blatantly that it was insane. They were co-mingling funds into there. So they're taking their allowance of money and putting it into the, and I say they is too broad. There was some examples of that occurring, which is disturbing. In addition, anyone who works for an organization knows that for the most of the time, if you're actually trying to track spending and keep a handle on things, you go and spend the money yourself and then you write a little form to your finance department. You say, I need to get reimbursed for this. And then they reimburse you. You don't go around just handing out the money. And when you do allow a flexible situation like that, you get the audit. And there were expenditures on, like I said, tickets for a rodeo, which maybe went a good thing, but you could have applied for it. You didn't need to get a trustee directly to give you money for it. They're paying each other's health bills. I mean, one trustee was paying for the health expenses of another trustee's spouse. There was a tuition or rent was being paid of beneficiaries directly by the trustees. And that's just, how is that not a conflict of interest? There was a quote of one of the trustees that said, you know, I'm not gonna use these funds because it seems strange to me, and I'm paraphrasing, to be paying my voters. I'm going around and I'm giving out money directly to the people who will be voting in the election. One person who objected to including trustee accounts sent to me, there's no real problem here because don't we expect that executives have perks? Now, what is your thought about that? Should trustees have these kind of perks? No, the expenditure accounts should just be completely eliminated. They should be kept strictly to a reimbursement process. The CEOs, sponsorships, why, why? Why does that exist? Well, if people wanna follow your work further, just Google Samuel Wilder King II and look at your article. We've got about a minute left, Sam. If you were called upon Oha to consult and to tell them what they should do now, moving forward in light of the audit, what would you say real quickly? I think you refocus on the bread and butter issues and to do that, you start eliminating some of the processes that are distracting. So eliminate the trustee account funds, have it all be reimbursable, eliminate the CEO sponsorships and get back to focusing on what the research division is pointing out. We're missing all these targets. We need to reallocate our funds only towards getting Hawaiians meeting income stack up, health indicators up and home ownership up. So Oha should be committed to helping Hawaiians improve in the areas of bread and butter issues. That's it. Well, very good. Sam, thanks for coming on the program. Thanks for your courage in speaking out. Thank you. My guest today, Samuel Wilder King, is sharing his mana'o, his understanding of the recent audit of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. And I encourage you to Google him and see what else he's written. My name is Kili'i Akina on Hawaii Together. You're watching the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network until next time. Aloha.