 Aloha and welcome to the Ruderman Round Table, where a semi-weekly program talking about environmental issues and good government here in Hawaii. This week is Sunshine Week, a week celebrating efforts to promote public access to government information. So, we have a timely topic for this show because here to talk about Hawaii's public access law is Sheryl Kakazu Park, who has been the Director of the State Office of Information Practices since April 2011. Thank you for being with us, Sheryl. Thank you, Senator. Ms. Park, after 19 years of living, working and traveling abroad and on the mainland, Ms. Park returned home to Hawaii where she has served on the board of Directors of the Beta Beta Gamma Foundation and the Continuing Legal Education Committee of the Hawaii State Bar Association. Ms. Park has been instrumental in obtaining passage of major legislative changes to Hawaii's open records and open meetings law. So tell me, Sheryl, I read on the website that the mission of OIP is ensuring open government while protecting individual privacy. How does the OIP Office of Information Practices go about fulfilling its mission? Well, we're responsible for administering two important laws, the first of which is the Uniform Information Practices Act or UIPA, and that's like the state's version of the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. And so if people want access to government records or documents, that's the law that will help them to obtain those documents if they're entitled to it. And most of them you are entitled to. The second law that we administer is the state's Sunshine Law, which is the open meetings law. And so that law has specific requirements as to when notice must be provided to the public and minutes are to be taken and different things so that people will know what's going on in government. Both of the laws are important laws to provide for government transparency and accountability. And we also help the state Office of Technology Services or ETS actually, Enterprise Technology Services to administer or promote the state's open data law policy. Thank you. Can I as a member of the public call OIP to get records of various agencies? Oh, certainly you can call us for help, but we don't actually have the records themselves. You would have to call the agency directly to get or to request the records. So first step is to call the agency I'm interested in, let's say if it's Department of Transportation I call them. And then if I have trouble getting what I want from them, then do I call you guys? Yes. Yes. For the most part, I'm going to presume that you're going to get the records because that's what the data is showing that people are getting the records from the agencies in a timely manner. But when they don't give you the records, that's when you call OIP for help. Because sometimes it just falls through the cracks. Other times they might not know the law sometimes. Other times they might have a good reason for withholding the information. Because things that are personal to people like their health information or that might be a trade secret for business or that might be something that's still in the works as part of the deliberative process, those things might be protected from public disclosure. So there are certain categories of information that you can't be shared or can't be shared yet. Right. But beyond that, the public has a general right to ask for information regarding the government's working. Definitely. Who can ask for help? Can anyone ask? Oh, anyone can ask for help. And we get calls from the public all the time. We also get calls from the government agencies because they rely upon us to help them remain in compliance with the law. If they have any questions, we try to keep them straight. So if the agency doesn't, the first agency contact does not give us the records that we ask for, then I would call you and you could help me navigate to know whether I'm entitled to those records and if so, whether I should ask one through you or go back to the agency. The first thing you should probably do is make a written request for the records to the agency so that there's a record of when you made your request. We know what you asked for and who you asked and when you asked for it. And if the agency doesn't respond then to your written request, then you give us that copy of your request and we'll go and ask the agency why didn't you respond. And typically, once we get involved, the agency will often give us the records or not us, they'll give you the records that you asked for unless again it's protected from disclosure for some very good reason. Can you give me any examples of relatively typical things that you get asked or common things you might get asked? Well, first of all, it's records from any agency. But then besides records, besides the UIPA, we also administer the Sunshine Law. And so when it comes to the Sunshine Law, people might ask us, for example, I'm not sure that this agenda is adequate because I really can't tell from this agenda what's going to happen at this meeting. And so we'll take a look at the agenda and say, you're right, we can't either. And so we'll go to the agency and say, I don't think your agenda is adequate and you're going to have to do a better agenda than this. And that might mean then that they have to redo the meeting or postpone that or cancel that meeting and do another one with a more sufficiently descriptive agenda. Another thing that might happen is during the course of the meeting, the board might go into a closed session out of the public view. That's what we call executive session. And people might call us say, hey, why did they go into this closed session? I don't know what's going on. And so we'll have to ask the board in that case, we might have to open up a formal case and ask the board for its input or for its meeting minutes and look to see whether or not they went into the executive session for one of the specified statutory reasons. And if they actually did talk about confidential matters during that session. So those are a couple of examples of sunshine law questions that we get a lot. The sunshine law applies to all boards and agencies. Is that right in the state of all government boards, that is? And county councils, I know we, the state legislator, exempt from it, curiously, but almost everyone else in the state is subject to sunshine law. Well, the sunshine law applies to all, most boards, boards and commissions. But the agencies, just about, I can't think of any that aren't. All state county and independent agencies, which would include like the UH or Hawaii Tourism Authority or OHA, they're all subject to the UIPA. And this is at all levels, whether it's the executive branch, the legislative branch, or the judicial branch. And the sunshine law going back to that would be boards that are created by state statute rule or executive order. And they have a specific area of concern that they have to hold meetings on. So there's a definition for sunshine law boards. And sometimes the legislature will exempt certain boards from being sunshine law boards. So that's why it's not necessarily every state board and commission. All right. So you actually have a role to play in keeping agencies honest or in compliance with the sunshine law. Because if someone complains to you, you can inform that agency that their agenda wasn't adequate or their notice wasn't adequate. How do people find out about board meetings? Well, it's supposed to be on an agenda that is put up on the state calendar, electronic calendar, on the county electronic calendar, and filed with either the, if it's a state agency with the office of the Lieutenant Governor or with the county clerk, if it's a county board, at least six days in advance. And so probably the easiest thing is to either check the electronic calendar or ask to be put on the mailing list of the board that you're particularly interested in so that they'll have to send you notices. Now, the electronic calendars, I believe, are supposed to be able to allow you to say, I want to get just these minutes from these boards. And it's supposed to push those out to you. Very nice. So tell me, how many employees does Office of Information Practice have to do all of this work? Well, we have nine employees, including me. And I have five staff attorneys that answer the phones every day and can help you with your questions as you call them in that day. We have a staff attorney on call each day. So it's called our attorney of the day service. So if you have just a simple question, you can get your answer the same day, or at least within 24 hours. And that's most of the inquiries that we have to the office in terms of numbers. So most inquiries you get can be answered that same day. It's not the same phone call by the attorney of the day answering the phone that day. For more difficult ones, we have formal cases that we open up. And I think we have a chart that would show you this. Yes, I think so. Let's see if this is the chart. So if you look at this chart, the big green portion of the bar are our attorney of the day or AOD calls. And then the lower candy striped portion are the formal cases that we open up for things that we just can't answer right away. We might have to conduct an investigation or write an opinion or do a lot more work for those types of inquiries. And so we have about 1,200. Well, last year, about 1,200, almost 1,200. It went down a little bit. I think if you looked at the next chart, I can show you exactly how this has been going. Yes, on this chart, you'll see that in the blue dotted line, those are the number of cases that we get. This is the formal cases that correlates to that smaller portion of the bar chart. So we opened an increasing number of formal cases each year, you can see, until 2016 when it dropped down considerably. So we got to break that year. The green solid line shows the number of cases that we've been resolving each year. And thankfully, that's been increasing. So that means our productivity has been going up. As a result, the bottom red dotted line shows the amount of backlog that we have. And it's been a bigger gap because that means our backlog has been going down. And you see that we were able to reduce the backlog considerably in this year, 2016. Unfortunately, this year, we have a big increase in cases. And that is going to start going back up. We have about 60% more cases at this point this year compared to last year. But even with your increased caseload, you're keeping up with that. Most cases are resolved promptly. And the complex ones we're keeping up with. All of the AODs are express lane. And we take care of those just about the same day. It's just the formal cases where we might finish about 3 fourths of them each year in the same year that they come in. But then if we are not able to do so, then they go into the backlog. And that backlog, though, what we haven't been able to show you on the graphs has been going down in terms of age. Because when I first came on in 2011, we had like a 12-year-old case. And I thought that was unacceptable. So we've been working really hard to reduce the age of the backlog. And in fact, we're down to now nothing older than two years at the end of each fiscal year. So last year, we ended with nothing older than 2014. And this year, we hope that there's going to be nothing older than 2015, even though the number of cases that we've been getting has been increasing a lot this year. Well, that's wonderful news. Thank you for that work you're doing, keeping up with all these many, many requests that you're getting and understanding that some of them are very complex and take some time. We're going to take a break for just a minute. And we'll be back again with Sherylok Kakazi Park of the Office of Information Practices here on the Ruderman Roundtable. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement, raising public awareness on tech, energy, diversification, and globalism. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel, host of Life After Statehood. And I do this with our regular contributor, Ray Tsuchiyama. And we try to make sense of all that has happened in Hawaii, all that is happening, and all that should happen. Ray, what do you think of that show? I feel delighted to be part of Life After Statehood. Since after 59, so many things happen to the state of Hawaii, yet things could have gone in other directions. And that's what I'm fascinated about, that Hawaii has had a great history but could have an even greater future. There you go. I believe that. I'm with you all the way. Ray Tsuchiyama and me, Jay Fidel, we do it as much as we can on Life After Statehood. Come around and see what we have to say. Thanks. Aloha, and welcome back to the Ruderman Roundtable. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman. I'm here with Sheryl Park, the Director of the State Office of Information Practices. And we're talking about good government and how public can access information from our government, which is what the OIP helps with. Tell me, what does the OIP do besides cases and opinions? Well, we have a lot of duties, and one of the primary duties we have is training. So we put a lot of things online where people can access them 24-7. And at the end of the show, I will have some contact information for you. And besides that, we're very busy now with the legislature in session, and we've been monitoring about 100 bills and testified on about 30 of them. And we also monitor litigation relating to the UIPA or Sunshine Law. And we'll be doing some administrative functions like rulemaking. So we're looking at updating our rules, which were last done in 1998, regarding the UIPA. We have done some other rules since then, but we're looking at implementing new rules in other areas as well. Does OIP have objective data to guide it in drafting new rules? Yes, and in fact, that's why we've been holding off on developing our rules right now because we've been creating, we created a UIPA record request log that we have all of the state and county agencies using now. And in fact, just yesterday for Sunshine Week, we posted our fiscal year 2016 reports online at yp.hawaii.gov, where it talks about the fiscal year 2016 results from all state agencies and a separate report for all of the county agencies. And this log was developed so that we can get some information on how well the UIPA is working. How are requests being completed by agencies? How long is it taking? How much is it costing? So this is the objective data that's gonna help to guide us when we update our rules soon. I see. So I believe we have a slider to talk about some of the ways you measure your own progress. Look at our next slide. Look at the total number of cases and how many have been completed. Yeah, this shows that of all the UIPA record requests, we're not counting the routine requests that are just handed out by the agencies, just UIPA record requests where people make a formal written request for records. Of over 2,200 that were handled by the state agencies, 99% of them were completed in the same year, fiscal year 2016. Only 25 requests or 1% were not completed that same year and they could have been at the end of the fiscal year. Very nice. Can we see our next chart? Oh, here we go. I'm sorry. You're way ahead of me there. Tell me about this next chart. What are we seeing here? Okay, this shows how those 22,224 requests were completed by the state agencies. They granted in full 66% of them, which I think is outstanding. They granted in full or in part another 13% and they denied in full only 4% and the remaining 17%, either the agency didn't have the records so was unable to respond or the requested withdrewed the request or abandoned or failed to pay for the request. Okay. And in our next slide, I think we're comparing our work at the state level to work on the county level. I think, yeah, if you could show the two slides together, what I found so interesting was that this county results were so similar, strikingly similar to the state results. Remarkable, yeah. Yeah. So you're seeing a pattern is not a fluke that you're resolving 65%. Yeah, I don't think so. It's about what we're doing statewide as well as the county right, huh? Very nice. And if we could go to the next slide. Tell us about this one, please. This slide shows you the average number of work days that it took for the agencies to complete requests. And of course, for complex record requests, they take like 24.7 work days on average, but that's because they're more complex. It might take a while for the agencies to go back and forth with the requester to understand exactly what the request is or to narrow down the request because they don't want to be looking through every single piece of paper in their agency and the requester doesn't want to get charged for that either. So they have to narrow it down. And then they might have to give it to another person to search and then maybe the supervisor or an attorney to review and redact the records. So they take much longer than typical ones. But the typical ones are still being done within the 10 day deadline. And that's important for members of the public asking for this because there may be a time limit on their need for this information. So your office's ability to respond promptly is a crucial part of it. I mean, if I were to ask you for information and it takes a year to get it, then that service is really not there in some way. So you're doing the best you can to respond as quickly as you can. And hopefully it might be just a phone call away, or just a letter away. It's just that those difficult ones, yes, you're gonna have to wait because we'll probably have to resolve legal issues. And the ones that take the longest time are the complex record requests that- Yes. That you're gonna take obviously the complex. So tell me how much time you typically spend on each request. Well, we don't spend it, but this is the average number of hours that the state agencies are taking to complete requests. And so you can see that for the typical request, it might be an average of four hours to do the search, review, and segregation. Personal record requests are done in one third of an hour. But the complex record requests take over seven hours. And that is done over, of course, as you saw earlier, many days. This is the agency is doing this. Right, the agencies, no. This is from our log showing what the agencies are reporting as they're logging down their times to complete records, record requests. Because based then on their logs of times, they can charge certain amounts. Because when I ask for information, there's two possible charges I may incur. One is copying costs, the other is time costs, right? It would be fees for search, review, or segregation. And we limit the amount of fees that agencies can charge. Basically, it comes out to, say, $5 an hour for, a lot, $2.50 per 15 minutes to search for a record. And $5 per 15 minutes to review and redact a record. So good, and I think we have a slide here talking about the cost per request. And it's showing that 82% some costs zero. And well, this shows any amount, whether it's fees or costs that requesters are paying. And actually with fees, there are waivers. And so you'll see that most requesters, 1,830 of them or almost 83% of the requesters are paying nothing at all. Nothing in fees or costs. Another little over 9% are paying under $5. And then another almost 6% or 5.6% are paying less than $50. So I think overall, this is very telling that it's not costing the average person anything to get the record request from agencies. And as we saw earlier, the agencies are doing it within 10 days. So if I were to summarize, I think that most people are getting what they asked for within the 10-day period and for free. For free, that's wonderful. So in some cases, some requesters are paying more than $50, some of them are somewhat substantial. What kind of requests would that typically be? I mean, who tends to incur those sorts of costs? Well, we looked into that because they're, you know, nearly, let's see, there were 58 requesters that paid more than $50 for their requests. And so we actually went into each of the logs and tried to identify who these requesters were. And we found that 60% of them, we could identify as being either attorneys or businesses or nonprofit organizations or somebody with other than an individual. The remaining people, 23 of them, we couldn't either identify because they were anonymous or they were an individual, but we were not certain if they were doing so on behalf of an organization. I see. So most of the people that incurred any substantial cost were not individual citizens. They were organizations or people with financial interests. And in fact, the two highest paying entities were commercial entities that paid a little over $3,300 each just for costs because they wanted some information from the Department of Transportation. So the wonderful good news that you're telling us today, Cheryl, is that people can request information for their government agencies. In most cases, they get it. In most cases, they get it promptly and with very little or no cost. Yes. So tell me how can someone contact the Office of Information Practices? Well, we'll have our contact information on the screen soon. And you can either call us at 586-1400 or email us at oipathawaii.gov. We still have a fax machine. Or you can write to us or come into our office. And we have our website, which I would encourage everybody to go to. It's oip.hawaii.gov because we have all of our training materials, our opinions, our reports, the log reports, and everything's on there. So the first step is I go to the agency that I'm interested in and I send a request to the director of that agency. And if I don't get what I want there, then I go to oip and repeat that request and you help me resolve it. Yes. Well, thank you so much for being with me. I've learned so much today. Cheryl Kakazu Park, thank you so much for being with me. Cheryl is the director of the State of Hawaii Office of Information Practices. She's been my guest here on the Ruderman Roundtable. And thank you very much for joining us. We'll see you again in two weeks.