 back to Think Tech this four o'clock on Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters. We're talking about the sorry state of public information in Hawaii with Christina Jedra of Civil Beat. Hi, Christina. Thank you for joining us today. Hey, Jay. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. You had this very good article with Civil Beat a few days ago about the sorry state of public information in Hawaii. And, you know, you're covering it as a beat. This is what you do. You cover this kind of stuff as a beat. And good for you that you do. We need this. Otherwise, it becomes what Ian Lynn calls a sacred cow that nobody touches. You touch it. So good for you. So, you know, the bottom line of that article is that in the time of COVID, perhaps using COVID as an excuse, David E. Gay has given political cover, if you will, legal cover to both state and federal authorities not to respond to requests for information, freedom of information act requests. And that falls right between the state government and the press. It's very disturbing. So can you summarize your article, where you were going with that and what you found? Yeah. So back in March, one of the first things that Governor E. Gay did was suspend the Uniform Information Practices Act, which is just our public records law. And that's really the greatest tool that we have as reporters and members of the public to see what the government is doing, how they're spending our money, you know, why they're making the decisions that they're making. And it's, you know, a great way for us to hold them accountable. And so that was one of the first things that went out the window when the pandemic started. And, you know, all these months later, we still don't have access so we can ask the city or the state to give us documents, but they, you know, don't have to adhere to any deadlines. And it's been tough. A lot of my requests have been ignored. And that's made my job harder, you know, in terms of getting information out to the public. Yeah, we've, you know, we've discussed this before, perhaps not in the same way that you have discussed it in the article with Tom Yamachika. He's the president of Tax Foundation of Hawaii. And one of his concerns about David E. Gay's proclamations is that the law only permits the proclamation to last for so long. I want to say 60 days. And then it's supposed to expire. But in this case, David E. Gay's suespanti has decided, well, we just keep on extending them and extending them and extending them. And along with the extension comes this provision, you know, relaxing the obligation of the government to respond to requests for information. I think it's just, don't you agree that it's especially important in the time of COVID? You can say that, oh, COVID is a good excuse not to respond. But at the same time, you know, government has to be functional. It has to deal with the public. It has to deal with the press. There's even a greater necessity, you know, to require government agencies to respond to requests by the press and the public. Don't you agree? I do agree. It's very important that we have access to these records. You know, as for the 60 day deadline, that's kind of a legal question I am not equipped to answer. But, you know, the larger question of whether the government is too busy at this time to be answering requests, you know, I think there are ways that we can be reasonable and work with them. And they can, you know, if it's a big request and it's a heavy lift, let's do it in batches, you know, but at this point, this is just a blanket excuse for government agencies not to answer at all, basically. And it's had some, you know, pretty upsetting results where, you know, there's just open questions that I have as a reporter that they won't answer in interviews and I can't answer the way that I used to force them to answer, which is documents. You know, I was telling you before the show that when I was practicing law, all too often we would ask for government information by way of a FOIA request or by way of a subpoena attached to deposition of written interrogatories or deposition of oral interrogatories. And and all too often the government would say, well, thank you for the subpoena, but we're not really sure we want to abide by that. So if you want to get these documents, you're going to have to go to court, you're going to have to get an order from a judge telling us to, you know, abide by the subpoena. However, that is not the law. The law is you get subpoenaed and you turn it over. That's that. And I think one of the problems you and I talked about before is that the sanctions are not specified and it's very hard to get sanctions against government if not impossible. So the result is that somebody at the at the information end of things can put you off with impunity. And that was the case with the subpoena, you know, scenario I described. And it's the case apparently here too. In the case of the subpoena and my experience and our experience in practicing, what we what we learned was there was a state subculture culture of not responding to requests for information of saying, you know, you want anything come after us, we're not we're not going to do it voluntarily. And you know, there was no good reason for that, except where we're us and you're you and we're on other sides of the fence and and we don't we don't serve you. The state does not serve you, you serve us. And it's a you know, to me it's a philosophical difference. And I think I think you're finding the same thing, proclamation or no proclamation. Do you feel that you are finding the same thing? Yeah, you know, it's the government really doesn't have much to lose when they ignore us or say no. They I'm not aware of any times when they've gotten a need to find or anything like that we can take them to court, but it takes a lot of years and a lot of resources and we may have to consider doing that more and more, given the situation that we're in, but it really shouldn't have to come to that. You know, these are taxpayer dollars, everything I'm asking for is things that are funded for by all of us. And I would hope that they would just proactively hand these things over, especially when it doesn't require any research or any kind of like detailed redaction. For example, one of the things I've requested from Governor E. Gay's office is his response to a California congresswoman who requested months ago some information about our pandemic response. So how many contact tracers do we have? And how are we spending our federal federal aid dollars, you know, things that are very much in the public interest, things that people have been asking for here, including us in the press. And his response was due to the congresswoman at the end of August. I soon after requested a copy of his response and I've gotten absolutely nothing. And so we just don't know. We don't know the answers to those questions. And I could request the response from the congresswoman side, except that Congress doesn't subject itself to the Freedom of Information Act. So that's an even larger story for another day. But, you know. Yeah. That was a representative as Shu. And you don't know for a fact that she actually got a response from the state of Hawaii. That's true. It's possible they never answered. I can't say for sure since they didn't answer my main records request. Yeah. What's interesting is that they wouldn't even give you a copy of what they had given, if anything, to her. And that would certainly be, you know, something they should share with you easily, instantly. It's so easy to do that. Right. So that's a good example of a subject that's very important. We're in the middle of COVID. Contact tracers are critically important. Are they still critically important? And we haven't solved the problem at all. And we have it embarrassed at various junctures along the way about how little the state has done. In fact, we had this whole musical chairs in Department of Health with epidemiology and that precise function. So it seems to me the public has an abiding need to know about that. And yet they never told you anything. That's the case. And that's just one example. I mean, there's things that are related to the pandemic. And there's things that are related to just our everyday crises like homelessness that have also gotten the same non-response. I mean, the city council budgeted $23 million a year and a half ago for all council districts to be able to address homelessness. And the council members were supposed to decide the best way to do that back in June. So a year after that allocation, I requested information, documents on how that money was spent. You know what? I want to see what the impact has been. Follow the money, right? They just basically said, we'll get to this when we get to it. We're really busy and that's it. And I followed up several times and I haven't received a single document now almost six months later. Any answer at all? Just the, you know, we'll get to it when we get to a kind of response, not a single bit of actual information in response to the question of how this money was spent. And again, these are taxpayer dollars that people have a right to know how it's spent and they're not getting answers. Yeah, that's really remarkable. Don't let them go. That's my reaction. Christina, don't ever let them go on that. They have an obligation. You have a need. You represent us, the people. You know, you're our agent in this matter and we need to know whether we realize it or not. And what's also interesting is that homelessness is a critical issue. So many politicians, you know, run on that issue. So many politicians make speeches on the issue all day long. That's one element. The other element is the state is going to be behind 1.5 how many billion, how many 1.5 billion in the budget this year, at least according to the council on revenues. And, you know, that we're going to be underwater. So every penny counts. If we spend 23 million on this, let's see how it was spent because there remains the logical possibility, which is louder all the time because of the silence. It's deafening silence that there was something wrong about the way it was spent or not spent at a time of COVID, at a time of homelessness, and at a time when every penny means something. So it's quite remarkable that, you know, that you don't get an answer. That's very troubling. Right. Right. And I rather would be writing stories about how the money was spent, but considering this time and again, they have not answered my request, the story became this week, the fact that they're not giving information. But we usually don't like to be the story as journalists. We, you know, we don't want that. We want to be writing about what's going on. But when the story is, we can't figure out what's going on. This is the result. So unfortunate. Well, let's let's turn to the police department because I think the police department is such a good example. And you covered that in your story. I was really fascinated with that. There were lots of things we want to know about the police department. But the police department is notoriously secretive about its records and about misconduct records. And she was about overtime records. Can you talk about that for a minute? Yeah. HPD is tough to get information out of on a good day and good times, pre-pandemic. Now, as I said in my story, they've basically become a black hole for public records requests. I've made several. One, for example, you know, we had all of this, all these protests about police brutality after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. And the department launched a use of force committee to look at, you know, whether their policy looks okay. And that committee has made recommendations. I filed a request for the recommendations. The department strangely enough said that there weren't any, even though a police commissioner that's on the committee said that there are in a public meeting. And I followed up several times. They won't give me the recommendations. I've asked for the union's input on those recommendations and whether the chief has weighed in at all in writing. Nothing. So we don't know what's going on with use of force. I used FBI and attorney general data to report on HPD's crime solving rate, also known as the clearance rate, the rate at which they're closing cases. A very important story, especially now. Yes, absolutely. It goes to, you know, the core effectiveness of our police department. And so after I reported that story, for which Chief Ballard declined to be interviewed, she publicly said in a police commission meeting that my reporting was wrong and that, you know, the numbers couldn't be trusted. So I filed a request with her department for the records or the numbers rather that she believes are correct. She has not responded. So I don't really know what to do with that. She has, however, given numbers to councilman Tommy Watter's office, which are pretty darn similar to what the FBI was saying. So do it that way. You will. They have actually answered my request for overtime data. I asked for information on how much officers you're making in 2019 versus this year. They declined to give me the record citing officer's privacy concerns. Not sure how individual officer privacy outweighs the public's right to know how this money is being spent, but that's their argument. I've also asked for disciplinary records for officers that were sued recently and others who my sources say have problem records in our high ranking. Zero response to that. Names and badge numbers, you know, I just asked for that to have on hand. Also, we did a story about officers giving criminal citations, particularly to homeless people. And there were some officers just giving the same people tickets over and over again, sometimes more than once in one day. So we wanted to know who they are. Their handwriting is practically illegible on the ticket. So we wanted to see the numbers. They haven't given us that either. So it's just, it's like pulling teeth sometimes to get information out of HPD and it's really frustrating. They have a general excuse or is it just come and get us? It's just they don't respond. So I don't even know what to do with that. I mean, if they said that they were really bogged down, again, I'm reasonable. I'll work with you. I'm patient. I'll take it in batches. Fine. But in the meantime, they've used federal care's money to expand hours for gun permitting and gun registration, which is interesting. They're willing to go above and beyond to accommodate gun owners in this time. But when it comes to government transparency, it's, oh, we don't have time. We don't have the resources to do it. Yeah. And with comments like the chief of police made about your information being inaccurate, it almost sounds like what we hear from Washington with fake news. It really does. And without cooperating with you, without responding to you. Yeah, that's troubling about the police. It's troubling about the police commission. Let me only say that my perception, you may know more about this, of the police commission is that they represent the public. They're supposed to be oversight on the police. And what they do to make recommendations to the police is totally a public matter. We need to know what they're talking about. We need to know their agendas. We need to know their discussions. And certainly we need to know their recommendations. And to find that the apparatus here has has kept you away from their recommendations or even denied. They made recommendation. That's quite extraordinary. They're supposed to be representing us. What happened? Something is wrong in the culture now. It's tough to say, you know, what goes on in people's minds. I don't know at this particular committee. It involves members of the police department itself and also one of the police commissioners. So it's not a public body that has public meetings. So it's not as if I could go and they've posted an agenda in minutes and see what they've been talking about. All I could do is file a records request and see what they've recommended after the fact. And I can't even get that. So, you know, the reason I wanted that is because at some point they're going to announce, you know, what their new policy is, and I won't know if they don't give me the recommendations, you know, how it evolved. Maybe the members of the committee, you know, recommended one thing, but the union influenced it in a different way. And, you know, we need to see how it was deliberated and how it was made. And we have a right to see that. And right now they're not denying us that right. Yeah, I think there's another sacred cow here. And that is the union, the police union, Chopo. It's very powerful, very powerful. And they flex their muscle all the time. And I think it's not unreasonable to assume they have a tremendous amount of influence on the chief and the police in general. And on this issue, they want to protect their members. They don't want their members to be embarrassed with claims of harassment and misconduct. So they take all the steps they can to keep you away from that information and protect their people. I have seen that. I have seen that myself. And so it's all the more important, the issue is all the more important that we find out what's going on. And we not let the union determine what information we can give. I suspect that's your right to refer because that is an element of what is happening here. I'm particularly interested in that request you made in June. I guess that was for the data on crimes, solving crimes in June. And you haven't heard yet. And they say they're still working on it, but it's like six months already. So that's the one on the homeless data. The homeless data, right? Yeah. Crime, solving rates, I can't even remember. It's a blur when I filed that one. But it's been longer than the law would normally allow for sure. Yeah. But there is no specific time in the law to require a response. And with David E. Gates' proclamations, that's thrown into a cocktail also. So nobody knows. Yeah. Right, right. There's no deadlines that we can hold them to. And as you stated, in each extension of the proclamation, it just has the same verbiage in it as it relates to the public records law. So I mean, this could go on indefinitely. And the government workers are still working every day. There's nothing that's really stopping them from accessing certain records. I mean, within, there might be some legitimate reasons why maybe they can't go to a certain warehouse where records are stored. Might be unsafe for some reason, I don't know. But there's a lot of records that are easily accessible that they could be sharing that they're not. You know, this morning, I was going for my walk in my neighborhood and a woman approached my walking buddy and me and she gave us a whole story about her house had been robbed and the police had been completely useless. And they hadn't even looked like they were going to try to solve this crime. And, you know, that's very troubling, especially now in the days of robbery, burglary, you know, cat burglary kinds of things that are happening. Luckily, she wasn't in the house, but there have been cases in the newspaper where people were in the house at the time the burglar came into the house. And I think that changes this severity of the offense. But everybody is interested in my neighborhood and all the neighborhoods in exactly what can the police do for you to protect you at a time when people are hungry and they come into your neighborhood and they go through this process of stealing things and breaking in and what have you. And I think that's probably, I think that the stats would show it's probably increasing. It's increasing in all neighborhoods. And therefore it's very important that you and other people, you know, seeking information for the media be able to get that information now so that we either be comforted or not, or we can call for action by the police department. But if we don't get the information, she was, that's a deafening silence, isn't it? Right. We haven't really gotten any explanation from the chief on the low crime solving rates. I mean, as I reported, and as she, her office told Councilman Waters office, they're only solving about 5% of property crime. And that's the biggest category. I mean, between 20 and 30,000 cases per year, and they're only solving about 5% and solving, meaning it results in an arrest or as they know who did it, but you know, the person died or, you know, it's called exceptional means. I think she needs to answer for that, but she's in this place of not even acknowledging that the data is accurate. And you know, we haven't gotten any explanation as to what exactly is going on. How many detectives does she have? Do they have the resources they need to do their jobs? It raises all of these other questions. And, you know, I've been working here for a year and a half, and I've never had an interview with her. Don't give up. I'll keep asking. Well, we have a question. Let me interrupt us and ask the question. Is there any way to solve this problem without dismantling? Listen to this question. This is a tough question. Is there any way to solve this problem without dismantling the entire system? See what you can do with that. I hope that's not necessary. I don't know what that would even mean. I just want it restored to the way it was. And there were ways to make it better before, but it's just we've taken such a step back. What we could really do is, you know, restore it to the way it was. The way the law was actually allows a lot of flexibility for the government. So it's not asking for anything unreasonable. You know, no one's asking for them to put aside the public health response to respond to my records request. That's, you know, we need them to do their jobs to keep everyone safe. But part of keeping people safe is keeping them informed. So that's all I'm asking. You know, in your article, Christina, you had a link to another article about, in fact, you did discuss it in your article also. To city employees, I guess it's specifically city employees who have been on administrative leave of some kind and who get paid. I mean, not for a week or a month, but for years and years. And they sit at home relaxing. Maybe they have bonbons in front of the television, but they don't do anything. And yet they are paid in full. They get their benefits in full. It's the sweetest life imaginable. Some of them are paid very well. And you looked into that here and in, you know, in other writings, I guess, in Civil Beat. So what's the story there? How can we, how can they, for one moment in time, justify this? I'm so glad you asked about this, because this is one of my most fascinating requests, actually. So a while back, I wrote this story about city employees that were getting paid administrative leave. So one example is the prosecuting attorney, Keith Conashiro, one of the more famous examples. But in the process of that, I thought, well, I might as well ask the city, you know, if there are other examples of this, people lower down on the totem pole who are also staying home because they are under investigation for some kind of misconduct. And they gave me a full list. And there was, there were two that really stood out to me, both in the Department of Planning and Permitting, one more than the other. The one person was accused of quote, serious ethical violations, having to do with the issuance of building permits. And this is something I've heard since I moved here, that people always suspect there's some bribery going on with DPP. And, you know, I've never really seen any hard evidence of that, but it's something that people suspect. So I thought, wow, this is some, you know, something concrete, someone's been accused of, I don't know what the details are, but misdeeds of some kind having to do with building permits. So I filed what I had, where I got that information was just a letter, very basic from the city. And so I asked for the full investigative file to find out what exactly this person did and how it is that they ended up on pay leave for two full years. And then once I reported my story on it, they abruptly resigned. They were ordered back to work all of a sudden, and then asked for vacation time. And then a few days later, they quit. So it's almost as if it feels as if the city like forgot about them or something. And we're like, oh, we thought in civilry, we need to bring them back. I don't know. I don't know what happened. But it's so unusual to me. And the same thing happened with the other DPP employee. They were accused not of ethics violations, but of some kind of physical encounter with somebody else. They caused someone bodily harm and allegedly. And also we're on pay leave for two years. I mean, there might be some reasonable explanation for this. I always try to think of, you know, give them the benefit of the doubt. But, you know, I've done my job, I've asked for the records, and they haven't provided them. So who knows what happened there. I'm waiting eagerly for DPP to respond to that one. Yeah. So you haven't had answers on any of that. And you did find that when you start tallying up what we do know about, there may be others, right? It was over $800,000 that was paid to people like this. These identified people that you found. $800,000 for people who sit at home and do not work and yet are paid in full. And that may not be the full amount because there are benefits, right? There may be retirement benefits that come into play. Who knows what. At the end of the day, it's costing taxpayers a fortune for people who don't work for reasons that are never expressed and never provided to you as a member of the media. It's really, really shocking. I was shocked with Keith Conashiro. Now, he's paid, he was paid. I'm not sure he's, I don't know if he's still being paid, but he was paid a lot of money. Is he still being paid? I think so. I think he's making 170 some per year, and it's been almost, in March, it would have been two years. So it's, you know, 22 months, something like that. Yeah, start doing the math. That's a lot of money. You figure the homeless, you figure people now who are out in the street who can't afford, who don't have a job, who can't afford a meal, who have to go to the, you know, the food pantry and other non-profits to get food to eat for their children. $170,000 per arm for two years. That's extraordinary. It's like you want to ask who's in charge here, but they never explain it to you. Again, I hope that you follow that through and never let, never, ever let go of it, Christina. I will keep nagging them, I promise. Well, you may have to go to court after a while, but I think you'll succeed in court. You'll absolutely succeed. I guess a lot of this depends on where we are in COVID. I mean, what are you seeing to the future? Do you see this resolving itself? Or do you see, you know, a kind of custom and culture reaction that is always going to be putting you at arm's length? That's a tough question to answer. I don't know. I just know that Civil Beat since its inception has had difficulty getting access to public records, and we've really made it part of our mission to keep fighting, including in court. And I think we have made some headway, but it's still tough. I mean, I came from a job in Delaware, and I thought it was hard to get information there. And now it seems like a breeze looking back, but, you know, I could just request things and they'd give it to me. Or sometimes, you know, I had to write a letter to their version of OIP, the Office of Information Practices, and you could appeal and they would put pressure on the agency. But it would happen within, you know, weeks or months. Here it can go on for years. And, you know, by the time you get the records, if you do, no one cares anymore. The issue is moot, or, you know, it's so outdated that you need to do it all over again to get the updated version. So it's like they, it almost feels like they try to exhaust you until you go away or quit. But we got to keep fighting. Yeah, and that's an interesting point to dwell on that for just a moment. If they can hold you up long enough, they know that it's no longer in the news cycle, that it's no interest, and that you can't make much of it because, you know, it's overtaken by events. That's got to be part of the delaying, kicking the can, you know, strategy on this. But one other thing you mentioned early on that you went to Tommy Waters and he was able to tell you, at least informally, you know, of, you know, of some numbers that he got from the police department. And, you know, he's, he's become an official city council member. He has a certain amount of cloud and every legislator has cloud. So although, you know, in some cases, maybe in many cases, you can only really be sure of an answer here by going to court and forcing them down with an order, which I think you could get, it's just time and delay. But also, you know, if you go to a legislature, later, or city council member and say, can you help me out on this? Can you use some of your twist? Maybe you can, maybe you can get it that way. The problem with that is it shouldn't have to work that way. It shouldn't have to do that. Right. And I think you're right that we may have to get more creative that way and kind of ask other offices if they have access to this information that we're seeking. Or, you know, it's just become my personal goal lately to become so well sourced at City Hall and at the police department that I don't need them, that I don't need them to confirm anything. You know, hopefully people will send me things, you know, within the rules, hopefully, and I don't want anyone to get in trouble. But this is information we're entitled to. And if they're not going to give it to me through official channels, well, maybe I'll have to ask people to tell me things off the record and just, you know, continue to do my job. I can't let them get in my way. You know what I enjoyed most, to close on this, what I enjoyed most about your article was that the media and your efforts were the story. And you can imagine, you can imagine how much pressure that puts on all the individuals involved in the state and the police force department of health, what have you, because they essentially become the, you know, the other side of that equation. And by implication, we know what they're doing. And so if you can't get it, Christina, you've got to keep on writing those articles about every effort you make and every, you know, point of resistance you find. I think we may very well do that, given the trend. And I know my editor is encouraging my colleagues to document as well, you know, on their own beats. I only cover really the city usually, but we all are coming up against these walls. And yeah, I think we will be documenting it more. So stay tuned. Maybe that won't be necessary if they wake up and decide to actually cooperate with us. But I don't know. Well, in the meantime, Christina, you represent us all. You are our agent and our hero and champion out there going for finding this information and reporting back on your experiences. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for coming on Think Tank. We really appreciate it. That's a privilege. Thanks so much for having me. Aloha.