I have lost all faith in the integrity of the three members of the Hawaii County Board of Ethics following its July 8 meeting. This is on the basis of its decisions regarding Finance Director Deanna Sako and Office of Aging Director Kimo Alameda.
I have lost all faith in the integrity of the three members of the Hawaii County Board of Ethics following its July 8 meeting. This is on the basis of its decisions regarding Finance Director Deanna Sako and Office of Aging Director Kimo Alameda.
This mess all started in late March when West Hawaii Today published an article informing the public that Mayor Billy Kenoi had made a personal purchase of some $900 on his county purchasing credit card, or pCard. This was a clearly illegal misuse of his pCard. Kenoi knew it was illegal to make personal purchases using his county pCard. As it turned out, since his election in 2008 Kenoi had made some $31,000 in illegal pCard purchases, using taxpayer money for his own personal benefit.
Nancy Crawford was the county finance director until December 2014. As such, she was the county’s Purchasing Card Administrator (hereinafter “PCA”) . One of the responsibilities of the finance director (or her designate) is to be the county’s PCA. Deanna Sako for 2013-15 was deputy finance director, until she became finance director on Jan. 7, 2015. Prior, she was involved with Crawford trying to convince the mayor — to no avail — to stop his illegal behavior. The mayor would not listen, and kept making illegal purchases right up until April 2015, when as PCA, Sako finally canceled his pCard.
My argument to the Ethics Board was that after being aware for more than two years of the mayor’s illegal purchases, Sako had a duty to revoke Kenoi’s pCard as soon as she became finance director. The board’s response: Well, she wasn’t director for long enough. Just because she failed to exercise her duty from January to April, she was excused by the rule from the pCard manual, which suggested “All notices of disputed items must be made within 60 days of the [billing] cycle in which the item first appears on the card holder statement.” It did not matter to the board that that sentence refers to disputed charges, not illegal charges. The board said that excused Sako from any unethical behavior over the January to April period when she continued to permit the mayor to use his pCard. Like: It is okay to be unethical as long as you don’t do it for too long.
The second aspect of my petition was that Sako deliberately refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act data about Kenoi’s pCard use, or worse, tried to mislead the media by giving only summary data instead of all the data. No county employee should be ethically permitted to do this. My biggest problem here is that the board did not even call Sako to testify. If you want to know the truth, as the saying goes, you go to the horse’s mouth. I made an allegation, which it then became the duty of the board to investigate. It simply refused to do so. How can one respect a tribunal that won’t even try to find out the truth about what happened?
Then the second case was whether or not Kimo Alameda had two year’s of supervisory experience in a governmental business setting. Since the position of executive director — paying $110,000 a year — required supervising 12 employees in the Office of Aging, the human resources professionals decided that to qualify for that position the director should have at least two years of such experience. According to the newspaper account of his appointment, Alameda did not have that experience. Our Hawaii County Charter (Section 13-3) requires that the mayor make sure he has that experience before he appoints him. Three years ago, the mayor ignored the same law when he appointed Ron Gonzales to the Windward Planning Commission. Gonzales was required by law to be a registered voter in North Hilo, Hamakua; he was not, but the mayor appointed him anyway.
What good is a law if you are going to ignore it? Kenoi likes to ignore laws he doesn’t like. That is unethical. So I filed a petition with the Ethics Board asking them to investigate if the mayor had done what I alleged. They held their entire meeting on this subject without once even mentioning the mayor or Gonzales. On top of that, the board called a human resources professional who testified Alameda “supervised” four employees in his one-man office job with the state Department of Health. But the board didn’t even ask if Alameda could have hired or fired those people, or if he was the “supervisor” who filled out their performance evaluations. In other words, the board made absolutely no effort to find out the truth of whether Alameda had actually “supervised” those four individuals.
But the Ethics Board also feels comfortable ignoring law-breaking. Wouldn’t you think if you committed a misdemeanor it would also be an ethical violation? Well, according to this board, its ethically permissible to overtly commit a misdemeanor. Maybe it has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
So after dismissing both of my petitions with no investigation worthy of the name at all, the board has reconsidered the matter of Kenoi’s illegal misuse of his pCard and set it for the board’s Sept. 9 meeting. What is the point of this? One board member has already declared the Attorney General doesn’t know what he is talking about, and another board member has decided he wants to investigate “quietly” by just asking for certain records before they disappear. The chairman is not talking. Me? I am befuddled by the lack of ethics on the Ethics Board, and wonder if the state ethics board is any more ethical.
Lanric Hyland is a resident of Kapaau.
Viewpoint articles are the opinion of the writer and not necessarily the opinion of West Hawaii Today.