The viewpoint recently offered by one of my colleagues does not give a true picture of the direction being taken by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Board of Trustees.
The viewpoint recently offered by one of my colleagues does not give a true picture of the direction being taken by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Board of Trustees.
Instead, her viewpoint is a distortion of a renewed effort by our nine-member policymaking board to enhance our ability to meet the higher standards of ethics, transparency and accountability that are expected from our oversight responsibilities.
To suggest that the decision to merge two standing committees into one is part of some larger effort to control power shows a lack of understanding of the amount of trust that has been placed in us as elected officials to act for the good of the organization, rather than for the benefit of ourselves.
For the record, the OHA Board of Trustees voted on Aug. 27, 2015, to merge its Committee on Asset Resource Management with our Committee on Land and Property.
Our newly-created Committee on Resource Management represents a necessary step to improve our board’s oversight responsibilities, which includes avoiding wasted time and effort.
Since all of our nine trustees are members of the board’s standing committees anyway, it simply made sense to eliminate an extra committee by streamlining our operations.
In February 2014, the board had created our Committee on Land and Property to improve OHA’s effectiveness as the 13th largest landowner in Hawaii, where we control more than 28,000 acres statewide, including Wao Kele o Puna on Hawaii Island.
About eight months later, our chief executive officer added to his executive team a Land and Property director to oversee a newly created division focused on addressing our growing challenges as a major property owner.
While the board’s now-defunct land committee and the administration’s existing land division have worked together in the past to help OHA’s efforts to be a responsible steward of the properties that we own, they also have not always enjoyed a peaceful co-existence amid a series of sometimes overlapping efforts to improve our effectiveness as a land and property owner.
With the newly-created Committee on Resource Management, our board expects to work more effectively with administration to better coordinate roles and responsibilities to avoid gaps or overlapping efforts that interfere with our ability to ensure that OHA’s land assets are well managed, and that the organization’s financial situation remains sound.
Make no mistake about it: Our board’s decision to combine two of our standing committees is about avoiding an unnecessary drain on everyone’s time and OHA’s resources.
From my perspective, splitting our oversight responsibilities for OHA’s land and finances across two committees became an inefficient and ineffective way for us to operate.
By combining the two committees, we expect to reap considerably greater rewards and foster more nimble decision-making for the beneficiaries who have entrusted us to maintain the financial accountability of our organization.
More importantly, those beneficiaries can count on the leadership at the helm of OHA’s board to always do one thing: Exercise reasonable care in all decision making, without placing the organization under unnecessary risk.
Robert K. Lindsey Jr. has represented Hawaii Island as an Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee since 2007.
Viewpoint articles are the opinion of the writer and not necessarily the opinion of West Hawaii Today.