University of Hawaii regent Neil Abercrombie is pressing for answers and explanations after looking through UH budgets from across the 10-campus system searching for details on how many and how much UH employees would receive in back pay for putting themselves at risk while working through the COVID-19 era.
Abercrombie called what he found in UH financial statements stunning: First, that a specific group of UH employees would receive a one-time collective payment of $42.5 million; and second, their one-time “hazard pay” was coming out of a special fund that UH students pay into as part of their tuition.
“I just about fell off of my chair,” Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser ahead of today’s Board of Regents meeting at UH Hilo, where he plans to bring up the issue before new UH President Wendy Hensel, her administrators and his fellow regents.
Abercrombie — Hawaii’s former governor, representative in Congress, City Council member and state representative — has spent 55 years reading, analyzing and deciphering budgets.
“I just assumed that when I got the budget summary, there would be a line item for hazard pay,” Abercrombie said. “I assumed it would be a big number and it would affect the university. I kept looking and I still couldn’t find it.”
Among various campus budgets, Abercrombie said he found “vague references at the different campuses … for extracurricular expenditures, and then the word ‘hazard pay’ would occur but not always. There were no numbers ever. I asked, What’s going on?”
So when he could not find an explanation of why every UH student was on the financial hook for employee hazard pay, Abercrombie began demanding answers from UH administrators who worked under former President David Lassner before he retired at the end of 2024.
His replacement, Hensel, has only been on the job since January, but “she knows this is a problem,” Abercrombie said. “This just got dumped on her.”
He doesn’t blame the Legislature, Gov. Josh Green or unions representing state workers for negotiating hazard pay.
But Abercrombie said he believes all of them — especially students — should have been informed that each of UH’s more than 20,000 students was going to be responsible for the $42.5 million for UH employees whose salaries come directly from the student tuition fee special fund and not out of the state’s general fund.
Worse, Abercrombie said, the one-time windfall has “multiplier” ramifications for the employees’ pensions and other retirement benefits.
So Abercrombie wants to know if the student special fund also will be expected to pay for increases in employee retirement benefits indefinitely.
Abercrombie said he still hasn’t gotten answers on how many UH employees are paid out of the student tuition special fund or who will pay for the increased cost of their retirement benefits.
UH administrators, he said, had other options on how they could be compensated, including making a budget request to the Legislature to cover their one-time hazard pay — or at least make legislators and Green aware that they were going to use the student special fund.
UH also could have spread the back pay among dozens of other UH special funds to ease the financial burden on students alone, Abercrombie said.
UH Board of Regents Chair Gabe Lee, however, told the Star-Advertiser in an email, “Paying benefits from the same source of funds as pays for salaries is the norm — this is not an exceptional instance in that regard.”
Lassner and his administrators had told regents that a 2024 funding bill that eventually passed the Legislature required that “non-general funded employees will have their temporary hazard pay funded by (the same) non-general fund that pays their salaries,” Lee said.
Then at Abercrombie’s request, UH asked Green to submit a budget bill this session “to retroactively reimburse the tuition and fees special fund for the amount of temporary hazard pay that was paid,” Lee said. “UH worked with the governor’s team to craft the proposed bill, but ultimately it was not included amongst the package of bills introduced in 2025.”
Abercrombie refuses to give up trying.
“Everybody knew what they were getting when Gov. Green appointed me” to the UH Board of Regents, Abercrombie said.
“I’m not a mystery. When I get involved in something, I’m not going to let it go. This is a situation that needs to be addressed. I’m standing up for the victims, which are the students.”
