This Maui board was created to improve clarity. Now it’s been accused of doing the opposite

Maui’s new Independent Nominating Board is charged with improving the quality of the county’s nearly 40 boards and commissions by making the member selection process more transparent and efficient.

The process involves a nominating committee interviewing candidates and then sending a shortlist to the mayor for appointment. The final step is approval by the County Council.

But Councilwoman Keani Rawlins-Fernandez wants the public to know who is running for board and commission positions early on. Politics can get in the way of nominations, she said, “and for that reason, it’s in the public interest to provide transparency to the public.”

So far, the County Council has received only four names of the 37 potential new board members that the INB sent to Mayor Richard Bissen for appointment. Some council members want those names publicly released. They also want minutes of INB meetings — the board has met several times since March — posted online under Hawaii’s Sunshine Law.

“We have a broad discussion about the need for transparency, and it’s ironic that we’re trying to solve the problem that INB set out to solve and we’re still banging our heads against a brick wall,” Rawlins-Fernandez said at a meeting of the council’s Government Relations, Ethics and Transparency Committee last week.

Before the meeting, committee chair Nohelani U’u-Hodgins asked deputy general counsel Yukari Murakami for a legal opinion on what parts of the Sunshine Law allow the board to vote in closed session and whether the board’s actions could be challenged if an individual was appointed in violation of the law.

Murakami responded in writing and suggested that the committee go into closed session for further discussion.

The INB was created through a bylaw amendment vote in 2022 and implemented earlier this year. Its members were immediately tasked with filling 57 vacancies across 43 boards and committees.

INB Chairman Jason Stone told council members during questioning at the meeting that he believed the council was doing what it was created to do: vetting candidates and then sending their names to the mayor.

“If we define transparency as asking whether we are informing everyone who these people are, then I would say that we are not doing that at this time,” Stone said.

Murakami told the committee that the fact that someone has applied to serve on a board or committee is considered confidential or sensitive information. She pointed to the Sunshine Law’s personnel provisions, which allow boards to hold closed sessions in certain circumstances.

Rawlins-Fernandez said the council has addressed a number of issues that ultimately required it to go into executive session. But the reason for discussing matters behind closed doors has always been given in open session, she said, including personnel matters.

“I know it’s a balance between an individual’s privacy rights and the public interest in transparency,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “I personally disagree with the department’s (Corporation Counsel) position that the fact that someone has applied to serve on a board or committee is confidential information.”

She said the council should develop rules to guide the process and achieve the goal of creating the INB, which she said was to allow the public to see who applied to various boards and committees. There is always the possibility, she said, that qualified candidates could be rejected for political reasons.

Dick Mayer, a longtime Kula resident who in 2021 petitioned the Charter Commission to craft the amendment that ultimately gave birth to the INB, noted that the board can go into closed session in at least some circumstances — for example, to discuss an applicant’s potential criminal record.

In 2006, he was appointed by then-Mayor Alan Arakawa to chair the Blue Ribbon Committee, an informal ad hoc committee with similar responsibilities to the INB, though it was not bound by Sunshine Law. He said the committee was able to find out that some candidates had criminal histories by consulting with the police department or the court system.

The Blue Ribbon Commission wanted to make sure it “appoints people who need to be appointed, not people who might cause problems,” Mayer said.

County council members also discussed the lack of transparency in recordkeeping for INB meetings. The Sunshine Law requires government boards to post minutes online within 40 days of a meeting, unless the minutes are from an executive session.

U’u-Hodgins asked Stone in writing why the INB had not yet released any minutes. Stone’s written response was that Gov. Josh Green’s declaration of a state of emergency following the Maui wildfires last year allowed Maui-based boards to suspend the deadline for releasing minutes, although the suspension is not indefinite. Video recordings of the INB meetings are available online.

Cory Vicens, Maui’s board and committee relations officer, said she has not yet released meeting minutes because of staffing issues — she has unsuccessfully requested to hire two additional staff for the next fiscal year.

“It’s a full plate and yes, additional staffing is needed,” Vicens said, noting that she is the only person hired to serve on boards and commissions since the current administration took office in 2023. In addition, there were 39 boards and commissions and now there are 43, she said, which increases the demand for her work.

Vicens told the council that she was working on the protocol and that it would be available soon.

U’u-Hodgins put together a set of questions for the Office of Information Practices, which oversees Hawaii’s laws promoting open and transparent government. Among them was whether a requester’s identity is considered confidential information and a request to define reasonable expectations of privacy.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.