Maui boards could soon get back to business thanks to a settlement

A legal dispute that for weeks has involved a number of appointments to Maui County boards and commissions will soon end with an agreement that will improve the process used to fill vacant positions, according to people involved in the settlement.

The agreement, which the Maui County Council unanimously supported in a resolution Tuesday, calls for the use of a recently updated procedure outlined in the county charter.

Council President Alice Lee said in an interview last week that she wanted to reach a settlement quickly, but declined to discuss the resolution’s contents in detail.

“We don’t want to continue to impede business, and that’s what the lawsuit is about – impeding the county’s business,” Lee said.

Boards and commissions play an important role in shaping the future of Maui County communities. Some of these panels address the county’s most pressing challenges, from homelessness and government ethics to development planning and police accountability. Others make binding decisions, such as the pay of elected officials or the winners and losers in tax disputes.

Despite their importance, the county’s 37 boards and commissions have an vacancy rate of 18 percent, which is at least partly the result of a long-standing problem recruiting volunteers. Of the 304 total posts, 56 are vacant.

And although the process drags on, the chances of filling these vacant positions are slim.

The understaffed Ethics Committee is one of many panels that desperately need more members. There are four vacant seats on the nine-person management board. As a result, the panel cannot even meet unless all five of its members participate. Filling these empty chairs is considered crucial to the usability of the board.

The council recently appointed Chivo Ching-Johnson to the ethics committee, but his nomination is one of dozens effectively on hold despite how badly new members are needed.

“Nothing like this can happen until the lawsuit is settled,” Lee said. “That’s why we want to solve this so we can get to work and get back to work.”

The litigation process is having a major impact on county operations

At issue is the process by which Mayor Richard Bissen’s office and the Maui County Council handled candidate disputes.

The lawsuit filed last month by Dick Mayer, a retired economics professor at the University of Hawaii at Maui College, argues that the mayor should have gone back to the drawing board to generate a new slate of candidates when 26 of his original candidates were rejected by the council.

That was not the case earlier this year, when Bissen nominated 40 people to serve on nearly two dozen boards and commissions.

The mayor listed his candidates in a letter of January 31 – the deadline for submitting them has passed. However, the district clerk’s office did not receive the letter until February 1.

The council found that the mayor failed to meet the deadline and instead tried to make his own appointments.

In April, Maui Judge Kelsey Kawano blocked the appointment of Building Director Danny Ray Blackburn to the county planning commission after Mayer challenged the county’s process, maintaining it was contrary to protocol set forth in the county’s charter.

In response, the district’s corporate counsel advised all newly appointed board and committee members to refrain from participating until the lawsuit is resolved.

According to Mayer’s attorney, Lance Collins, the main concern is that decisions made by new council members, who he believes were sitting in the wrong place, could later face legal challenges.

“If you are seated and you are not eligible for that office, you can be removed and your actions canceled,” Collins said. “And that can be very destructive. “It could wreak enormous havoc on the operations of all these boards and commissions.”

Mayer declined to comment until the settlement was finalized.

But Collins said a more widespread concern is that the board thwarted the will of Maui County voters by following an improper appointments process.

Maui County voters approved a ballot question for the 2022 election that created an independent nominating commission to recruit residents and place them on county boards and commissions. The goal of the bylaw change is to create a process for selecting board and committee members that is less political and more focused on merit.

Under the previous system, the mayor or council independently recruited and evaluated candidates for boards and commissions.

The nominating committee consists of nine members from each of the council’s residential areas, who are appointed by the mayor and approved by the council. However, the newly established, voter-approved nominating commission is still writing its self-governance regulations and has not prepared any lists of candidates for vacancies on county boards and commissions. So the mayor stepped in with his own list of nominees.

The lawsuit does not question the 14 people the council and mayor agreed to place in their positions. But he accuses the council of creating its own list of candidates and attempting to independently approve those appointments – a power Collins says the council no longer has under the new charter amendment.

Lee said the statute was unclear about how the board should have acted.

“Unfortunately, the people who created the language for this provision in the Charter did not do a full job,” she said. “It was clear in the old statute provisions, so we followed the old statute because there was nothing in the new procedure that created a process that we could follow.”

What should have happened, according to Collins, is that the mayor should have presented the council with a new list of candidates and the council should have approved or rejected those candidates. This process should be repeated as many times as necessary until the mayor and council have reached an agreement on all 40 nominations.

“Delays in meetings don’t help.”

In 14 cases, the council’s nominations overlapped with the mayor’s original nominations. These people are expected to take their seats as soon as the settlement becomes official.

They are: Joseph Wilson, who has been appointed to serve as a member of the Discrepancies and Appeals Committee; Arnold Wunder to the Civil Service Commission; Dylan Andrion on Government Commission costs; Sterling Higa at the expense of the Government Commission; Deborah Moore on Government Commission costs; Sally Barr to the Kula Agricultural Park Committee; Lu Ann Lankford-Faborito to the Liquor Control Adjudication Commission; Rainey Dock Mathews to the Commission for Persons with Disabilities; Patty Copperfield to the Disability Commission; Debra Kelly to Molokai Planning Commission; Michael Williams to the Property Tax Audit Committee; Lindsey Ball to the Compensation Committee; Gerri Lewis to the Compensation Committee; and Jeremy Stoddart, to the Urban Design Review Committee.

However, at least one of those appointees chose to withdraw, citing delays in their ability to engage in the change.

Higa, 33, of Haiku, applied to join the Government Expenses Committee last June, and although the mayor and council approved his appointment, he has not yet been able to participate.

There are five vacancies on the nine-member Government Cost Commission, undermining the productivity of a body tasked with promoting economy and efficiency in government by reviewing existing county government processes and making recommendations to improve them.

Higa said he stepped down from his contested commission seat in early May after another organization asked him for more volunteer hours.

“It’s hard to devote time to volunteering opportunities when there are real opportunities to get involved,” he said. “One of the challenges is getting people to volunteer in government. And meeting delays don’t help.”

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