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"If you got the money honey, I've got the time..." -- Lefty Frizzell
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CORRUPTION FOR FIVE MILLION, ALEX!
A freshly minted Certified Technology Consultant for the State of Hawaii, Department of Education arrived in Hana almost a decade ago, with a single, simple objective. My responsibility was to identify why Maui's student's achievement as measured per annual assessments were continually declining, in the context of continually increasing spending on classroom technology expenditures. It seemed a reasonable premise that equiping teachers with the latest classroom technology, computers, Internet access and educational software would provide them with the kinds of tools that in turn would allow their students to advance and achieve. Or maybe at least pass the annual assessments.
When I arrived in Hana, I found determined teachers teaching in a school without history books or a principal, the school technology coordinator moonlighting for the local hotel during the day, when he should have been at the school, a non-functioning network, classrooms full of broken computers, and stacks of boxes full of non-functioning network terminals. Even a pallet of brand new desktop computers from the mainland -- half of them knowingly shipped without power supplies to a remote school with a limited budget in the most rural of communities, cut from tropical rain forest, on an Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Really? The words of one young, sixteen year old wahine still ring in my ears, "Mister, No Need, No Got, No Get. These Haoles are corrupt!" And that was only my first day.
DOOR NUMBER 1: HAWAII'S LEGAL PUBLIC PROCUREMENT PROCESS
"The State Procurement Office is against statutorily exempting specific purchases from the Code, as it is not in the best interest of government, the businuess community, and the general public. The Code establishes a time-tested, fair, and reliable set of rules and process for award of contracts. The competitive procurement processes of the Code are to insure that all potential providers are afforded the opportunity to compete for the required services.... The Code Should not be viewed as an obstacle to a purchasing agency's mission, but rather as the single source of public procurement policy to be applied equally and uniformly to obtain its requirements. It was the legislature's intent for the Code to be a single source of public procurement policy. If individual agencies are exempted and allowed to develop their own individual processes, it becomes problematic for operational purposes and for vendors/contractors who must comply with a variety of processes. Fairness, open competition, a level playing field, and government disclosure and transparency in the procurement and contracting process are vital to good government. For this to be accomplished, we must participate in the process with one set of statues and rules." -- Statement of State Procurement Officer, Aaron Fujioka.
DOOR NUMBER 2: STATE OWNED PUBLIC ACCESS TELEVISION, PEG ACCESS ORGANIZATIONS
Hawaii's State Owned Public, Educational and Governmental Access Television providers, the PEG Access Organizations, Akaku, Olelo, Hoike and Na Leo O Hawaii operate under the authority of the Office of our Governer, Linda Lingle, responsible to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. The State of Hawaii's PEG Access providers provide public, educational and governmental access television across the cable of the State of Hawaii's exclusive cable television franchisee to the customers of the cable television franchisee. Akaku, Olelo, Hoike and Na Leo are funded from a small percentage of the monthly cable television bill paid for by every customer of Hawaii's cable television franchisee, Oceanic Time Warner. PEG Access television, as its name implies is intended to provide non-commercial and non-discriminatory access to public, educational and governmental television production facilities and cable television channels to all members of our community, in exchange for the cable company's private access to our public right of way upon which they lay their cable.
DOOR NUMBER 3: ONE TIGER
The State of Hawaii's PEG access providers, Akaku, Olelo, Hoike and Na Leo come from a time before Hawaii adopted a uniform legal public procurement process. And now the legal public procurement of the State of Hawai`i PEG Public Access Television Service seems inevitable. It is important to understand the history of PEG Access service in Hawaii to understand how we ended up here.
Hawaii's Public Access Television Service is unique in the nation in that it connects together the individual islands that comprise our State. And Hawaii's Public Access Television Service is a vital community resource that brings public, educational and governmental programming to our remote communities that otherwise would be traditionally cut-off from Hawaii's large population centers by miles of open ocean. What began primarily as a means for the University of Hawaii and the Department of Education to deliver educational programming to Hawaii's outer islands has mushroomed into a multi million dollar a year, multi-island, State sponsored bureaucracy allegedly rife with private agendas, corruption, political intrigue, sexual harrasment of female community members and the unaccountability and misappropriation of public access television funds for the purchase of private property, commercial real-estate, illegal lobbying, illegal campaigning for politicians and legislation, and the production of propoganda attacking members of our community,....
Amusingly, it was Jay April, current President and CEO of Akaku: Maui Community Television and former Chairman of Akaku: Maui Community Television's Board of Director's, and leader of the current "Save Akaku" propoganda campaign against legal public procurement of public access television that originally led the campaign to keep Akaku: Maui Community Television's financials and operations secret. Mr. April claimed that Akaku: Maui Community Television was exempt from the Sunshine Act, and that its business was nobody's business but his own, and that the legal means that the State of Hawaii had its disposal with regards to the accountability of Akaku: Maui Community Television or even Mr. April himself was: PROCUREMENT! To be fair to all of Hawaii's PEG Access providers, it was they themselves that pursued this legal argument to the Hawaii Supreme Court, and won! However, it was in their own winning of their own exemption from Hawaii's Sunshine Laws, winning the ability to the keep the finances of the State of Hawaii's Public Access Organizations secret from the public, that ultimately eliminated Akaku, Olelo, Hoike and Na Leo's sole source eligibility. Even more amusingly, the State of Hawaii Supreme Court based their ruling on the wording of the law establishing the provisioning of Public, Educational and Governemental Access television "on behalf of the public," explicitly excludes the public! Just like a guardian of the mentally competent makes decisions "on behalf of" their ward.
THE PRICE IS RIGHT
Corruption is a serious accusation, because it implies that someone entrusted to act in the best interests of the public, has instead chosen to violate that trust and instead act instead in what they perceive as the best interest to themselves, and at the expense of the public. What is most interesting about the whole issue of the Legal Public Procurement of Public Access Television in the State of Hawaii is the extent to which this case, the longest public procurement process in the history of the State of Hawaii, has been documented. Most recently the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs has posted the testimony provided by Hawaii's community members (including my own) to the Governmental Task Force created by the State of Hawaii, Concurrent Resolution, HCR 358, discussing alternatives to the legal procurement of public access television in the State of Hawaii.
So is the legal public procurement of public access television a good thing? If you believe the testimony of Akaku's executives including Jay April, Lance Collins and Linda Puppolo who pay themselves and the rest of Akaku: Maui Community Television's small staff (most of whom are not even from Maui) in excess of three quarters of one million dollars a year of the annual budget intended to otherwise provide public access television services to the public, the answer would be no. On the otherhand, if you believe the testimony of Hawaii's community members that believe public access television funding should be spent on making sure that public access television resources are available throughout our entire Islands, including our remote communities and that funding be fairly shared and spent wisely, so that public access television provides opportunities for all members of our community, and not just to the bank accounts of a few vexatious executives in Maui working "on behalf of" our community, well the answer would be most resoundingly yes.
My personal opinion is pretty clear, "The alternative to the legal procurement of public access television, is the illegal procurement of public access television." On the other hand, page after page of semanticly mangled testimony by the well paid employees, lawyers and staff members of the State of Hawaii's incumbent public Access Television Organizations desperately attempt to justify any exemption from the law, accountability for their actions or responsibility for their mis-spending of the public access funds and consequential continuing denial of access of public resources to members of the public living in our most rural neighborhoods and students of our most underserved schools.
In either case, if Akaku is to be saved, legal public procurement could be the very means, by which Akaku can at least be saved from itself.
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Sam Epstein is Executive Director of the Maui Media Lab Foundation School of Media Arts & Science, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity.