Ethics Board marches on

LIHU‘E — The county Board of Ethics renewed with a vengeance its discussion on conflicts of interest and the infamous Section 20.02(d) of the County Charter, rejecting a County Attorney opinion, repeatedly declining to go into executive session, and changing its rules to provide public discussion of county employees’ disclosure statements in a wild meeting Thursday at the Mo‘ikeha Building.

When board members arrived for the meeting, they found waiting for them a County Attorney opinion backing up the verbal claims County Attorney Al Castillo made during the executive session of the June 4 meeting, which the board used to justify clearing three county volunteers accused of violating the Charter.

The issue regained the board’s attention after member Rolf Bieber filed complaints against the volunteers earlier this year. For a detailed history of the Board of Ethics’ recent work on conflicts of interest, see the sidebar “Charter 20.02(d) timeline.”

Deputy County Attorney Mauna Kea Trask, rather than Castillo, covered the meeting and authored the opinion. For detailed coverage of Castillo’s “mysterious” absence, see the sidebar “Bieber: Castillo’s absence ‘unacceptable’.”

Although the opinion was not released to the public, board members made clear with their disdain for the opinion and their eventual rejection of it that it shared an ideology with its predecessor, which said 20.02(d) should be read “in conjunction” with Section 3-1.7 of the Kaua‘i County Code.

“I was most disappointed that this was dropped on us at the last minute here this morning,” Ethics Boad member Paul Weil said, adding that the opinion does not confirm, clarify or replace the previous opinion. “This does nothing in my brief review to correct the flaws that existed in the prior. … I would hope that someone would go back to the drawing board. … I think it’s a shame.

“We are trying to be transparent, trying to regain the trust of the public and trying to do our jobs,” Weil said.

A motion to release the opinion to the public failed. Weil, Mark Hubbard and Bieber voted in favor of the motion.

Board member Sally Motta said she didn’t feel she was “qualified to make that determination.” Board member Judy Lenthall said she had not had enough time to review the document to release it to the public, but told Trask she expected the next version would be releaseable.

Trask said he would try to address questions in a new opinion he said he would issue to the board one week prior to the Aug. 13 meeting. How that new opinion affects the results of the June 4 meeting remains to be seen.

Although the votes on Bieber’s three complaints at the June meeting were never publicly revealed, with Bieber, Lenthall and Hubbard all outside during the discussion, all four remaining members would have had to vote in favor of giving Lenthall, Hubbard and Cost Control Commissioner Lorna Nishimitsu passes for their transgressions.

Weil said he voted in June to give Lenthall and Hubbard passes on their apparent violations of the charter because they appeared in front of the County Council on behalf of nonprofit organizations that do work in the public interest, not fitting the description of a “private interest.”

Asked after Thursday’s meeting about his vote to clear Nishimitsu, Weil said “I am human and I made a mistake.” He said Nishimitsu was “in the same boat as Jonathan Chun” and didn’t believe there was any exemption that applied to their situations.

Also during the meeting, the board on multiple occasions declined to go into scheduled executive sessions. Rather than go behind closed doors to review the executive session minutes from June 4, the board simply approved them in open session. Hubbard made the motion to do so despite the fact that the minutes were redacted heavily for Bieber and Lenthall, and presumably himself.

In a bizarre twist, the third executive session, which would have featured discussion of Trask’s new opinion regarding 20.02(d), was shot down when Hubbard and Lenthall — the two board members who were targets of the complaints that served as the impetus for the opinion — joined Weil in voting to not go into executive session.

Because an executive session requires a supermajority, the measure was killed. However, Bieber, who brought the complaints, voted to go into executive session, later explaining that he was momentarily tempted by the possibility of hearing Trask explain the opinion he had authored, but later regretted his decision.

The second executive session was also declined. For coverage of the board’s discussion of disclosure statements, see the sidebar “Disclosures aired in public.”

At the meeting’s conclusion, Bieber made an announcement that he requested that discussion of the release of executive session minutes from the meetings of March 13, 2008, March 12, 2009, and June 4, 2009, be put on the August agenda.

• Michael Levine, assistant news editor, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) or via e-mail at mlevine@kauaipubco.com