HONOLULU — Some people who served on Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s Ocean Safety Task Force to help form the new public safety department say they were fed up with the outcome.
Set up in 2023, the 14-member group — composed of current and former city and county lifeguards including Ocean Safety Division Chief John Titchen, as well as city employees from the departments of Budget and Fiscal Services, Human Resources, Honolulu Emergency Services and legal advisers from Corporation Counsel — met 11 times between July and early 2024.
HESD Deputy Director Ian Santee led the task force. By March it emerged with its final recommendation: that the city’s Ocean Safety Division should “be its own stand-alone department.”
“The task force was stood up to review and study the feasibility of a separate Ocean Safety Department from Honolulu Emergency Services/EMS,” Scott Humber, the mayor’s communications director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
“The task force was to fact-find, research and provide a recommendation to the mayor and the managing director, including fiscal implications, human resource implications, and pros/cons associated with a separate department versus a division.”
He added, “The mayor and managing director wanted to know whether the current organizational structure — two first responders with disparate missions under one director — made sense. If not, did breaking out Ocean Safety into its own department make sense and serve the public better.”
But while serving on the task force, retired City and County of Honolulu lifeguard Bryan Phillips grew frustrated.
“To be honest, I was extremely dissatisfied with how the task force conducted their process,” Phillips told the Star-Advertiser. “The administration was trying to influence the bias of the findings. All of the meetings were recorded by video. Santee expressed that there were no voting rights, and we were forbidden to speak to the media.”
“The threat was to fold the task force if any one of us spoke,” he added.
And Phillips felt the task force itself was “not as objective as some of us thought it could be.”
“We were not able to have a vote, which was sort of interesting because, at the end of it all, we ended up making a unanimous recommendation: that the task force recommends a Department of Ocean Safety,” he said. “So it was just sort of bizarre how it was run.”
According to Humber, the mayor and managing director attended the first and last meetings of the task force but were not aware of any “outside interference.”
“At the final meeting, no member of the task force alerted the mayor or managing director to any concerns regarding ‘bias’ or ‘outside influence,’” he added.
But task force member Sarah Fairchild, executive director of the nonprofit Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation, also found “an extremely dysfunctional meeting process.”
“The first meeting I went to was in August,” she said, adding, “Everything was always described verbally,” and nothing with regard to the task force was committed to in writing, except the final report.
Fairchild said the effort took far too long to complete.
“From the first couple of meetings, it was apparent that the group generally agreed that it should be a separate department,” she said. “And so I said in the first couple of meetings … ‘Why can’t we just go ahead and write the report now, since we’re all kind of in agreement, and just get this done?’ Because it was August, and they said we needed to meet through December.”
Early on, she said, the task force found background material — including comparisons to other U.S. cities with ocean safety departments, particularly ones with oversight commissions that are deemed the “national standard” for such agencies — to compile for the final report.
“By meeting two or three, we had that pretty well compiled,” she added. “We weren’t going to be finding more … it seemed ridiculously long … and it seemed like a waste of money, too, to be spending the time in the meetings.”
And much like Phillips, the so-called rules of the task force also annoyed Fairchild.
Those rules included having no written agendas at their closed-door, nonpublic meetings, which seemed to be “heavily controlled by the deputy director,” Santee.
“He told us that this is not Chapter 91,” Fairchild said, a reference to state laws governing the public notice of government meetings. “And he said we don’t need to have an agenda or post to the public, and we have to keep the conversations within the task force, yet we were told not to speak about it to anyone, not even to each other outside meetings.”
She added, “We were told not to tell anyone we were on this task force.”
“And if we wanted to communicate to the group via email, we had to do it through the deputy director privately,” she said, “and that he would decide if he would disseminate the information to the group.”
Email communications obtained by the Star-Advertiser also show disagreements among task force leader Santee and Ocean Safety Chief Titchen.
On Feb. 27, Titchen — who publicly supports using a voter-approved charter amendment to create a stand-alone ocean safety department with an oversight commission — emailed Santee over that fact.
“I do not foresee a chance where I will sign off on any task force conclusion that doesn’t recommend a public vote and a commission,” Titchen’s email states. “If there are any other task force members who feel the same way, I respectfully recommend you advise the (managing director’s office).”
Santee replied, “There are no signatures or ‘sign off’ being requested by any member.”
“The task force was to provide the feasibility of creating an Ocean Safety department and provide recommendations, plural, not one recommendation,” Santee wrote. “I believe we all do not agree with all the suggestions, however, everyone has been able to provide input.”
Since that time the city has placed Titchen on unpaid administrative leave pending investigation of an unexplained personnel matter, the Star-Advertiser confirmed.
And according to Fairchild, the final report never included any other task force recommendations save for its final directive: to create a stand-alone ocean safety department, though not a commission.
At a final group meeting with the mayor in February, she said, “We’re presented with this ‘new’ idea of ‘Hey, the mayor could stand up the department on his own, as a department head, and we could get a commission later. What do you all think?’”
“I don’t know why this was brought up literally eight months into the process at the very last meeting,” Fairchild said. “There have been lawyers involved the entire time. It doesn’t make any sense why this was brought up then.”
“I feel like it’s a pressuring situation for all the city employees that are on this task force,” she added. “Here’s their boss telling them, like, ‘We have this great idea, why don’t we just do this, why don’t we decide right now?’”
According to Humber, the city never stated it prefers an ocean safety department without a commission. “The mayor and managing director have been very clear that they do not oppose a commission and would support such a charter amendment going to the voters.”
And as far as how the city ran its task force with restrictions, Humber said, “The mayor and managing director have no knowledge of any such restrictions and would have left that to the determination of the task force as to how they conducted their business.”
“The mayor and managing director put no restrictions on the conduct of the Ocean Safety Task Force,” he added.
But after seeing this process play out, Fairchild said an oversight commission is essential.
“I really think we need as much transparency and accountability as possible with anything in our city government,” she said. “If this is what Ocean Safety deals with all the time, this is unacceptable.”
