i L i n d . n e t

Coming and going…well, mostly going. Yesterday word was spreading that the Department of Education and longtime spokesman Greg Knudsen have parted ways. No clue about the circumstances. Then news came that former newsman Ron Mizutani has resigned from Hawaiian Telcom just after he had to announce the company’s layoffs of dozens of managers.

Later this morning, FreePress Action Network will be blogging live from Congressional hearings on public, educational, and governmental programming (PEG). The hearing is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. EST. Former Akaku executive director and Honolulu Community Media Council member Sean McLaughlin is expected to be part of the festivities.

A few days before Christmas, the Washington Times reported that China’s intelligence services had set up a company in Hawaii to offer translation services and ended up landing a contract that gave them inside access to secret U.S. facility here on Oahu. I mentioned it here on December 29. And the Advertiser got around to mentioning the Washington Times report as a brief item way down at the bottom following a story by William Cole. There was no indication in the ‘Tizer’s telling that the news item was a little stale.

House Bill 2583, scheduled to be heard by the House Higher Education Committee this afternoon at 2:40 p.m., would prevent a repeat of the UH Board of Regents move last summer in which they held a meeting and discussed budget issues in code, referring to documents that were not available to the public.

The Office of Information Practices advised back in 1991 that documents which might otherwise be privileged must be made public if cited and used in a public meeting. The proposed bill tries to write that into law, although only as it applies to the Board of Regents.

Here’s the description of the bill:

Denies the University of Hawaii the use of the deliberative process privilege in closing an agency meeting to the public. Specifies that the deliberative process privilege does not cover meetings related to the budget of the University of Hawaii. Requires the University of Hawaii to disclose beforehand the range of proposed compensation to executives, including head athletic coaches. Extends annual salary reporting requirement to include salaries of head athletic coaches.

No one asks me about these things, but in my view an easier way to accomplish the same thing, and to make it apply more generally to all agencies and not simply limited to the Board of Regents, would be to amend
Section 92F-12, to add documents used by a board in a public meeting to the list of documents required to be disclosed. This could include all documents submitted to the board on any agenda item, including recommendations, reports, etc. This approach would be much cleaner and more straight forward than the current approach of HB2583.

Meanwhile, I’m back in computer hell after discovering that the solution to one problem–removing many gigabytes of photos that Adobe Lightroom had mistakenly written into a hidden directory on my MacBook Pro laptop–apparently created a bigger problem by causing Lightroom to cease functioning. I have a love-hate relationship with this program, which I’ve come to rely on for handling digital photos. I love the way it works, but this is the second time that it’s complex internal indexing has failed.