i L i n d . n e t

Last week it was Turtle Bay drawing attention because of strong opposition to development. Last night it was people in Hawaii Kai standing up to keep hotel-cabins from being built under the guise of “vacation cabins”, a category certainly never intended to include hotel use. Then there are neighbor island residents saying that if the state’s going to protect areas from development, they should be in line for protection as well. The reaction to the Superferry. All pointing to a widespread and visceral public demand to look beyond the latest speculative schemes to how we can protect natural areas from simply going to the highest bidder for the most lucrative use. This is probably something that isn’t going to be successfully done county by county, but I’m not aware of a vehicle being talked about during the current legislative session. Anybody have a more informed sense of this?

Saddle the UH with the stadium? Are people demented? UH has a top tier baseball stadium, and the campus arena is nothing to sneeze at. Do they automatically translate into more income and better team performances? Obviously not. The danger, it seems to me, is that the well know problems of the stadium will become another huge money pit that devours resources without doing a thing for the University’s primary product, its academic offerings. West Oahu is already killing the system. Then there’s the maintenance backlog. The medical school. Throwing the stadium into the mix would undoubtedly end up dragging the whole system into permanent financial crisis. If it would be such a great business, let’s sell the thing, or at least the right to operate it, and let private investors take the risks.

Speaking of UH, Honolulu attorney David B. Rosen delivered a 22 page broadside to the House and Senate higher education committees on Monday spelling out a legal argument that the current solicitation for a general contractor to begin Phase I of the West Oahu campus on a design-build contract is illegal because it sidesteps competitive bidding.

Rosen represents Nan, Inc., a contractor that has done a number of large projects. Rosen says UH has routed the West Oahu procurement through the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii (RCUH) which is exempted from most of the state’s procurement requirements.

But Rosen argues that state law:

…expressly limits the “management and other services” that the University may contract out to the RCUH to those relating to “research and training activities.” It expressly states: “Contracts by the university with the research corporation pursuant to this section shall be limited to sponsored research and training projects.”

Nowhere, Rosen says, is there a mention of construction contracting.

“At the same time,” Rosen writes, “nothing in the RCUH’s authorizing legislation designated that entiy as the procurement officer for the University of Hawaii or allowed the University to dispense with the requirements of the (procurement) Code by simply having RCUH contract to perform construction contracting services, which have nothing to do with the RCUH’s underlying mission.”

The problem with the process, according to Rosen, is that RCUH intends to first choose a contractor for a small segment of the job, and then negotiate the much larger future phases with that single contractor. This approach provides little, if any, opportunity for the kind of competition that could control costs. Rosen says a similar appraoch for the new medical school “appears to have resulted in significant cost overruns related to that project.”

In a cover memo, Rosen noted: “Prior to involving you, I have already attempted to discuss this matter with the attorneys for the two state agencies involved in this procurement. Unfortunately, I have received no response from them.”

A reader who went to the Ethics Commission web site to look at financial disclosures asks what the letters used to indicate value mean. My advice: Return to the Ethics Commission site, click on the link for forms and instructions, and then look at the instructions for the financial disclosures. This lists out the value ranges associated with each of the letters.