Here’s another one to add to Hawaiian Electric’s series of procurement foul-ups, along with BlueEarth and Imperium, that ended up in court.
At issue here was a 2006 contract with Peace Software, Inc. for a new Customer Information System.
A new Customer Information System was expected to improve, among other things, HECO’s management of its customer accounts, products, and services.
Well, just a few months had gone by when Peace Software’s parent company was bought out by First Data Corporation, and things apparently went downhill from there, with corporate fingers pointed back and forth, up and down. To make this more complicated, First Data turned around and sold the company again just two years later.
HECO said the new owners interfered with the contract and failed to perform, while Peace alleged “breach of contract.”
Then it was off to federal court. Peace Software, which brought the lawsuit, was represented by a number of attorneys, including former Attorney General Margery Bronster and former Hawaii Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Klein. The defendant, Hawaiian Electric was represented by Glenn T. Melchinger, from the law firm of Alston Hunt Floyd & Ing. HECO then filed a counterclaim against Peace and First Data.
The case was eventually settled after Peace and First Data failed to get HECO’s counterclaim thrown out.
Judge Susan Oki Mollway’s opinion can be found here.
Meanwhile, I guess the improved customer service that the new system was supposed to bring went by the wayside until the smoke cleared. In November 2010, four and a half years after the Peace contract with signed, Hawaiian Electric finally entered into a new contract with another vendor for that customer information system.
What’s interesting to me is not so much the legal intricacies of this particular case, which HECO essentially won in the courtroom, but the series of high-profile HECO contracts that fell apart during this period. One deal that goes bad is bad luck. Two is a trend. Three or more is a business issue. And, in the case of a regulated utility, potentially a public issue as well.
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Ian, you hit the nail on the head with the Safeway story. The trick to making that a great post was the corporate welfare aspect, with HPD expending big money for a $5 mistake by customers. You hit the sweet spot.
Here’s a take by Henry Curtis on HECO that points out the corporate welfare aspect of the utility, and that also illustrates with a ven diagram how the Tea Party is anti-government, the Occupy Wall Street is anti-corporate, but they share the same belief in the collusion of government and business.
http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/10/hecos-approach-to-uncertainty_22.html
But really, the whole population, not just demonstrators, is tee-offed about corporate welfare. But no one has come up with a framework to end such corporate-government collusion, so we have these extremes protesting.
As for the local utility monopoly, Boulder CO could be showing the way. The residents of Boulder may vote to boot out their corporate utility, Xcel Energy, “and move toward a home-ruled, municipally owned one that would be environmentally greener and locally accountable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/us/boulder-seeks-to-take-power-from-the-power-company.html
As for Safeway, I haven’t shopped there in a long time because I cannot afford it. But it is worse than that. I remember going there years ago, to the Kailua Safeway a few years after it had opened, and there was a long line of shoppers queued up, but only two registers were open. The guy behind me says out loud to the rest of us, “The MBAs are in charge. All the idiots who went to business school did a cost-benefits analysis of how much money could be saved by firing workers, and so we have this fiasco. Most of these shoppers won’t be coming back regularly.” That turned out to be true of myself; after that, I only went to Safeway when I needed to use the ATM or buy donuts.
In fact, during the depths of the recession, I went to Safeway at 8 pm to get some medicine, and there were only a couple of cars in the parking lot (it is open 24/7). The place was empty when it should have been packed. That is the future of Safeway. Americans cannot afford Safeway. Costco is the future.
A related article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/our-unpaid-extra-shadow-work.html?src=me&ref=general
As for your latest posting on the expansion of the Black Press, I was reminded of a quote in an article in Civil Beat on APEC.
Its other relevance, she says, is as a place for trade ministers and political leaders to seek political deals, jump-start stalled negotiations, sign agreements and partake in a telegenic photo ops dressed in matching ponchos, bomber jackets, batik or (could this year be anything else?) — aloha shirts. As early as the 1990s, Kelsey says, APEC was discredited to the point that it was jokingly referred to as “Aging Politicians Enjoying Cocktails.”
http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2011/11/02/13476-moana-nui-speakers-say-apec-is-colonization-today-in-real-time/
That is the final sentence in that article, and it’s hilarious because the whole article consists of input from academic radicals accusing APEC of being neo-colonialism or colonialism in disguise. Ultimately, APEC is really just a bunch of old farts who don’t know what they are doing.
The same can be said of the Black Press. From a distance, it seems like the Borg on Star Trek, conquering and assimilating entire solar systems into a semi-comatose cyborg existence. The reality is that Black Press is itself like a zombie bank or the latter-day Soviet Union — the walking dead. Like investors buying dirt-cheap housing in the suburbs of Detroit, it’s ruthless expansion into a market that has long-term prospects even poorer than those of today.
But that’s like so much I read about in Civil Beat. The accusation in the past was that the East-West Center was a front for the CIA. If anything, the EWC seems like a dinosaur that will eventually disappear along with Dan Inouye (another dinosaur). Disneyland, James Bond movies — these are all tired things from the 1950s and early 1960s that lamely persist along with the EWC and Inouye.
Locally, we have the bold rail project launched five years ago. But now it feels like a project from fifty years ago. The Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative is three years old, but it feels like it is thirty years old, at least to me. Who gets excited about wind turbines? Old guys do.
Here is an op-ed by Harold Bloom who characterizes the Mormon church not as a religion but as a corporation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?src=me&ref=general
These are the people who want to turn your neck of the woods into a Disneyland for rich people.
I don’t have a problem at all with turning Honolulu or even west Oahu into Manhattan or Hong Kong. Opposition to highrises is absurd. We need more of that.
But what is planned for your area is evil.
One thing I meant to add but forgot was that one cannot simply be anti-development on the North Shore. That would risk looking like a nimby, reactionary, selfish and hypocritical. What is needed is an alternative development model for the north shore.
What would that look like?
I would guess that it would involve more alternative energy, and perhaps more of a presence of the film industry out there, and more agriculture. It might also involve having new colleges and universities built out there. There would also be more eco-tourism.
Yet another Civil Beat story on the Big Wind:
http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2011/11/17/13738-up-in-the-air-still-no-easy-answers-for-big-wind/
The concluding sentence reads:
“Now even the very idea idea of Big Wind is up in the air — demonstrating once again that it’s not easy to get major projects done in Hawaii.”
I think that this misses the point — and in fact reflects the kind of thinking that makes big projects difficult in Hawaii.
The problem is that even small projects are very difficult in Hawaii.
The State has a 43-year-old computer system. How did this happen? Up until the 1990s, Hawaii had one of the most robust economies in the world (aside from some turbulence in the 1970s). Up until relatively recently, there was always all sorts of money for fanciful pet projects in Hawaii. But a country’s computer system is at a basic level of infrastructure, like roads and sewers. The average person replaces their computer every three years, so one would expect the State to update their data systems every seven or ten or fifteen years. Again, how did this happen?
Here’s a personal anecdote that might explain this local obsession with big projects and ineptitude at small projects.
A friend of mine became a salesman for a small printshop after college. His whole strategy was to target small business. He would eat in a cafe, then chat with the owner and make a sales pitch. He’d make a sale now and then, just casually working his way through a neighborhood everyday. Years later, he was still getting checks in the mail from sales commissions for repeat business.
He was one of the most successful salesmen for the printshop despite his lack of experience or talent at that job. This was because the other salesmen would target big businesses. But those big businesses already had their own advertising accounts.
The same mix of grandiosity and cluelessness applies to APEC. We have politicians like Abercrombie and Schatz singing the glories of big conferences in Hawaii. Now, APEC does not seem like a disaster, but it doesn’t seem to have been a great boon either. In fact, Hawaii doesn’t seem to have any real positive benefit from hosting APEC.
What the Governor should be focusing on is eco-tourism on the North Shore. But I can anticipate the objections now: “Yeah, well, that’s just small time stuff….” But that’s what business is all about, small stuff that brings in profits and establish a brand, not big things like APEC that lose money and have no real impact on the state’s profile.
So some might be lamenting how hard it is to do big projects in Hawaii, but that misses the point. It’s hard to do the small stuff, and that small stuff is what builds the society.
And that emphasis on big projects is a reflection of a certain kind of “company town” mentality where you yearn to set up a mega-institution (sugarcane, big government) and just kick back and milk it. In a society like that, you can’t really do anything in the long run when your luck runs out.