Mayoral candidate and former governor, Ben Cayetano, scored this week when he made public several emails from federal transit staffers critical of the city’s rush to get its rail project underway. These are among the 155,000 pages of documents delivered to the federal court in Honolulu on a hard drive. The documents filled approximately 44 [...]
Tags:
You never know what you’re going to stumble over. This morning I hurriedly skimmed through bills that will be up for 3rd reading votes in the House this week, and flagged several for further attention. Among them, largely ignored, is SB 2267, which would allocate $100 million in special purpose revenue bonds to Clearcom, a [...]
Tags:
Here’s a list of Senate bills awaiting third reading before Thursday’s “First Crossover” deadline. [Note: Sorry for the earlier 404 error. The link has been corrected.] The problem is that it was sent to me by a friendly senator. I don’t think the list is available to the public yet, although the internal legislative computer [...]
Tags:
Here we go again. Another instance of the Abercrombie administration trying to turn back years of precedent in favor of secrecy. The matter was reported by Civil Beat today (“It’s Your Money: Hawaii Residents Expected to Pay for Whistleblower Suit, But the state and the fired employee have agreed to keep details of what happened [...]
Tags:
The current issue of the journal of the American Bar Association has a good article on the legal questions surrounding videotaping of the police by private citizens (Good Cop, Bad Citizen? As Cellphone Recording Increases, Officers Are Uneasy). The article reviews several legal cases, completed and pending. “The prevalence of cellphone cameras with high enough [...]
Tags:
I pulled this week’s Pacific Business News out of our mail stack yesterday and started reading. Two stories jumped out at me with sunshine law issues. They tell me that we’re already facing issues of openness, and reporters are going to have to get pushier in order to pry information out for the public. First, [...]
Tags:
There are large red flags waving over the House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, February 21, at 2 p.m. Several bills of note are included on the long afternoon agenda. HB2742 is yet another attempt to exempt the county councils from the reach of the sunshine law. This bill simply amends the definition [...]
Tags:
Feel like you just can’t get enough of the legislative process? The State House has launched its own House Webcast Archive Pilot, featuring on-demand video of many committee hearings and, most recently, floor sessions. Also included are pdf’s of agendas and, in some cases, MP3 audio files. It looks like a big step forward in [...]
Tags:
