The Maui County Board of Ethics is confronting a dire shortage of resources, hampering its ability to investigate potential wrongdoing by public officials, educate and advise government workers on ethics dilemmas and even hold its own meetings. 

The nine-person board has four vacancies. As such, the county ethics watchdog is unable to summon a quorum unless all five members are present. 

This posed a problem as recently as last Wednesday, when a board member traveling to the mainland forced the cancellation of the panel’s April meeting, at which members had planned to elect a chairperson. The board — which unlike other county ethics commissions has no staff and no dedicated budget — isn’t scheduled to meet again until May 8.

“There’s a lot of potential for problems out there but we’re just not equipped to handle it right now, especially with our numbers down,” board member Steven Sturdevant said.

Ethics board members say the process of filling its four vacancies appears to be held up amid an ongoing legal dispute between Mayor Richard Bissen’s office and the Maui County Council over the timing of when the mayor submitted his selections for citizen nominees to serve on a number of boards and commissions.

The council says the mayor missed the deadline to submit his nominations and has since tried to make its own appointments. Last week, a Maui judge blocked a new appointee to the county Planning Commission from joining the nine-member panel.

“We need to have more members and we’ve made that clear to the mayor and the council, but nothing seems to happen,” Sturdevant said. “Everything seems to be bogged down with the wildfires and everything else that’s going on.”

Those who serve on the underpowered panel say it needs more than just an additional four members to return to full strength.

The board is also advocating for full-time staff, less stringent term limits and an independent budget. It recently adopted its initial strategic plan that lays out its mission, priorities and operating strengths and weaknesses.

The fight for resources among members of the oversight board responsible for enforcing ethical behavior in government comes after two county officials and two lawmakers from Maui who took bribes from Honolulu businessman Milton Choy have been sent to prison.

Voters Could Decide On Ethics Board Staff

The board is advocating for a charter amendment that would provide it with three full-time staff consisting of an executive director or legal counsel, a secretary and an investigator. The board presently has no staff.

The proposal would give the board the resources it needs to be able to offer annual ethics training to every county employee, board member Michael Lilly said.

The board currently offers no educational services to county workers. Instead, the county’s Department of Personnel Services offers basic, one-time ethics training to employees at the time of their hiring. But Lilly said the board doesn’t see this minimal amount of ethics education as adequate.

“We want every county employee trained up annually and we want to be auditing that so we know every employee has been checked off the list every year,” Lilly said. “And that not only helps prevent public employees from running afoul of the ethics laws, but when they do run afoul of the ethics laws we can prove that they got training in that.”

The addition of a dedicated staff also would allow the board to begin providing public employees with timely informal opinions on ethics questions. Currently, an employee might need to wait weeks or even months to receive advice from the board during its monthly meetings. An informal opinion might take a week or two to generate on top of that, Lilly said.

“I talked to one council member and they had an ethics issue and they needed immediate advice, but there’s no way you could get it because you’d have to wait for us to look at it when we next met — that could be a month away,” Lilly said. “And so whatever the thing was that they were concerned about, they just declined it and avoided the issue. But if we had full-time staff, they could have gotten immediate guidance.”

If the board has to cancel its meeting due to a lack of quorum, as it’s been forced to do twice in the last year, a public employee needing ethics advice could have to wait even longer for advice.

This is not the case for public employees on Oahu, who can call the county’s ethics board staff for real-time advice over the phone, according to Lilly, who served on the Honolulu board for nine years.

The absence of staff also makes it difficult for the board to prosecute ethics violations. As members of a quasi-judicial body, board members themselves are meant to adjudicate complaints, not investigate them, according to Lilly.

“We need a third party to investigate complaints, and we just don’t have it,” he said.

This doesn’t mean the board doesn’t pursue ethics issues at all. But it’s limited in what it can do.

After learning an audit into all “no-bid” contracts awarded to companies controlled by Milton Choy was requested by former Maui Mayor Mike Victorino but never conducted, the board earlier this year asked Mayor Richard Bissen to instruct the county auditor to perform the audit.

Choy was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for bribing a former county official $2 million in exchange for more than $19 million in work between 2012 and 2018.

It’s unclear whether an audit has been or will be conducted.

In January, the board directed the county to perform an informal internal inquiry into an ethics complaint about the county’s hiring of a local company with political connections to Bissen. Satisfied with the results of the inquiry, in which a county employee questioned the public workers who awarded the contract, the board decided not to launch an official investigation.

“We didn’t find anything that was really wrong at that point and there didn’t seem like there was a lot going on to really pursue,” Sturdevant said. “But, again, it was all done internally and I don’t know how thorough it was, how much time was spent.”

Lilly said the board plans to meet with the county prosecutor next month to see if the office might be willing to loan the board a prosecutor to pursue complaints on an as-needed basis.

In a memo to the council, Bissen signaled his support for new secretary and investigator positions for the ethics board, adding that the board’s work has “grown tremendously with the new online ability for filing financial disclosures, complaints and requests for advisory opinions.” He said the board has become more proactive in pursuing complaints that require investigation.

If the board does acquire the staff it’s requesting, it would need to carve out its own budget, Lilly said. Currently the board must request access to money through the county Department of the Corporation Counsel.

One of the board’s most recent budget requests is for funds to send its membership to the mainland for the annual conference of the Council on Government Ethics Laws. With the possible acquisition of staff, there also would be new salary and administrative cost considerations.

Board Wants Second Term Option For Members

The ethics board is pushing for a charter amendment that would relax county-imposed term limits for its appointed membership.

The board submitted a request to the council to include on the November ballot a charter amendment question that asks voters to decide whether ethics board members should be allowed to stay on for a second term.

County board and commission members currently must step down after a single term of two to five years.

Two of the ethics panel’s four unfilled seats went vacant due to term limits.

“If we had had that, then our last chairman, who we just lost, would have been able and, I think, would have been willing to continue and we wouldn’t have had to suffer that loss of corporate knowledge,” Lilly said.

In a notice to the council, the board also recommended that at least some of its vacancies be filled by retired judges, who have the skillset to adjudicate complaints. Two retired judges sit on the Honolulu Ethics Commission, which also has 11 dedicated staff positions.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.