Office of Hawaiian Affairs Has 10 Employees In The Six-Figure Range

Editor’s Note: Our popular public employees salaries database is back. This year, we’ve combined all agencies in a single database; but we are still breaking out stories on state and city departments individually. Today: the Department of Education.

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs employs 164 people to help it achieve its mission of improving the conditions of Native Hawaiians.

Ten of those employees earn salaries in the six-figure range. Another four earn from $91,000 to $99,000.

At the top of the list is Kamana’opono Crabbe, OHA’s chief executive officer, who makes $150,000 annually — nearly three times the salary of eight of OHA’s nine trustees, who each earn about $56,000. Trustee Robert Lindsey, chair of the Board of Trustees, makes $64,000.

Kamana’opono Crabbe is the executive director of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and its top-paid employee.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

Crabbe sparked a controversy in 2014 when he sought a legal opinion from then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Hawaii’s sovereign status. It spotlighted the disagreement among Native Hawaiians about whether they should be seeking federal recognition as a sovereign people or complete independence from the United States.

At the low end of the OHA pay scale, community outreach coordinators and intake and referral specialists make from $30,000 to $40,000.

Created at the state’s Constitutional Convention of 1978, OHA is focused on the issues of land (aina), culture, economic self-sufficiency, education, governance and health.

OHA is a semi-autonomous “self-governing body” that depends on a revenue stream set by the Legislature. OHA’s leaders have argued that the agency should get a greater share of money from ceded lands — the current level is about $15 million — but the Legislature has not agreed.

OHA has an office in Washington, D.C., to advocate for its interests with the federal government. The agency is the state’s 13th-largest landowner, and its holdings include Kakaako Makai and the former Gentry Pacific Design Center, where OHA offices are located.

With corporate headquarters in Honolulu and a $36 million core operating budget, OHA is at the center of Native Hawaiian affairs.

OHA has been in the news recently for rescinding its support for construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, efforts toward federal recognition of Native Hawaiians similar to that of other indigenous groups in America, and helping to fund the Nai Aupuni self-determination convention.

OHA was one of many government agencies that provided specific salaries or pay ranges for tens of thousands of public employees in response to Civil Beat’s request. Previous articles focused on the City and County of Honolulu, state government, the University of Hawaii system and the Department of Education.

The massive database at the bottom of this article can be searched by department, name, job title or salary range. (Department of Education salaries are also searchable by district or location.)

To find the highest-paid employees, type in a starting salary figure of, say, $100,000 for a given department. But to understand the big picture of public employee compensation, you might want to look at the lower-end salaries as well.

Here’s are the highest-paid Office of Hawaiian Affairs employees as of last July 1:

Civil Beat Database of Public Employee Salaries