A Honolulu department head’s trip to Poland next month will be funded by a private company that has signed a no-bid contract with that department after City Council members voted Wednesday to approve the gift.

The gift is valued at $5,000 and includes travel, hotel accommodations, meals and related expenses for Department of Customer Services director Kim Hashiro to visit the Baltic coast port city of Gdańsk, Poland between May 3 and May 10.

Hashiro oversees the city’s motor vehicle office, and in a previous interview with Civil Beat said the trip was necessary so she could approve Hawaiʻi’s new license and ID card designs at Thales Group’s Gdańsk facility, including aesthetic components and holographic imagery to prevent fraud.

Thales offered the trip to Hashiro shortly after it received a no-bid extension from the city to continue its work with licenses and IDs. Honolulu Managing Director Mike Formby told Civil Beat Thales was exempt from the standard procurement process in order to comply with an impending federal deadline.

Still, watchdogs including Common Cause Hawaiʻi’s executive director Camron Hurt and state ethics commission chair Wesley Fong said the gift is ethically questionable.

The Honolulu Ethics Commission’s guidelines on gifts say city officials with authority to award, oversee or evaluate a contract may not accept gifts from contractors that recently had a contract with the city, have a current contract or are likely to seek one in the future. 

Formby defended the trip on Wednesday, testifying that he believes the city is paying for the trip in the cost of the contract.

“To ask the taxpayers to pay $5,000 on top of a contract that requires that we go to Poland, to make sure that we get what we bargained for, is just wrong,” he told the council members.

Formby and Hashiro, who also testified Wednesday, said it’s important for jurisdictions to send representatives in person to examine these cards’ security features.

“You can’t look at a computer screen and see security features in the way that you can when you look at a card,” Formby said.

Three people opposed the gift in written testimony, saying they thought the trip was unnecessary for Hashiro to perform her job.

Without further discussion, all eight council members who were present approved the gift. Council member Andria Tupola was absent Wednesday.

The council also voted to keep Jim Ireland in his role leading the city’s Department of Emergency Services after he faced accusations of fostering a toxic work environment at previous hearings.

Council member Val Okimoto, who chairs the council’s Public Safety and Customer Services Committee that evaluated Ireland’s reappointment, maintained her skepticism of Ireland Wednesday but voted with reservations to approve him.

“Testimony from EMS professionals has consistently described a workplace culture marked by low morale, favoritism and even retaliation,” she said, “indicating a serious breakdown in the trust between frontline staff and department leadership.”

Ireland denied the accusations of mismanagement but said the department is steadily working toward getting enough ambulances and personnel to handle the call volume. 

“One year from now, we will have 30 ambulances in our fleet that are under one year old,” Ireland said. “And that’s unprecedented in our history.”

Ireland acknowledged these new ambulances won’t solve the burnout issue overnight. He said he has also started talking to the United Public Workers union, which includes paramedics, to try to boost their pay. Paramedics currently lack the same automatic pay raises other public union workers get for every year they work. 

“A paramedic with 30 years of experience makes the same as a paramedic with one day of experience in the same job class,” Ireland said.