Higher education: The Sunshine Blog was happy to see University of Hawaiʻi officials apparently learned a lesson in transparency and accountability from the public blowup over the hiring of new UH President Wendy Hensel.

UH appears to be making sure that the executive search firm engaged to find a new athletic director is not allowed to keep public records secret.

As Civil Beat reported, that’s exactly what happened in the search for Hensel. UH inked a contract with search firm WittKieffer that made any information collected on candidates the exclusive property of WittKieffer. That turned out to include anything the search firm may have turned up on problems with discrimination, harassment and retaliation relating to Hensel at previous jobs at Georgia State University and City University of New York.

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The contract with WittKieffer revealed a special condition allowing UH to dodge public records requests for material collected on Hensel. That prompted state senators to introduce a bill this session that would make sure private contractors did not have ownership of material that would arguably be public if in the possession of a state agency. The bill died earlier this session after agencies and companies complained it was too convoluted and burdensome. Advocates promised to work on better language during the interim and resubmit it.

Civil Beat recently obtained through a public records request the new UH contract with Parker Executive Search, a Georgia firm that is being paid $70,000 to find a new athletic director after Craig Angelos was canned late last year.

Unlike the WittKieffer contract, this one has numerous provisions that would seem to make the work of this search firm much more transparent and accessible to public scrutiny.

“One of the objectives of the search process is to give the UNIVERSITY, candidates, and general public a substantial comfort level that the search has been conducted professionally and efficiently,” the new contract says.

Under a section called “Ownership Rights,” this contract clearly states: “The UNIVERSITY shall have complete ownership of all reports, plans, evaluations, applications, resume data, and related material, both finished and unfinished, which are received, developed, prepared, assembled, or conceived by the CONTRACTOR pursuant to this Agreement. All such material shall be provided to the UNiVERSITY upon request and/or upon expiration or termination of this Agreement.”

Compare that to the WittKieffer contract, which said “it is understood and agreed that the Contractor’s internal notes and work papers shall remain the exclusive property of the Contractor.”

Needless to say, WittKieffer refused to give us any material it had collected on Hensel especially relating to the allegations by Georgia State and CUNY professors. The UH Board of Regents claimed to have little information on Hensel and that regents only knew what the search firm had told them. And then they refused to talk to us about it.

Read the new contract here:

In an ocean far, far away: Speaking of the UH president search, Julian Vasquez Heilig, the former provost of the University of Western Michigan who was one of two finalists for the top job at UH but lost out to Wendy Hensel, is now a semi-finalist to be president of the University of Puerto Rico.

Heilig, who is much more chatty than Hensel, had a nice conversation with reporter Stewart Yerton last week and the discussion naturally turned to the difference between Puerto Rico and Hawaiʻi when it comes to openness and accountability. Heilig says he sees the Puerto Rican process as a model for transparency in academic hiring.

In that island community, Heilig is facing public vetting that includes interviews by faculty senates at each of the university system’s 11 campuses. The faculty panels have access to application files and are charged with submitting recommendations to the university’s governing board, which will livestream final interviews.

The process is so transparent that even candidates’ letters of recommendation are public and posted on the university website.

“If you want a model for transparency,” he said, “here you go.”

The Blog has to agree.

Puerto Rico is not just making more info public; it’s also revealing the identities of candidates much sooner than UH did by making public the names of nine semi-finalists. That gives the public more time to see who could soon be guiding one of Puerto Rico’s most important public institutions.

The semi-finalist stage in Hawaiʻi was private, Heilig noted. “But the semi-finalist stage in Puerto Rico is very public,” he said. “Very, very public.”

Crime and punishment: Friday marked the 46th day of the 60-day Hawaiʻi Legislature, which means sine die on May 2 is well in sight. All bills needed to clear committees on Friday and now there are several hundred bills awaiting floor action in the House and Senate, many of which will be voted on this coming week.

But as of Friday, 18 bills had already been sent up to the governor’s desk on the fifth floor of the Capitol. Most of them are crime bills that received little opposition, including:

• House Bill 392 bans the possession, transfer and sale of ghost guns and sets up mandatory minimum sentencing if they are used when committing a felony.
• House Bill 137 requires that violent felons who violate the ban against owning, possessing or controlling a firearm or ammunition are subject to a mandatory prison term.
• House Bill 386 adds fentanyl to the offense threshold for possession of methamphetamine, heroin, morphine and cocaine.
• Senate Bill 112 lets immediate family members receive a copy of the closing police report of deceased loved ones.
• Senate Bill 1382 requires that intentionally or knowingly causing bodily injury to a National Guard member while doing their duty is a class C felony.

Another measure that has nothing to do with crime but has struggled to gain traction in recent legislative sessions finally passed this year and has been sent to the governor. Senate Bill 1202 would allow campaign funds to be used for a candidate’s child care and vital household dependent care costs.

Gov. Josh Green has until June 24 to inform the Legislature of bills he’s thinking of vetoing, and until July 9 to veto, sign or let bills become law without his signature. The Legislature then has until noon on July 9 to convene a special session to override any vetoes.

A president is not a king: Anyone who follows Sen. Karl Rhoads’s X feed will know just how much the Senate Judiciary chair despises the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I think I finally understand why POTUS wants to gut the federal government. If we make life really miserable in the US, immigrants won’t try to come here anymore.

— Karl Rhoads (@KarlRhoads1) April 2, 2025

He’s now introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution 158, which cleared the Senate Thursday. Hawaiʻi senators are urging President Donald Trump to follow the law by obeying court orders, among other things.

“Some seem to believe that burning down the federal government will make America a better place,” Rhoads said in a press release this week about SCR 158.” There are plenty of examples of countries without functioning governments and people flee these countries and try to come to the United States.”

Concurrent resolutions do not carry the force of law, but state legislators continue to introduce and vote on them every session. It’s a way for them to speak out on an issue and let folks know where they stand.

The reso, a copy of which will be sent to the White House but is unlikely — The Blog figures — to find its way to the Resolute Desk, was opposed by two of the three Republicans in the state Senate, Samantha DeCorte and Brenton Awa.

Goes well with butter and garlic: Hawaiʻi has a state snail, a state land mammal, a state marine mammal, a state insect, a state bird — even a state microbe. And if House Bill 345 passes the Legislature, it will soon have a state shrimp.

No, it’s not Bruno Mars. Say hello to the ʻōpae ‘ula (Halocaridina rubra), a species of shrimp endemic to Hawaiʻi’s anchialine pools.

What, you might ask, is an anchialine pool? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it’s an enclosed water body or pond with an underground connection to the ocean. NOAA says more than half the world’s anchialine pools are in Hawaiʻi and are home to rare critters as well as crustaceans (aka shrimp), fish and eels.

By designating the Halocaridina rubra as the state shrimp, the bill posits, it will raise awareness of protection of the pool ecosystems as a natural resource. HB 345 has already passed the House and is up for a vote in the Senate Tuesday.

Signs of the times: April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month in Hawaiʻi, and supporters including Honolulu Police Chief Joe Logan and Honolulu Prosecutor Steve Alm were among those sign-waving about it last week in front of the Hawaiʻi State Capitol.

According to the state Department of Health, 1,714 adults and children received specialized services from sexual assault centers and 2,472 calls were made to the state’s sex assault center hotlines in 2022.