OHA Trustees Race To Beat Deadline For New Controversial Budget
Staff and some trustees had been caught off guard by a dramatically different spending plan. Monday’s decision came after a flurry of changes to reach a compromise.
Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs approved a new two-year budget after a marathon meeting on Monday to resolve issues in a spending plan that had drawn intense criticism and scrutiny in recent weeks.
The nine-member board spent more than nine hours debating individual items in the budget in a process that gave the public a rare glimpse into the sausage-making that goes into crafting a government budget.
What emerged was a plan that allocates upward of $60 million in each of the next two years to the office created to improve the condition of Native Hawaiians. It includes more funds for Hawaiian charter schools and additional workers to assist OHA’s Native Hawaiian beneficiaries.
The budget vote followed a tense few weeks at OHA after a new draft of the budget proposed dramatic budget changes and reorganizations of the office that caught staff and even some trustees off guard.
At the end of Monday’s proceedings, board Chair Kai Kahele told staff that their message last week “was heard. It resonated.”
Earlier in the meeting, he explained that he had made the changes to put the office in a better position to serve Native Hawaiians and improve employee morale with higher wages and 12 weeks of paid family leave — more than what is offered by any other state agency.
He described the budget as transformational and said his proposal had set the stage for the debate on Monday that saw trustees enact a slew of changes as staff made calculations in real time, all in the public eye.
Trustees needed to pass a budget Monday so OHA would not begin the new fiscal year on Tuesday without a clear spending plan.
Some trustees at the start of Monday’s meeting called for a stop-gap budget for July, which could give the board the rest of the month to hash out the rest of the two-year budget. But trustee Luana Alapa, who leads the board’s budget committee, withdrew that request after seeing the line-item voting process play out throughout Monday afternoon.
“It restored my faith in the board, that we can do this,” Alapa said.
The process wasn’t without hiccups. Trustees were ready to vote on the budget around 5:30 p.m. but realized they had appropriated too much money. They fixed that by reducing disaster aid funding in the next fiscal year by $50,000, to $410,000.
At the end of the day, Kahele said the process demonstrated growth among the trustees, and acknowledged that the path to finalizing the budget was at times hard.
“We challenged each other with respect,” he said. “We found a way forward together.”
A few highlights from Monday’s meeting, where trustees:
- Removed $4.9 million in funding set aside to capital improvement projects and used the funds to create competitive grants available to nonprofits that have already received funding from the Legislature.
- Reduced requests for marketing and communications projects by more than $500,000, which freed up $500,000 over the next two years to restore funding for restorative justice programs.
- Added an OHA beneficiary services agent to Hilo and one more that could be located on any island but nixed a $180,000 request for fleet vehicles on neighbor islands.
- Added $750,000 over the next two years for home improvement and about $800,000 for economic resilience programs.
The board also beefed up funding for some of the state’s largest Hawaiian charter schools by more than $500,00) each over the next two years, specifically:
- Ka Waihona o Ka Na’auao: $551,800
- Kanu o ka ʻĀina: $538,986
- Ke Kula ʻO Nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu: $551,800
- Kamaile Academy: $548,600
