Counseling the council: The Sunshine Blog was happy to see that the Office of Information Practices is considering whether it’s legal for that new Honolulu City Council task force on police department hiring to meet secretly. This after the Public First Law Center raised the concern in a recent letter to OIP.

The council created the task force earlier this summer at the request of council member Andria Tupola, who The Blog applauds for being another one willing to step up and do what the Honolulu Police Department and Honolulu Police Commission seem unable to do — get serious about filling more than 450 sworn-officer jobs.

The number of empty positions has grown considerably since recently retired former chief Joe Logan took over and is expected to get even worse as certain dominoes start to fall into place — hazard pay payouts, a new collective bargaining contract kicks in and normal end-of-the-year retirements take their toll. (See our in-depth Q&A with SHOPO officials elsewhere in today’s edition for more details.)

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat opinion writers are closely following efforts to bring more transparency and accountability to government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

The 11-member Police Department Staffing and Retention Task Force was scheduled to start meeting this week with the goal of producing a final report by Dec. 1. Presumably its recommendations would result in some sort of council-mandated action that could help fill some of those vacancies and create much-needed strategies to retain experienced officers.

The Blog has never understood why the task force needed to meet privately. Its tasks are of great interest to the public and include such things as analyzing existing hiring and retention issues, reviewing hiring standards to see if they are too restrictive and evaluating the adequacy of HPD’s budget.

The law center points out that a group created by council resolution (as this one was) is subject to the Sunshine Law in certain circumstances and that the open meetings law intends for the public to be involved in these things from the get-go.

“The Task Force appears to be acting in the place of the Council through a delegation of the Council’s powers and duties,” Public First’s Ben Creps wrote in a letter to OIP. “Resolution 25-160 shifts matters within the purview of the Council — fiscal and management oversight over the Honolulu Police Department, at least as it relates hiring — to the Task Force. The Task Force is chaired by a Councilmember who sits on the Committee on Public Safety and the Economy. It reports to the Council with final recommendations on HPD hiring matters within sixth months ‘and shall remain in effect to monitor progress on its recommendations.’ Given the task and enacting language, the Task Force has a likely lengthy and potentially indefinite term.”

OIP is at least looking into the matter and has asked Tupola to provide the agency with information about the task force’s creation and operation. And unredacted minutes of any meetings.

But The Blog isn’t holding its breath on this one. OIP notes in its letter that it has a substantial backlog of cases and an appeal will take a long time to resolve. Perhaps Tupola and the task force will spare us all, especially OIP, and just decide to do the right thing and meet in public session. We can dream, right?

Anything goes? In a ruling that could have implications for Hawaiʻi’s relatively new law prohibiting the use of deepfake material (doctored photos and the like) in political campaigns, a federal judge last week pulled the plug on a California law that did much the same thing when it comes to restricting AI-generated content in election material.

The California case was a win for Elon Musk, who had challenged the law there. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law which came about after opponents of Kamala Harris circulated a doctored video of her before the 2024 presidential election.

Politico reports that the judge didn’t rule on free speech issues but issued his decision based on federal law regarding online platforms.

Here in the islands, The Babylon Bee, a national political satire site, and Dawn O’Brien, a local conservative activist, earlier this year filed a federal lawsuit against Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez, Honolulu Prosecutor Steve Alm and the Hawaiʻi Campaign Spending Commission that seeks to keep them from enforcing the law as the 2026 election cycle ramps up. That case is still pending in federal court.

Deposing the king: No one seems to know for sure why a suburban community west of Portland is called Aloha, or why it’s pronounced “Aloah.”

But ever since Aloha High School opened in the late 1960s, it’s sought an island vibe by calling its teams the Warriors and adorning them with a logo depicting King Kamehameha in native headdress.

Until now.

Students and staff began raising questions about “the appropriateness of the Aloha High School Warrior mascot, its branding and related traditions,” the school wrote on Facebook in April 2024.

But in a twist on the trend of teams moving away from cultural appropriation by changing their names, the school is keeping the name Warriors and just dropping its Hawaiian logo.

The new logo is at left. The Blog could immediately tell how appropriate it is, because well, nothing says Aloha Warriors like … a wolf.

Aloha is in the Beaverton School District, which said this on its website:

“As a district, we’re moving away from school mascots that depict human figures or specific genders, as these types of mascots do not connect to or represent all students.”

About 1% of Aloha High’s 1,575 students identified as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander during the 2023-24 school year, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

The Blog finds this all exceedingly appropriate. Except for that mispronunciation of “aloha.”

Friends like these: State Human Services Director Ryan Yamane may not be in elected office anymore, but his leftover campaign funds are helping out those who are. In total, other people’s campaigns reported receiving $14,000 from Yamane’s leftover campaign fund.

Some notables include a $3,000 donation to his boss, Gov. Josh Green, and another $3,000 to Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke. Yamane’s amigo from his House days, now-Sen. Henry Aquino, got $2,000. 

Other donations of note from former electeds:

• Former House speaker and current Insurance Commissioner Scott Saiki’s campaign doled out seven $1,000 donations to members of the House.
• Former Maui Sen. Gil Keith-Agaran’s campaign gave $1,000 to Rep. Andrew Garrett and $200 donations to five legislators including Rep. Kyle Yamashita.

And speaking of the recently deposed House Finance chair, his campaign also donated $2,000 to another former Finance chair, that being Luke.

Luke, in fact, appears to be the top recipient of donations from other campaigns in the first six months of the year – getting $7,000 in total.

In addition to the donation from the “Good Friends of Kyle Yamashita,” her campaign reported donations from the Friends of Esther Kiaʻāina, Ryan Yamane and Tommy Waters.

Voice of a warrior: The deadline to apply for the Robert Kekaula Scholarship is Sept. 1. It’s for Hawaiʻi residents, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders who are in college and pursuing a career in broadcast journalism.

The $5,000 award is part of the San Francisco/Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which is dedicated to fostering the next generation of television professionals.

Janice Gin, the former KITV news director, is underwriting the Kekaula scholarship, named for the station’s co-anchor and managing editor who passed away in June 2021.

Described as a “warrior” during his time with Island News, Kekaula worked on and off air and served as a role model, mentor and coach to co-workers.  

Scholarships will be awarded Oct. 18 at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco. Click here for more information.