Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs voted unanimously against a raise to the base salary for the office’s chief executive officer by 35% next month, while also giving the current CEO a year’s worth of retroactive pay.

Some trustees were concerned with the process that budget chair Luana Alapa utilized to come up with the suggested increase. Others believed the raise stepped outside the lines of CEO Stacy Ferreira’s contract, or worried that the proposal conflated two things that should be separate — the base salary for future CEOs and pay raises under Ferreira’s contract.

“This is an absolute mess,” Board Vice Chair Keoni Souza said at one point during the meeting.

The debate over the pay raise comes three weeks after Ferreira mysteriously went on paid leave.

The CEO sent a message to staff on Sept. 23 saying she was taking personal leave, although Board Chair Kai Kahele later called it administrative leave after the board voted to approve Ferreira’s absence. OHA hasn’t yet clarified the circumstances surrounding her departure or if she will return.

Under the proposal, her pay would have gone from $200,000 to $270,400 starting Nov. 1.

The nine-member Board of Trustees debated raising the pay for the CEO position Oct. 2, but decided to send the pay raise through Alapa’s committee instead. That timeline gave her office about a week to craft the salary increase in order to meet deadlines to make the materials for Wednesday’s meeting publicly available. She faced criticism during the Wednesday hearing for how she handled the process.

Souza and Trustee Brickwood Galueria questioned Alapa on why she and her office didn’t work more closely with OHA’s administration on the proposal, as is the usual process for initiatives that may cost large sums of money. Alapa said she worked with the OHA’s budget chief and others on staff to develop the proposal and ensure there was money in the budget for the raises.

Trustee Dan Ahuna said the board is still conducting a job evaluation of Ferreira and that attempting to enact a pay raise before the process is completed “undermines what the trustees have worked on all these months.”

Kai Kahele, the board chair, said he believed that the pay proposal was too complicated, adding that Alapa should have only considered what is in Ferreira’s contract, which requires that pay raises be tied to increases for other state department heads approved by the state Salary Commission. The board hasn’t given Ferreira a pay raise in two years.

He was also concerned that approving the pay raise, along with retroactive pay, would require significant changes to OHA’s operating budget — something that would require a separate process for vetting and approval.

“Frankly, it’s too much money,” Kahele said.

In closing the debate, Alapa apologized to the other trustees and said she never intended to undermine them and misunderstood the directions they were giving her at the board’s Oct. 2 meeting. At another point in the meeting, Alapa said she may have been overzealous in her approach to significantly raise the CEO’s salary to make it competitive with that of other large Native Hawaiian-serving organizations.

“There is no intent to do any harm whatsoever,” Alapa said, adding that she and the trustees wanted to ” ensure our CEO position is paid appropriately.” But, she conceded, “The timing, apparently, is not good.”

The board was initially going to defer the pay raise, but capped the contentious meeting that saw Alapa come under fire for the suggested salary increase by voting unanimously against it instead.

“Trustee Alapa, did you vote ‘No’ too?” Ahuna asked.

“Yes, I did,” Alapa said.

“Oh, you wasted – you wasted our time,” Ahuna said.