New members of the boards that oversee lower and higher public education and the Hawaii Tourism Authority are being named by Gov. Josh Green after soured relationships with the state Legislature resulted in lackluster financial support, including proposals to not fund the HTA and even abolish it.
The HTA survived, barely. And in the aftermath, Green said it needs to change directions.
It “is important that we figure out how we can shift this agency from its focus of marketing tourism to more strategically looking at destination management that would attract and educate responsible visitors,” Green said in May at the end of the legislative session.
The Legislature gave Green $200 million in discretionary funding last session and he told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” livestream program last week that he plans to use most of it to shore up funding for the HTA ($71 million), Department of Education ($55 million) and University of Hawaii ($25 million).
“This year three entities got into, I guess, hot water or didn’t do what they needed to ultimately get out of the Legislature,” Green told Spotlight. “So the Board of Education came up, unfortunately, very short with the DOE and the funding. I’m not blaming them. I’m just saying that they did not have, obviously, a great relationship with some of the leadership at the Legislature. … That’s why ultimately some changes have to occur.
“It’s no coincidence that the HTA, the BOE and the (University of Hawaii) Board of Regents are all getting some change in their leadership structure because I can’t have these entities be in conflict with the Legislature and then see under-funding for our university, our schools or the tourism efforts that we have to make. I’m fixing those things because they didn’t get handled during the Legislature. So, we’re going to have some new leadership.”
Earlier this month, Green appointed former Gov. Neil Abercrombie, attorney Lauren Akitake and Global Resiliency Hub CEO Alapaki Nahale-a as interim appointees to the UH Board of Regents. Their five-year terms begin July 1.
The 11-member Board of Regents oversees the 10-campus UH system and its 7,900 employees serving nearly 45,000 students.
UH President David Lassner has been a frequent target of criticism from three key state senators: Donovan Dela Cruz, chair of the Ways and Means Committee; Donna Mercado Kim, chair of the Higher Education Committee; and Michele Kidani, chair of the Education Committee.
Also this month, Green announced that he will replace BOE board Chair Bruce Voss — a lawyer and former news reporter — with business leader Warren Haruki.
Voss could have continued to serve as an at-large board member for another year but he told the Star-Advertiser after Green’s announcement that he will resign effective June 30.
Green named two other interim appointees to the BOE, starting July 1: Kahele Dukelow, dean of arts and sciences at UH Maui College; and Shanty Asher, a current BOE member.
They await Senate confirmation during the next legislative session.
The BOE sets policy for the 10th-largest school district in the United States. It includes 258 regular public schools serving 156,500 students and nearly 40,000 full- and part-time employees. The BOE also is responsible for the state librarian, who heads the state’s 51 library branches; and the Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission, which oversees 37 public charter schools statewide.
The terms of three gubernatorial appointees to the HTA board by then-Gov. David Ige already have expired but they are still serving and Green is considering his options. They are HTA board Chair George Kam and board members Keone Downing and Ben Rafter.
Kam told the Star-Advertiser that, “We are holdovers from Gov. Ige, who asked us to hold over for one year. He had the option to recommend three new board members for four-year terms, and he thought the pono thing to do was to have the next governor recommend his picks.”
Technically, the governor can appoint six members to the HTA, along with three appointees from the House and three from the Senate.
But Kam said the ultimate decision is up to the governor, who gets to select from three recommendations for each HTA seat made by the House and Senate, and then nominates his preferred choices to the Senate for confirmation.
“When you hear the governor saying that he wants to replace the three governor picks, that is his kuleana,” Kam said. “But the process would be, as I understand it, that he would recommend the three names that he wants and they would go through confirmation by the Senate and once they are confirmed they would take the helm on the board.”
Despite its issues with the Legislature last session, Kam called the HTA “a dream team that is all coming together. We started out as the ‘Bad News Bears’ but these guys are playing for a championship and I know with other key acquisitions I think we are gonna be in a great position.”
———
Staff writer Esme M. Infante contributed to this report
