The enforcement arm of the Honolulu Liquor Commission (HLC) is in disarray: short-staffed, demoralized, dysfunctional and by many standards, ineffective.

It would be counterproductive to make excuses for the astonishingly poor state of the agency: Given revelations of questionable performance, inadequate training, lack of transparency and inadequate leadership that have come out from a city-commissioned report on the Liquor Commission, this government body needs to remain under overarching scrutiny by the city administration, and methodically rebuilt from the ground up.

A months-long review conducted this year by Hui Chen, who reports to the city managing director, found that the agency has no clear policies and procedures for enforcement, that staffers were inadequately trained, and that reporting requirements were so lax and insufficient that reliable data about agents’ performance could not be obtained. With this failure to operate by clear, fair and effective rules for enforcement, much less reporting, it follows that there was no adequate framework for training — there weren’t standards to train up to.

The report found that HLC agents prioritized enforcement visits with no discernible logic, so that one business might be visited multiple times while another, nearby, evaded scrutiny. The lack of transparent policy and procedure to ensure that a wide cross-section of applicable businesses were reviewed resulted in unreasonable disparities in enforcement between districts. And when complaints came in, the commission failed to follow through.

The sting in this is all the more painful in light of the fact that city constituents — the bars, clubs, pubs, restaurants, food courts, liquor stores and retailers selling alcohol on Oahu — have raised the alarm over uneven, opaque enforcement actions, perceived targeting of certain segments of the markets under HLC’s purview, and the potential for corruption for years.

Only after a lawsuit was filed, alleging violations of civil rights arising from aggressive targeting of a gay bar in Honolulu, did the city take meaningful action.

Walter Enriquez, publishers of the Gay Island Guide and Scarlet Honolulu, Inc. together filed suit against the HLC in November 2021, alleging the HLC engaged in an “ongoing campaign of unlawful, unconstitutional, and highly discriminatory anti-gay harassment of Scarlet, Gay Island Guide, and generally, the Honolulu LGBTQ+ community” for more than six years.

Early this year, the city assigned Chen to review HLC operations. Chen’s report makes it clear that reform is overwhelmingly necessary — as prior complaints from businesses involved with the agency, and oversight by the Honolulu City Council, should have done long before this.

Between 2020 and 2022, two chairs and an interim chair of the Honolulu Liquor Commission’s oversight board have departed, and in March, two candidates identified as possible leaders of the agency withdrew from consideration. That led City Council member Esther Kiaaina to observe, in July 2022, “There’s no checks and balances.”

Weak oversight, combined with a lack of clear policy and procedures, creates ripe conditions for uneven and, in the worst case, corrupt practice. That’s a lesson city leadership and the City Council should have absorbed in 2002, when eight working and former HLC investigators were indicted on federal charges of racketeering and extortion for taking bribes from bar owners, prompting U.S. District Judge David Ezra to label it the most “open and notorious case of public corruption” he’d seen in 17 years on the bench. Warning signs flashed again in 2007, when liquor commissioner James Rodenhurst pleaded guilty to accepting bribes.

To find that the Liquor Commission continues to operate with startlingly inadequate oversight and reporting requirements is “disturbing and unacceptable,” in the words of Mayor Rick Blangiardi himself. Blangiardi’s administration and the City Council must now own the responsibility for reforming this agency, ending the prospect that the commission will ever again be caught up in a cycle of inadequacy or corruption.