Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s slippery defense of his more than $200,000-a-year side job as a director of Territorial Bancorp should set off more alarms than it silences.
Territorial pays Caldwell between $200,000 and $299,999 a year, according to his city financial disclosure, far more than his $164,928 mayoral salary.
For this rich compensation, Caldwell told the
Honolulu Star-Advertiser he spends two hours a month attending bank board meetings, taking vacation from his city job.
This comes to between $8,333.33 and $12,499.95 an hour, raising troubling questions about what the bank gets for its money.
In a mayoral debate before the primary election, Caldwell fended off suggestions that Territorial is buying political influence by citing his banking expertise, saying he understands the business “very well.”
It’s true he’s represented banks as an attorney, but in that capacity he would have gotten maybe $500 or $600 an hour for his counsel; what makes his advice now worth as much as
20 times more?
Again, Caldwell dismisses concerns about influence-buying, saying he became a bank director before he was mayor and Territorial is “getting the same thing from me as when I served on the board prior to me becoming mayor.”
He leaves out that he was majority leader of the state House of Representatives when he joined Territorial in 2007 — a position nearly equal in political influence to the mayor.
So yeah, the bank is getting what it always got.
This needs a stronger deodorant than waving around a tepid Ethics Commission opinion that there’s no conflict of interest because the bank has no city deposits.
Such a narrow construal of the bank’s business interests ignores the reality that a bank is interested in almost everything the city does, especially favoring pro-development land use and regulatory and public works policies that drive lending.
Not to mention the bank’s clients who need building permits, zoning variances and property tax breaks.
Also disingenuous is Caldwell’s claim that it’s common for elected officials to have outside income “such as rental income, stock dividends or book royalties.”
Those are passive incomes, as opposed to his fee-for-service deal with Territorial.
While side jobs aren’t unusual for part-time legislators, they’re highly unusual for full-time chief executives.
Once asked for examples of previous mayors who did such lucrative outside work, neither Caldwell’s office nor the Ethics Commission responded.
Caldwell is relying heavily on his Democratic Party ties in this year’s election, and it’s curious that local progressive Democrats who joined Bernie Sanders in raising hell about the financial industry’s political influence have kept silent about their mayor being on a bank’s payroll.
The dismal quality of our local government will never improve as long as we let elected officials live with impunity on the ethical edge.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
