Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 11, Number 6, 1 June 1994 — How can we spend resources better? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

How can we spend resources better?

by Rowena Akana Trustee-at-large Bureaucracy. It is the bane of progress and, unfortunately, often the norm at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. A good example is the Budget, Finance and Policy committee, chaired by Trustee Abraham Aiona. The OHA board voted

some time ago to endow the E d u e a t i o n Foundation with $10 million to provide scholarships to students of H a w a i i a n ancestry. For some reason, Trustee Aiona

clings to the absurd notion that he is performing a trust obligation by withholding this money from the foundation. "I have not stalled the OHA Education Foundation. ..." Aiona wrote in his eolumn for Ka Wai Ola' s May issue. "I have searched for an alternative to transferring the full $10 million, knowing full well that if I transferred these funds, I would be relinquishing my fiduciary duties to a foundation board that was not elected by the Hawaiian people as I was," he said. Meanwhile, Hawaiian students will eontinue to wait for scholarships. Why? Standing committees are as mueh of the problem as Trustee Aiona's fiduciary abstinenee. There are six standing committees: Budget, Finance and Policy; Heakh and Human Services; Planning, Eeonomie Development and Housing; Education and

Culture; Legislative Review; and Land and Sovereignty (not to mention the standing ad hoe committees, Health and Entitlements), eaeh with its own collection

of committees, and eaeh pitted against the other for funding.

We should trust the ability of staff, and entities such as the Education Foundation, to carry out what the board plans.

"The board committee structure ... is dysfunctional by encouraging: 1) an operational orientation, 2) inappropriate advocacy by trustees, and 3) too many meetings," the state auditor wrote in December. To correct the problem, the

auditor suggested the board scrap its six standing committees. Several trustees balked at the idea, but I think it deserves closer inspection. Many people in the office eomplain of too many meetings, commit1 tees that share jurisdictions, and general confusion about who's in : charge of what. • "The current structure also gives staff members the opportunity to align themselves with trustees to advocate particular programs," the auditor wrote. "The orientation of individual trustees may distort and pit programmatic areas against eaeh other. These forces detract from the board's

policy-making responsibility of rationally evaluating altematives." I do not believe simply eliminating some redundant responsibilities or meetings, as has been suggested, will greatly improve the operation of the standing committees. As it is, a committee chairman ean hold up funding everyone else has agreed upon. Tmstee Abraham Aiona's posturing eonceming the alleged $10 million Education Foundation exemplifies this type of funding bottleneck. Aiona allowed the foundation to receive $270,000 of trust funds for administrative functions, and claimed last month that it ean tap "earnings" from the $10 million in OHA's eommon tmst fund. First, Aiona's niggling would force the OHA bureaucracy to re-involve itself in the fiduciary administration of a $10 million education endowment, a job for whieh the Education Foundation was created.

Second, keeping the endowment in OHA's funds, then funding the foundation with its interest, would generate perhaps one-twentieth the annual amount intended for scholarships. Some foundation members threatened to resign if OHA reneged on its funding promises. As of May 6, 1994, the Education Foundation is still a $270,000 shell — hopeful, but empty. As currently designed, standing committees such as Aiona's focus individual trustees on particular interests instead of overall policies. Board members should

have clear jurisdiction over a functional area, such as budgeting, planning or program management, instead of a subject area, such as health. We should tmst the ability of staff, and entities such as the Education Foundation, to carry out what the board plans. That's why they were named. Without a serious effort to re-engineer or even re-think our method of operations, expect more of these ineffectual shell games.