Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 32, Number 10, 1 October 2015 — Merging committees is about improving board's oversight responsibilities [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Merging committees is about improving board's oversight responsibilities

Aperspective offered by one of my eolleagues did not give a true picture of the direction being taken by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Board of Trustees. Instead, that perspective is a shameless distortion of a renewed effort by our nine-member policymaking board to enhanee our ability to meet the higher standards of ethics, transparency and accountability

that are expected from our oversight responsibilities. To suggest that the decision to merge two standing committees into one is part of some larger effort to control power showed a laek of understanding for the amount of trust that has been placed in us as elected officials to act for the good of the organization, rather than for the benefit of ourselves. At best, that particular viewpoint provided as mueh insight into the new direction being taken at OHA as you would expect to read in a eheap tabloid purchased at a supermarket checkout counter. For the record, the OHA Board of Trustees voted on Aug. 27, 2015 to merge our Committee on Asset Resource Management with our Committee on Land and Property. Two weeks later, the board named Trustee Colette Machado as the Chairperson, and Trustee Haunani Apoliona as the Vice Chairperson, of our newly-combined Committee on Resource Management. Together, they bring 14 years of OHA board chairmanship experienee and a combined total of 38 years of OHA board experience to efforts to improve our board's oversight responsibilities. In February 20 14, the board had created our now-defunct Committee on Land and Property to improve OHA's effectiveness as the 13th largest landowner in the Hawai'i, where we control more than 28,000 acres statewide. About eight months later, our CEO

added to his executive team a Land & Property Director to oversee a newly-created division focused on addressing our growing challenges as a major property owner. While the board's nowdefunct land committee and the administration's existing land division have worked together in the past to help OHA's efforts to be a responsible steward of the properties that we own, they also have not always enjoyed a

peaceful co-existence amid a series of sometimes-overlapping efforts to improve our effectiveness as a land and property owner. With the newly-created Committee on Resource Management, our board expects to work more effectively with administration to better coordinate roles and responsibilities to avoid gaps or overlapping efforts that interfere with our ability to ensure that OHA's land assets are well managed, and that the organization's hnaneial situation remains sound. Make no mistake about it: our board's decision to combine two of our standing committees is about avoiding an unnecessary drain on everyone's time and OHA's resources. From my perspective, splitting our oversight responsibilities for OHA's land and finances across two committees became an inefficient and ineffective way for us to operate, especially since all of our nine trustees are members of the board's standing committees, anyway. By combining the two committees, we expect to reap considerably greater rewards and foster more nimble decision-making for the beneficiaries who have entrusted us to maintain the hnaneial accountability of our organization. More importantly, those beneficiaries ean count on the leadership at the helm of OHA's board to always do one thing: exercise reasonable care in all decision making, without placing the organization under unnecessary risk. ■

V LEO 'ELELE V > TRUSTEE MESSSAGES "

www.oha.org/kwo | kwo@OHA.org NATIVE HAWAIIAN » NEWS | FEATURES | EVENTS

Rūbert K. Lindsey, Jr. Chair, TrustEE, Hawai'i