2009-09-23 Board of Ethics Minutes

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SCHOEN: Okay, then you can allow him another CHAIR: - -Okay, all right. Another three minutes? All right, I'm sorry. Go ahead. REES: I wish to also testify on three more items, and I'll make it as fast as I can. CHAIR: Okay, thanks. REES: I believe that your New Business, number S on your agenda these petitions are insufficiently agendized. And why I'm saying this is that what has happened in this state is, we have a one party system, and it's led to quite a bit of corruption in this state on all levels. What happened was, years back we had university law professors that were engaging in sexual conduct with students. They have a strong union. We also have SHOPO police officers have a very strong union. They lobbied the State Legislature to put in a provision in the Uniform Information Practices Act which our state, low and behold, puts parentheses after and says, modified. The uniform was not so uniform I guess it was uniform and good enough for all the other states. Hawaii needed to modify it for its own intents and purposes. What they did do, if you look at the open information laws and the UIPA chapters, they started out very well. They had good intentions. They had great provisions in there. What they did was they took the actual first amendment balancing test of where privacy rights were being unduly affected or jeopardized, and they took the right to know of the public, which the right to know has been considered a first amendment constitutional right. The unions stepped in and said, we need to exempt government employees and police officers from having their names and complaints about them mentioned. And so this is why you don't see this in your thing right now. People always refer to the SHOPO case. The SHOPO case was actually kind of ridiculous. It missed so much. What the Ethics Board should consider is UH Law Review, Volume 18, where a university student went into the I don't have it in front of me right here the page citation I could give you. It is here somewhere in my papers. But with the time limits I'm just going to have to tell you. He points out how the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on these matters, not for specifically ethics boards, but for judicial review commissions where the language is synonymous with the language you folks use. It says it is silly, when you're trying to present an open and fair ethics process in a review process of government employees, not to name them. Now I want to relate that very quickly to the insufficiency of this agenda. If I read New Business 5.a., I could just as well think that this complaint is against yourself, Mr. Dill. Or Ms. Gentry. So has it sufficiently generated the knowledge that persons of interest need to decide whether they will come down here and try to interact with our government? We need to know what's happening. So my loss here the violation to my constitutional right is perhaps I would want to speak in support if the violation is against you. Perhaps I would want to speak in support of the complainant. But because the violator and the complainant are not named here, for silly reasons that have been adopted under this SHOPO ruling, I don't know who this is about or what's going on. I don't know if I could trust my paper, everything they print. If I ask politicians, they say well, you can't trust everything the paper says. So I should be able to get it off a government document. And if I went long, I would include those too already. The last issue I wanted to speak on is moot petitions. This is I