AZAMBOGUS

AZAMBOGUS: When it comes to the local Kaua`i newspaper it takes an awful lot to flabbergast us.

But today's article headlining, on the basis of one unidentified source, that "Radiation feared in Airport shutdown; Airport worker: HAZMAT team was looking for radiation" might just take the cake for the all time most irresponsible piece of "journalism" (note the quotes) we've ever seen.

"Reporter" (those quotes again) Leo Azambuja quotes a single "airport worker" who apparently was speculating him or her self for the story which, if true, would no doubt make national headlines.

Who the heck would "go with" a story like this, especially with an apparent denial from the county and a lack of confirmation from the state?

Now journalists do sometimes report items from single, unidentified sources, But it is, as it should be, rare and the exception to the rule and done only under certain very strict circumstances.

If the source is well known to the reporter, in a position to know and has been extremely reliable in the past there may be a way to present the story with consultation and confirmation with the source by an editor. But publication should come only if every effort has been made to either confirm or debunk the story, especially one that could cause a panic if published.

If the call is made to publish the reporter and editor should then make every effort to inform the reader as to the reason for the single anonymous sourcing and any other information on the source that can be revealed. The information as to why the source is being protected should be included making it very clear at every point in the story that the statement is unconfirmed.

This is what a modern 21st century policy would yield at the NY Times, Washington Post or Associated Press.

In this case it sounds to us like the source just doesn't want to be identified because the story is probably bogus and based on idiotic, uninformed speculation.

But the fact that there is an apparent denial changes circumstances. Actually we have no idea whether there really was a denial from County Spokesperson Mary Daubert because Azambuja's reporting on that is so ambiguous:

County spokeswoman Mary Daubert said the HAZMAT crew tested the center checkpoint for toxic and hazardous odors and substances and found none, and found no radiation.

It's said almost as an afterthought and who knows how or even if the question was posed. You would think for something this important there would be a quote and clarity as to what was said by the spokesperson who's in a position to know.

It's no wonder that no one has picked up on this story even though the Honolulu Star Advertiser and Associated Press commonly, by agreement, re-report local Kaua`i newspaper stories. No one in their right mind would pick up a story like this without any confirmation or at least more information or other sources.

The obvious thing here is that, were this to be some stupid innocuous story like 99% of what appears in the local paper no one would care. But this has the potential to cause panic and people- especially visitors- refusing to go anywhere near the screening area or even the airport itself. Who could blame them?

And all based on a report from "an airport worker" who, for all we know is a janitor or someone who has no connection with the screening process and may have no idea what it would look like if someone was indeed testing for radiation.

Sheesh.

AN UNSAVORY MORSEL

AN UNSAVORY MORSEL: We couldn’t have been more than two or three years old when we somehow became aware- we suspect it was via our fount of all knowledge in those days, Bug Bunny- that we had been missing out on a culinary treat called mock turtle soup.

Of course we immediately made the obvious inference- they were made from mock turtles.

We’d heard of and seen lots of kinds of turtles. Over the years we assumed that, as the case is many times, it was like places called “Bear Creek” that had no bears- it was “just the name of the turtle.”

Over the years Lewis Carroll did nothing to dissuade us from our presumptuous assumption and so a decade later a trip to a fancy restaurant and a bowl of weak broth with some soggy crackers made a, well, mockery of our postulation.

We had gotten what we had long craved only to find out it wasn’t at all what we really expected and wanted.

So it was a bit of deja vu for us today after tracking down the answer to a question that people have been asking us for a couple of months now- who the heck if Sarah Blane?

The answer- Blane is our very own mock turtle.

At first we feared the worst- that references to Blane as “Kaua`i county spokesperson” meant that our old friend Public Information Officer (PIO) Mary Daubert might be on the outs. But Daubert’s name continued to be preceded by the same title.

Observation yielded another of those assumptions- Blane’s name seemed to be attached to county press release emanating from the Kaua`i Police and Fire Departments.

Could it really be true? After years of complaints from the public and KPD chiefs that they needed their own embedded PIO in order to speak directly to the public- rather than having to filter everything through the mayor’s office and his or her PIO- KPD had their very own spokesperson?

After all, KPD is set up by charter to be an independent department with a police commission, not the mayor, doing the oversight. They don’t need to have the contents of each and every communication with the public filtered through the political whims of the mayor.

So, after a month or so of seeing Blane’s name attached to police and fire statements today we asked Mary “whassup?”

And, as if we couldn’t have predicted it, she wrote:

Sarah Blane is the newest member of Kaua`i County’s communications team. The other members of the team are Beth Tokioka, director of communications, and myself, public information officer. Sarah joined the Mayor’s office staff on Dec. 1 at the start of Mayor Carvalho’s first full term. Her title is public information assistant. She is responsible primarily for media communications for KPD and KFD, the county’s Facebook page, and assisting with community outreach efforts.

In an administration where even the smallest bit of PR minutia is carefully controlled we’d have to be as naive as a two year old searching for a delectable misnomer to think that any KPD spokesperson would be situated in KPD and answer to the chief.

We can only imagine how Chief Darryl Perry really feels about this after having had his, er, legs cut off while he was off island during the anti-marijuana rally fiasco with a deceptive press release going out on KPD letterhead under his name- a release that only hours later proved to be a lie in order to cover-up the fact that the rally was cancelled due to an ACLU compliant, not the weather.

So pity poor Sarah the county’s mock turtle. She aspires to be real meat but ends up nothing more than a mouthful of watery mush.

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We're taking a long weekend. Be back next week.

PAGING DR. HEIMLICH

PAGING DR. HEIMLICH: It’s not unusual for besieged pols to pee on your foot and tell you it’s raining while asking us if we’re going to believe them or our own lyin’ eyes..

But for a classic Kaua`i-style “that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it” take on County Council Chair Kaipo Asing’s and his henchman county clerk Peter Nakamura’s obstinate fight for opaque, closed governance and lack of access to records it took the administration to whip up a gourmet feast of ridiculous, roll-on-the-floor-funny fiction in announcing that they will post the minutes to council meetings on-line at the county’s web site.

Their press release announcing the posting now that dissident Councilmembers Lani Kawahara and Tim Bynum have already done it at their kauaiinfo.org web site, answers our oft asked question “what are we- a bunch of freakin’ idiots” with a resounding “if you believe this, yes”.

The bullsh-t we’re asked to swallow starts at the top where, despite well publicized quotes from administration IT specialist Erik Knutzen that he has been ready for more than a year to post them in an instant and had been prevented by Nakamura and Asing from doing so,

after more than a year of planning the County Council web site will include Council meeting minutes, along with memoranda of actions taken at Council meetings (also called “Recap Memos”)...

Putting meeting minutes and Recap Memos on the Council website is part of a county-wide effort to make more and more public information available online.

The truth is the only year-long effort was to keep them off-line as Bynum and Kawahara have documented and detailed at their kauaiinfo.org web site where they’ve also been posting minutes going back to February as well as other public documents since they posted it in early May.

On to the next mouthful of utter crap.

The implementation of posting Council minutes was delayed by several factors, including the untimely passing of the late Mayor Bryan Baptiste, the complex subsequent transition in county leadership, the special 2008 Mayoral election, the relocation of the Office of the County Clerk - Elections Division, and the seating of a new Council.

As we said Knutzen said, the dynamic duo had been stymied only by Asing’s and Nakamura’s refusal to take two seconds to okay the posting, not by seemingly unrelated minutia.

The fact is that the administration has been posting board and commission meeting minutes routinely for quite some time now and has offered to do so for the council. All these very apparently irrelevant excuses notwithstanding.

One thing that struck us was the availability of what is called “recap memos”- not the fact that they are now going to be available but the fact that such a document exists.

We and others have been asking for years for a way to find out what official actions the council took at meetings as soon as they are over and have always been told there was no such document much less offered one.

It’s always been a supreme hassle to find out what happened at council meetings with the only way to know being to watch the meeting and divine the results from examining future agendas.

No one has ever been offered any such “recap memos” that, we are told, are routinely distributed to the administration.

This press release comes, of course, on the same day as the agenda was released for the July 8 meeting, the first of two alternative dates that a slew of equally if not more important inequities and dictatorial edicts from Chair Asing were supposed to be placed on the agenda for discussion.

It’s not on the July 8 agenda, leaving the showdown scheduled for the July 22 meeting if Asing follows the vote of the council to discuss it on one of the two dates.

One head scratchier is how- and why- Asing and Nakamura had to go to the administration and get poor County Public Information Officer Mary Daubert to do their lying for them.

It indicates that Friend of the Minotaur Mayor Bernard Carvalho is now acting as a cog in Asing’s plantation-era style paternalism in support of the cabal of insiders that run the county through the revolving door personnel polices that have been in effect for decades.

It’s no revelation that they are feeling challenged and threatened by Bynum and Kawahara’s quest for transparency, open governance and democratic principles, especially in light of the current FBI investigation of the county which is still on-going according to recent bureau interviewees.

It is also telling that the “announcement” comes not just from Asing but Vice Chair Jay Furfaro who ran against Asing for the chair last December- with Bynum’s and Kawahara’s support- in a challenge to Asing’s iron-fisted reign.

Furfaro objected to our characterization of the “180” he did between the two meetings earlier this year. During the first, Bynum was blocked from placing resolutions changing the council rules on the agenda and the in next Kawahara changed tactics and managed to get the item placed on a “future” agenda.

Furfaro managed to get his fingerprints on the “day late and dollar short”, minute-posting concession in an self serving and blatant attempt to publicly associate himself with the popular dissidents without actually doing anything about the myriad of other documents that are denied to the public via on-line posting.

Things like the actual communications, resolutions, bills, committee reports and other documentation that accompanies each agenda item- documents which are already available at kauaiinfo.org- remain available only in paper form and require a trip to Lihu`e to obtain.

In addition to Knutzen's document posting program he has said that the administration is also about to start posting and even doing live streaming of the meetings of the planning and police commissions with a feature allowing direct access to “clips” sorted by agenda item.

But despite Knutzen’s offer to do the same for council meetings there’s no announcement here of any plans to allow that to happen when again all that would take is permission from Nakamura and Asing to do so.

It should be pointed out that, for what it’s worth, the county charter says that council and administration are separate organizational entities and, according to the Sunshine Law and UIPA, each are responsible for maintaining their own “records”. But in practice both share the county web site and the contract to facilitate the televising of the various meetings and the “mayor’s show”.

So are we “a bunch of freakin’ idiots”? We sure are if we look at this as some kind of wonderful breakthrough. It’s like ordering and paying for a 12 course meal and getting only a glass of water.

The news here is not that the minutes and recap will be posted- they’re already available on-line no thanks to Asing and Nakamura.

The real news is the council chair’s- not to mention the administration’s- refusal to make all public record available on-line and in a timely manner.

The time to celebrate will only be when all legally-public documents relating to the council, boards, commissions and the administration and it’s departments- itself including all public testimony and correspondence- are available on-line.

Until then the availability of anything less is just another denial of records that apparently violates the Uniform Information Practices Act which, the OIP has recently indicated, mandates widespread distribution of covered documents in electronic form.

The only thing transparent here is the transparently vapid spin claiming that any progress is being made.

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Update: In the ES-177 County vs. OIP case we detailed this week, according to reporter Michael Levine of the local newspaper the Hawaii Supreme Court accepted “OIP’s petition for a writ of certiorari on June 23, according to a clerk, and on Wednesday scheduled oral arguments for the morning of Aug. 10.”