James Weatherford for Hawaii County Council District 5

Three experiences over recent years highlight a problem with Hawaii County’s use of  experts from somewhere else to do the people’s business here at home:

• The County’s search for a ‘waste reduction technology’, in which consultants were paid more than $1.5 million plus expenses; and the search ended in Council rejection of an incinerator that was an expensive, dirty deception;
• The Puna Community Development Planning process, in which the principal consultant was regularly hostile to ideas of community-based working groups, and in which the transportation consultant was eventually dismissed after months of conflict with the community; and
• The Puna Regional Circulation Plan, in which the consultant held several meetings and then drafted a report that did not accurately reflect community input at those meetings.

Local government administration has come to rely on non-resident consultants, so that local government policy and planning is often done by high-paid ‘outside experts’. County funds are paid to non-resident consultants who arrive with a predetermined solution and proceed to demonstrate minimum knowledge of the local community plus little regard for what local residents have to say. These experts are from, and return to, somewhere else with county revenue in their pocket, unbothered about how it is living day-to-day with the outcomes of their own counsel.

Outsourcing of local government policy and planning has, at best, become stale and ineffective. A harsher assessment, to which I subscribe, is that the paradigm has become corrupted and serves interests other than those of the local community.

The expert-from-somewhere-else paradigm is based on an underlying implication that people in the local community are not capable of managing their own public affairs.

Interests of the local community are best served when the residents of the local community have charge of their own local government policy and planning.

When public employees do policy and planning ‘in-house’, there are issues regarding long- and short-term commitments to costs of salaries and benefits and overhead costs of office buildings. These issues deserve a fair evaluation of the impacts.

A fair evaluation would also recognize that outsourcing of local government policy and planning has direct costs (for example, the $1.5 million above for ‘waste reduction’), and, it is submitted here, outsourcing of local government policy and planning has substantial indirect costs in the form of corruption and an inherent absence of compulsion to serve local community interests.

What is needed and achievable is local government policy and planning of, by, and for the people of our island instead of non-resident consultants.

The Puna Community Development Plan process, especially by way of working groups and the steering committee, clearly demonstrated that dedicated community volunteers can deliver  know-how to the task at hand.

Among residents and ohana of this island, there are talents sufficient in quality and quantity to accomplish policy and planning tasks now outsourced to nonresidents whose relationship to the community is only transactional.

Residents and ohana of this island, as grassroots community volunteers and as in-house public employees, are the experts best able to do the work of local government policy and planning for Hawaii County.