Week 6: Learning From Our Experiences
This was a week that saw us do something unusual.
Actually, two things.
Today, I’d like to tell you how I see them being related.
Our Money reporter, Noelle Chun, on Tuesday published a series of stories about the state of the economy by interviewing every business on a single block of Kapahulu. We had heard from leading economists that things were looking up. We thought we’d test that assertion by asking business owners what the world looked like from their perspective. The answer wasn’t as pretty as the indicators.
Later in the week, Noelle went to a meeting with the top administrator of the state’s pension fund, the Employment Retirement System. This one man, David Shimabukuro, oversees $10 billion in assets, but he’s also responsible for more than $6 billion in liabilities. Two recent studies have warned that the system is in danger of running out of money, which would put the burden on taxpayers to come up with more money — read tax hikes — to meet their obligation to state workers.
Yet when Noelle sat down for an interview with him, he told her he thought he was talking to a student to help her with a paper. He didn’t want to answer questions from a reporter. He said he was worried they would cause “alarm.”
“I’ve got to work,” he told her. I find it strange that he would have time to answer questions from a student, but not from a reporter.
Shimabukuro has a different idea of what his work is than we do at Civil Beat. We understand that the work of the merchants on Kapahulu is to make their businesses successful. We respect that they may be too busy to speak with us, although we always try to explain to them the benefits of sharing their stories. But the work of a public servant is different. A public servant has an obligation to, you guessed it, the public. Their work is to serve the public. They need an informed public for government to run effectively.
At most news organizations, when a reporter gets kicked out of an office by an official who doesn’t want to talk, it’s not a story. They don’t think what they experience as they go about their work is “news.”
We think differently at Civil Beat. We think that the more we can share about how government works and how accessible and open — or closed — it is, the better off we’ll be as a society. So we’re going to share our experiences. We don’t believe government doesn’t work best when it’s hidden behind closed doors.
Yet, sadly, here in Hawaii we’ve encountered a lot of closed doors. Of course not all agencies or all officials. But it’s amazing that there are so many spokespeople working for government here, and so few journalists for them to speak with. Yet when basic questions are asked about how government works, we hear that people don’t have the time to talk or we’re asked why we want to know something.
It’s one thing when a shopkeeper struggling to make ends meet begs off a long conversation, but when people who are stewards of the public’s money act as if they’re not accountable, that’s a problem.
And that’s what’s happening here. So that’s one of the things we’ll be telling you about.
