Honolulu Mayor Lacks Key Overtime Info For Budget
By the end of Mayor Peter Carlisle‘s campaign, it was easy to predict what he would say when asked about his priorities: We have to get the financial house in order, my top priority is getting the financial house in order, as mayor I will get the financial house in order.
But a Civil Beat investigation finds Honolulu’s antiquated information systems mean the mayor lacks some crucial tools to make informed decisions. Carlisle has said he’s determined to eliminate furloughs for city workers in the budget he’ll present next week. But Civil Beat found that the city doesn’t know how much furloughs cost, because it can’t retrieve information about overtime on furlough days.
Carlisle’s tough fiscal stance helped get him elected. On the day he was sworn in, he spoke with enthusiasm about a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the city’s spend management program that would give a more precise look at city spending, right down to how much a department was spending on pencils.
Mayor Mufi Hannemann, whose administration initiated the systems improvements, said the 24 furlough days would save the city an estimated $18 million. But Civil Beat wondered: How much would overtime pay on furlough days chip away at the savings?
As part of the furlough agreement, workers aren’t allowed to come in on furlough days. But in emergency situations that requirement goes out the window. So on November 16, Civil Beat made two open records requests.
We asked the city to provide “the total amount the City of Honolulu spent on overtime on Furlough Fridays from July 2010 through October 2010,” and requested that figure also be broken down by department.
For comparison purposes, we also asked the city to provide “the total amount that the City of Honolulu spent on overtime from July 2010 through October 2010, and July 2009 through October 2009,” and asked for those totals to be broken down by department.
“We are not ready,” Jim Fulton of the mayor’s office wrote in an e-mail. “We need to continue to work on the program and will not have it ready until January AT BEST!”
We asked again in December, and did not receive a written response. On January 6, we followed up again. On Jan. 13, Fulton asked Civil Beat to resend the initial request. After we did, Civil Beat received this response from Fulton: “I have followed up on your request for information on OT as it relates to furloughs — We are unable to provide this information at this time — We thought that this information would be available in early January. It is not available as of today January 13 2011.”
Believing our request to be reasonable, we opted on Feb. 15 to contact the Office of Information Practices, a state agency that administers Hawaii’s open records law, and offers advice on how to obtain records. On February 17, we received a response.
“An agency is not required to compile data in response to a UIPA request unless it is ‘readily retrievable,'” wrote Cathy Takase, OIP’s acting director. “I spoke today with Mr. Jim Fulton at the City Managing Director’s Office. He confirmed that the City does not maintain this information, and also represented that the City does do not have the ability to readily retrieve this information. He stated that the City had intended to compile the information, but that they have not yet done so. If the City does compile the information, he stated that it would be shared with you.”
Soon after reading the letter, we got another call from Fulton. He took issue with the wording of the OIP letter.
“We do maintain the information, we just don’t have the ability to retrieve it,” Fulton said.
He said he, too, was eager to see what overtime records might indicate about furlough savings. He assured us the city is still working on our request. It has been more than three months since we asked for the information, and there’s a week until the budget will be presented.
Whatever the mayor decides about furlough days, he’ll be doing so without key data about how they affected city finances while they were in place.
Department of Information Technology Director Gordon Bruce told Civil Beat in October that the new financial system is up and running, but the city won’t be able to assess complete data in time for this year’s budget.
