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A top government official this week complained to one of our reporters about all the time it takes to answer questions from Civil Beat.

I took that as a compliment.

Our job is to ask the tough — and right — questions and then give you the answers in as easily digestible a way as possible. To do the heavy lifting for you.

This week’s exclusive story by Reporters Chad Blair and Michael Levine detailing the construction projects in the budget approved by the Hawaii House of Representatives is a good example of what I’m talking about.

We wondered whether support for Speaker Calvin Say in his fight to hold on to his job would have any impact on how much money lawmakers would bring back to their district.

Would supporters get more than opponents? The old political game, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back.” Or were districts getting help based on their need?

Our questions led us to obtain documents that we thought would help answer them. It’s our job to do the work for you and try to make sense of things.

The hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects are listed in the most basic terms in the 220-page budget bill, however people would have to do a tremendous amount of work to figure it out. And I don’t think they’d be able to decipher which lawmaker was responsible for each project and how much each lawmaker brought home to their district.

We obtained a 22-page internal working document, and spent a lot of time organizing the information and then crunching numbers.

The result: We could tell you that supporters of Speaker Calvin Say in his successful fight to hold on to his office appeared to have been richly rewarded while dissidents, those who opposed him, fared far less well. And Republicans, well, forget about it. You can read all the data in this article.

City Has Data, But Can’t See It

We also tested the city government this week. Reporter Adrienne LaFrance wondered what the impact of furloughs was on the city’s use of overtime on furlough Fridays. The city couldn’t give us the data to answer the question.

So instead, Adrienne asked for overtime use by department for the same period in each of the last three years. (We looked at six months already covered by furloughs this year.) What we learned, and shared, was that overtime use has gone down.

Sure, the story might have been more interesting if we had learned that the city had piled on the overtime on furlough days. But our purpose was to answer a question.

Sometimes our questions are going to lead to troubling answers. Sometimes what we discover is going to be benign or encouraging. Other times the fact that a simple question can’t be answered is troubling in itself. No matter the way the answer turns out, we’re going to share it with you.

That’s our job.

Other Stories

Here are a few other exclusive stories from this week that reflected our questioning approach.

• Honolulu Will Revise Tsunami Evacuation Plans For The Homeless
• Should Private Scrap Yard Get $1.9 Million Subsidy from Honolulu?
• Other Cities Report Problems with Honolulu Rail Contractor
• Honolulu Transit Chair Says He Has Serious ‘Concerns’ About Rail
• Former GM: Scrap Yard Doesn’t Need Subsidy