Planning Commissioner Fined For Ethics Violations
A member of the Honolulu Planning Commission has been rebuked for repeated violations of the city’s ethics code and fined $650.
Andrew Jamila Jr. continued to vote on matters related to the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill without disclosing a conflict even after he was warned by the city’s Ethics Commission to recuse himself. Jamila is president of a nonprofit that accepted some of the money distributed to the Leeward Coast as compensation for hosting the landfill.
“Mr. Jamila’s violations are numerous (over a dozen) and are exacerbated given the fact that Mr. Jamila failed to follow the Ethics Commission’s instructions to him,” the commission wrote in an published on its website Tuesday afternoon. “The evidence is strong as the facts are not contested.”
Jamila’s organization, Waimanalo Construction Coalition (WCC), helps find Oahu residents construction jobs. Since Fiscal Year 2007, the organization received a total of $120,000 from the Leeward Coast Community Benefits Program (LCCBP). Jamila didn’t take a salary, but did have a fiduciary role in the company.
Between May and August 2009, Jamila participated in 14 matters and voted seven times on issues related to the Department of Environmental Services’ application to expand the landfill by 92.5 acres. He participated and voted without disclosing his connection to WCC.
“It’s my fault. I should have checked with ethics first,” Jamila told Civil Beat Tuesday. “I trusted my case manager and the mayor at that time, and they said as long as you’re only going to Leeward Coast people … and it’s only going to be for programs, to put people into the vocational training class” and not for salaries, then it would be alright.
“It was very stupid on my part to trust people who were not with the Ethics Commission,” he said.
The commission criticized Jamila for failing to disclose the connection on his personal information form when he was reappointed to the commission by then-Mayor Mufi Hannemann last year and in his financial disclosure documents for 2009 and 2010.
The matter first became public in filed by environmental watchdog Carroll Cox. In a post on the matter titled “Another One of Hannemann’s ‘Honest Mistakes’?” Cox wondered: “Is the mayor using these grants to pay off Mr. Jamila for favorable votes on matters before the City and County鈥檚 Planning Commission?”
The commission’s findings don’t go quite that far.
“Based on the totality of circumstances, a reasonable person could conclude that Mr. Jamila’s independent judgment regarding the performance of his duties on the Planning Commission related to Landfill issues would be impaired by WCC’s receipt of LCCBP grant awards,” the commission wrote. It said the commission “is not implying that Mr. Jamila’s participation was in fact tainted,” only that his impartiality could be questioned.
Asked Tuesday if the grant funds for his nonprofit motivated his actions in favor of the landfill expansion, Jamila said that it “no way influenced my vote.”
“I’m a survivor of the rubbish wars back in the ’80s, when the rubbish men went on strike and all the rubbish piled up,” he said. “So when they said they were going to close the landfill, I just saw nightmares of the 1980s rubbish garbage man strike. Basically I was just in belief that we needed to put the trash somewhere.”
The findings were transmitted to Mayor Peter Carlisle, who as the appointing authority could impose additional penalties on Jamila. Spokesman Jim Fulton said the mayor’s office had not yet received the opinion Tuesday afternoon and would not comment until after it had a chance to review it.
