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Budget blues: In case you haven’t noticed, Hawaii’s state budget is a very difficult thing to make sense of unless you’re trained as a forensic accountant.

Unfortunately for the taxpayers, it’s a necessary read if you’re concerned about how $25 billion of our money is being spent. Or if you want to understand the priorities of the legislative and executive branches.

How much money does the Department of Education get, for example? Where does all that capital improvement project money go? And where does the state get its kala?

Now the nonprofit has taken a major step toward enlightenment with its recently released . It breaks down in simple language, graphics, charts and photos the various components of the budgets for the administration, the Legislature, the Judiciary and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Here are just a couple of helpful infografs from Appleseed’s primer:

• Interest on debt service, health benefits for current employees, health costs and “other post-employment benefits” for retirees, pension and social security contributions for public workers and the state share for Medicaid make up one-quarter of the state’s operating budget. That requires use of nearly half of the state’s general funds, which are mostly comprised of tax revenue. These obligated costs have grown from $3.1 billion to $4.7 billion over the past decade.
• The largest share of CIP goes to transportation (highways, harbors and airports), public schools and the University of Hawaii System, economic development (housing investment, technology development, agribusiness development) and health care facilities. The current CIP budget is $4.5 billion and includes $85 million for counties, and two-thirds of its funding will be borrowed through bonds.
• The state’s largest source of revenue — nearly 50% — is the general excise tax, which is applied to nearly every purchase and service paid by visitors and residents alike. It’s a regressive tax, because lower income households contribute a greater percentage of their income than wealthier households.

There’s much more in Appleseed’s primer, including highlights of recently passed bills like that big tax cut and Gov. Josh Green’s line-item budget vetoes. The Blog has bookmarked the primer in its browser and expects to be consulting it frequently, in particular in the 2025 session that begins in January.

Hey, big spenders: The Hawaii primary election seems ages ago, but in fact it’s been barely a month since voters cast their ballots. The final campaign spending reports through Aug. 10 are now posted online, and there are a couple of updates worth flagging.

Scott Saiki, the Hawaii House of Representatives speaker, but still lost narrowly (256 votes) to Kim Coco Iwamoto, who of that amount.

Saiki was helped in the final stretch of the primary for the District 25 seat (Kakakao, Ala Moana, Downtown) from $14,000 in donations that came from the United Public Workers Political Action Committee, Ironworkers for Better Government Local 625, Local Union 293 State Legislative Fund and several executives with Servco Pacific including executive chair Mark Fukunaga.

Saiki still has $132,000 in cash left, which he could use in a future race for office, should he choose, or give to other candidates.

In another major defeat, former state Sen. Clayton Hee lost to Ben Shafer in a landslide, yet Hee spent five times more than Shafer — compared to — in the Democratic primary for Senate District 23, which runs from Kaneohe to Mokuleia.

Shafer, whose donors included “legislative aide” Mike McCartney (it’s true; McCartney, who has held just about every political and government job in the state, worked for Sen. Les Ihara this past session), now goes up against Republican incumbent Brenton Awa, who spent $702 in his unopposed primary. It’s a race to watch.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine: meetings of late have been dominated by seemingly endless public testimony raising questions about “election integrity” and calls to oust Chief Election Officer Scott Nago. Many complaints have come from local Republicans, and their concerns about possible election fraud parallel ongoing challenges to state election boards nationwide.

Last week’s meeting but with one major twist: The Zoom link on the meeting agenda did not work. Many meeting participants including The Blog called the elections commission to get the proper link, but some were already suspecting that the broken link was intentional.

“There’s no way to reach you all,” testified Tara Rojas, who held up a hand-made sign listing the correct URL. “You know how many people’s voices are being left out right now?”

Rojas then stood up to reveal her T-shirt that showed the word “Pilauticians” with a red line crossed through it.

You can catch Rojas at about the one-hour mark , just after commission critics Karl Dicks and Brett Kulbis shared their manao (thoughts) over the pilau (dirty, filthy, stench). Dicks, an unsuccessful Honolulu mayoral candidate, accused the commission of electoral shenanigans that he said rose to the level of tyranny and treason.

So, was , which requires open public meetings, violated?

The meeting was held at Department of Land and Natural Resources Kalanimoku Building, but most attendees were on Zoom. By the time the meeting was well underway, over 100 people were tuned in.

The Attorney General’s Office passed The Blog’s inquiry on to the elections commission. Michael Curtis, the commission chair, said via email that the wrong URL on the meeting agenda was “a clerical error” but added that the correct URL was posted on the commission’s website.

“Whether this becomes an issue with Sunshine Law remains to be seen,” Curtis added.

Jennifer Brooks, a staff attorney with the that administers the Sunshine Law, said there may have been a violation: “Remote meetings require a remote link that works, and if there is a link provided that doesn’t work and people have to call the board to get the correct link, that would be a violation.”

School daze: State employees are not permitted to use their position to “secure or grant unwarranted privileges, exemptions, advantages, contracts, or treatment, for oneself or others.” They also can’t accept gifts if it can be “reasonably inferred” that the gift could influence the employee or be seen as an award.

That’s all pretty clear in the . But Vera Alvarez, a teacher at Moanalua Elementary School, appears to have missed that lesson — even though she was present at a 2021 meeting
where her principal cautioned school employees against accepting cashier’s checks given to them for personal use.

Not long after that meeting Alvarez accepted multiple cashier’s checks from an elderly volunteer at Moanalua Elementary totaling $48,000. She did not tell the principal and she did not spend the funds for school-related purposes. But she did deposit $34,000 into her personal bank account to pay for personal things.

Last week, the Hawaii State Ethics Commission penalized Alvarez $5,000, made her pay back $34,000 to the donor and required her to return the three checks totaling $14,000 that she did not deposit. Alvarez also admitted that she violated the fair treatment and gifts laws.

For his part, the elderly volunteer admitted that he gave Alvarez the money “partly because he felt that teachers were underpaid, and he wanted to help her,” according to .

The free press isn’t free: As journalists we get all sorts of news industry newsletters and emails from all sorts of journalism groups. This one caught The Blog’s eye this past week.

It seems the Oklahoma Media Center came up with its own music video as a fundraiser for the nonprofit that works to support all the state’s news media. The Poynter Institute’s Kristen Hare interviewed the center’s Rob Collins about the innovative effort and .

Here’s the video, kind of Schoolhouse Rock meets Woody Guthrie, but hey, it’s Oklahoma, right?

The Blog was thinking what a good idea and perhaps some clever and musically inclined citizen(s) might help us come up with a Hawaii version. We are all about transparency and accountability here at The Sunshine Blog. And, OK, corruption and bad behavior by public officials too. So much material to work with!

Any lyrics or musical thoughts welcome. Send to sunshine@civilbeat.org.