Personnel details should accompany city settlements

Year after year, Oahu taxpayers pay to settle lawsuits provoked by the wrongdoing of city employees. The damage done to the victims in these cases transcends monetary loss, of course, but the financial burden borne by all for the misconduct of a few also is a serious matter.

This year the tab reached $3.67 million, as the Honolulu City Council last week unanimously approved settlements of four major legal claims, including $1.4 million for the survivors of a man who was suffocated by the Honolulu police who were trying to arrest him; $1.25 million for a woman whose right foot was amputated after she was hit by a city garbage truck; $950,000 for a pedestrian permanently injured when she was struck in a crosswalk by an off-duty police sergeant driving a city-subsidized vehicle; and $70,000 for a man whose Kaneohe home was violently raided by Honolulu police who mistook his bamboo trees for marijuana plants.

City Councilman Ron Menor, chairman of the Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee, lamented the large payouts, especially when the budget-crunched city is short money to fund vital programs and services. But he said the settlements were necessary, because the city’s legal arm, the Department of Corporation Counsel, advised that city employees had "clearly engaged in wrongful and negligent conduct," and taxpayers faced even greater liability if the cases proceeded to litigation.

All of the employees involved still work for the city. Other than that, the taxpayers who paid for their misdeeds know very little, including whether any were disciplined at all. This extreme shield of the employees’ privacy serves also to guard their employers from accountability.

Absent details of the internal investigations, the public is left to wonder whether flaws in workplace culture, procedures and training that may have contributed to these costly mistakes have actually been corrected.

Once again, the settlements highlight how important it is for state lawmakers to impose more stringent disclosure requirements when government employees commit misconduct on the job. As it stands now, state law requires disciplinary action to be disclosed only if the employee is suspended or fired. Moreover, the suspension-disclosure mandate is not being applied to police officers, despite a legal ruling that it should be; lawmakers wrongly killed a bill this past session that would have delet-ed special treatment for police.

At the very least, next session, state lawmakers should strengthen the state’s open-records law to add government employees whose misconduct results in a legal settlement paid by taxpayers to the group for whom disciplinary records must be disclosed — whether or not that misconduct results in the employee being suspended or fired. The individual’s right to privacy does not outweigh the public’s right to know, especially when the public is footing the bill for the employee’s wrongdoing.

Taxpayers also deserve to know a whole lot more about the working conditions that may have contributed to these lethal and costly mistakes, and about the corrective actions that city administrators have taken or should be taking to prevent similar problems in the future. The extreme privacy protection afforded Hawaii’s individual government workers — even those known to be negligent — essentially shields entire departments from scrutiny, a lack of transparency and accountability that lawmakers must correct.