Court dismisses lawsuit to invalidate rail votes

City attorneys applauded a state Circuit Court decision Thursday to dismiss a case that sought to invalidate key Honolulu City Council votes cast for the rail project.

But attorneys for Abigail Kawananakoa, the Campbell Estate heiress who filed the lawsuit, said they intend to appeal Circuit Judge Virginia Crandall’s decision.

Crandall granted the city’s motion to dismiss the case, which demanded key Council votes be declared void and unenforceable, and funding tied to those approvals be stopped — until the votes are retaken — because a majority of Council members who voted should have had their votes nullified.

The city argued the Honolulu City Charter is clear that the Honolulu Ethics Commission administers the city’s standards of conduct and that it was out of the jurisdiction of the courts to compel the commission to take certain actions.

The commission settled charges against former Council members Romy Cachola and Nestor Garcia, and dismissed cases against current Council members Ikaika Anderson and Ann Kobayashi and former Council members Todd Apo and Donovan Dela Cruz.

The charges alleged that they failed to disclose receiving free golf rounds and meals from lobbyists and others who benefited from the votes the Council had taken and approved. Among the votes were key budget votes for rail funding and land-use approvals for rail and West Oahu-related developments.

A 2003 Ethics Commission advisory opinion said Council members may vote on a bill as long as they first disclose conflicts of interest from the acceptance of gifts. Failure to disclose such conflicts would void those votes. A separate gift law bars Council members from soliciting, accepting or receiving gifts valued at $200 or more from any single donor.

None of the six admitted wrongdoing, and the commission made no conclusions that ethics laws were violated.

But Cachola was slapped with a $50,000 fine in September 2014 to settle the claims against him, while Garcia paid $8,100 in fines in May as part of his deal with the Ethics Commission. The advisory opinion settling Garcia’s case pointed out that he had been fined previously for failing to disclose, before taking votes, that he was executive director of the West Oahu Chamber of Commerce.

When Kawananakoa’s lawsuit was filed in September, the cases against Anderson, Apo, Dela Cruz and Kobayashi were still pending. The commission in October dismissed the cases against Anderson, Dela Cruz and Kobayashi on the recommendation of the staff, which initiated the investigations against the four. Apo’s case was dropped several weeks later.

Corporation Counsel Donna Leong, in a statement, said she was pleased by the ruling.

“It provides assurances to the people of the city that the City Council’s legislative actions, many of which involve complex policy decisions, such as the rail project, will not be overturned by the judicial branch of government based on an alleged violation of the standards of conduct,” Leong said.

Bridget Morgan, an attorney for Kawananakoa, said the settlements and dismissals against the Council members by the Ethics Commission prevent the charges against them from being adjudicated.

“Clearly, the process so far has left no way for the public to know whether the laws adopted by these tainted votes were valid or not,” Morgan said. “The judge did not find that no violations occurred or that the laws enacted were valid, but simply that taxpayers can’t question the laws on these grounds, so we still don’t have an answer to the question posed by the suit — whether these laws are valid.”

However, the lawsuit did prompt the Council in December to pass a bill authorizing the city to issue up to $450 million in short-term bonds, $350 million for rail construction. Administration officials pressed for its passage, reasoning that Kawananakoa’s suit cast a legal cloud over the original bond approval.