OHA must put house in order

The new Office of Hawaiian Affairs board of trustees — almost all of them familiar to the job — will pick up business where it left off before the election season ramped up.

What looms ahead for the newly elected and re-elected is a critical time in the history of OHA, which lately has turned its attention toward facilitating the movement toward Native Hawaiian sovereignty, ultimately creating a government that would supplant OHA.

But even as OHA now describes itself as a transitional agency, it’s going to need better organizational integrity to achieve its goals. The release last week of a finding that OHA had run afoul of open-government laws in its internal disputes makes that need for improvement especially apparent.

Over its three decades of history, OHA programs have centered on improving lives in the Native Hawaiian community, often through awarding grants to organizations that benefit the community. Over the past 10 years or more, the focus has turned toward advocating for a measure of nationhood.

Until recently OHA concentrated on the "nation within a nation" concept advanced by the so-called Akaka Bill, a proposal for federal recognition of a native political entity that was championed by the former U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka.

But the federal-recognition approach was opposed by a large sector of the community, and so OHA adopted a more neutral role as facilitator of a Native Hawaiian enrollment process, creating an electorate that would decide on the form of governance.

The initial timetable pegged this fall for the election of delegates to a governance convention, but in August, the OHA board extended that timetable by six months.

The schedule still seems tentative but there’s no escaping the fact that the board faces action on this front very soon.

Further, Trustee Colette Machado says she will step down as chairwoman when the new board convenes this month.

To some extent, such an announcement is pro forma — the new board must select someone to chair its meetings at the start of a term — but it seems likely that new leadership is coming.

And with that leadership, a new direction seems desirable, if not inevitable. The board and its chief of staff must establish far clearer lines of authority and better communication than has been on display this year.

That much became plain last week, when an opinion on recent OHA conduct was announced by the state Office of Informa-tion Practices. The problem stemmed from a decision by OHA’s chief executive officer, Kamana‘opono Crabbe, to write a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, requesting a legal opinion about Hawaii’s sovereign status and indicating a plan to postpone the delegate convention until that was clarified.

Members of the OHA Board of Trustees, at that moment in Washington, D.C., objected and fired off a letter rescinding Crabbe’s request. The problem, according to OIP, was that the agreement to send the "recission letter" was made outside any official meeting for which the required public notice was given.

And that violated open-government laws.

Crabbe and the trustees seemed to patch up personal relations after the clash, but this kind of irregularity in operations must be corrected, too. The lapse indicates a problem with internal communications and coordination that can only distract OHA from the tasks at hand.

In the immediate future, those tasks include furthering some resolution — at last — in the longstanding debate over the future of Hawaiian sovereignty. But even if that discussion is postponed again, OHA’s mission remains the betterment of conditions for Hawaii’s indigenous population, and it needs to approach that objective with unity and openness.