Restaurants’ health ratings are not yet available online

Question: Where can we find a listing of restaurants and the ratings issued by the state Department of Health?

Answer: For now you’re advised to call or go to a restaurant to check on its color-coded placard, which will indicate whether it has passed a safety inspection, received a conditional pass or is closed because of problems.

"The placard is required to be posted in a high-traffic area in full public view," said Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo.

The DOH began conducting inspections for the new placard system July 21.

"It will take some time before all the roughly 6,000 Oahu food establishments have a completed inspection and a placard posted," Okubo said.

The DOH does plan to make inspection reports available "using a Web-based system," she said. "We are hoping to have the system in place in the next six to eight months."

No ID Required to Attend Meetings

A Kokua Line reader contacted us after the Board of Water Supply said it was requiring anyone without a BWS identification badge to show a photo ID when entering its Beretania Street offices as a security measure. (See bit.ly/1zAxqGa).

He had filed a complaint against the agency with the state Office of Information Practices, saying members of the public who visit the building to attend board of directors meetings are not required to show any identification or to sign in, per the state’s "sunshine law."

That was verified by OIP attorney Jennifer Brooks.

Brooks said the reader’s complaint against the BWS is still pending because of another, more complex issue, "but it is certainly true that we have in the past said that you can’t require (showing an ID) to attend a public meeting under the sunshine law" — Hawaii’s open-meetings law.

The BWS has not been notified by OIP of any filed complaint that enforcement of its ID requirement for board meetings is in violation of the sunshine law, said BWS spokeswoman Tracy Burgo.

Board meetings are public meetings that anyone is welcome to attend, she said, and "the BWS has always sought and continues to seek to comply with the sunshine law."

However, she said, "If a visitor chooses to not comply with our long-standing security procedures, he or she can still attend the meeting and be escorted to and from the boardroom by a security staff member."

That option is acceptable under the law, according to Brooks.

OIP’s general recommendation is that boards wanting to meet in a secured building should notify the guard that if someone doesn’t want to show an ID to attend a meeting, to either let them go through or to escort them, "but don’t say, ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t go in without an ID,’" she said.

No Id, no sign-in

Brooks said the above opinion is not a "formal opinion," which is published and considered "precedential"(precedent setting).

Rather, it is a "memorandum opinion, which means we don’t treat it as precedent," which is more fact specific and makes up the majority of OIP’s opinions, she said.

However, the no-ID-required opinion is based on a formal one — OIP Opinion Letter No. 04-09 — which holds that a board cannot require people to identify themselves to testify at a meeting, she said.

OIP also addressed a sign-in requirement in OIP Opinion Letter No. 02-02, "which likewise found that a board cannot require people to sign in ahead of time to testify."

Mahalo

To the Hawaiian Telcom repair division for answering my plea for help when our phone service failed. I reported a nonfunctional phone in a house full of sick people who needed constant communications with medical facilities and was told it might be weeks before they got to us. Instead we got a call the next day from a technician who was on his way. He was courteous, friendly and very efficient, and we had phone service again. — Harvey Wiegert, Kailua

Write to “Kokua Line” at Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 7 Waterfront Plaza, Suite 210, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Honolulu 96813; call 529-4773; fax 529-4750; or email kokualine@staradvertiser.com.