INTRODUCTION

Everybody knows that the movers and shakers in government are not only the ones named on the ballot. There are lobbyists, environmentalists, activists and, to an increasing extent in recent years, what are alternately called “public policy institutes” or “think tanks.”

National entities with names like Rand, Heritage and Brookings have dotted the D.C. landscape forever, it seems, but now they’ve been proliferating around state capitols as well, with groups directing their research or educational materials toward policymakers, ideally to help them make informed decisions.

It’s still a fledgling phenomenon in Hawaii, really only getting off the ground in 2001. That year marked the founding of the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs — described by its executive director, Bill Kaneko, as “Hawaii’s first independent and nonpartisan public policy institute.”

Others have arrived, adding a range of political philosophies and mission statements to the mix. Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, for example, is part of a national conservative movement that sees its role as educating leaders along conservative lines. Blue Planet Foundation focuses on clean-energy policies; state Sen. Sam Slom three years ago founded the nonprofit Small Business Hawaii Entrepreneurial Education Foundation as a means to teach youth about free-market ideas and entrepreneurship.

It’s HIPA, however, that has attracted the most attention lately. Most recently, a dispute over whether ethics rules allowed lawmakers to accept invitations to a HIPA fundraiser drew a spotlight that HIPA probably didn’t relish.

Overall, however, what’s drawn notice is that its staff and board members have strong ties throughout the political and business communities. Most prominently, Kaneko was a key member of Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s campaign team.

Slom is only too happy to draw some other distinctions between his group and HIPA.

“Organizations like HIPA have no qualms about taking federal money, no qualms about having officers serve in power positions in political organizations,” he said.

Kaneko shrugs this off. The institute tries to tap diversified funding sources for each of its many policy papers, to avoid the appearance that any one entity “bought” it. And in-house connections with government is fairly standard practice throughout the think-tank realm.

The bottom line, he said: The research is good.

“Our work speaks for itself,” he said.

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The seat-of-the-pants way that some government policies are born can be a little scary, said Bill Kaneko, and he’s worked in and around government long enough to see what goes on. He dug back about a decade for one particularly vivid anecdote. A keynote speaker at a conference had observed that Hawaii had only a 2 percent high-tech investment tax credit.

“He got up there and said, ‘If I were you guys, I would move it over a digit,’” Kaneko said. “And, lo and behold, the legislation went to 20 percent, and a year later it was 100 percent … all without research.”

The speaker had been a man named Ted Halstead, researcher and founder of a think tank called New America Foundation, who probably never suspected his offhand comment would have driven a legislative decision in the 50th state.

Kaneko is an attorney who worked as a planner in the Waihee administration and has been active behind the scenes in politics since then. He never forgot that episode, and was convinced Hawaii needed what Halstead had: a data-driven organization that helped to drive how government functions.

“We are Hawaii’s first nongovernmental public policy institute, Hawaii’s first think tank,” said Kaneko, president and chief executive officer of the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs.

HIPA is now well known in government and business circles after 10 years of existence and a growing collection of research publications. What raised its profile in recent weeks — and not in a way Kaneko would have preferred — was that new state Senate President Shan Tsutsui had asked the Ethics Commission for an opinion on $200 tickets to a fundraiser for HIPA that had been sent to his members. The commission said the gifts breached the state ethics code, and what followed was a protracted debate over proposals to loosen that code, proposals that last week were shelved.

Kaneko’s response to all of this is that offering the tickets had been routine, but this year it was questioned. Because HIPA invites had been a trigger event, he felt called to testify on the practice, which he maintained was defensible. The immediate impact of all this, he said: Far fewer lawmakers attended the HIPA event this year.

Under Internal Revenue Service codes, HIPA is a tax-exempt 501(c)3 entity. It also opted for a 501(h) election, a filing that sets clearer rules on what limited lobbying the nonprofit may do. Under the 501(h) subsection, an organization can spend up to 20 percent of the first $500,000 of its budget on lobbying; for budget amounts above $500,000, the percentage is lower. The cap on lobbying expenditures is $1 million.

By many measures, HIPA is tiny. Kaneko, Executive Vice President Jeanne Schultz Afuvai and one office support staff are its only employees. According to its 2009 tax filing, HIPA ended the year with net assets of $550,672. The officers’ compensation came to a little under $73,000 and $78,000, respectively.

But people remark on the organization because of its healthy grants and contract awards, which totaled about $6 million in the past five years.

HIPA’s pool of power players, too, is deep.

Kaneko was in the Office of Planning during the Waihee administration and Afuvai was with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, which acquainted them with many powerful people still in government.

Most prominently, Kaneko worked with the campaign to elect Gov. Neil Abercrombie. HIPA’s board also includes some others known in government and business circles, among them: Richard Lim now heads DBEDT; Robbie Alm is a top Hawaiian Electric Co. executive; James Tollefson is president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii.

Some have classified HIPA as a progressive think tank because of its leadership roster, even one with a Democratic Party stamp. Tollefson has heard some of this.

“We’ve talked about it and said we’ve got to make sure we stay independent and balanced in the work we do,” he said. “I see it as an independent, third-party review.”

All the same, the institute is not without its critics, largely from the Republican side of the aisle. Jamie Storey is the outgoing president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, which considers its main function to be education on public policy matters. HIPA gets “a large amount of their money from taxpayer sources,” Storey noted. “I’m having to contribute to something I may not agree with.”

Richard Rowland, the Grassroot Institute’s chairman of the board, agreed with Storey’s main objection: HIPA is too close to government.

“We try to stay remote, because we don’t want to be influenced,” he said. “And they have what I would call a bias for large government; we’re biased in favor of smaller government.”

That philosophical difference was also noted by Linda Smith, the policy chief in the administration of GOP Gov. Linda Lingle. The Lingle administration was unenthused by one of HIPA’s key projects, the Hawaii 2050 Sustainability Plan, published in January 2008.

“We thought it was an ineffective use of state resources, a package of proposals that would have the state treading water rather than moving forward,” Smith said.

Afuvai countered that the plan’s objectives are due in the current Legislature to be added to the law containing the overall state plan. And although “sustainability” is not the buzz word it was a few sessions back, Kaneko maintained that the plan helped to plant the seed for energy independence and a greater “green” ethic that is now starting to flower.

“I think it actually enhanced the community’s awareness of the need for independence and sustainability,” he said.

Afuvai said she feels strongly — “passionate” was her word — about the importance of the work HIPA does, and she pointed out how difficult good government is without it.

“When Bill started HIPA, that was the whole thing about it,” she said. “You’ve got to be able to operate with good data that will stand up. That’s nonpartisan. Good data is good data. It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you’re on.

“I wish we would have had some of these kinds of things back in the ’80s when we were trying to make big decisions to build the airport bigger, immigration bigger, customs bigger. We didn’t really know how many Japanese visitors were getting off the airplanes.”

Kaneko said most policy institutes have former government employees on staff precisely because the experience is helpful in knowing what information is needed. Much of what HIPA does involves bringing all the moving parts of government together, he said.

“Really, the niche we fill is research of Hawaii-based issues and serving as a neutral convenor,” he added. “That’s actually a very, very important aspect of HIPA which separates us from other think tanks.

“The infrastructure study involved bringing together state county agencies, and part of that process was to convene leadership group. We got their buy-in on what the scope of study would be, did peer review.

"We don’t just do these reports and say, ‘OK, here it is!’ because we’ve learned over the years that you really need to engage stakeholders to be part of the process.

“The whole premise is, if you have good research and good data, that leads to hopefully better planning and better policies. That’s kind of the crux of what HIPA does.”