The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is asking the Legislature to create a special exemption to the state’s open-records law, making all government documents related to the agency’s homestead lessees and applicants confidential if the records include personal information.
Supporters, including some Native Hawaiian organizations, say the proposed legislation is needed to protect sensitive data in files for homestead leases and applications.
But opponents say the two companion bills (Senate Bill 2837 and House Bill 2287) are unnecessary because state law already protects from disclosure the type of personal information, such as contact phone numbers and finance information, that DHHL is seeking to protect.
They also said the measures are so broadly written that they would give DHHL’s documents blanket confidentiality, allowing the department to keep from the public data considered publicly accessible for other state and county agencies.
"The proposed provision seeks to protect more information than just personal contact information, genealogies and finance and loan documents — it would protect all correspondence between DHHL and a homestead applicant or lessee and apparently would even protect the names of lessees," Cheryl Kakazu Park, director of the Office of Information Practices, wrote in testimony opposing the legislation.
Park’s office oversees Hawaii’s open-records law.
In written testimony to the Legislature, DHHL Director Jobie Masagatani acknowledged that certain documents, such as homestead leases and blood quantum information, are public.
But the applicant and lessee files include other documents in which their status under the open-records law is ambiguous, and the bill would provide clarity, she wrote.
For DHHL to operate effectively, clients must be able to communicate freely with the department about sensitive information, and if they believe that information potentially could be released to anyone from the public without their permission, that will have a chilling effect and significantly hinder the agency’s ability to meet its mission, according to Masagatani.
"Unfettered communication between DHHL and its beneficiaries is absolutely necessary," she wrote.
DHHL’s main mission is to manage a 200,000-acre land trust for the benefit of its beneficiaries, who must be at least 50 percent Hawaiian, and to provide 99-year homestead leases for residential, pastoral and farming purposes.
Masagatani also noted that DHHL’s relationship with its beneficiaries is different from the relationships between other government agencies and members of the public they serve, justifying the need for the legislation.
DHHL’s push to get an exemption comes after the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in June requested that the department make available a listing of all beneficiaries who have homestead leases, where the properties are located and when the leases were awarded.
The agency has told the newspaper that a special computer program would have to be written to extract the requested information from a database that includes confidential personal data and is run with proprietary software.
"It seems that DHHL is using every excuse possible to avoid turning over the information," University of Hawaii journalism professor Gerald Kato said in an email to the Star-Advertiser. "Saying that a new program would need to be written because DHHL uses proprietary software is a tired and time-worn way of saying they don’t want to give you the information even if it is a public record."
For nearly a year, the newspaper has written extensively about DHHL, exposing programs plagued by inefficiency and mismanagement.
In asking for the homesteading data, the Star-Advertiser told DHHL that the newspaper was seeking only information clearly considered public under Hawaii’s open-records law and was not requesting private information, such as Social Security and phone numbers, which already are protected from disclosure.
The newspaper made the request after hearing from numerous beneficiaries who complained that favoritism or other problems were hampering the awarding of homestead leases.
That suspicion is driven in part because DHHL does not make a lessee list publicly available. Yet it keeps on its website a detailed listing of the 26,000-plus beneficiaries waiting for homestead lots.
DHHL spokesman Puni Chee said in an email that the exemption bill is not a response to the Star-Advertiser request for lessee data and does not seek to exempt disclosure of the leases or the names of lessees.
Masagatani, in her testimony, noted that the department recently has received records requests for specific homestead application and lease files and said the bill would help clarify what is protected from disclosure.
Native Hawaiian advocate Annelle Amaral, a former state legislator, said she is among those who believe making information about who has leases publicly available would be beneficial.
Both exemption bills are scheduled to be heard today at the Capitol. HB 2287 goes before the House Committee on Ocean, Marine Resources and Hawaiian Affairs at 8 a.m. in Room 325. SB 2837 goes before the Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs at 2:45 p.m. in Room 224.
