When city Parks Director Michele Nekota and Design and Construction Director Robert Kroning were nominated to their posts last year, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell waived a Hawaii Constitution requirement that says an appointee to a state or county office should have lived in the state for at least one year.
At that time, administration officials insisted that they had a difficult time finding qualified candidates locally and pointed out that the state law allows for exemptions in such cases.
Questions about the two appointments surfaced after Gov. David Ige withdrew his nominee for state labor director due to the residency requirement earlier this year.
When Ige was asked in January by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser whether the constitutional provision applied to Janice Kim, his nominee for labor director, Ige withdrew Kim’s nomination after consulting with state attorneys.
Kim is a Kalani High School graduate who has not resided in Hawaii since graduation. When nominated by Ige, she was serving as an appointee of President Barack Obama’s in Washington, D.C.
Caldwell spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke pointed to a provision in the Hawaii Revised Statutes that states that the one-year residency requirement can be waived in certain circumstances.
"The appointing authority may approve the appointment of persons without consideration of (the residency requirement) when services essential to the public interest require highly specialized technical and scientific skills or knowledge for critical-to-fill and labor shortage positions," state law says.
That’s why Caldwell chose to exercise his authority to waive the requirement for Kroning and Nekota, Broder Van Dyke said.
Nekota’s nomination was first sent to the City Council on March 31, 2014, and she was formally approved May 7.
On her nominee/appointee form, Nekota said she had been a resident of the City and County of Honolulu since March 29. Nekota was born and raised in Hawaii and went to school in Hawaii, and her late father, Tom, was a one-time City Council member and parks director.
Michelle Nekota had been parks director of Salt Lake City from 2008 until the time she returned to Hawaii for the Honolulu job last spring, but had also been spending significant time on Oahu in recent years to help care for an ill family member.
Kroning’s nomination was first sent to the Council on Aug. 29, and he was formally approved Nov. 12. Kroning put on his nominee/appointee form that he had been a Honolulu resident for eight months.
In a letter to Council members Oct. 6, about a week before the Council’s Public Works and Sustainabiilty Committee gave the thumbs up to Kroning’s nomination, Caldwell pointed out both the residency requirement and the language allowing for an exemption.
Caldwell’s letter said that any applicant for the design director’s job must have at least five years of training and experience in an architectural or engineering position, at least three years of which must have been in a responsible administrative capacity.
"While it is well documented that finding engineers to work for the city is difficult, I found it considerably more difficult to find an engineer with the strong management and administrative background and proven skills in overseeing large-scale operations that would enable them to meet these highly specialized qualification requirements," Caldwell wrote.
In addition to Kroning’s meeting the city qualifications for the job, Caldwell said he also considered that Kroning spent five years, from 2005 to 2010, as an engineering supervisor for the Army, and that he had already chosen to return to Oahu upon his retirement from the military long before his city appointment, even keeping a home on Oahu and being registered to vote on Oahu. Upon returning to Oahu, he immediately registered as a professional engineer to practice in Hawaii, eight months before his appointment, the mayor said.
No such memo was sent to the Council regarding Nekota’s nomination, Broder Van Dyke said, although it was made clear to Council members that she was coming from Utah and that Caldwell needed to waive the residency requirement.
"Michele was our first time dealing with the issue, and the second time around (with Kroning), we decided that the best practice was to proactively send a letter about it," Broder Van Dyke said.
City Deputy Managing Director Georgette Deemer, in a statement to the Star-Advertiser, said Caldwell had difficulty finding qualified applicants for the parks director’s position from the time he first took office in January 2013.
"The five-year parks experience requirement is considered a highly specialized qualification," Deemer said. "We did not find anyone locally who both met this requirement and who interviewed strongly for the position. We were fortunate to convince Toni Robinson (a former Honolulu parks supervisor) to come out of retirement to fill the position. When Ms. Robinson decided to go back to retirement, we were faced with the same difficulty finding a qualified candidate."
