OHA candidates
range from bankrupt
to well-to-do

Thirty-eight candidates are
vying for five of the nine
board seats at the Office
of Hawaiian Affairs

By Pat Omandam
Star-Bulletin

They are pig farmers and politicians, fish dealers and investment advisers, the unemployed and the retired.

But all they want to be for the next four years is a trustee for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

According to financial disclosure filings due yesterday to the state Ethics Commission, the financial backgrounds of the 38 OHA candidates range from bankruptcy to the well-to-do, although most fall somewhere in between.

Louis K. "Buzzy" Agard Jr., a fish dealer who earns between $10,000 and $25,000 a year as owner of Marine Supply & Exchange on Ala Moana Boulevard, said his business once dealt with machinery and supplies, but the market became too competitive due to imports from Asia.

Today, the 75-year-old businessman sells fish wholesale to his longtime customers.

"Anybody who calls up, who knows about the business, who has purchased from me for the last 50 years, are my customers," he said.

Agard, vying for the Oahu trustee seat, is in a tight race with Clayton Hee, Kina'u Boyd Kamali'i, Annelle C. Amaral, Reginald K. Hao, Larry J. Kiyohiro and Les A. Among.

Five of the nine OHA board seats are up for election.

Among, who listed his annual income at below $10,000, said he's working three jobs to make ends meet and knows others in the same situation. He works part time at the Hawaii Newspaper Agency, as a promotions director at Snappers Sports Pub and as a musician.

"I've met people my age and younger, and the X's (Generation X) are really struggling," said the 38-year-old acting vice chairman of the Waikiki Neighborhood Board.

"Nobody's making money, only the unions and the state workers.

Kiyohiro, an investment adviser and attorney who earns between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, said people have told him there are OHA candidates running just to get a steady job for the next four years, including some politicos.

"You know, it (OHA) is becoming a repository for used politicians, actually," he said.

Meanwhile, disclosures filed by OHA incumbents Hee, A. Frenchy DeSoto, Rowena Akana and Herbert K. Campos show Campos makes the most money with a combined annual income of $117,395.

Campos earns $55,080 as a Hawaii Medical Service Association community relations officer, $10,000 as a fire protection consultant and $18,666 as an appointed OHA trustee for the past seven months. The retired Maui fire chief also gets $33,649 from the state retirement system.

Along with his trustee pay of $32,000 a year, Hee listed income between $25,000 and $50,000 in rental housing. He is also co-owner of the Cowboy Co., a rodeo promotion company in Kaneohe.

The total value of Hee's Molokai and Oahu properties ranges between $700,000 and $1.1 million, while Akana values her Niu Valley property at $500,000. Campos and DeSoto don't own property.

Hee has the most debt among incumbents, owing between $500,000 to $750,000 to First Hawaiian Bank for his properties. Akana follows with a debt of $89,000, owed mostly to Bank of America.

Campos owes $28,000 for his 1997 Buick, while DeSoto -- who also earns $5,016 a year as a state retiree -- reports a $3,000 personal signature loan from Finance Factors.

Trustee-at-large candidate Joseph Prigge Jr. of Kauai, a residential aide at John Howard Association, supplements his $8,320-a-year income with the $7,000 he earned from pig farming.

Fellow candidate and former Big Island Mayor Dante Carpenter is a corporate officer who owns less than $25,000 in shares at Pacific Waste Inc., a refuse collection and disposal operation.

The former OHA administrator also makes less than $10,000 a year in consultant work that includes legislative lobbying, which he didn't do last year. Still, Carpenter has a combined retirement income of between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from New York Life, the state retirement system and Social Security.

Carpenter said he doesn't see any conflict of interest with either job if he is elected as trustee.

"There's no conflict unless OHA is going to go into the rubbish business or something, which is possible," he joked.

More Hawaiians than ever sign up to vote A record number of Hawaiians have registered to vote next month for trustees at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. State elections officials yesterday said 100,163 Hawaiians have signed up to vote, marking the largest registration ever for Hawaiians. Hawaiians now represent 16 percent of the registered voters in the state. To get there, OHA sponsored numerous registration drives and also sent 70,000 voter forms to the Hawaiian community in August. Jalna Keala, OHA governmental affairs officer, said while there is success in the latest figures, OHA will not let up on its efforts to get Hawaiians into the polling booth. "We can celebrate for a time being," she said. "The bigger question is whether or not OHA beneficiaries will get out to vote." Star-Bulletin

Voter registration soars
to state record; GOP, Dems
each think it’ll help them

By Craig Gima
Star-Bulletin

The number of registered voters for the general election is up by 56,488, or 9.4 percent from the last general election in 1996. The 601,404 registered voters sets a record for the state.

An additional 18,846 voters registered just since the primary election on Sept. 19.

"We're hopeful they're all Republicans," said Republican party Chairwoman Donna Alcantara.

Alcantara believes the record number of new voters will help gubernatorial candidate Linda Lingle.

"If what happened in the primary follows through for this election, there are a lot of people who voted differently than they did before and we think a lot of those people are new voters," she said.

But Ann Kobayashi, a co-chairwoman for Gov. Ben Cayetano's re-election campaign, said Democrats have also been signing up new voters.

"We're looking forward to a large percentage of new voters coming our way," she said.

Kobayashi said the campaign is now focused on getting Democratic voters to the polls. She said the campaign has launched an absentee voter drive.

"First-time voters are sometimes hesitant to go to the polls," she said. "We're encouraging people to fill out absentee voter forms and concentrating on getting our people out to vote."