Kauai Council may
have violated state
Sunshine Law

A newspaper complains that
reporters and the public were
excluded from two meetings

By Ian Lind
Star-Bulletin

Newly elected members of the Kauai County Council may have violated the state Sunshine Law by excluding reporters and the public from two organizing meetings held Nov. 9 and 12, according to a challenge brought by the Garden Island newspaper.

All seven members elected to the Council in the Nov. 3 general election participated in the meetings, which resulted in the selection of political veteran Ron Kouchi as Council chairman and the assignment of chairmen for each of the six Council committees, the newspaper said in a letter to the Office of Information Practices.

The results of the secret meetings were announced by Kouchi in a Nov. 12 news release distributed under the Council letterhead. "The news release was prepared, copied and distributed at county expense," the newspaper complained.

"The opportunity for mischief, in the form of members-elect deliberating and deciding secretly on issues that would be before them in only two weeks appears boundless," the newspaper charged. "And it violates the entire spirit of the open-meeting laws."

County Attorney Hartwell Blake on Friday dismissed the meetings as "an internal housekeeping matter involving seven people who were going to become official at a later date."

"They aren't councilpeople yet since they haven't been sworn in," Blake said. "It was more of an internal administrative matter, and I don't see how the public interest is damaged by it."

Office of Information Practices Director Moya Gray said that she had not seen the complaint, but her office would have to determine whether a group of elected officials is an "agency" or "board," subject to open-meeting requirements prior to being sworn in. "The question is a technical one," she said.

The complaint is only the second relating to open-meeting requirements that has reached the agency since it took over the task of administering this part of the Sunshine Law on July 1, Gray said.

The Legislature amended the law this year to give the Office of Information Practices jurisdiction over open-meeting laws, in addition to its original responsibility to interpret laws requiring the disclosure of state and county government documents and records.

The Kauai County Charter requires the Council to meet "promptly after its inauguration and swearing-in ceremony" to make organizational decisions. "They will do that on Dec. 1, but it's just a pro forma vote on what was already decided in a secret meeting," said Garden Island reporter Anthony Sommer, who signed the complaint to the Office of Information Practices.

Sommer said he had "a friendly talk" about the issue with Kouchi.

"I said, 'How can you do that?' And he replied, 'We've always done that,' " according to Sommer. Sommer said the practice creates "kind of a twilight zone" for elected officials prior to being sworn in.

"They could discuss raising taxes, selling the landfill -- almost anything," he said.