The city's 19 vision teams should comply with the state open-meeting law, the state Office of Information Practices says. City advised to allow
By Gordon Y.K. Pang
sunshine into meetings
of vision teams
Star-BulletinMayor Jeremy Harris said yesterday he was not happy with the OIP's April 6 opinion but will ensure that it is followed.
City spokeswoman Carol Costa said most guidelines in the Sunshine Law are already being followed by the vision teams.
Notice of the meetings are posted at the front bulletin board at City Hall, distributed to the clerk's office, placed on the vision teams' Web site and mailed to anyone who signs up at a meeting, Costa said.
She estimated about 300 people are on each of the vision teams' lists.
Volunteer secretaries, consisting of political appointees by the mayor, take minutes of the meetings, Costa said.
But Lynne Matusow, chairwoman of the Downtown Neighborhood Board, said the vision team in her area does not post agendas within the six days required by the Sunshine Law. She also questioned whether all are dated and stamped as required.
"If your agenda is not filed on time, you are not allowed to hold the meeting," Matusow said.
The downtown-Chinatown vision team, she said, has received minutes of meetings sporadically.
"Sometimes we get minutes in the mail; sometimes they hand them out at meetings," Matusow said.
The vision team in another area, she said, "may not even be taking minutes."
The city's position had been that the vision teams are not subject to the Sunshine Law since a May 2000 opinion by city attorneys.
Matusow and others involved in the city's neighborhood boards complained that the vision teams functioned much like they did and that Harris was forming a new layer of bureaucracy in an effort to bypass them.
Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D, Fort Shafter-Aiea) sought the OIP opinion while she was still on the City Council last year. Kim questioned whether enough of the public was being informed about the teams.
The OIP opinion stated that applying the Sunshine Law to the vision teams is "problematic" because its members and procedures are fluid and not consistent from team to team. Membership in vision teams, for all intents and purposes, consists of those who attend any given meeting.
Despite this, however, Harris gives each of the teams $2 million to use on construction projects in their regions, pending approval by the City Council.
City & County of Honolulu
