Gathering Place
Gathering Place
STAR-BULLETIN / 2002
The University of Hawaii's biomedical center is to be built on this spot near the Waterfront Park in Kakaako.
It’s time for a
closer look at UHRecently renewed pleas from residents in Central and West Oahu for the state to build the long-promised Leeward campus of the University of Hawaii likely will be rejected again because of other strong pressures on the state budget. But this deplorable situation underscores an urgent need for the Legislature and the news media to take a much closer look at the way UH is governed by its board and managed by its executives.
In the first place, any realistic chance that the much-needed West Oahu campus would get started in the near future ended on Nov. 2, 2001, the day that then-Gov. Ben Cayetano signed into law a bill passed a few days earlier by a special session of the Legislature authorizing UH to issue $150 million in special revenue bonds to build a "health and wellness center" in Kakaako Makai. The legislators, including most of those from West and Central Oahu, approved the use of money that would be coming from the tobacco settlement fund to pay down the construction debt, and they did the deed with little scrutiny and only one hastily called public hearing.
In granting the university that large sum of money to be used over a 30-year period, the Legislature made it virtually impossible any time in the near future to allocate the $171 million needed to build the West Oahu campus.
Why? Because using general obligation bonds would add a huge debt burden at a time when the state was already paying more than $400 million a year in interest on existing bonds (today the figure is $435 million, and this does not include the additional debt that Mayor Harris wants to place on Oahu taxpayers).
Nor would using special revenue bonds work because UH does not have sufficient revenue sources to carry that kind of debt (unless it can sell some existing assets). Using money from other "special funds" could not be justified because the Legislature was already generously allocating 27 percent of the tobacco fund to the university.
In any case, the state would need all of its remaining money to deal with enormous financial challenges in other sectors of the economy, including K-12 public education, the rapidly increasing public transportation crisis, rising health-care costs, demands to help at least some of the growing number of elderly citizens, the need to combat increasing drug abuse, continuing worries about uncertainties in tourism, and a limping national economy in which Hawaii must compete with other states for federal assistance.
That was the economic situation in November 2001 and, as we all know, it's worse today. So there was no way then, and certainly no way now, that the state could give UH financial support for both the Kakaako project and a new campus in West Oahu.
Did UH President Evan Dobelle, the UH Board of Regents, Cayetano and the Legislature deliberately give preference to the Kakaako scheme over the Leeward campus? Is that why they were in such a rush to pass the legislation? It's hard to know, but certainly they all must have recognized that money was getting much more scarce.
The UH argument that the Kakaako project would stimulate the economy remains pure speculation; a hope, but by no means a sure thing. So, the long and short of the situation is that our academic and political leaders took a huge gamble on a high-cost and risky project, and in the process gave short shrift to Central and Leeward Oahu.
A number of troubling questions still remain about the Kakaako project, but right now the issue of the West Oahu campus exemplifies a more fundamental concern: namely, whether the Board of Regents and the Dobelle administration are realistically facing the financial restraints that all state agencies -- and indeed all of us citizens -- must cope with these days.
Already there are signs that UH and a few demagogic legislators would like to blame Governor Lingle for problems that the university itself has created. But Lingle has made it clear she wants a strong UH. She is simply asking the question any governor should raise: Where's the money coming from? How would you pay for the project? At the same time, she recently accommodated both UH and the Department of Education in their appeals for bigger exemptions to the across-the-board 5 percent budget cutbacks.
One big problem at UH is the wish-list strategic plan it formulated last year. The cost of the plan goes well beyond anything Hawaii can afford. Yet Dobelle has suggested that UH should rise to the level of the Universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), California (Berkeley) and Texas (Austin).
How is that even remotely possible? Those great institutions reside in communities that are far wealthier, far more populous and with far greater resources than Hawaii. UH lives in a modest economy with a relatively small population and limited resources. Despite those limitations, the taxpayers have been generous to the university, giving it an estimated $3.5 billion in operational funds during the past 10 years, not to mention the millions appropriated for construction and free tuition currently dispensed to more than 7,000 students.
The core issue would seem to be how well UH manages its money.
UH Regent Ah Quon McElrath seemed to acknowledge the harsh realities faced by the university when she was quoted during the past November board meeting as saying, "Let us be prepared for the eventuality that we will not get what we want -- we never have," and she suggested the school might have to consider aspiring less to national excellence than being a simple career-oriented educational institution.
Unquestionably, a strong UH (with a modestly sized medical school) is critical to the future of Hawaii. Unquestionably, too, running a state university is a big challenge, often requiring the leadership to prioritize one excellent program over another, to decide between competing departments of seemingly equal value to the community, to make difficult decisions in achieving a proper balance between teaching and research, to raise new money (always more difficult for a state-funded school), to recognize when it's best to repair or to rebuild infrastructure, to pay staff and faculty adequately, to ensure fair treatment for community colleges and graduate and undergraduate programs.
Dobelle's new organizational plan, though it apparently worries some major campus groups, may be an important step toward more effective administration of the entire UH system. But the fundamental challenge is to develop a university that provides excellence in education and research while keeping the whole thing compatible with Hawaii's pocketbook. Many small state universities manage to offer outstanding programs with limited budgets, so Hawaii might look to them rather than the giants for inspiration.
Dobelle has an extensive background in education. Through the regents, Hawaii has made a big investment in him, with a very generous compensation package and administrative powers not enjoyed by his predecessors. The regents also gave him fast-track authority to hire the management team he wanted, some at higher salaries than their predecessors. So, he's been given most of the tools to do his job. The regents now should make clear to him that instead of launching costly projects and programs, the prudent thing to do is to put his considerable executive skills to work in skillfully managing the resources at hand.
In other words, it's time to get real.
Webster Nolan is a former Hawaii journalist (including four years at the Star-Bulletin) and retired director of the East-West Center Media Program.
