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Hawaii never goes
according to plan

Something about Hawaii makes you think it would be easy to get everybody marching to one plan. Government is centralized, there is a tradition of big business and big unions deciding who would get rich or get jobs. And depending on the time period, either the Democrats or Republicans ran all the politics.

It isn't that we shun plans, Hawaii is a state with a plan surplus. We have plans for the year, decade and millennium. We plan the land, the schools, the economy and even the future. What Hawaii never had was any willingness to actually follow one of those strategic, functional or general plans.

Plans in Hawaii do not beget order as much as they spawn exceptions.

Now a national think tank has caught on to Hawaii's plan jive.

The new study gave Hawaii its lowest ranking, a "C," for how it runs state government. And in one of four areas studied, "Information," only Hawaii and South Dakota got a D.

The Government Performance Project, a two-year study of how well the 50 states are operating, was not impressed with Hawaii's ability to do anything with its plans.

"Planning is an area of weakness for Hawaii," the report, "Grading the State 2005," notes.

"Hawaii struggles in every aspect of information management. The state lacks a uniform agency and statewide strategic planning process," it adds.

The key to Hawaii's "D" is this line: "There are no concrete examples of the use of performance information during the budget process by the governor, Legislature or agencies."

The report notes that since Gov. Linda Lingle took office "the state has made efforts to improve public outreach." And the administration is working to plug holes in the budget process.

If the team preparing the report had known about Lingle's campaign promises to "design a performance-based budget" that shows whether the results accomplish goals and that measures how much state workers accomplish, the report might have expected more and been even more critical.

Georgina Kawamura, budget director, who worked with Lingle when she was mayor of Maui to erect a performance-based budget system, asks for more time to accomplish the same on the state level.

"We can't do it overnight and we didn't do it overnight on Maui. It is a process," she says.

While the report dings the state for its less-than-up-to-date Internet site, and Kawamura says changes will take "millions and millions" to show any results, there is no mention of how quickly the state was able to get real-time video of Lingle's news conferences up on the Web.

The state is lucky that the report didn't try to use the Legislature's primitive Web site, which can easily sour the most enthusiastic Internet supporter.

In fact, Hawaii should consider itself lucky that even in state surveys grade inflation continues to float at "C" level.