StarBulletin.com

Hugh R. Jones


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POSTED: Friday, March 19, 2010

Hugh R. Jones is an expert at making things work, whether it's getting elected president of the Hawaii State Bar Association, despite the confines of public service; persevering in the attorney general's office, despite serious budget cuts; or keeping his kids' education on track, despite mandated days off from school.

“;It's not easy. You just have to keep at it, doing your best,”; said Jones, in an understatement to which every government worker and public school parent in Hawaii likely can relate.

Jones, who turns 50 on Monday, is supervising deputy attorney general in the tax division and the first practicing government lawyer elected president of the Hawaii State Bar Association, a post he holds this year.

He grew up in Madison, Wis., earning a bachelor's and a law degree from the state university there before moving to Honolulu in 1988. He was briefly in private practice before joining the state Office of Information Practices in 1989 as staff attorney, a natural fit for the journalism graduate, who had worked at the Chicago Sun-Times before attending law school.

Jones' OIP tenure included groundbreaking cases that expanded the public's right to know, and prepared him for even more high-profile work in the attorney general's tax division, which he joined in 1996. There, he was part of the history-making team that prosecuted misconduct by trustees of the United States' largest charitable trust, then known as Bishop Estate.

“;Recovering $20 million for Kamehameha Schools that resulted from breaches of trust and being a part of all the reforms that followed, whether it be on trust spending or trustee compensation, certainly were memorable,”; said Jones, who stressed that it's the day-to-day work out of the media spotlight that drives major accomplishments.

Elected on his second try, Jones hopes to involve more government lawyers in the bar association, which includes about 7,000 retired or practicing attorneys.

The nonprofit organization's mission is to unite and inspire Hawaii's lawyers to promote justice for all. Besides providing a variety of services for its members, it reaches out to general public by sponsoring programs such as the Mock Trial contest for high schoolers and providing free legal advice at neighborhood clinics and via a telephone call-in service.

Jones is married to Kate Lloyd, vice president and general counsel of the Hawaii Community Foundation, and they co-teach a class at the University of Hawaii law school on nonprofit law. They're also active in the parent-teacher association at Aikahi Elementary School in Kailua, which their son, 11, and daughter, 6, attend.

The kids' furlough days usually coincide with Jones' own as a government employee, “;so we try to do something educational. We're doing our best to take lemons and turn them into lemonade.”;

QUESTION: You're the first practicing public-sector lawyer elected president of the Hawaii State Bar Association. Why do you think that is?

ANSWER: It takes a lot of time to run for president. It takes resources to run for president. ... Certainly a state ethics law is an impediment to (government lawyers) running for bar president, because you've got to do it on your own time, you've got to do it on nights and weekends, or vacation. The big firms can afford to send out mailings to the bar. ... So there are a number of barriers, but the fact that I got elected shows that it is a democratically organized structure and government lawyers can run for the highest position and serve in that position.

Q: One of your goals is to encourage practicing government lawyers to be more active in the association. How do you propose to do that?

A: We have a young lawyers division, and we have now a senior counsel division. So one thing we're giving serious consideration to is forming a government lawyers division. (It) could develop programs at our annual bar convention for government lawyers, provide legal education in areas of interest to government lawyers that are unique to government law practice, and also serve as a social network for them.

Q: Your career has been very interesting - a whole gamut of newsworthy cases. Can we talk about some of the highlights?

A: One of my highlights certainly was arguing against the state police union in the 1990s over the disclosure of discipline by the Honolulu Police Department. I was then with the Office of Information Practices and wrote an opinion saying that the HPD had to release that information to the local news media, and the police union sued. That led to a very emotional hearing before then-Circuit Judge John Lim, who's now deceased, who ruled in favor of the public's right to know. That went all the way to the Hawaii Supreme Court, which sustained the ruling. Certainly that was a memorable moment. Certainly the day that Judge Kevin Chang, who's now a federal magistrate, removed the Bishop Estate trustees, temporarily at least - that was a real sea change. That was after three years of very difficult, time-consuming legal work on behalf of the beneficiaries of the Kamehameha Schools. ... But you know, a lot of the important stuff isn't really that memorable. It just comes from painstaking work. For example, the charities program that now we have today has resulted from a series of bills that the AG's office introduced and got passed to strengthen our charity laws and the oversight of our charities.

Q: Right. Tell me about that.

A: You can now come to our Web site (http://www.hawaii.gov/

ag/charities) and search to see if a charity that has contacted you for a donation is registered and find out how they spend your money, whether it be on programs for people or on compensation for their executives - how much they pay their fundraiser, how much their fundraiser keeps of your donation. So with the strengthening of these laws, donors are better protected and can make a make a better informed decision. And good charities are protected from some bad ones.

Q: We've all been reading a lot lately about budget cuts, including at the Judiciary. Can you talk about how they've affected the legal system, or your job in particular?

A: Everyone across the board is affected by the budget crisis we're in, and the Judiciary is no different. The AG's office is following the furlough days that the Judiciary is following. Certainly we can't get the amount of legal work done in the time allotted. It's simply not possible. And in some cases, court orders are not being processed because people are on furlough. So the wheels of justice move just a little bit slower. We're all hoping that the old adage that “;Justice delayed is justice denied”; doesn't apply here. And I think the Judiciary is doing its utmost to ensure that its vital programs will continue - a variety of programs that save the taxpayers money - diversion programs that keep people out of prison and rehabilitate them. It's far cheaper to do that than to send someone to prison. We're hoping that the budget cuts won't chop so deeply that they chop into these diversion programs. ...

Q: When you say diversion programs - things like HOPE, Drug Court, Girls Court?

A: Exactly.

Q: Are they on the chopping block?

A: The Judiciary's core program is running courtrooms, and that's the program it has to, in the last analysis, protect from budget cuts. So some of these very creative programs are susceptible to being terminated, unfortunately.

Q: Since we're talking about money: Are people more likely to cheat on their taxes in an economic downturn?

A: I won't say they cheat, but small businesses, particularly ... may have collected general excise tax but may not be in a position to be able to pay it over at the end of the month because of their operating costs and a decline in revenues. So they find themselves in a position of having to file their tax returns but unable to pay the taxes.

Q: So what do they do?

A: They're technically subject to collection efforts by the department. They try to get on payment plans, or they may try to pay it over time, or hope that things improve. But it's not uncommon for small businesses to collect the general excise tax from consumers and not pay it over at the end of the month. And there's actually a bill pending right now that would make principals in businesses personally liable for that.

Q: I hate to end on such a downbeat note - taxes and budget cuts. ... Anything happy we can talk about?

A: I think we can say that the attorney general's charity oversight program has come light years from where we were when the Bishop Estate investigation started, when the “;Broken Trust”; articles were published (in 1997). That's something we can be proud of. And nationally we are among a very small number of states that is highly respected for our charities program.