By Michele Kayal
Advertiser Staff Writer
A Senate committee put the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority on alert yesterday, questioning the two-year-old board’s accountability and sending along a measure that threatens to take away its powers.
In a hearing that was occasionally argumentative, the Tourism and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee stymied tourism authority representatives for a second time in two weeks, presenting them with questions about the board’s operations and spending that they could not answer.
Authority Chairman Roy Tokujo, who has been on the board since it began in October 1998, had no answer when committee head Donna Mercado Kim, D-15th (Moanalua, ‘Aiea, Pearlridge, Kalihi Valley), asked him to give the board’s visitor spending target. (Targeted visitor spending for 2001 is $12.6 billion.)
Authority chief executive Robert Fishman could not tell the committee what percentage of the board’s $61 million budget goes to contractors, saying only "a significant portion." Fishman also said he did not know whether the board’s 20 staff members had received performance evaluations.
Authority representatives were asked similar questions by the committee in a hearing last week, and also had difficulty answering.
It is unlikely that the Legislature actually will kill the authority, but the two hearings have sent a message to the authority that the lawmakers will demand more formal descriptions of how and where the board spends the tax money it controls.
"The senators are trying to send a message that they would like HTA to perform accountability requirements that are meaningful to this particular leadership in the Senate," Fishman said. "Some things will be done differently from the way they are right now. We’ll make changes."
During the five-hour hearing yesterday, many industry groups testified in support of the authority.
The Legislature established the authority in 1998 partly to create better accountability for tourism financing. The authority drew up a master plan and set targets for visitor spending, saying it would hold contractors to those goals, or require them to explain why they had not met them.
Kim and Sen. Sam Slom, R-8th (Hawai‘i Kai, ‘ļina Haina), yesterday took the board to task on why it had not done performance evaluations of Fishman, who receives more than $182,000 a year, or of its largest single contractor, the Hawai‘i Visitors & Convention Bureau, which receives $45 million a year from the authority.
Of the 20 staff positions at the authority, the only one vacant is that of accountability coordinator. That job has been vacant only since last month, however, when Jan Yamane left the authority to become chief operating officer of the Waikiki Improvement Association.
The 13-member tourism authority is completely volunteer except for ex-officio government members.
The bill, which would transfer authority over the tourism special fund to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, now goes to the Ways and Means Committee. The action yesterday deleted a provision that would have raised the hotel tax by 1 percent with every increment of 500,000 visitor arrivals. Ways and Means Committee member Rod Tam, D-13th (Downtown, Pauoa, Nu‘uanu), however, indicated that the measure could be revived.
