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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, October 7, 2002

EDITORIAL
Tourism Authority must live up to its ideal

Rex Johnson, the new executive director of the Hawai'i Tourism Authority, is assuring key members of legislative tourism committees that the agency will clean up its act in response to state Auditor Marion Higa's harsh critique in February.

From now on, Johnson says, the HTA will evaluate its performance on tourism initiatives, hold public meetings on each island and meet with tourism industry leaders to gather input on its initiatives.

Moreover, the authority will "seek to negotiate terms and conditions in contracts that will provide greater accountability for the use of public funds" and comply with state laws governing public meetings.

That's great, but let's not pat Johnson too hard on the back. He gets paid $240,000 a year as chief of a relatively small state agency whose mission it is to oversee the promotion of tourism. For that salary, we certainly expect him to make changes that will raise the credibility of the HTA.

More to the point, Johnson is merely proposing what the HTA should have been doing all along: accounting for the money it funnels to the Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau and other contractors.

From the moment of its inception, the HTA appeared more interested in pumping up the HVCB than tracking how tens of millions of hotel tax dollars were being spent.

It pledged to set up a system to account for every tourism promotion dollar spent, but we've yet to see any results.

In her audit of the HTA, Higa argued that the authority had mismanaged its $61 million annual budget and that the overall lack of accountability made it hard to gauge whether the HTA's efforts had been a success.

In light of that, we would expect the HTA's new leadership to address that damning report card and promise to turn things around. We're pleased that Johnson has taken that first step.

But as Sen. Donna Mercado Kim points out, promises are one thing and action is another. "You never know," she says, "until you see the final result."

We're watching to see if Johnson's actions justify his generous salary and bring the HTA in line with its mandate to effectively monitor and improve tourism promotion in Hawai'i.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of the HTA. Thus far, though, there have been problems with execution of that idea.