EDITORIAL
Conference success is old news today

Mayor Jeremy Harris makes a valid point, but misses a more important one, when he complains that attention to campaign contributors and city contractors who donated to a 1999 environmental conference has unfairly maligned an important and successful event.

Harris is right that the Mayor's Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit, which he hosted in Waikiki, was a worthwhile undertaking. And we wrote about it, in glowing terms, in this space at the time.

The conference attracted top-flight economists, environmentalists and policy-makers from the United States, Canada and the Pacific Rim. The buzzword of the Honolulu conference, and one that remains vitally important to Honolulu, was "technology transfer." The United States and other industrialized nations have developed advanced technologies to deal with environmental challenges such as water and air pollution, recycling, sewage reuse and more.

So Hawai'i companies, including those that helped pay for the conference, obviously benefitted from the connections made.

But that's old news. The issue today, raised not by the news media but by prosecutors, is whether the money that was used to put on the event was raised legally. While his attorneys make a strong case that there was nothing wrong in the financing of the conference, Harris has personally declined to be interviewed at length about the nonprofit group that received $100,000 in public money for the event.

That's his right, of course. But that issue is what's making news and raising questions on the City Council today. Harris knows better than to rest on a 3 1/2-year-old laurel.