Contract secrecy disservice to public
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
Does the man who would be the highest-paid state employee really think he can keep his five-year, $4 million deal hermetically sealed?
After weeks of maintaining that nothing of significance had been holding up his signing of the contract, University of Hawai'i football coach June Jones finally came clean yesterday and said the reason he has so far refused to complete the record-breaking deal is that he wants assurances that its terms will not be disclosed.
Now, keeping secret the contents of the Warriors' playbook is one thing. And, so is keeping quiet until game time who might be UH's starting running back. That's gamesmanship and part of the job.
But contracts of prominent state employees are something else entirely. They necessarily fall under the Uniform Information Practices Act, Hawai'i's open records law, which seeks to safeguard public interest by allowing inspection of public documents. And, that, too, comes with the job.
Whether they want to or not, Jones and UH need to accept it.
Where the financial operations of a public agency are at issue and where representatives of state institutions are involved, that is the way it has to be. Otherwise, when secrecy reigns and side deals are permitted, you open up the possibility of all kinds of abuses. And we've been down that road too often before and seen the consequences.
Peter Olson, a media law specialist with Cades Schutte Fleming & Wright, said, "if the public's interests outweigh the privacy interests of the individual, then disclosure may be required even though there is a privacy interest at issue."
The law correctly prohibits the disclosure of certain private information such as medical conditions and there are provisions to safeguard them. Not that you would likely find that kind of information in a coach's contract anyway.
But whether a coach gets a bonus for taking a team to a bowl game or his contract mandates that certain graduation rate milestones be met hardly constitutes a significant privacy interest. Indeed, the public has the right to know what standards its most prominent employees are being held to and why they qualify for lucrative bonuses.
Jones might have wanted to believe his athletic directors, Hugh Yoshida and Herman Frazier, could have kept his contracts secret, but that would be to give them standing to grant assurances that was not theirs to give.
Gerald Kato, a UH journalism professor, said, "It is pretty clear that you can't have a confidential agreement overriding a state law."
It is also clear that the time has come for UH to recognize its obligations under that law and for Jones to abide by them.
