Contract secrecy served nobody

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

A week after the state's Office of Information Practices publicly rebuffed the school's attempts at secrecy as "unrealistic," UH finally opened up.

While some elements and bonus provisions of the contract might plow new ground in the area of UH deals, there was nothing remotely revolutionary on a national scale.

Certainly there was nothing so demanding of secrecy that necessitated the prolonged game of legal hide and seek the UH athletic department and general counsel's office engaged in.

In fact, the terms of the contract that Jones has operated on since signing on at UH in December 1998 are less lucrative than the agreements held by many of his Division I-A peers.

Georgia's Mark Richt this month, according to release of the 11-page contract gained through that state's open records law by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, signed a deal that gives him nearly nine times the $70,000 collateral income of Jones.

Washington coach Keith Gilbertson, in a deal made public by Seattle media just days after his signing this month, receives $20,000 in travel allowances, about four times that of Jones.

Yet only at UH was there a stall. If not for the foot dragging and arrogance, the whole issue could have been dispensed of back in January 1999, days after the original five-year deal was signed. At most the contract would have been an out-of-the-spotlight story.

Instead some in Manoa, for reasons largely known only to themselves, prolonged the process and, in doing so, helped turn a molehill into the Ko'olaus, launching a dozen wild rumors. If the objective was to preserve secrecy, it did the opposite.

Leslie H. Kondo and the new administration of the OIP cut through the red tape to assure the kind of open records access the legislature intended with the passage of the Uniform Informational Practices Act, athletic director Herman Frazier's feeble protestations notwithstanding.

Whatever you think of our legislators — and Jones has already fired a salvo in their direction — the UIPA has shown itself to be a necessary weapon in the arsenal of public scrutiny.

For too many years on too many levels, contracts had been held in the dark and the law is recognition that the public was poorly served by the practice. While coaches contracts were probably not at the top of the list of deals the UIPA was enacted to shed light upon, they involve the money of a state agency and are still government documents.

That's a lesson that didn't have to be four years in the learning.