EDITORIAL
Tourism officials can't censor all criticism

The controlling behavior of the Hawai'i Tourism Authority appears to get stranger by the day.

Just weeks after a tourism summit held by Gov. Linda Lingle, the agency charged with accounting for how an annual 69 million in hotel room tax dollars are spent has placed a gag order of sorts on its primary marketing contractor, the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau.

Under its marketing contract, the HVCB can be fined $25,000 for violating such standards of conduct as criticizing the HTA. In the contract, the state agency acknowledges that citizens have certain freedoms to speak out and express their opinions on matters of public concern, but are not guaranteed absolute free speech.

Well no, but we're pretty certain that criticism — even of those whose livelihood you depend upon, is protected speech.

Essentially, the HTA doesn't want the HVCB using public money to bite the hand that feeds it. And you can't blame it. After all the HVCB gets virtually all its money from the HTA and was pretty outspoken when the HTA transferred the convention center marketing contract to the Philadelphia-based SMG.

But like it or not, the money that controls this contract and binds the HVCB belongs not to the visitor industry or the HTA. It belongs to the taxpayers who have a right to know how it is being spent.

Correction: Gov. Linda Lingle's first tourism summit in April was closed to the public. The governor's second tourism summit, in May, was open to the public. A previous version of this editorial incorrectly said the Hawai'i Tourism Authority held the closed summit.