Posted on: Wednesday, January 14, 2004

EDITORIAL
Kamehameha board pay should stay as is

There is surely no question that the new board of trustees for Kamehameha Schools has been working long, hard hours in its effort to get the estate and the school on an even, successful keel.

But that alone should not justify a major boost in trustee salaries as recommended by a Trustee Compensation Committee in a report filed with Probate Court.

The recommendation inches the estate back toward the position it was in prior to the resignation of the previous board of trustees.

One of the major knocks against that board, with its million-dollar salaries, was that the trustees were acting as chief executives, each with his own area of responsibility.

In theory, being a trustee of Kamehameha Schools is not supposed to be a full-time job. And indeed, several of the trustees do hold other outside responsibilities.

The attorney general's office, which may come up with its own recommendations on trustee compensation, notes that the board members are already paid in the top 2 percent among public charity trustees.

They earn $97,500 today, with the chair collecting $120,000. Under the recommendation, pay would go up to $180,000 for board members and $207,000 for the chair.

The compensation committee concluded that "for the foreseeable next few years, being a Kamehameha trustee is virtually a full-time job."

The correct response is that it should not be. The trustees should set broad policy and then turn the decisions over to full-time executives to implement.

Now clearly, the work of a board member at any big corporation or charity has changed in recent years. No longer is it possible to attend monthly ceremonial board meetings and let business attend to itself.

Both in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, board members have come to grief for not keeping a close enough eye on business. Think Enron, for example.

But the current pay levels, among the highest in the nation for nonprofits, should be enough to compensate for this higher level of responsibility.

The current board of trustees has done much to turn Kamehameha Schools around from years of turmoil and controversy. That good work should not be buried under a fresh round of argument over trustee compensation.

The best route would be to thank the compensation committee for its work, keep salaries where they are and leave more of the daily work of running Kamehameha to the full-time executives who are paid to do just that.