State must shore up fair-contracts process
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for the Lingle administration, which has been put in the hot seat over its adherence to state procurement laws.
Rightly so: It was, after all, Gov. Linda Lingle herself who extolled the virtues of procurement reforms following her first full year in office. In her 2004 State of the State address, the governor said she was "proud of how we worked together to rewrite the state procurement law so we now have a contracting system that is open, accessible and devoid of favoritism."
Fast-forwarding to 2007, we find these three potholes in the road to clean government:
All three cases strongly suggest a need for Lingle's government at least to review its administrative criteria allowing for nonbid contracts and directing how competitive contracts should be weighed.
Focusing on the DBEDT issue, Liu has some explaining to do about how No. 3 moved up to the winner's circle for the hydrogen award. The law is, as he suggests, vague about whether the award should hinge solely on the evaluation panel's scoring, and that should be cleaned up.
But to the business community and the public at large, this process doesn't seem transparent or — given that Liu and the panel seemed to use different scoring methods — very credible.
It's high time that the state reaffirms its commitment to spend taxpayer money fairly.
Correction: One member of a state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands committee formed to award nonbid consultant contracts was a former employee of the company selected for the contracts. A previous version of this story indicated more than one member had been employed by the firm.
