Pip: HAWAIʻI is where the government money flows freely, the reporting doesn’t, and Richard Bodien has been following the receipts.
Mara: Richard’s recent blog posts dig into two connected problems: how public money gets handed to private interests with almost no strings attached, and what actually happens — or doesn’t — once the announcements are made. Let’s start with the accountability gap hiding inside the spending numbers.
Where the Money Goes — and Who’s Watching
Pip: The core question here is whether Hawaiʻi residents can actually track what the state does with their money — and the answer, it turns out, is mostly no.
Mara: The post on gaps in reporting puts it plainly: “Three programs. Thirty-six fields. Thirteen visible. Not one of the three publishes what the recipients contributed to the campaigns of the people who authorized the money.”
Pip: So out of thirty-six data fields that should describe where public money went, fewer than half are visible to an ordinary resident. The rest are either suppressed, scattered, or simply never assembled.
Mara: The post documents why that’s structurally baked in. The procurement database excludes whole categories of awards. Tax subsidy reports are compiled from returns but suppress recipient names to protect confidentiality. Numbers from different agencies don’t reconcile — DBEDT and DOTAX report different figures for the same film tax credit year, because they’re measuring different periods.
Pip: And the post on Lahaina’s recovery shows exactly what that opacity costs when a disaster hits and the press releases start flying.
Mara: That piece tracks public money through five distinct stages — appropriated, awarded, obligated, spent, and built — and the Lahaina numbers illustrate the gap at every step. The HUD disaster-recovery grant awarded to Maui County was roughly $1.639 billion. Expenditure through March 2026: $20.1 million. That’s about 1.2 percent.
Pip: Obligation surged. Expenditure barely moved. Nineteen wooden poles replaced along one highway, three years after the fire.
Mara: The gaps-in-reporting post proposes a concrete fix: a statewide public support ledger, built from data that already exists but is never assembled in one place. The prototype was built in an afternoon. A funded organization, the post argues, could build the real one.
Pip: Which raises the obvious question of who exactly benefits from the current arrangement where nobody builds it.
Mara: The transparency gaps sheet in the prototype specifically documents where Hawaiʻi’s own disclosure system prevents accountability — not just where data is missing, but where the rules are designed so the data can’t be connected. That’s the real finding.
Mara: And that design connects directly to who’s collecting the benefits while the public carries the risk.
Corporate Subsidies and the Public Tab
Pip: The question the second major post is asking is whether what Hawaiʻi calls economic development is actually something else — a structural arrangement where private interests profit and the public absorbs the downside.
Mara: The post frames it directly: “Here’s the deal Hawaiʻi government keeps making: the public takes the risk, and private interests take the profit.”
Pip: Subsidies, tax exemptions, no-bid contracts, land concessions, regulatory favors — and in return, almost no enforceable promises, no penalties when promises break, no accounting anyone can follow.
Mara: The post calls this corporate socialism, and it proposes a layered response. Expose every transfer through a public support ledger. Attach real conditions to public money — living wages, local hiring, clawbacks, and a public equity stake when taxpayers carry serious risk. Reform campaign financing, which the post documents has already failed: the state election fund held over $2.4 million at the end of fiscal 2025, and not one candidate received a dollar of it in 2026.
Pip: A fund nobody can use isn’t reform — it’s furniture.
Mara: The post also calls for banning lobbyist contributions across the full election cycle, not just during session, and requiring disclosure of who actually wrote significant amendments. The coalition infrastructure to push this already exists — more than fifty organizations in the Clean Elections Hawaiʻi Coalition, plus the groups that drove Act 11 through the 2026 session, which restricted corporate and dark-money election spending and takes effect July 2027.
Pip: The post’s closing argument is that the coalition has the numbers but needs a specific, traceable document: one industry, every public benefit it received, every dollar of political spending it produced, both columns on the same page.
Mara: The diagnosis is structural, the prescription is concrete, and the ledger from the transparency post is the instrument that makes the prescription possible.
Pip: Announcements generate press releases. Infrastructure generates infrastructure. Hawaiʻi has a lot of the former.
Mara: And until there’s a public ledger connecting subsidies to outcomes and contributions to decision-makers, that gap stays invisible by design. Next episode, we’ll see what else is hiding in plain sight.
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