And the Scandal Deepens....

Last week, a "group of Maui residents" (as the Maui News described them) initiated a petition to have county council member Wayne Nishiki impeached, based on the late filing of his financial disclosure.

Really, color me shocked. I never thought it would get this far. I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding where all of the moral outrage is coming from here. Are people angry about the perceived deception, or about the possibility that one of our council members could "owe" something to the biggest, baddest development company on the island?

Whether it's the former or the latter, I'd be really dumbfounded to discover that people on Maui are somehow ridiculously naive, as compared to the rest of the country. Do you really think politicians never deceive, never use smoke and mirrors, never fudge the truth? And what is politics if not deal-making and compromises done behind closed doors? Honestly, you'd think the island of Maui had never seen a political scandal before.

Maybe I'm just a cynic. But I don't think what Nishiki did was all that bad. And I certainly don't think it's worth an impeachment. A reprimand, certainly, but impeachment? Seems a touch dramatic to me.

At any rate, I was feeling a little suspicious of the motivations of the people leading the impeachment charge. The Maui News did not identify the group, and listed their leader only as "Dave Mackwell," without any explanation of who he is or how he's associated with the situation. 

So I followed the newspaper's link to the impeachment group's website. (Sorry, no link; I don't care attach it to my blog.) They also fail to identify themselves as anything other than "angry Maui residents." They make no mention of Dave Mackwell. However, they do take great pains to note that they are "in no way affiliated" with Don Couch, Nishiki's opponent in the hotly contested battle for the council seat that Nishiki won.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, methinks they doth protest too much.

So I started doing a little digging around on the Internet, and here's what I discovered. Dave Mackwell is a former board president of the Kihei Community Association. Don Couch currently serves on the board of the Kihei Community Association. How interesting.

Now, I don't have any conclusive evidence at this point which would prove that they served on the board at the same time, but it appears as though they did. They both seem to have been on the board within the last few years, and I gather that they may have overlapped for at least one of those years. It's a small board. I find it hard to believe - if they did serve at the same time - that they didn't get to know one another.

Which leads me to ponder: Does the Mackwell group's drive to impeachment really have nothing to do with Don Couch? And if these two men do in fact know one another, isn't this just as deceptive as what Nishiki did?

And, seriously, what's up Maui News? I found out this info by using Google. You might want to try it. Scandal sells papers, you know!

Will update when and if I find out more on this topic.

Journalistic Integrity

I've still been thinking a lot about the Nishiki scandal, although it seems, by and large, to have blown over at this point. As someone commented on my previous post about Nishiki, there's a lot more to the Nishiki story than the simple facts of what occurred.

It honestly astounds me that the Nishiki story broke after the election. While I know that it's dangerous to continue comparing Portland to Maui, it's hard not to in this case. Back in Portland, a scandal like Nishiki's would have broken months before the election was held.  Not only would the Willamette Weekly, Portland's trendy, non-mainstream weekly newspaper, have been all over the story, so too would have the Oregonian, the state's largest paper.

I would think that investigating a candidate's financial background would be a top priority on any journalist's list. So what happened here? I'm inclined to think that it's merely sloppy, amateurish journalism. In reading all of the papers here on Maui, I frequently find myself disappointed with the quality and frustrated with the lack of actual information presented. Where is the substance?

However, I'm still essentially a newcomer to Maui. There could perhaps be more to the story. Are Maui journalists complicit in covering up damaging stories for Maui politicians? I find this highly unlikely, but it's not unheard of. Politics is certainly filled with a vast amount of corruption, which seems to bleed into all other aspects of life.

This is an interesting journey that I have been on over the last 5 months, as I learn to adjust to this new place. I learn more and more every day. Back in Portland, I volunteered over the course of several years for a non-profit, independent, left-leaning newspaper. It was a paper that was beholden to no one, that chased stories no matter the fall out. It was interesting and informative. I would love to see a paper like that on Maui.

So often here, I feel starved for information and "out of touch." How I would love to not feel that any longer.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

I recently got sucked into a political scandal that developed on Maui after the Nov. 4 election.  I have to admit, local politics here are a bit bewildering to me. I think maybe you need to live here for a while before it all starts making any kind of sense. But the uproar over the Nishiki brouhaha has been rather loud, and it caught my attention, so I started to do a little digging to figure out what was going on.

So Wayne Nishiki, it seems, was a retired county council member.  (On Maui, there is no city government, only county government, which also includes the islands - counties- of Lanai and Molokai.)  He left politics 4 years ago - to do what, I'm not sure.  Seems he has a stand at the farmers market?  At any rate, during his tenure on the council, Nishiki was well known for his anti-development stance.

Development is a very hot button topic here.  Really, it's kind of a dirty word.  The prevailing sentiment on the island is the "anti" standpoint, which I do get.  Without proper laws in place, it's hard to control development, and your elected officials really have to want to do it.  And most people have no interest in Maui becoming another Oahu.  From what I've seen of Oahu, I totally agree with that, because yeah, yuck.

Apparently, during his retirement, in 2005, Nishiki accepted a $100,000 business loan from Dowling, the biggest and "slickest" (as I have heard it described) development company on the island.  Then, in 2008, he decided to run for the council again.  Nishiki won the council seat, by a mere 2,000 votes, in November.  However, he had neglected to file the proper paperwork to publicize the loan he received in 2005.  In fact, news of the loan didn't didn't reach the public until a week after the election.  And that's when the sh*t hit the fan, as they say.

There are a lot of people angry with Wayne Nishiki.  The more cynical believe that this was a long-term, evil plan.  He gets the loan in 2005, waits a few years, and then gets re-elected so he can start scratching a few backs.  While that seems a tad far-fetched to me (it seems a rather long time for Dowling to wait to get their payback), I do get where people are coming from.  I wouldn't trust pretty much any politician as far as I could throw them, particularly not after what we've seen in the last 8 years on the national level.

Nishiki says the loan was innocent. He says that he became friends with Dowling over the years.  I'm inclined to actually believe him. I certainly have friends who believe the exact opposite of me, and they would probably give me money if I needed it. I find it hard to believe that a man who spent 14 scandal-free years opposing development would have such a sudden change of heart. But I could be wrong.

What I find less innocent is his "neglecting" to file the paperwork until when it would coincidentally do the least amount of damage to his campaign.  I think it's pretty obvious he did it on purpose.  He knew it was a political hot potato, and he knew it would likely scuttle his campaign.  So he went the route of most politicians and did something underhanded to win the election.  A politician caught being dishonest?  Really not the most shocking thing in the world.

I think the best thing he could have done for himself is disclose the money from the very beginning of his campaign.  He might not have won, but I think he would have had a shot. Americans in this day and age are hungering for politicians they can trust. I think they would have had some amount of admiration for a man who disclosed potentially scandalous information right from the start.

The question is, what happens now? Many are calling for him to resign. Certainly, if he stays, his whole tenure will be tainted. He will never be able to vote on any Dowling projects without the specter of this looming over his head. If he votes for a single one . . . I can already hear the howls of anger.

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm looking forward to keeping my eye on it.