Counseling the council: The Sunshine Blog was happy to see that the Office of Information Practices is considering whether it’s legal for that new Honolulu City Council task force on police department hiring to meet secretly. This after the Public First Law Center raised the concern in a recent letter to OIP.
The council created the task force earlier this summer at the request of council member Andria Tupola, who The Blog applauds for being another one willing to step up and do what the Honolulu Police Department and Honolulu Police Commission seem unable to do — get serious about filling more than 450 sworn-officer jobs.
The number of empty positions has grown considerably since recently retired former chief Joe Logan took over and is expected to get even worse as certain dominoes start to fall into place — hazard pay payouts, a new collective bargaining contract kicks in and normal end-of-the-year retirements take their toll. (See our in-depth Q&A with SHOPO officials elsewhere in today’s edition for more details.)…