It seems that Honolulu’s Office of Economic Revitalization is very good at spending money, but not particularly effective at revitalizing the county’s economy.
That’s not just my opinion. The Honolulu Office of the City Auditor released an audit earlier this month that paints a picture of an agency that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars without making progress on most of its objectives.
In a summary of the audit’s results, acting City Auditor Troy Shimasaki wrote that despite its creation more than five years ago, “OER has only recently begun to establish actual program implementation.” Instead, he noted, “OER’s priority was to create staffing capacity over economic recovery and revitalization.”
And it gets worse…