The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. This is the city: Honolulu, Hawai‘i. I live here. I’m a doggie.
This is the case of the missing contact-tracer millions.
In a previous column the boss mentioned $1.25 billion that the federal government made available to Hawai‘i through the CARES Act. (I wanted to howl about the real possibility that lots of that money will disappear at year’s end.)
Another federal act was passed after the CARES Act to throw a few more bones to those using the Paycheck Protection Program. That act, the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, also made $11 billion more available to the states. Hawai‘i’s share of this additional money was roughly $50 million. It was supposed to be for necessary expenses to develop or scale up COVID-19 testing, conduct surveillance, trace contacts and other pandemic-related activities.
In Senate Bill 75, the state Legislature told us what we were going to do with that money: $36 million was to go to the state Department of Transportation for thermal screening and related uses, and $14 million was to go the state Department of Health for outbreak control, contact tracing and personal protective equipment.
The bill also said that both agencies were to submit a monthly report to the governor and Legislature that details all allocations and expenditures.
Governor David Ige allowed the bill to become law without his signature July 15. None of the appropriations just mentioned were vetoed or reduced. So, the state DOH was able to fetch $14 million.
It doesn’t seem like $14 million was spent on contact tracing.
When a group of senators raided the department to sniff around, they found only a handful of overworked tracers where there were supposed to be closer to a hundred.
As mentioned, the appropriation act required monthly reports to the Legislature on how the money was spent. Reports to the Legislature from an executive department are called Departmental Communications and are available on the Legislature’s website. I pawed through the departmental communications from May 5 to Aug. 20, DC 432 to DC 492, and none of them were from the DOH. (There was no DOT report either.)
I’m not the only one trying to dig up information on where the money went. On Aug. 19, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo of California, who chairs the Subcommittee on Health of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote a letter to Ige asking the same question. She said that, “less than two months ago, Hawai‘i had the lowest number of COVID-19 cases per capita of any state in the nation. However, this trend has reversed and now Hawai‘i has the highest infection rate in the United States.” She requested specific information, and the last request was: “Due to numerous instances of conflicting and false information being released to the public by your Department of Health regarding the number of contract tracers employed and their capabilities, what specific actions will you take to restore the integrity of the Department of Health?”
Yipe! Talk about pointed questions!
This is a true story. The end of the story has not yet been written. We too will be following the money, or trying to, and will continue to bark like crazy if we can’t. Ours is a tough job but someone has to do it. The name’s Watch Doggie.
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Tom Yamachika is president of the Tax Foundation of Hawai‘i.
The state representatives know more than they let on. They cannot be that incompetent., lazy or disengaged. The Rail System is under investigation and the Care Act funding should be already or hopefully be soon. I think it is. The elected officials is where the buck stops. Period. They visited the DOH in the way that they did in a calculated way to look like they were checking when I believe they knew already. It’s been pass the buck forever and now with these major scandals and the information age clashing the truth will come out. Meanwhile ALL the elected officials whom you so graciously say are honest and well intentioned cannot be so. Common sense says that. The whole lot of them is an old boy clique who aren’t all that smart in reality. Well maybe whip smart in a crafty way. It’s been a cruise for years. You scratch my back i’ll scratch yours. But now the whole state economy is in danger and they are all hamstrung by politics and saving face. I believe state and county politics are destroying the economy. Nobody wants to tell the truth. The truth is the virus is here for good. We can’t hide from it. There is going to be deaths. There have been deaths. It’s how the people in power handle that fact that will guide how things go. Right now idiots with ulterior motives run the ship. False pride no loose face no look bad or tell the truth fools who don’t know what to do because they are all too concerned with their place at the trough and not us the people. There needs to be a buying spree of ventilators and planning for more cases and deaths. That should have been done months ago but the old cronies thought they could get through it and didn’t even have a clue how to do so. Just like Kauai has done. Postponing the inevitable by closing down the economy in fear and above all political aspirations of the people running the show being the driving force of the decisions being made. ie. “Let’s be the one place that has the least cases and that will look good on the resumes” Well that just prolongs the inevitable which is it is always going to be out there and will get here in more cases but what will we do when that happens and when do they actually allow it to happen. Well the powers that be are only looking out their own political hides it seems to me and chasing rainbows doing things like “looking at” creating a “hotel bubble” where they let tourists in like caged rats. Now that’s a brilliant bit of thinking. They are beholden to the hotel lobby and using the situation to put more stress on TVR owners by completely overlooking the fact that TVR’s would be a much better place for visitors to be watched and stay because there is no common space. How convenient. They can kill two birds with one stone. Truth? There’s going to be death. Truth? take the drug rehab building that was turned into the original quarantine location and turn it into a place for covid patients. Truth? Get all the test kits they can get their hands on and start using them. Truth? Get their hands on as many ventilators as they can and have them ready to do asap. Truth? start letting in tourists when those things i just mentioned are in place. Truth? Allow only direct flights into Kauai and only allow people with a recent test on the planes not a crazy 72 hour window. And whatever it takes to get the process going. Waiting in fear with political motives is not the most commonsensical way to get our economy up and running and we need that most of all. The rest will work itself out. There has to be a point we let people back in and it needs to be sooner than later. Nero is watching Rome burn and my ass is starting to get singed. I’ll bet there are plenty of others frying now. How many old businesses have to be lost before politics gets put aside and common sense and reality become what is deemed to be the logical way to proceed. This is not time for running for governor. Nor is it time to hide and wait for the coast to clear. It’s time for some concrete and bold steps that involve risk to everyone. People die every day but how often do 40 year businesses that are the foundation of the community die and in such large and irreplaceable numbers? Now what were you saying about the millions of missing Care Act money? 😉