Op-Ed: New rules for awarding county grants could boost transparency, but more action needed

Op-Ed: New rules for awarding county grants could boost transparency, but more action needed
By: Jonathan Helton | policy analyst at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi

Maui County appropriates tens of millions of dollars in grants to businesses and nonprofits every year, but the protocols for awarding and monitoring that funding are subjective and opaque.

A new law could help improve that.

Ordinance 6015, effective July 27, requires the Maui Department of Management to adopt administrative rules standardizing how county agencies award grants. The department has already drafted its proposed rules and plans to hold a public hearing on them Oct. 7.

Unfortunately, the new rules will not apply to grants funded directly through the County’s budget, which go through a different approval process. But more on that later.

An audit released earlier this year reported that the county lacks an anti-nepotism policy, fraud-monitoring programs for outside vendors who perform services for the county and oversight mechanisms for grants awarded during declared emergencies. 

Around the same time the audit was released, Council Member Gabe Johnson surveyed 28 grant recipients for their thoughts on the county’s grant processes. 

Significantly, more than 40% said they thought county grant decisions were made for personal reasons, or that they had refrained from commenting on the process to avoid endangering existing relationships with county officials. 

Most of the respondents also said the county was slow in releasing approved funds, and about half said that reporting rules make it harder to comply with the county’s grant process. 

Those reporting requirements, however, are critical to accountability — but the current reporting rules do not always provide meaningful transparency. 

For example, the county’s Office of Economic Development posts its end-of-budget evaluation of grant recipients and the amounts they receive online, but the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi needed to submit an information request and wait weeks for the most recent evaluation. 

That report lists more than 130 grantees that received nearly $10 million in county money. Because grant periods don’t always line up exactly with the budget cycle for one reason or another, it is only a snapshot in time. But it did reveal that several of the grantees had not yet submitted their final reports at the time it was drafted.

Also troubling is that the Maui Department of Human Concerns charged the Grassroot Institute more than $500 to search through its records to disclose the grant applications it received for this year’s budget. Those reports should have been public to begin with.

The proposed rules drafted by the Maui Department of Management aim to remedy these issues in part by implementing uniform minimum standards for county grant programs. These standards would include scoring grant applications and setting a minimum score needed to receive a grant, updating grant reporting requirements and outlining penalties for grant recipients that misrepresent facts to an agency.

What else needs to change

Implementing new administrative rules for the competitive grant process is a good opportunity to improve transparency and accountability regarding how Maui agencies award and track their grant funding. 

But the reforms should not stop there. Similar to how the City and County of Honolulu handles its Council-awarded grants, Maui County should standardize how councilmembers add grants to the budget — especially because substantial tax dollars are at stake.

Maui County’s current budget has more than $40 million allocated for more than 100 named recipients, funding activities such as trap-neuter-and-release programs for feral cats, the creation of a book about the history of the Maui Fair, and the construction of  fencing for a childcare center. 

The largest grant awarded for fiscal 2027 is $6 million to the Lahaina Community Land Trust; the smallest is $5,000 going to the West Maui Veterans Club. 

Council-approved grants do not go through the competitive application process that agency grants do. Instead, they originate in the proposed budget submitted to the Council by the mayor. The Council then has the authority to add, delete or change them with a simple affirmative vote. 

The only check on how much the Council gives out in grants and to whom it awards them is the Council itself. 

Honolulu’s City Charter, on the other hand, requires all applications for Council-awarded grants to be evaluated by Honolulu’s Grants in Aid Advisory Commission, which is composed of members appointed by the mayor. 

The commission scores every application on a scale 1 to 100 scale using a process created by a Council-approved resolution that must undergo public hearings. Furthermore, all grant requests and the commission’s final scores are posted to the City’s website, which allows the public to evaluate the commission’s scoring. 

These features do not result in a fraud-proof grant process. But they do help maintain a degree of transparency and accountability that Maui’s grant process lacks. 

Maui County officials would do well to further reform how county grants are awarded to the public so taxpayers can know exactly how their money is being spent.

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*****Views expressed in Op-Ed pieces are those of the author’s alone and do not reflect or represent the opinions, policies or positions of Maui Now.*****