Wespac Refuses to Rubberstamp Budget; Public Will Be Able to See It Before Vote

posted in: Fisheries, Marine, September 2009 | 0

For Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, what happened on Saturday, July 25, must have felt like a palace coup.

At the tail end of a four-day meeting of the council in Kona, Simonds had scheduled a discussion on administrative and budget matters.

Under normal circumstances, it’s a safe bet that most members of the public would have long ago left, their patience having been sorely tried by inane and ridiculous comments of some council members, or their capacity for boredom having been pushed to the limit by tedious PowerPoint presentations.

Under normal circumstances, the discussions of council administrative and budget issues might just as well be held in closed session, for all the attention the public pays.

But July’s meeting was, so far as this part of the council’s agenda was concerned, anything but normal. It was the first meeting of Wespac since the Government Accountability Office issued its long-awaited report last May on the council’s operations. And while that report stopped short of confirming the worst suspicions of many council critics about Simonds’ management, it kindled interest among certain council observers in agenda items that stray far from the more customary discussions of the health of fish stocks or presentations on the number of active boats in American Samoa’s fledgling longline fleet.

Council chairman Sean Martin called the council to order shortly after 11 a.m. on that Saturday. He and others apparently thought the remainder of the agenda could be dealt with in short order, announcing to members that lunch would be available for them in the neighboring council staff room at the conclusion of the meeting.

With that, he let Simonds have the floor.

“Two sets of financial reports have been distributed,” Simonds said. “One is a short version, with line items and totals. The other is a bit more detailed, with staff travel.”

“As you know,” she continued, “this is the last year of our five-year grant.” The council receives all its funds through a process of applying for and receiving grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The process of developing a new five-year budget began last year, Simonds said. Now, “what you have is a draft budget with numbers, and what [the National Marine Fisheries Service] suggested to the councils is that we do a 5 to 10 percent increase every year. We don’t know what we’re going to get… This budget is based on what the administration asked Congress for in 2010…. [It] describes the work we plan to do based on our history.”

At that point, a member of the audience asked why no copies of the budget were available for the public to review.

“We want the council members to review the document first,” Simonds said. “It’s a draft document.”

She then went on to impress on council members the importance of quick action in approving the budget. “We all [council executives] said we were going to send [NMFS] budgets in September because the new year begins in January. The [congressional] conference appears to be working very quickly on appropriations.”

Former state Department of Land and Natural Resources administrator Peter Young, who now sits on the council, reminded Simonds that despite her stated desire that council members review the document before giving it to the public, he and other council members had been given no advance copy. “I observed the budget committee” (which met earlier in the week), he said. “The executive committee was given a budget and discussed it on Wednesday…. There’s a lot of numbers and information in here. And council members who are not members of the budget or executive committee are put at a serious disadvantage when they are not able to get this document in advance of the meeting – but also when it’s clear that other council members have copies, but not everyone is given one….

“I believe there’s an expectation we’re supposed to vote on it, and have an understanding of what it is we’re voting on. So I can understand the frustration of the public, not even being able to get a copy of it, but I wanted to express my frustration, disappointment, and disagreement that there are two classes of council members with respect to getting the information.”

Laura Thielen, who sits on the council by virtue of her position as current DLNR administrator, announced she wanted “time to look through the materials” – at which point Simonds dramatically rolled her eyes.

But Thielen persevered. She quickly pointed out that categories such as “international management,” “policy development,” and “outreach” contained big increases over previous years. “This is a lot of information,” she said. “Can we have some time to read through this and come back at the next meeting and have some comment and discussion?”

Simonds was thrown off by Thielen’s question: “Where are you?” she asked, not knowing what pages in the inch-thick document Thielen was referring to.

“The multiyear summary, fiscal year `09 to fiscal year 15,” Thielen responded.

Simonds was dismissive: “Start with the administration [budget of] $2.7 million.”

Thielen could not find Simonds’ starting point.

After several moments of discussion and murmurs among the council members and staff, it emerged that not all council members had been given the same documents.

“This illustrates the point,” Thielen then said. “We have a lot of information here. I want a chance to look through it and I want a chance to ask questions before we approve it. Is this multiyear summary I have – is that the proposal the council is making? If that’s the case, it doesn’t correlate with the information you just said.”

Simonds tried again: “What you’re looking at here is supposed to be a 10 percent increase annually, on the advice of NMFS. Unless we know the cost for something is different.”

Thielen: “If I’m told I get a 10 percent increase in my total budget, I don’t just do a 10 percent across-the-board” increase.

At that point, the council took a break so its staff could scramble to get all members copies of the same documents. Afterward, Young chimed in to support Thielen: “I support Laura’s statement about the need for more time…. I think it’s unreasonable to expect that we would be able to vote on it today before lunch.”

“Laura, so how much time do you think you need?” Simonds asked Thielen. (Simonds earlier had instructed Young not to speak to her.) “What are you asking for?”

“I’d like an opportunity to read through the materials and then come back with the questions. And make sure we –”

Simonds interrupted, announcing that the council would “need to have a teleconference on the five-year budget some time in the next week,” seeming to ride roughshod over Federal Notice requirements for such meetings.

There followed a lengthy discussion of whether members of the public could be trusted not to confuse budget documents clearly stamped “DRAFT” with final budgets. According to Fred Tucher, general council for the Pacific Islands Regional Office of NMFS, the council could choose to make any document it wanted public, so long as legal prohibitions on release of confidential or proprietary data were not breached. Martin noted that before the council could take any action to approve the budget, “we have to have public comment” – which in turn implied that, at some point, sooner or later, the public would need to see what the council was voting upon.

In the end, the council decided to put off any further discussion of the budget until members had been given sufficient time to review it. After the motion was made, Thielen suggested an amendment: “I would add that the materials, upon distribution to council members, also be posted publicly for review during the discussion of that meeting… Draft materials for this meeting should be distributed and made available for the public no later than two weeks before the conference call.”

Martin again expressed his reservations: “Although documents may clearly be marked as draft documents, there is a potential for misinterpretation of those draft documents prior to them being formalized.”

Thielen pressed her point harder: “All we’re looking at in this motion is giving the council members time to receive the accurate information on the budget we’re being asked to vote on, giving us enough time prior to having that publicly noticed meeting to make a decision, to inform ourselves – and also making that information available to people who are going to listen in on that publicly noticed meeting. That’s all that’s in the motion….

“What we’ve found … in Hawai`i, is that unless you give the public information, there is a cloud over the council members, and it is very difficult for any of us to be able to defend ourselves against accusations of wrongful misconduct. There are two reasons for having public information out there. One is so that the public trusts the public process. The other is to protect the volunteers who serve on these councils and boards and commissions by providing that transparency so they can say, ‘I followed that process.’ If someone objects, they can say that.

“There have been a lot of questions about how this council makes decisions… I very strongly believe we should have these materials available to the public… Putting them on the website is a very good way.”

By that time, Thielen had either persuaded or worn down most of the other council members. (Simonds had left the room long before the matter came to a vote.)

But it was left to Guam council member Manny Duenas to voice a last, desperate – and bizarre – argument against the proposal of Thielen and others that council materials be made available online. The motion, he said, “is highly discriminatory to the people of Guam. They’re not technologically literate.”

Despite the stated concerns of Martin and Duenas, the motion passed unanimously.

* * *
The GAO Report

July’s meeting gave the council its first opportunity to discuss the report issued last May by the Government Accountability Office on the operations of Wespac and allegations of mismanagement. Most of that discussion concerned the GAO’s criticism that the council’s operations were not transparent to the public.

The advisory measures in the report were directed to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not to the council, which technically is a contractor to NOAA. On July 13, William Robinson, administrator of the Pacific Islands Regional Office of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, transmitted to council chairman Sean Martin recommendations based on the GAO’s findings.

First, with respect to reports that Wespac and its director, Simonds, were overstepping federal limits on lobbying activities, Robinson instructed the council “to maintain documentation of all requests for information from federal and state legislators.”

Second, with respect to reports that council staff or contractors were handing out cash in white envelopes to participants at certain council-sponsored meetings, Robinson told Martin that the council must pay per-diem costs by check “to the extent practicable.”

Third, to improve “transparency of the council’s actions,” Robinson proposed that the council undertake five separate measures:

  • That NOAA’s regional counsel give council members and staff an annual briefing on rules governing their conduct, with the first meeting to occur during the council’s October meeting;
  • That the council adopt procedures to ensure that meeting minutes contain not only a council member’s recusal but also the reasons for it;
  • That it place council meeting minutes and briefing materials on its website, with this task to be done no later than October 1;
  • That it adopt procedures “to provide greater access to council information and ensure the public is aware of the types of records that are available to the public at the council office and the procedures for reviewing these records;”
  • Finally, that the council adopt procedures “to ensure a full and timely response” to the requests of council members for information needed in the course of their duties.

The GAO report had noted that materials in council briefing books (which can be hundreds of pages long) are routinely placed on the websites of other fishery management councils, while briefing materials at Wespac meetings are available to the public only during the portion of the agenda in which the materials are being discussed – and only some of those materials, at that.

Although Simonds indicated that this problem would be addressed when the new IT person on the council’s staff got up to speed, it turned out that all the briefing materials were in fact available online – but only to council members, on a password-protected website.

Council member Peter Young pointed out that it would have been a simple matter to make the materials available online to the public, “but we made it password-protected. The only people who had access were the members. We ended up killing trees because we have to distribute copies at the meeting. We had a great opportunity to demonstrate to the public that we could [be more transparent], but we didn’t. And to add further insult, we didn’t even distribute to members documents at the time they were available.”

Other council members remarked on how convenient it was to have all the council materials available on their laptops during the meeting. David Itano said, “I have a hard time getting my hands on the right piece of paper, but when I have the documents on the computer, I can go through them. I prefer this… I can flip through my screen and get what I want.”

Don Palawski, representing the Fish and Wildlife Service, agreed.

Only Manny Duenas dissented. “I, for one, like paper…. I get insulted because people are on computers” during the meeting, he said, since he has seen members playing video games or watching sports channels.

Regardless of whether or how quickly the council complies with the request that it put more information on its website, it seems clear that the public will finally be able to have online access to critical council records in the near future. In his letter forwarding GAO recommendations to the council, PIRO administrator Robinson announced that by December 1, his office was intending to post meeting minutes and other council records on its own website (www.fpir.noaa.gov).

“NMFS will include procedures for submitting a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request for NMFS and council records on this website” as well, Robinson said.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 20, Number 3 September 2009

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