Writer's Block

Covering the past

Uncovering the truth about events happening today is hard enough; reporting on the past offers a completely different set of challenges. Documents get lost. Phone numbers change. People forget. It gets harder to hold people accountable.

One of my first big "investigative" stories for the paper, and a great learning experience for me as a reporter, was a piece about the consequences of the county's decision in the 1990s to build a new phase of the Central Maui Landfill without getting permits. By the time I wrote the story, the new phase had been completed for several years, but the county still wasn't allowed to use it and would be required to make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of changes to bring it into compliance with state and federal requirements before it could operate.

The first challenge was just to figure out what happened. But I also wanted to talk to some of the people involved in making the decisions, so they would have a chance to tell their side of the story.

There had already been two changes in county administration since the landfill construction took place. The state regulators who had been involved at the time had retired or moved to other jobs. Fortunately I was able to retrieve some county records from the period, and could talk with former public works officials who were still on the island working in the private sector. But I always felt the story was lacking because I couldn't track down and talk to everybody who had been involved at the time.

More recently, I've written about an audit of Maui Economic Concerns of the Community, the island's biggest provider of homeless services (read the stories here and here). The audit found that the agency was in trouble financially, in large part because it accepted millions of dollars in loans from the county to build a new homeless shelter on the expectation it would receive more money in grants to cover costs -- but the county never came through with the funds.

The loans and agreements were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the whole saga covers four different mayoral administrations. Piecing together the recollections of people I spoke with, the funds apparently were promised under the Lingle administration in the 1990s. When the Apana administration took over in 1998, Housing and Human Concerns Director Alice Lee supported the funding plan, but either finance officials or the County Council did not support it. Lee may have supported other plans that could have financed the project while she served in the Arakawa administration, but those plans fizzled out when she retired and the Tavares administration took over. And Charlie Ridings, executive director of MECC  when the loan agreements were made, retired two years ago and moved to Arizona.

For a story like this, where someone is being blamed for causing a mess, the first thing I'm trying to do is give the person being blamed a chance to tell their side of the story. But who do I call? And where are they now?

Current Housing and Human Concerns Director Lori Tsuhako wasn't around when any of the events took place, and couldn't say much other than that the county would meet with MECC to discuss resolving the issue. I talked with Alice Lee, who had a pretty good recollection of the loan agreements and the position she took on them at the time, but she was fuzzy about the actions taken by other branches of the Apana administration. Former Finance Director Wesley Lo only dimly remembered them. And when I reached Ridings later, he had a slightly different memory of the events surrounding the loans.

In almost every story, a reporter experiences a Roshomon effect, where each person interviewed tells a different -- and sometimes conflicting -- version of what happened. When an event happened years in the past, that effect seems to be magnified.