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Bishop Estate Trustee Oz Stender and Desmond Byrne, executive director of Common Cause Hawaii, examined whether Hawaii's largest private charitable trust was governing itself with appropriate transparency and fulfilling its educational mission. Byrne contended that the practice of having Hawaii Supreme Court justices select trustees in an unofficial capacity created conflicts of interest with no precedent elsewhere in the country, violating multiple canons of judicial ethics. Stender maintained the arrangement was required by the will of founder Bernice Pauahi Bishop and that openly disclosed conflicts were manageable. On the estate's educational record, both agreed that more needed to be done for Hawaiian children, though Stender cautioned against expanding programs so rapidly as to strain the endowment. Byrne called for the estate's strategic plan to be made public, arguing that an institution controlling a significant share of Hawaii's land and serving thousands of students could not operate without greater accountability. The episode also addressed a Honolulu ordinance requiring leasehold condominium conversion, which Stender opposed as an unconstitutional government transfer of private property. Stender outlined a long-range vision of a globally managed institution capable of serving Hawaiian children well into the twenty-first century.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
