LETTER: ‘Administration Has Done a Poor Job Interacting With Public’

Mayor Harry Kim’s administration has done a poor job interacting with the public over the first year he’s been in office. It hasn’t helped that he’s repeated the same mistakes that plagued his last term.

These mistakes include imposing restrictions on how I interact with Department of Public Works employees.

I believe his administration really needs to reevaluate how public inquiries, and dissemination of information is handled. He promised to run Hawaii County in more transparent, and honest, manner. I have yet to see his administration fulfill latter campaign promise. Transparency in County government has actually taken two steps back from the previous administration it seems like.

The first step in addressing this issue is doing a better job acknowledging and responding to public feedback. This could done by leveraging social media, blogs, newspapers, etc, to get the word out to his constituents.

For example, the mayor of Maui has an Ask The Mayor column in the Maui newspapers, which posts frequent questions posed by the public to his office.

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