On September 25, plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the City & County of Honolulu that alleges corrupt Department of Planning and Permitting employees stymied development at Marconi Point filed a motion to compel the production of documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The parties have been fighting in U.S. District Court over whether the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting rightfully determined that a Special Management Area permit needed to be obtained, or at least applied for, before more development could continue within the roughly 100-acre project known as the Marconi Point Condominiums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Attorneys representing the project\u2019s developer Makai Ranch, LLC \u2014 as well as related entities Marconi Farms, LLC; MP Unit 21, LLC and RCA Trade Center Inc. \u2014 stated in a memorandum that their requests for production related to 1) documents related to the FBI\u2019s investigation of corruption within DPP, and 2) electronically stored information (ESI) and e-mail correspondence. (Within the last few years, five DPP employees have been sentenced to federal prison for bribery.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plaintiffs\u2019 original lawsuit alleged that the DPP had violated the Uniform Information Practices Act when it denied their requests for similar records. They sent their renewed request, as part of the lawsuit, on February 24.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The request for electronically stored information included all documents and information from 2005 to the present resulting from searches of \u201cany electronic device or service or site owned or controlled by Defendants, including but not limited to any computer, tablet, local area network, hard drive, back-up driver, server, portable device (such as a thumb-drive), cloud storage system, cellular telephone, website, e-mail account, or instant message account (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc.).\u201d The plaintiffs provided 77 initial proposed search terms \u2014 mostly names of unit owners or government officials combined with Makai Ranch, Marconi Point, Marconi, or SMA \u2014 with additional terms \u201cto be provided following review of initial production.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An April response from John Dubiel, deputy corporation counsel for the city, states that the city \u201cobjects to this request to the extent that it is vague, ambiguous, overly broad, compound, irrelevant, and seeks information that is not proportional to the needs of the case, and\/or to the extent that the information sought is unobtainable from some other source that is more convenient, less burdensome, or less expensive. The City further objects to this request to the extent that the information sought is protected from discovery by attorney-client privilege, and\/or work-product doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A declaration from plaintiff attorney Ross Uehara-Tilton counters that based on discussions with Dubiel, Uehara-Tilton believed that the city was refusing to provide the FBI-related documents because multiple city employees \u201cmay have independently transmitted documents directly to the FBI, and Defendants believed it would be too burdensome to search the records of individual employees to determine which records had been sent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The memorandum, which Uehara-Tilton signed, added that the city could and should identify the employees responsible for collecting and turning over records and ask them to search their records. \u201cDefendants could also easily conduct a search of their electronic records, cross-referencing, for example, the names of the FBI investigators assigned to the case (e.g., Special Agent Eli Miranda), or even the search term \u2018FBI.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Any of these efforts would at least be a start toward providing responsive documents, but Defendants have not made even a minimal attempt at producing a response,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regarding the electronically stored information, Uehara-Tilton stated that, as of the date of his filing, the city had produced 245 pages of e-mail correspondence that \u201cappear to consist of only e-mail correspondence among William Wong [an architect sentenced to federal prison for bribing DPP employees], Jason Dadez, Jocelyn Godoy, and Kanani Padeken, [convicted DPP employees] most of which is unrelated to the subject property, and which only appears to cover time periods between 2019 and 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To fulfill the plaintiffs\u2019 request, Uehara-Tilton stated that the city was relying on an outside technology vendor and, \u201caccording to Mr. Dubiel, the outside vendor was unable or unwilling to complete the search in a timely manner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Uehara-Tilton stated that after he suggested issuing a subpoena to the vendor, Dubiel informed him that the city was unwilling to disclose the vendor\u2019s name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCounsel understands that the ESI search parameters are extensive, and that it could reasonably take the Defendants some time to search and compile responsive documents. However, it has been over 5 months since the Defendants\u2019 written response, over 3 months since the parties\u2019 initial meet-and-confer regarding the Defendants\u2019 deficient production, and zero additional documents have been produced, and Defendants have refused to commit to any timeline for producing the responsive information,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
U.S. District Judge Wes Reber Porter ordered that the city\u2019s response or opposition must be filed by October 10, and any reply must be filed by October 24.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014Teresa Dawson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On September 25, plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the City & County of Honolulu that alleges corrupt Department of Planning and Permitting employees stymied development at Marconi Point filed a motion to compel the production of documents. The parties … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[529],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-16166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-october-2024","tag-teresa-dawson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}