Hawaii taxpayers will cough up $18M for state workers’ mistakes, misbehavior

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Hawaii taxpayers are on the hook for more than $18 million this year to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of people and companies.

Lawmakers, frustrated over repeated failures, did try to make some departments pay the cash themselves.

Altogether, the state Attorney General asked for nearly $19 million to settle claims and lawsuits over mistakes or misbehavior by government workers.

Senate Judiciary Chair Karl Rhoads has had to approve hundreds of settlements over the years.

“First of all, it’s just very frustrating, because it is taxpayers’ money, and there are significant amounts of money involved,” Rhoads said.

This year, Attorney General Anne Lopez ended up requesting payment of 40 claims, adding up to over $18 million.

HNN Investigates

The biggest settlements were both for neglect of repairs by the Department of Transportation.

The family of 21-year-old Joshua Banks will receive $3.9 million. Banks was killed instantly when he hit a guardrail on H-3 that had gone unrepaired for 18 months.

The family’s attorney, Ilana Waxman, said DOT regulations required the repair to begin within 72 hours.

“It’s a very, very tragic accident, but one that could have been prevented if the state had been doing its job and repairing the guardrail properly,” she said.

Waxman said after the accident, DOT did improve its process for expediting guardrail repairs.

The second largest settlement — $2.95 million — was for allowing a tree root to buckle and crack the road on a popular Maui bike route.

Avid bicyclist David Lawrence fell and was disabled for life, according to his attorney Michael Cruise.

“Their failure is that they didn’t do anything,” he said. “This condition appears for a number of years and for whatever reason, it just was never fixed.”

Cruise said in researching the accident, the road damage was apparent on Google Earth, but still missed by roving maintenance crews.

Rhoads said he is bothered most by repeated issues.

“It does seem like there’s a pattern with transportation and corrections that we just get claims over and over and over again,” he said.

So Rhoads’ committee sent a message about that designed to sting the departments pocketbooks.

Among the lawsuits against the prison system was a case of guards sexually assaulting inmates at the women’s facility. It led to a settlement of $2 million, but the Judiciary Committee voted to have the Department of Public Safety pay $800,000 of that out of its own budget.

In the case of DLNR Conservation Enforcement Officer Ethan Ferguson, who raped a girl at a state park, the committee said of the $1.25 million settlement, $500,000 should come out of the DLNR and Department of Human Resources budgets.

“The message obviously is please don’t get any more of these claims — do what it takes to stop getting them,” Rhoads said.

After the departments complained that they would have to cut services to pay the legal settlements and the attorney general testified that “the Department has a longstanding policy of advising agencies as to how to avoid claims,” lawmakers decided not to penalize the departments.

The bill funding claims against the state is in conference committee, but approval is certain.

Failing to fund the settlements would send many of the cases back to court, potentially costing taxpayers even more.

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