Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi working with legal adviser on agency abuses

In response to the federal bribery charges of five Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting employees, Mayor Rick Blangiardi is working with Dana Viola, one of Honolulu’s new chief legal advisers, to curb abuses within the department.

Monday was Viola’s first day on the job.

“We met first thing this morning on what we’re going to do, what we’re going to institute and implement with respect to our self- monitoring on any kind of illegal activity and what we intend to do about it,” Blangiardi said.

He explained that when he came into office, he anticipated working on streamlining operations at DPP to be one of his largest challenges. However, after the Hawaii U.S. Attorney’s Office accused two current and three former DPP employees of soliciting thousands of dollars from people to advance building projects, Blangiardi is looking at more reforms.

“We looked at it from the standpoint of our base operations … what it was that we needed to do. We had the benefit of an audit that had been talked about … during the campaign by all candidates with respect to morale, turnover, lack of modernization, dysfunctional setup, etc.,” he said.

“The arrests last week shifted everything to a very different discussion. There is one thing to think about it from an operational standpoint, another thing to look at it from a criminal standpoint.”

Blangiardi was not yet ready to share specifics about what actions are being considered, but assured the public that he would fully report what specific policies the city would be adopting as soon as they were ready to be presented.

Two of the charged DPP employees, Jason Dadez and Kanani Padeken, along with William Wong, an architect charged with taking part and devising the pay-to-play scheme, are scheduled to appear in court Wednesday.