Classroom Heat

by Tom Yamachika, President, Tax Foundation Hawaii

“Stop the presses!”  The Hawaii State Tax Watch Doggie burst into the room. 

“What?”  I turned around and squinted at the Doggie.  “We don’t even have presses.  We do everything electronically these days.  Website.  Email.”

“But I just wanted to say that!”

“Okay, so what’s the big news you have that is worth stopping the presses?”

“The State Auditor came out with a new report about the Cool Schools initiative.”

“Oh, yes, about ten years ago Governor Ige kicked off an effort to get air conditioners into public school classrooms.  We wrote about that in 2020 and 2023.  At first, people in the community were more than willing to donate air conditioners to school classrooms.  But the ancient wiring in the classrooms couldn’t tolerate the electrical load, so lots of circuits were blown.”

“Then, the Department of Education folks figured that they could solve the problem by installing solar air conditioners.  But they conked out midway through the school day, and perhaps earlier if it were rainy or cloudy.  The units could only run four or five hours a day.”

“So, according to reporting at the time, the DOE spent more than $120 million, $130,000 per classroom, for air conditioning that didn’t work.  Then they rolled out a new program, the School Directed AC Program, to leave the installation and heat abatement work to the individual schools.  Is that what the Auditor found?”

“No.  The Auditor doesn’t really know what happened to that money.  Here’s what they said:

The objectives of this follow-up effort were seemingly straightforward: Report on how DOE expended $100 million that was appropriated through Act 47, SLH 2016, for the Cool Classrooms Initiative; describe DOE’s process to air condition classrooms under the School Directed AC program.

They were not, far from it.

For both follow-up efforts, we found that DOE could not provide straightforward answers to our seemingly straightforward questions.  As previously mentioned, because the department provided us with inconsistent, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory information, the total cost and the breakdown of the amounts expended under the Cool Classrooms Initiative that we report are estimates, the best achievable accounting – by us, not DOE – of the amounts DOE spent.  Paradoxically, the more information that we were able to gather from DOE and its contractors, the less clarity there was about how much was spent, where it was spent, and what it was spent on.

Similarly, at the start of our follow-up of the School Directed AC program, we made what we thought was a simple request:  Please provide us with a list of schools that have participated in the School Directed AC program.  DOE, however, was never able to provide us with such a list or other basic details about the program, such as its budget.  We did learn that DOE had limited participation in and knowledge of the program.

At the end of our fieldwork, the present and the future of DOE’s heat abatement efforts were unclear.  Has the School Directed AC program been officially rescinded?  If so, what policy replaces it?  We don’t know the answers to those questions, and at the time, it didn’t appear DOE knew either.”

“You know, Doggie, this is very concerning to me.  Now I can see that people might be a little sloppy with their own record keeping.  It’s their own money.  They might be called on it later, in a tax audit or such, but only they bear the consequences of their action, or inaction.”

“Even businesses are supposed to keep bookkeeping records so they can figure out what they spent money on, how much was spent, and where they spent it.  But the Auditor is saying that we taxpayers gave the DOE more than $100 million of public money and they can only guess as to what happened to it.”

“The current folks at DOE are, by and large, saying that the problems happened before their watch and they shut down the School Directed AC program.  But has the problem been solved?  Doggie, do you want to go to school for a while to check it out?”

“No thanks!  I like hot dogs, but not when one of them is me.”