Office of Information Practices

U Memo 25-19
May 16, 2025
Request for Recording No Longer Maintained

Requester asked whether the Aloha Stadium Authority Board (Authority) properly denied his request for recordings of a presentation made in executive session.  OIP found that the Authority no longer maintained a recording of the executive session that included the presentation Requester was seeking access to, and OIP therefore concluded that the Authority could not be required under the UIPA to produce records it no longer maintained.  See, e.g., OIP Op. Ltr. No. F25-03 at 3 (noting that “an agency’s disclosure obligation applies only to those records it actually maintains”).  Because it is improper for an agency to destroy a record that is subject to a pending UIPA request or appeal, the Authority should have taken measures to preserve both the audio recording and the Zoom recording of the meeting at which the presentation was made.  Nonetheless, because the Authority was in the middle of transferring all its operations to a new agency during the relevant period, and given the operational challenges and general confusion that such a move entails, OIP stopped short of finding bad faith by the Authority in failing to preserve the recordings before their scheduled destruction.

Since the Authority had previously made public the written minutes of the executive session that included the presentation Requester was seeking a recording of, OIP did not need to reach the question of whether the Authority was required to disclose them in the absence of any recordings of the Presentation.  OIP noted that the authorized purposes for holding an executive session under part I of chapter 92, HRS (the Sunshine Law), do not include consideration of matters relating to an ongoing procurement, and it was not clear that the Authority had a proper basis for hearing the Presentation in executive session.  See HRS § 92-5(a) (2012) (listing authorized purposes to hold an executive session).