Eye on Hawaii - Akamai Hawai`i
Honolulu symphony bankruptcy saga
The long Honolulu symphony bankruptcy saga entered another, hopefully final phase on December 13th when the Honolulu Symphony Society (HSS) Board of Directors requested the court to place Hawaii's besieged 110-year-old orchestra into Chapter 7 bankruptcy (liquidation). Federal Judge Robert Faris confirmed the expected request. Faris said in open court, "this entity has to stop" and instead of giving the Society until the end of December as they had asked, he made the order effective as of that day and that moment. Amen! This is the first positive news to come out on the matter and I'll get to that part in a moment.
Judge Faris had been very professional during the year since the Honolulu Symphony declared bankruptcy and stopped holding concerts -- but it was clear to anyone watching that he had, early on, grown weary of the vacuous testimony routinely delivered by Ms. Majken Mechling -- the most recent in a long series of unqualified executive directors of the Honolulu Symphony.
What the fiscally (and morally) bankrupt HSS Board might have been thinking when they hired yet another ED with zero experience in managing a symphony orchestra -- in the very midst of a fiscal catastrophe and giving her a $175,000 annual salary -- is anyone's guess. Mechling's last gig was as ED of the American Diabetes Association. In Hawai`i and why anyone thought that qualified her for the HSS job is in itself worth pondering. But there she was in front of the bankruptcy court representing our 110-year old symphony orchestra -- overdressed with too much clanking jewelry.
Sadly, the entire story of the loss of Hawaii's revered symphony orchestra reeks with the stench of a corrosive combination of elitism, favoritism, nepotism, the failure of perhaps otherwise good people to stand up and speak truth to power -- and just plain meanness. Hawai`i is a very small state with a little over 900 thousand of it's 1.36 million residents concentrated on the small island of Oahu. Once one subtracts the large 2nd-language immigrant population, the working poor and the very poor, it get lonely at the top of uber-affluent Waialae Iki and Kahala. Obviously some very nice people live there too -- but many of the boorish, bored board types and their handmaidens all hang together. In that social set, nobody criticizes anybody even in the face of such obviously bad decisions. I'll write more about this in the coming weeks, but I do want to leave you, dear reader, on my promised positive note. Now that the deed is finally done and the old HSS organization is pau, rumor has it that three separate groups have been meeting to discuss rebirthing the orchestra. One could be led to believe that the money is out there with 6.4 percent of Hawaii's households being classified as millionaires, but as one might imagine, the devil is always in the details.
Comments
Agree with AF. I could have run the organization into the ground for $175,000 per year. The attempts to maintain the symphony were an overall joke - like asking the musicians to take a 92% pay cut!
The symphony could use more good, common and hard-headed business sense and less of the matronly "let them eat cake" approach.
Too bad, CZ. This article is a welcome breath of fresh air. Mechling decided to become a public figure when she took on the ED position, so she's open game for commentary. Yes, the way she chooses to dress is fair game. She kept pulling in a hefty salary, while "running" an orchestra that was not putting on any concerts. What's that about? The woman deserves all the lampooning headed her way--- and her jewelry isn't the half of it!
This is one the the most disappointing of all the articles I have read about the demise of the Symphony Society. The utter arrogance of this type of blaming is a complete turnoff and is not helpful in any way.
Every ED before Ms. Mechling had experience running a symphony and because of them she inherited a nightmare of a poorly managed organization. That she could not get cooperation from the Union to assist in returning the organization to health should not reflect on her personal competence. Her prior experience (with American Diabetes, not American Lung) demonstrated that she could take a foundering chapter of a non-profit agency and bring it into a very strong and healthy chapter is a more accurate reflection of her skills. Talking about her clothing and jewelery is sexist and out of place.
You only display your own ignorance with this kind of article and you should be ashamed.
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