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The City & County of Honolulu loses data for more than 66,000 people and it’s hard not to compare it to the state’s colossal missile alert mistake. Read more

The City & County of Honolulu loses data for more than 66,000 people and it’s hard not to compare it to the state’s colossal missile alert mistake.

I mean, of course the two are not at all the same. The fake missile alert plunged the entire state into the chaos and horror of thinking death was imminent. The city’s lost data will inconvenience some people trying to get their driver’s license replaced or renewed. Not much of a comparison.

But the connective theme is, of course, local government screwing up something basic in a big way. Taxpayers don’t control how every dollar is spent. We just hand over the money and hope-hope-hope the folks on the other end know what they’re doing.

Most people have misunderstood directions or pushed the wrong button or forgotten their Twitter password, but with very little impact to the larger community. Likewise, many people know what it’s like to have a server crash or to lose all the data on their phone. It can be devastating and frustrating, but that’s just us, at home, with our own devastation and frustration and ineptitude. It’s very different when a company is paid by local government to keep safe thousands of personal documents — the very same documents we’re always told to keep safe from identity thieves —and they lose it all in a crash that nobody finds out about for six months.

City officials have assured this was not a security breach. City spokesman Andrew Perreira says there is zero risk of identity theft.

And Gov. David Ige said, hours after the missile scare, before anyone really knew what even happened, that it would not happen again.

So that’s reassuring.

Looking at both incidents side by side, the contrast is in how the state handled its snafu versus how the city dealt with its.

The city held a news conference, took questions, brought out the principals from both the city and the contracted vendor to provide answers and, notably, apologized and truly seemed apologetic. The tone was very different in Ige and Vern Miyagi’s first news conference: defensive and not very contrite. They seemed ticked off that anyone would question their competence or be upset by the false alarm. Instead, there was a lecture about how the onus is on us, the taxpaying public, to get our heads out of the sand and learn proper nuclear-attack preparedness. Like somehow it was our fault for being scared.

Jokes about our dopey local government come too easily these days, but at least the city came right out and owned up to the problem, said they were sorry and looked like they meant it.

In a perfect world, no one makes mistakes, servers never crash and everyone who works for the government knows what’s what. In a perfect world, there are no missiles to fear. But in the real world, stuff happens and people are measured by what they do next to fix the problem and regain trust.