Trustees of the Kamehameha Schools received much deserved applause last month when they rejected a court-approved pay increase plan and instead took a 10 percent pay cut.

After all, it's the prudent thing to do in face of the trust’s weakened financial condition, members of the Kamehameha Schools ohana have said.

But others, including former Gov. Ben Cayetano believe the way trustee pay is set is still out of whack and opens the trust to the type of abuses that haunted the estate during the late 1990s.

Previously, trustee pay was based on a formula set by law which entitled them to up to 2 percent of the estate’s annual gross. That resulted in $1 million-a-year trustee pay checks that nearly got the trust's tax-exempt status revoked by the Internal Revenue Service.

Now, trustee pay is supposed to be set at reasonable levels. Every several years, a Probate Court-appointed panel is supposed to come up with recommendations on what those reasonable levels are.

In 2004, the panel approved raising trustees maximum pay by more than 69 percent, generating much criticism among the schools’ ohana and the state Attorney General.

Probate Judge Colleen Hirai approved that  increase but trustees turned it down.

Last year, the panel approved a similar plan before trustees decided to take  their pay cut. The increase was again opposed by some members of the Kamehameha ohana as well as by the Attorney General’s office.

According to Cayetano, the lack of a more permanent trustee compensation schedule exposes the trust to future controversies.

In the past, the lucrative trustee compensation served as the “root cause for the ethical and political problems” that plagued the estate during the 1980s and 1990s, Cayetano wrote in his recently published memoir “Ben.”

It not only led to corrupted trust but it also tarnished the state Legislature and the state judiciary.

No doubt, the ethical characters of current Trustees Nainoa Thompson, Douglas Ing, Robert Kihune, Diane Plotts and Corbett Kalama are unquestioned. All are dedicated to the trust’s mission of educating native Hawaiian children.

But in approving steep pay raises for the trustees, Cayetano see a potential for history repeating itself:

“One could only wonder whether the panel, the probate judge and the new trustees had learned any lessons from the Bishop Estate controversy,” he wrote.

“The failure of the new trustees to ‘clean house’ left me wondering whether the problems that vexed the old trustees and the Bishop Estate would emerge again one day when the passing of time had blurred the reasons the reforms were made in the first place.”