WASHINGTON — Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle spent two weeks in June 2011 in Taiwan and China on a business trip that included visits to a museum and a national park, an appearance at the Shanghai Film Festival and meetings with government officials and airline executives.

The trip stirred controversy earlier this year when the Honolulu Ethics Commission determined that it was wrong for the mayor’s wife to join Carlisle using money that was gifted to the city for the trip.

While Carlisle dismissed the commission’s recommendation that he reimburse the city $3,300 for his wife’s travel, a Civil Beat review finds that other jurisdictions have deemed similar scenarios unlawful.

Honolulu’s City Council approved¹ the mayor’s request to accept a gift² worth $16,500 to cover airfaire, meals and lodging for a group of five delegates. The group included Carlisle, his wife Judy, City Council member Stanley Chang, an international relations staffer with the city and Honolulu’s director of Economic Development.

In a Feb. 21 letter to the City Council, Carlisle asked council members to formally determine the “public purpose” in his wife traveling with him last June. He also asked council members to explicitly explain such a purpose when approving gifts of travel to spouses of city employees in the future.

When the Honoulu Ethics Commission opined that Carlisle should reimburse the city for the amount spent on his wife, Carlisle said in a statement that he “respectfully disagree(d)” with the idea that a spouse’s travel might not serve a public purpose. Carlisle had asked the commission about whether it would be lawful for his wife to accept the travel gift before the trip, but the opinion was not issued until months later.

The commission found that Carlisle should reimburse the city because once a gift is accepted by the council, it becomes a public resource that may “only be expended for government purposes.” But the mayor said that his wife accepted the gift as a matter of respect to the donors. Honolulu Director of Economic Development Ann Chung told the commission that the mayor’s wife is considered an “extension of the mayor” in some Asian countries, according to the ethics opinion.

The issue of whether taxpayers should foot the bill for officials’ spouses travel comes up regularly in government.

In its opinion, the Honolulu Ethics Commission provided additional examples of jurisdictions that banned using public funds for spouse’s travel including Texas and New York.

Ohio’s ethics code bans the spouses of state employees from accepting “travel expenses from a party that is interested in matters before, regulated by, or doing or seeking to do business with the department with which the public employee serves.”

But in Miami taxpayers chipped in at least $86,500 on travel for officials’ spouses and girlfriends to attend a Switzerland art festival since 2005, according to The Miami Herald.

“To the citizen out there, your wife getting to go to Basel, Switzerland, for a week is a junket,” the FIU Business News quoted a Miami ethics commission advocate as having said at the time. Miami hosts the sister event to the globally-renowned Art Basel.

On the federal level, officials and their spouses are allowed to accept gifts of travel by foreign governments only in some cases. In other instances, accepting expenses for spouses is permitted but there are limitations.

One example that the U.S. House Committee on Ethics gives is a trip to China paid for by the Chinese Agricultural Ministry. In this example, members of the House Agriculture Committee can accept the trip, and bring their spouses, but they are not permitted to accept expenses for airfare to and from China.

The Honolulu Ethics Commission acknowledged in its opinion that federal law sometimes permits spouses to accept gifts of travel, but said that unlike the federal law, there is “no city law that would provide a similar exception to the city’s ethics laws for a city official’s spouse to accept a gift for travel from a foreign government.”