Legislature’s hottest topics get left on the back burner

The 2013 Legislature opened with interesting possibilities.

The cooks were taste-testing some interesting recipes. This was going to be the duck confit, not steak and potatoes, session.

House Speaker Joe Souki had just reclaimed his leadership position after being deposed 14 years ago. He was toppled back then by Rep. Calvin Say and this year, Souki was able to return the favor with an interesting stew of dissident Democrats and seven House Republicans.

Rumored to be on the stove were all the hot dishes: casino gambling, marijuana legalization, mail-in voting and even an income tax cut.

The Senate also had a new old hand in the kitchen, as Sen. Donna Mercado Kim — always a power behind the scenes — was stepping up from vice president to president after Maui’s Shan Tsutsui went from Senate president to lieutenant governor.

If the ordering were left to them, Souki and Kim most likely would have picked some form of legalized gambling from the menu, but there were never enough votes in both chambers and the issue stayed in the fridge.

There was no spice left for some of the other hot dishes, such as marijuana legalization and mail-in voting. They were both watered down to just a potential decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana and perhaps some changes to voter registration laws. If you were looking at a rich, flourless chocolate cake and only got a day-old cupcake, who wouldn’t be disappointed?

Still this year’s Legislature did a surprisingly good job with some of the left-overs.

Putting money toward the unfunded liabilities of the state pension system and public employees insurance may be the mac-and-cheese of the legislative world: filling, but boring. For nearly a decade, lawmakers have been either spending on prime beef or ordering everyone on a diet and ignoring any substantive work on the billions in unfunded liabilities.

This year, the first meeting of the budget conference committee served up the real deal and voted to start an orderly process of putting more than $100 million a year in the unfunded liability pot.

This was not, however, an "eat your vegetables" session, as nearly all of the tax increases or new fees requested by Gov. Neil Abercrombie, such as the tax on soda, were also killed.

Also there will not be any more servings of the Public Land Development Corp. Environmentalists and citizen groups who said they couldn’t stomach the PLDC appear to have won as a repeal of that bill is heading for a final vote this week.

The big question then is, who is still hungry? The answer is the state’s public workers who, after five years on the low-carbo regime of staff cuts, unfilled vacancies and then pay cuts, are now looking for some prime rib.

The teachers appear headed for ratification of a contract that restores past pay cuts and dishes out both pay raises and steps up the pay-scale ladder. The question will be exactly how big is the appetite of the state’s largest union, the Hawaii Government Employees Association.

Extra big servings for the HGEA could mean everything else goes on the back burner next year.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.