Key bills still need deeper scrutiny

The major weeding process is over at the state Legislature, and now House and Senate members begin hashing out differences on myriad issues — water rights, installing air conditioning at public schools, the purchase of 8,000 acres of Dole Food Co. land for farming, among them. In this final phase of the session, the devil — or angel — is in the details.

For now, controversial proposals such as increasing the state gasoline and vehicle weight taxes to help fund transportation projects have rightly fallen to the wayside. Now lawmakers must intently weigh budget appropriations and other bills still alive.

For instance, lawmakers should eye skeptically the proposal to float bonds to borrow $107 million to buy about 8,000 acres of former sugar and pineapple lands between Central Oahu and the North Shore. Of those lands, 4,454 acres are farmable, an Agribusiness Development Corp. report said.

The transaction raises serious questions, including whether the state should spend that amount now to land-bank for future agriculture. The intent of the proposal is admirable — providing long-term leases to farmers for food production — but the state likely will never recover that money. Lawmakers also will need to outline the true cost of the land, including interest, that would be passed on to taxpayers.

Other noteworthy issues under consideration before the session’s May 5 adjournment:

>> House Bill 2501, which would have allowed Alexander &Baldwin to retain its rights to water flowing through dozens of streams and tributaries in East Maui while challenges to its water permits are resolved by the courts and other state entities. Protesters called for the Senate to kill the bill, which the Senate Ways and Means Committee amended last week to exclude A&B from being covered by the measure. The legality of such an exclusion is questionable, and requires further vetting.

>> House Bill 1850, which allows companies to act as tax collection agents for vacation rentals, benefited from an 11th-hour amendment that prevents tax scofflaws and individual unit owners from hiding operations behind an Airbnb license. Broker tax collection agents must ensure that the transient accommodation is in compliance with all pertinent state and county land use laws, which would prevent owners of illegal vacation rentals from using agents such as Airbnb.

>> Senate Bill 2987, which would reduce Honolulu’s share of the transient accommodations tax (TAT), or hotel room tax, and increase the proportionate share of the tax that goes to the other counties, needs reexamining. The formula used to divvy up the TAT revenues does need refiguring, but the method proposed in SB 2987 has not been studied thoroughly. Lawmakers will need to revisit its TAT working group recommendations that they dismissed earlier this year, seemingly because it proposed increasing the counties’ share, thus reducing the state’s.

>> The $100 million that Gov. David Ige proposed for installing air conditioning in overheated public school classrooms. A budget appropriation for the air conditioning is still alive, while the measure to pay for the project through a loan from the state’s Green Energy Market Securitization (GEMS) fund also has legs. A straight appropriation is preferable because the interest on the loan would fall on taxpayers.

>> The $3 million bailout of Wahiawa General Hospital has generated a groundswell of support, and lawmakers will need to consider the severe ramifications of not funding the medical center. The hospital’s projected closure within six to nine months without emergency funding would be a huge loss to residents from the North Shore to Mililani, who would be forced to seek emergency treatment as far as Ewa Beach or Pearl City. The hospital, though, must restrategize its business model for the future.

On a bad-government note: Legislators on the House floor Tuesday approved a blank bill with no content; its only vague reference was to geothermal power and it was advanced, over some objections, to conference committee negotiations. This short-form bill maneuver — “unusual,” conceded House Finance Chairwoman Sylvia Luke — locks out direct public input on the proposed law to be discussed, since conference committee is where language will be inserted in the blank bill but public testimony is not allowed.

Open-government advocates warn yearly about “gut and replace” tactics at this stage of the session, but it is unconscionable for legislators to forward a blank bill on the contentious issue of geothermal power with no hint of content or prior public input. This one bears particular scrutiny.