Legislative loose ends

Even the most attentive political junkies can miss things at the state Capitol. A lot of things.

The big, sweeping policy debates by the Hawaii Legislature get a lot of attention, and most people are aware of them. The Public Land Development Corp. has been repealed. There are no big changes in either the tax code or the minimum wage. There is more help for poor families short on preschool tuition but no major preschool initiative. Not yet, anyway.

However, whatever happened to the lesser PLDC issue: the push to retain the agency’s employees elsewhere? And what’s this about a flight-training school in Hilo?

Finally, wasn’t that proposed program to protect the state’s watershed supposed to be funded by the plastic bag fee? The bag bill died, but the watershed program … didn’t?

Here’s a look at just a few Capitol endgames that you may have missed.

REVIEWING ‘GUT AND REPLACE’

One of the mechanisms that produces 11th-hour legislative surprises, known informally but widely as "gut and replace," is going to get a little poking and prodding over the interim between sessions by at least one of the houses in the Capitol that uses it.

That word comes from Senate President Donna Mercado Kim, who will convene a leadership committee in the coming months to more tightly regulate how it’s done. She will join in the panel along with Sens. Ronald Kouchi, Jill Tokuda and Les Ihara, the Senate vice president, majority whip and majority policy leader, respectively.

"Gut and replace" refers to the lawmaking practice of carving out the contents of one measure and replacing it entirely with the language of another. It happens in both houses but it was a big issue this session primarily in the Senate. Indications from the House are that no similar review is planned.

But in the Senate this year it became an issue, used in the course of the Public Land Development Corp. legislation and when a geothermal bill was tacked on to an unrelated measure.

Most commonly it’s been used after bills cross over from the other chamber, Kim said, to substitute a competing measure.

Sometimes, though, the substitute language is unrelated to the gutted bill, a tactic used to keep alive a proposal that otherwise would be off the table.

Currently, legislative leadership issues guidelines on the practice in the form of a memorandum each session, she said, but some of them have been misunderstood or, in any case, missed. For example, she said, legislators are supposed to send in proposed drafts and the bill is supposed to get a referral to any other appropriate committees.

For clarity’s sake, she said, it may be best for any guidelines to be formally enshrined in Senate rules so there is less likely to be anything falling through cracks.