If the Hawaii Legislature had an official sport, it would have to be jujitsu.

The Legislature convenes for the 2014 session Wednesday, and for those wanting to understand the beast, it is best to understand the ancient Japanese self-defense tactics.

If you want to push something, what you need to do is get someone else to do the pulling.

Just like in jujitsu, what you want to do at the Legislature is use an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing it.

This year, like most years, it is all about the money. After a decade of cutting services to avoid a deficit, the state has a nice, fat $844 million surplus.

There is more than a little temptation on how to spend it. Hint: Much of it will go to public employees, either to fund their pay raises or to fund their retirement benefits and medical insurance coverage.

The rest of the surplus could find a home on Kauai, Maui, Oahu and Hawaii island, say the four county mayors.

The counties this year start off with the mayors asking for help from the state.

Wednesday afternoon, after the opening ceremonies at the state Capitol, the House and Senate budget committees will hold their first hearings on the counties’ plans.

Top of the list for the mayors will be HB 1606, introduced by the Council of Mayors. It would let the neighbor island counties raise their own general excise tax, up to 1 percentage point more, meaning that the tax you pay on Maui or Kauai could go from 4 percent to 5 percent.

The professed reason the mayors would want this is because the state has cut back payments to the counties. Remember that back when the Legislature didn’t have any money, one of the ways it got money was by not giving it to the counties.

The state allowed the GET to increase on Oahu to pay for the rail transit program, but the state also skimmed 10 percent of the collection to "administer the tax collection."

Of course that was nothing but a money grab by the state, but if most of it was going for the rail transit system, there was little complaint, except from the taxpayers.

Now the counties want the Oahu skim cut from 10 percent to 2 percent.

Of course, the big jujitsu moment is that the counties do not want to go through the agony of defending a tax increase. If you think property tax hearings are torture, just wait to see what it would be like if the counties forced a new tax increase on the voters.

County services are reduced across the board, with parks and roads suffering the most.

So the real push-pull that is going on is that counties simply want more money from the state, or at least a restoration of the old payment system.

Give the counties more money and you will see the tax increase push flipped off the mat.

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