As anyone knows who pays the monthly rent, fills up the car or hopes that the leaky roof can be just patched and not replaced, times of no money are different from times of plenty of money.

So here at the state Capitol, there are two views on Hawaii’s finances and economic future.

If you recall, in 2009 the state’s budget was unbalanced by $2.1 billion. After trimming the budget, in 2010 the budget was another $1.2 billion off.

In 2011, because the Council on Revenues said the economy was still tanking, the budget was $1.3 billion off.

Those were the times of no money.

Back then, the union for the University of Hawaii professors still scored with a new contract that temporarily cut salaries by 6.6 percent, which was restored in 2011 with an included pay raise. Their pay was then raised 3 percent in 2013 and another 3 percent in 2014. This was agreed to back when other unions were just taking pay cuts.

So it was understandable that the Legislature’s 2011 conference committee on the budget wrote that it "believes the negotiated collective bargaining agreement may be overly generous."

This next part is important. The committee said, "The university is fully responsible for funding these costs," and that, "The University of Hawaii should not request that cost items associated with its six-year collective bargaining contract with UHPA be supported by general funds (money from taxes)."

The UH planned to get the money both for the pay raises and the money restored in 2011 by raising student tuition.

At the same time, UH and the Legislature discovered that UH had ignored maintenance for decades and needed more than $400 million in repairs.

So UH needed money, not just to pay the professors but also for habitable classrooms.

So this year, the Legislature did an Olympic-quality back flip, saying to UH: Don’t raise tuition to pay for salaries; the state will give UH the money for salaries.

Interim UH President David Lassner declared the funding flip-flop "an important cornerstone for supporting the financial sustainability of the University of Hawaii system and enabling us to provide the 21st century facilities for learning our students need and deserve.

"We consider this item to be our highest funding priority," Lassner said in testimony.

Now this year we shifted into a time with money, and it was time to spare the students another tuition increase.

But the Legislature’s "times are fat" generosity was matched by the UH’s quick move to ask for not only the money for the increased salaries $19 million but also the one-time payment of $14 million that went to restoring salaries.

Rep. Isaac Choy, the Manoa Democrat who chairs the Higher Education Committee, caught it and tried to block the $14 million.

"The $14 million was for salary restorations that have already been paid to faculty members and lecturers with tuition dollars," Choy wrote in a committee report.

This is not a collective bargaining cost; it is a request for reimbursement, Choy noted.

But Gov. Neil Abercrombie is supporting the $14 million gift to UH and the leaders of the House and Senate money committees appear to be calling the $14 million a collective bargaining cost item, while also saying that because UH says it will use the money for campus repairs, it is all good.

Finally, to see how times change, now that the state is running a surplus, Sen. Clayton Hee, chairman of the Judiciary and Labor Committee that approved the deal, noted in his report that the UH professors’ salary increase, called "overly generous" in 2011, are now deemed to be "modest."

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