Legislature ends session with winners and losers

This 2015 edition of the state Legislature is providing both winners and losers for Hawaii’s political class.

For the Legislature’s leaders, the 60-day session is a chance to advance their issues, and House Speaker Joe Souki, the 82-year-old Maui Democrat, showed why he is in full control.

Three of his big issues — reforming medical marijuana laws, supporting the Honolulu rail project with more tax money and bringing stability to the Maui hospital crisis — all passed.

Both House and Senate members are quietly saying that Souki drove all three hard and is a major reason they passed.

Leadership can also be an opportunity to fail, and ousted Senate President Donna Mercado Kim, a Kalihi Democrat with 34 years of elective experience, was a loser as her fellow Democrats voted to replace her as president on Tuesday.

Kim’s major fault, according to anonymous senators, was her insistence on inserting herself in Senate committees run by other chairpeople.

As much as the House is a political group that needs two hands on the reins and a few whip cracks to move along, the Senate mostly marvels at its own independence and likes to function like a gathering of princes and princesses. Micromanagers need not apply.

Kim sitting in on committee meetings and commenting was never welcome and she paid the price.

If there was close to unanimous agreement on a loser this session, it would be Big Island Democrat Sen. Josh Green, who has capitalized on his professional background as an emergency room physician to become the Legislature’s medical resource and policy adviser.

His intransigence and refusal to compromise on the medical marijuana bill forced fellow senators to actually petition Kim to remove him from the conference committee, which she did. And when Kim lost the presidency, Green also was bounced as chairman of the Health Committee.

That is more than just a big political loss because Green has raised $91,000 from physicians and physicians groups since becoming chairman in 2011, and picked up another $27,000 from hospitals and medical groups.

Some political players ended the session with a glass half-full or half-empty, depending on where you sat at the bar.

Randy Perreira, the politically potent HGEA executive director, has bragged to public workers in past years that he could and would kill any bill that allowed the privatization of the Maui hospital. This year, while Perreira was unable to stop it, he was able to get a six-month job security guarantee for state workers and also have Gov. David Ige conduct the hospital sale negotiations.

Also sitting down to a half-empty, half-full glass is Ige himself. His determined support of development lobbyist Carleton Ching as chairman of the Department of Land and Natural Resources was a bust and he was forced to recall the nomination — but he nicely threaded the legislative needle with both the revised and improved Turtle Bay acquisition bill and by inserting his own lobbying into the medical marijuana bill.

Solidifying themselves as legislative heavyweights were Rep. Sylvia Luke and Sen. Jill Tokuda, chairwomen of the House and Senate money committees. Luke supported innovative ideas such as lump-sum budgeting for the University of Hawaii, while Tokuda sliced even more off an already lean state budget.

Finally, Rep. Della Au Belatti, a Makiki Democrat, an eight-year legislative veteran, is something of a rising star as she chaired the House Health Committee and successfully steered the complex and controversial medical marijuana bill through both a year of public hearings and then the rancorous conference committee.

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