Hawaii state legislators looking to tighten enforcement of quarantine orders for arriving passengers, especially visitors, were told Friday that tourism and airport officials are making improvements to the verification and tracking process.

The Hawaii Tourism Authority, which along with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau has been assisting the state Airports Division with airport screening, said it is adding extra verification steps to confirm information from arriving passengers. HTA also is working with other state agencies to come up with a plan to randomly track residents.

HTA Chief Administrative Officer Keith Regan told Hawaii senators at a COVID-19 hearing Friday that airport screeners will start testing passenger cell phones at the airport to ensure the phone numbers are good. Tourism workers have been calling visitors up to three times during their stay to follow up. Visitors who don’t respond to any of the three calls get referred to county law enforcement agencies. Hotels may also report visitors for noncompliance.

Regan said screeners also will start searching property tax records to verify that passengers have provided actual addresses where they are supposed to be staying. The new steps are expected to prevent noncompliant visitors from slipping through the cracks.

HTA and HVCB staff members have been calling hotels to alert them that they have visitors arriving who must quarantine. However, they didn’t have a program in place to provide the same level of scrutiny for the residential addresses they provided or even to verify that visitors had put down a real address.

These moves are only the latest attempts to close loopholes in the mandatory 14-day self-quarantine orders, which began March 26 for trans-Pacific passengers and April 1 for interisland travelers.

Aarona Browning-Lopez, 37, was arrested Thursday for allegedly violating emergency rules in place because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Browning-Lopez was allowed into Hawaii despite listing her address as a post office box. She was sent back to Los Angeles on Friday through an HTA-funded COVID-19 flight assistance program run by the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii.

Since the program started last week, VASH has helped return 16 visitors to their homes.

HTA President and CEO Chris Tatum said, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, the focus of HTA has been to move 250,000 visitors out of the state. We went from 30,000 a day to less than 130 a day average. We’ve closed 129 hotels. The folks that are still coming here, just so it’s clear to you, I don’t want them coming here … ; it’s not a good experience. I don’t want them bringing the challenges or the virus or putting any more pressure on our health system.”

The count of trans-Pacific passengers coming to Hawaii was greatly reduced Thursday, but about a third were visitors.

HTA reported Friday that 386 trans-Pacific passengers arrived Thursday, including 110 visitors and 157 residents. The count included 54 airline crew members, 20 transit passengers who are catching other flights and 44 intended new residents for Oahu and one for Kona.

Regan said adding resident checks could occur as soon as more workers are trained. Since residents are the largest group of daily passengers, Regan envisions limited calls to random samples.

The Senate committee praised the HTA for working to address its public safety concerns. However, lawmakers did take the HTA and the state Airports Division to task for paying $30 an hour to furloughed badged workers from Roberts Hawaii to assist in the airport screening rather than deploying idled state employees.

State Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D-Kalihi Valley-­Moanalua-Halawa,) asked, “Why are we paying them when we have state workers on the payroll who are not working?”

Regan said HTA isn’t ­wedded to using contractors and could explore other arrangements.