Wide range of bills advance, stall at mid-point of Hawaii legislative session

State lawmakers halfway through the 60-day legislative session are poised to grant raises to public worker union members and infuse millions of dollars to help Native Hawaiians afford homes on their ancestral lands.

The session began with the introduction of 2,505 bills, many designed to do more to help working families.

But some bills were quickly spiked and others moved along immediately by legislators amid federal corruption charges by two of their own admitting to accepting bribes from a wastewater executive in exchange for introducing and managing legislation.

Following guilty pleas in February by former Sen. J. Kalani English and former Rep. Ty J.K. Cullen, a joint hearing of the House Committees on Government Reform and Legislative Management almost immediately moved out House Bill 1475, which mandates ethics training for new elected officials and state hires within 90 days of employment and again every four years.

The committees also kept alive bills designed to improve government transparency, including HB 2069, which outlines how lawmakers and state employees report and deal with gifts from foreign officials, federal officers or officials from other states.

They also killed HB 1871 and Senate Bill 2714, which would have exempted legislators and state employees from state Code of Ethics provisions banning the acceptance of “foreign protocol gifts, gifts of aloha, invitations to certain events and meals, under certain conditions.”

Also dead is HB 1874, which would have allowed state boards to “conduct up to one retreat in private per calendar year; provided that the board does not vote on any matter, make decisions, or deliberate toward a decision on any matter currently pending before the board or likely to arise before the board.”

One high-priority goal at the Legislature this year is to incrementally raise Hawaii’s minimum wage, though House members and senators started out with vastly different approaches that recently have come into closer alignment.

Senators favor taking the existing $10.10 hourly minimum wage to $18 by 2026 after an initial increase to $12 on Oct. 1 and a second step to $15 on Jan. 1, 2024. A measure to do so, SB 2018, was quickly passed by senators in January on a 24-1 vote.

The approach in the House was more gradual and complex.

HB 2510 started out proposing tweaks to several tax credits along with a higher tip credit and eight annual increases for the hourly minimum starting next year to reach $18 in 2030.

On Tuesday, House members voted 42-8 to send the Senate an amended version that abandoned most tax credit changes and would take the minimum wage to $18 in 2028 in six annual steps while maintaining a higher tip credit that allows some employees who receive tips to be paid less than the minimum wage.

Gov. David Ige also proposed a $100 tax rebate or credit for every taxpayer and their dependents, but the plan seems to be going nowhere.

The governor proposed the giveback during his State of the State speech Jan. 24 and included its estimated $110 million cost in his proposed state budget as tax revenues continue to grow following the pandemic.

However, a pair of bills to deliver the rebates, which would give a family of four $400, failed to pass out of the House or Senate after scant discussion.

The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism has forecast that tourism arrivals will rebound faster than expected and tie Hawaii’s 2019 pre-COVID-19 number of 10.4 million in 2025. House and Senate leaders proposed a series of bills to charge tourism-related fees to offset their impacts, but only one significant bill, the latest version of SB 3192, remains alive.

It would create “a visitor impact fee program” to collect a fee to visit a state park, beach, state-owned forest, hiking trail or other state-owned natural area.

Other tourism fees appear dead, perhaps most notably separate Senate and House bills that would impose a new “climate change mitigation impact fee” on every visitor who rents or leases a vehicle, or rides a tour bus or shuttle.

HAWAII LAWMAKERS are considering making a historic appropriation to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands — $600 million — to help the agency develop homestead lots for several thousand beneficiaries.

The agency has around 28,700 applicants on a wait list for homestead lots.

DHHL for decades has not been able to keep up with demand for homesteads available to beneficiaries, who receive 99-year land leases for $1 a year but have to pay for or build their own homes.

With a $600 million capital infusion, DHHL anticipates being able to deliver 2,910 homestead lots on Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Hawaii island and Kauai by 2028 and have $112 million left over to be used to provide cash assistance to beneficiaries. This cash assistance could be used by beneficiaries on the wait list who are willing to relinquish their claim in exchange for up to $100,000 if used to help buy a home that is not on DHHL land or even to pay down a mortgage on a home they own outside a DHHL subdivision.

Legislators also seem determined to limit a governor’s ability to issue emergency proclamations, especially following two years of COVID-19 emergency proclamations that expire March 25.

The latest versions of HB 1585 and SB 3089 would allow the Legislature to terminate a state of emergency, in part or in whole, by a two-thirds vote.

THIS YEAR the Legislature has been relatively busy in terms of how many bills lawmakers introduced for consideration.

The 2,505 bills introduced — 1,119 in the House and 1,386 in the Senate — represent a moderately higher total than the average for recent even-numbered years corresponding to the second year of the Legislature’s two-year terms, or biennium.

On average, the annual volume of bills introduced in even-numbered years going back to 2010 is 2,283.

Typically, fewer bills get introduced in the second year of the legislative biennium compared with the first year, and that holds true this year as there were 2,820 bills introduced last year.

Over the past decade or so, Hawaii lawmakers have passed about 250 bills annually, including an abnormally low 82 bills two years ago in a session curtailed by COVID-19.

The expectation this year for bills passing is in line with normal years, and lawmakers at the midpoint of this session have dramatically whittled down the number of bills that have crossed from either the House to the Senate, or vice versa.

As of a Thursday crossover deadline, 890 bills have made the cross — 353 that originated in the House and 537 that originated in the Senate.

Because of the biennium setup, bills crossing over this year include about 85 measures that were introduced last year.

For instance HB 426, which would allow University of Hawaii tuition waivers for dependent children of certain disabled, decorated and deceased military veterans, was introduced last year but didn’t receive any hearings until this year. Now, HB 426 has been passed by House members and awaits action in the Senate.

How major bills fared at th… by Honolulu Star-Advertiser