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The window is closing for Gov. David Ige to indicate which bills he intends to veto this year, and as the Monday deadline nears many more bills have become law.
Ige as of Friday had signed 115 bills passed by the Legislature in 2022.
Some of the new laws were enacted at publicized bill-signing ceremonies in recent weeks, though most were added to state statutes with little or no fanfare.
June 17 was the busiest day so far this year for the governor adding his signature to bills, as he created 74 acts on that day alone.
New laws created on June 17 include measures to increase penalties for motor vehicle theft, catalytic converter theft, using an electric gun in the course of committing theft and for illegal fireworks violations. Bills to do these things, respectively, became Act 54, 88, 51 and 104.
Other new acts born that same day expand Hawaii’s Intermediate Court of Appeals with an additional judge, Act 90, and broaden the power of the state Department of Taxation to pursue tax law violations, Act 79.
The 115 new laws enacted so far this year are from 343 measures passed by legislators out of 2,505 bills introduced along with several dozen sustained from last year under the Legislature’s two-year term, or biennium.
On average, about 250 bills annually have become law during the past decade or so, or roughly 1 in 10 bills introduced in the same year.
This year, the number of new laws is expected to be well above average given that more bills were passed by lawmakers who had over $2 billion in unexpected revenue to work with largely due to a recovering state economy and injections of COVID-19-related federal aid.
It’s uncertain whether Ige, who is in the last year of his eight-year run as governor, also may veto more bills this year than he has in many of the prior seven years.
“It’s hard to predict,” said Colin Moore, director of the Public Policy Center at the University of Hawaii.
Since 2015, Ige has vetoed a low of eight bills four times — in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 — in contrast with a high of 26 bills last year, of which six ultimately became law after veto overrides were made by super-majority votes in the House and Senate.
The spike in vetoes last year was driven partly by budget and agency funding measures affected by state revenues that improved while the Legislature was in session and from federal aid spending guidance delivered after the session ended.
“The state’s economic position has significantly brightened since the beginning of the legislative session, and most definitely since the Legislature concluded its work,” Ige said last year, explaining his veto intent list. “Because of this we definitely no longer need some of the extraordinary revenue measures that have been proposed.”
Moore said Ige probably doesn’t have any extra motive to veto bills in his lame-duck year in office, as he has not shown shyness in vetoing bills in prior years and hasn’t previously had a great relationship with powerful fellow Democrats in the Legislature to protect.
One unusual circumstance this year, in Moore’s view, is high-profile public campaigning for Ige to veto a couple of bills.
“Public rallies to encourage a governor to veto a bill — you just don’t see that very often,” Moore said, adding that most pleas for vetoes are expressed privately.
One bill that recently generated a public appeal for a veto would eliminate the ability for judges to require that people arrested for many lower-level nonviolent offenses post cash bail to get out of jail before their case is adjudicated.
Hawaii’s four county mayors, Honolulu Prosecutor Steve Alm, Honolulu Police Department representatives and the introducer of the bill, Rep. Scot Matayoshi, have urged Ige to veto the bail reform measure, House Bill 1567. Three of the mayors and Alm held a news conference in Honolulu on June 8 to deliver their message.
On the same day, a few hundred representatives of local solar power companies and environmental organizations held a rally at the state Capitol to call for Ige’s veto of Senate Bill 2510, which aims to cap how much electricity can be produced from the sun, wind and other sources of renewable energy on each island.
After Ige releases his veto intention list, he has until July 12 to deliver actual vetoes by returning bills to the Legislature with an explanation of his objections. Any bills not signed by the governor or vetoed by the same date automatically become law.
In five of the past seven years, Ige has not gone on to veto all the bills on his intent list.
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