A series of bills aimed at further cleaning up government ethics, lobbying practices and campaign contributions — while making it easier for new candidates to campaign for office — are suddenly enjoying renewed energy in the Legislature after a lull in 2024.
None of the bills by themselves represent a dramatic overhaul of how elections and politics work at the state and county levels.
But collectively, the package of “clean government” bills that remain alive this session are designed to tighten many of the practices that have directly or indirectly been linked to recent federal trials, guilty verdicts and pleas by state and county officials.
In the early days of the 2022 legislative session, former Senate Majority Leader J. Kalani English and then-Rep. Ty T.J. Cullen shocked the community and their colleagues by abruptly pleading guilty to federal charges, putting pressure on legislators to respond.
English and Cullen, both Democrats, admitted accepting cash, casino chips, Las Vegas hotel rooms and dinners in exchange for influencing legislation to benefit a company involved in publicly financed cesspool conversion projects.
English was sentenced to three years and three months in federal prison, while Cullen received a two-year term.
Among English’s and Cullen’s former legislative colleagues, political analyst Neal Milner said, “You could smell the panic.”
In response, then-House Speaker Scott Saiki created the Commission to Improve Standards of Conduct, led by retired Intermediate Court of Appeals Chief Judge Dan Foley, made 28 recommendations that resulted in 20 bills becoming law in 2023.
The momentum of the 2023 legislative session then stalled after legislators turned their focus in the 2024 session to helping survivors of the August 2023 Maui wildfires.
“The following session, it was like all the air was sucked out of the room,” Foley said. “Government reform kind of got sidetracked. But government reform hasn’t gone away.”
Rep. David Tarnas — who continues to push government reform bills as chair of the House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee — used a similar analogy.
Helping “Lahaina took all the oxygen out of the room,” Tarnas said. “Dealing with the aftermath of the Lahaina fire did dominate the discussion and the energy.”
Seemingly unrelated events between the 2024 and current legislative sessions also drew renewed pressure on the Legislature to further address government reform.
In the spring, the public heard about the campaign donation relationship during the federal trial of former Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro and prominent Hawaii businessman Dennis Mitsunaga and four Mitsunaga &Associates executives that federal prosecutors alleged amounted to a pay-to-prosecute corruption scheme.
The defendants were indicted in June 2022 for allegedly conspiring to charge a former Mitsunaga employee with felony theft for exposing the company to liability and keeping some money from jobs done on company time with company resources. They faced federal charges of conspiracy, honest services wire fraud and federal program bribery.
In May, however, all of the defendants were found not guilty on all counts in U.S. District Court.
Members of the public nevertheless continued to express outrage, especially after federal criminal proceedings continued against former Corporation Counsel Donna Yuk Lan Leong, ex-Honolulu Police Commission Chair Max John Sword and then-Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s Managing Director Roy Keiji Amemiya Jr.
In March they were sentenced in U.S. District Court after each admitted to a single federal misdemeanor for illegally pushing a $250,000 payout to former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha without City Council scrutiny.
All avoided federal prison sentences, but Sword and Leong were required to pay a $100,000 fine and serve one year of supervised release as part of their plea agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Amemiya entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement.
Kealoha and his then-wife, former Honolulu Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, had been convicted by a federal jury in 2020 of bank fraud, framing Katherine Kealoha’s uncle for a crime he did not commit and bilking her grandmother out of her home to bankroll the couple’s lavish lifestyle.
Louis Kealoha was sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay $238,198.56 in restitution.
Katherine Kealoha, whom Chief U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright called the mastermind of the crimes, was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
All of the cases continue to generate public concerns about how government officials operate out of the public spotlight, said Colin Moore, who teaches public policy at the University of Hawaii and serves as associate professor at the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.
In between the 2024 and current legislative sessions, a handful of freshman legislators also were voted into office in the November general election, including Republicans and progressive Democrats who called for greater government transparency, along with new House leadership led by newly elected House Speaker Nadine Nakamura.
Years before, during her early days in the House as a dissident outsider, Nakamura and Saiki publicly cited the need for government reforms and transparency that continue today under Nakamura’s leadership, Tarnas said.
Like Saiki, Nakamura this session encouraged Tarnas to push for “clean government” bills, Tarnas said.
He has continued to support reform efforts along with Sen. Karl Rhoads, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Many of the original and current bills were proposed by the state Ethics Commission and state Campaign Spending Commission, which work to pursue government transparency and election, campaign and lobbying reform.
The surviving bills are:
>> The latest version of HB 412, which would void state contracts if there are violations of state lobbying laws. It would also expand the definition of lobbying to include communications with “high-level government officials regarding procurement decisions.”
It’s scheduled to be heard today before the Senate Government Operations Committee.
>> The latest version of HB 413, which would make it illegal for lobbyists to make campaign contributions during legislative sessions.
It’s scheduled to be heard today before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
>> The current version of Senate Bill 345, which would raise the cap on the maximum amount of public matching funds available to candidates eligible for the Hawaii Partial Public Financing Program.
Instead of the current $1 public financing match for every $1 of limited contributions raised, candidates would receive $2 in public campaign funds for every $1 they raise.
Proponents argue that more public money for individual campaigns would make it easier to attract candidates who won’t run for political office if it means asking voters and others for campaign contributions, which they argue makes candidates susceptible to the wishes of donors over voters.
>> Senate Bill 289, which would create a uniform fine schedule for common violations of the state Ethics Code and Lobbyist Law, which the Ethics Commission hopes will streamline and shorten the process of paying fines, similar to traffic fines.
>> SB 1202, which would allow campaign funds to be used for a candidate’s child care and “vital household dependent care costs under certain conditions.”
Moore, at UH, said that “all of these ideas have been kicking around for a long time and will close some loopholes that people have been pointing out for years and years. … Momentum has been building for a long time because it’s pretty hard to defend the status quo.”
Voters likely have been voicing their concerns to legislators over the most recent federal cases against the former city officials, Moore said.
“The general sense is that there’s too much corruption,” he said.
In response, Moore said, legislators likely “want to point to specific matters they’ve passed.”
Retired Judge Foley — former head of the now-defunct Commission to Improve Standards of Conduct — remains hopeful that more progress will be made by the end of the current legislative session.
”We started on a track, and I don’t think we’re going to get off it,” Foley said. “It’s like the Legislature has gotten a second breath.”
