Off The Beat: Hawaii House Buried By Paper Weight

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There’s a digital divide in the Hawaii Legislature.

The Senate went virtually paperless after 2008, cutting its paper usage from 9,798,456 pages of paper weighing 19.6 tons to 1,543,053 pages weighing 3.09 tons in two years. Lawmakers there now use laptops to look at online testimony during hearings.

The House? Not so sleek. Reams of paper and giant binders clutter committee tables — and sometimes clog the public hearing process as well.

At a House Finance Committee hearing last week, the committee took the unusual step of asking testifiers to come up and enter their written testimony into the record verbally. It bogged down an already onerous hearing process that began at 10 a.m. and extended well into the evening.

We wonder what’s keeping the House from giving up the paper goods?

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