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Gov. Neil Abercrombie used his last week to push plenty of proposals he wants lawmakers to pass this session.

He covered a lot of ground in his 6,000-word speech, which included his thoughts on liquefied natural gas, the barrel tax and the Public Land Development Corporation.

But there wasn’t time or perhaps political incentive to touch on all 473 bills and resolutions the governor included this year in .

Abercrombie didn’t mention the controversial school bus issue, for instance, or taxing sugar-sweetened beverages.

Nor did he talk about a new annual fee for banks or raising the hotel tax 2 percent.

Yet all four of those issues have been introduced as bills, sitting before committee chairs for consideration.

The governor’s package this year actually contained fewer bills than in 2012, which had 563 pieces of proposed legislation.

That was more than double Abercrombie’s first year in office. He put forward 217 bills and resolutions in 2011.

Thousands of bills are introduced each legislative session. Only a few hundred become law, and many never even get a committee hearing. Indeed, some are only read by a handful of people.

Suzanne Marinelli, state coordinator, said Hawaii has a high rate of bill introduction, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Allowing more bills to be introduced can foster more creative thought,” she said.

In Hawaii, only about 6.5 percent to 8.5 percent of bills become law, Marinelli said.

The deadline to introduce bills this session was Thursday. Between the House and Senate, 2,872 bills were put forward.

That’s down considerably from the previous year. In 2012, 5,263 bills were introduced, of which 329 became law, according to the .

In 2011, lawmakers introduced 3,224 bills and 235 became law.

Marinelli said by March 7, the for bills to be passed from the House to the Senate and vice versa, roughly 80 percent of the bills will have been eliminated.

“That’s when you start really figuring out what the legislative session is really going to yield, what it’s really going to be about,” she said.

Committee chairs determine which bills see the political light of day. They have the power to put proposed laws on the agenda for the committees to consider advancing.

Marinelli said given the high volume of bills, it’s unlikely committee chairs are able to read all of them before making a decision. She said the chairs rely on staff and the community.

“You try to hire good staff, and that’s a big part of it, but you also rely on public input,” she said. “You have people calling and saying, ‘This is a crucially important bill, please make sure it gets on an agenda.’ Or conversely, ‘This is an awful bill and don’t waste your time on it.’ There’s 10,000 moving parts at any given time.”

As far as the governor’s package goes, Marinelli said the bills included in it are moved “higher up the food chain.”

She said this doesn’t necessarily mean they stand a better chance of becoming law, but they are more likely to get at least a committee hearing.