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When I was in high school during the early 1990s, most of my classmates came from lower-income, blue collar, working-class families or military families who just wanted a big break in life.

There was a running fantasy many of us would engage in whenever we had free time together, where we would boast about the kinds of jobs we would get after graduation and how we would spend the money we made.

You’ve probably engaged in the same career thought experiment at some point. Someone says they’ll join the military and use their G.I. bill to be the first to go to college. Another person describes how they’ll start a business and get so rich they’ll buy a big house with a garage full of sports cars. Maybe one or two might even dream of being a movie star and talk of how they’ll live a jet set lifestyle surrounded by adoring fans.

I had one friend, however, who went far above and beyond the rest of us. He had stacks of Mead-brand spiral, college-ruled notebooks that he would fill with shopping lists of all the things he wanted to buy in exacting detail. When we’d be sitting in class together, instead of paying attention to the lecture, he’d be penning shopping lists of all the things he wanted, sometimes even going so far as to draw illustrations of how they would look or what he would do with them.

At one point my friend boasted to us that he would buy off the Seychelles government – no, really – to furnish him with a private island, procure hordes of surplus weapons from former Soviet republics to create a mercenary army, and then get married to a ’90s supermodel in a wedding that would feature a live performance by the Guns N’ Roses band.��

Unfortunately for my friend, none of this ever manifested at all and he would later spend most of his life homeless or in jail. But craziness aside, we loved that guy so much and delighted in spending time with him, because he could tell the most entertaining stories about all the things he planned to do or intended to buy.

Moral Hazard

I mention this story because whenever I hear Hawaii Gov. Josh Green or others , it seriously reminds me of the wild shopping lists my high school buddy used to create.

Now, in all deference to Gov. Green,��I do think the idea of visitor fees has merit. Post-agricultural Hawaii is a tourist state, and it makes sense that some kind of fee structure for infrastructure upkeep, recapitalization and modernization needs to exist to avoid being overwhelmed by tourist wear and tear.��

The problem however occurs when we start using visitor fees to go on government spending binges. If the whole point of a visitor fee is to��reduce��the impact caused by visitors, you don’t want to grow government spending so big that in the future, Hawaii is then caught in a loop where we have to bring increasingly more tourists just to keep the visitor fees coming in to pay for all the things we’re funding with the visitor fee.��

If our intent is to have better managed, responsible tourism, having a visitor fee and then creating a shopping list of things we want to buy above and beyond the basics puts us at contretemps with reducing tourist impact. 

What happens if a future governor of Hawaii urgently needs to throttle back excessive visitors due to a new pandemic or other crisis? Will state partner nonprofits subsidized by visitor fees and cultural or environmental workers whose salaries come from these fees launch rancorous protests and disrupt any efforts to stop tourism from coming in, lest they be starved of money?

That’s called “moral hazard,” where a conflict of interest exists that prevents us from doing the right thing because we fear the loss of money more than any perceived loss that occurs from not doing what is best for all of us. And that is why, if we are to ever have visitor fees, they must be narrowly applied, fund a very specific goal with measurable objectives, and then repeal itself automatically after a certain number of years have passed.

If we implement visitor fees, it should be for not more than six years, with a sunset clause that states that unless reauthorized by a two-thirds majority vote of the Legislature, the fee will terminate and all funds will then lapse into the general fund.��

The money should not go to any nonprofits – that’s just asking for corruption to occur – but should be spent only by state or county government agencies for the purposes of building or maintaining public infrastructure used by tourists, repairing environmental damage, and performing safety or cultural education for visitors. 

You do something like fix a shoreline and harden it against erosion with a visitor fee. You don’t do something like pay a nonprofit to hire someone for $130,000/year just to liaise with the government and virtue signal all day.

Last of all, there needs to be a stipulation that no procurement exemptions of any sort may be applied to any spending done with visitor fee revenues. The last thing we need is for private contractors or political friends of the government milking the visitor fee cash cow and not providing tangible benefits to the people of Hawaii. 

Can visitor fees work? Yeah. But I think the more important question we should be asking is, will the people being funded by visitor fees work? That’s what we need to be concerned about if we are to ever implement them.