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Surprise visitor: You gotta love Donovan Dela Cruz.

On Tuesday, the day we published a story about Senate bullies creating chaos at the State Capitol, Dela Cruz — one of the aforementioned bullies — called us to complain that he had been unfairly maligned in the piece. It laid out how his Senate colleagues were concerned he and Sen. Michelle Kidani were strong-arming some senators to backpedal on approval of one of the governor’s nominees.

“I’m hardly even at the Legislature these days,” Dela Cruz said at one point in a lengthy phone conversation. “I’ve been staying home a lot to take care of my dog.”

“Well, hey,” we said, “we just happen to be at Civil Beat’s pop-up newsroom at the library in Wahiawa today. You should come by.”

Twenty minutes later, guess who showed up? He spent the next two hours insisting we had him all wrong and that he did not try to coerce anyone. In fact, he contends, he is just one guy in a big system and he has no influence over anyone. He’s just trying to do the best he can for his district.

We’d give you more specifics, but he insisted “this whole thing is off the record” so many times it’s hard to keep straight what is ethically useable and what isn’t.

Suffice it to say Dela Cruz was his most charming self at our pop-up. He even shook a couple of constituents’ hands. He showed us pictures of the aging French bulldog he rescued and now needs to spend quality time with.

He invited us over to his house — near the library — so we could see his tea-bagging operation, a small business he owns with his longtime colleague Dane Wicker who was recently confirmed as the new deputy director of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, an arrangement that has raised eyebrows for sure. He promised to help several Civil Beat reporters with future stories, including walking us through the state budget, which he likes to detail out on a giant whiteboard.

Soon to come: watch for a short video of Dela Cruz talking about what he loves most about Wahiawa. It will be on our pop-up newsroom landing page soon.

Coming down to the wire: It’s that time in the legislative session when some bills are starting to move quickly and others aren’t moving at all.

We’ve got less than two weeks to go until the April 6 deadline when bills need to have at least gotten a hearing in their final committee or they are doomed for the year.

To that end, we have been diligently updating our Sunshine Bill Tracker as soon as paperwork on the measures is available, giving the latest status and details on what committee a bill is in and what the next action is.

We started out in January tracking more than 200 bills aimed at improving accountability and transparency at all levels of government. We’re down to about 70 still alive. A handful have gone to the governor’s desk.

You can keep up with the bills here.