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As the leadership shuffle takes place at the State Capitol there are a few meaningful changes that could be implemented to create more transparency and accountability. 

Consider the following current situations that could be changed:

Currently, power is consolidated in the hands of a few committee chairs. These committee chairs singularly decide what bills will and will not get a hearing.

Hearing notices disclosing which bills will be heard are not made available to anyone until 48 hours before the meeting. A chair can ask for an exception to that 48-hour rule and add a bill last-minute to a hearing notice. 

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That’s all the time the public and elected officials have to familiarize themselves with the bills being put forward. This starts the testimony clock. The public has 48 hours to submit testimony on any subject matter presented in a hearing notice for a scheduled hearing. Testimony is compiled by the office of the committee’s vice chair and that testimony is completely prohibited from distribution to colleagues until minutes before the hearing.

What does this mean? Only two representatives of the entire body are given any time at all to review testimony submitted on a particular bill. Committee members are asked to vote on measures following the hearing.

The most any individual member can ascertain about a bill is how many people support and how many people oppose it. There just isn’t time to digest nuance and specifics prior to voting. Increasing the hearing notice interval to 72 hours and offering testimony to the public when it is submitted would benefit everyone working to make life in Hawaii better.

As an element of control, many bills, even if they don’t have any funding components, get referred lastly to the finance committee. This gives the finance chair power over every single committee and bill that gets put forward. The finance chair has the ability to kill any bill, by either not scheduling a hearing for it or deferring it after hearing it. 

There’s no reason other than power consolidation for the finance committee to hear bills that don’t have a funding requirement. Eliminating automatic referral to the finance committee would distribute decision-making more equitably among committee chairs and the representative body.

So many of the limited number of bills permitted to be put forward by each representative never even get a hearing. If leadership decides they don’t want to consider a certain subject that bill doesn’t get a hearing.

Recognizing that offensive, undemocratic or otherwise inappropriate bills are drafted regularly, a mechanism could be implemented where if a chair thinks a bill is inappropriate or offensive it could be brought to a Committee of the Chairs to decide if it should not be heard by any committee. Otherwise, all bills drafted should be heard by at least one committee. 

The speaker solely appoints committee chairs. So, the committee chairs are entirely beholden to the speaker. The legislative body should also vote for committee chairs in the same manner they vote for the speaker.

The speaker’s office distributes the rules the Legislature will follow at the beginning of the biennial session. Representatives should be given the chance to vote on rule changes. 

These considerations will add time to the process. The current frenetic pace of every session makes following the process challenging.

It would be a heavy lift, but maybe adding time to the session, allowing more time and including more in the process would go a long way to improving transparency and accountability.