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The folks who still resist making major reforms to state government have just lost one of their favorite excuses: We can’t afford them.

It turns out, we can.

In a general fund financial plan obtained by Civil Beat and due for public release later this month, Gov. Josh Green’s administration anticipates billion-dollar surpluses for the next four fiscal years and even bigger surpluses after that.

That’s in spite of the largest income tax cut in state history and the ongoing costs of the Maui wildfire disaster.

Big surpluses aren’t excuses to spend public money recklessly, but they certainly shed new light on the financial practicality of much-needed steps to improve government in Hawaii.

Simply put: If you’re going to oppose these reforms, state your real reasons and quit pretending the budget is just too tight.

We’re talking about game-changers, like full public financing of viable political campaigns and converting the Legislature into a year-round body.

The costs of those changes could run into the tens of millions of dollars. The payoff: a state government driven by the will of the people instead of special interests and a Legislature that makes its decisions in public rather than behind closed doors.

But we’re also talking about adequately funding the commissions that oversee campaign spending and ethics laws. The additional spending needed here is a lot less, but still crucial in terms of good government.

Quit Starving Campaign Spending Commission

Let’s start with the little guys. Unfortunately, that description applies to even though it plays a giant role in political transparency.

The commission’s staff of five full-timers is the same size it was when it was created in 1973, despite an ever-increasing workload. It’s currently tracking 751 active campaign committees, including 488 candidate committees and 263 noncandidate committees (PACS, super PACs and ballot measure groups).

Last year the CSC failed to persuade Green’s administration to include $200,000 in its supplemental budget proposal, and it’s asking again this year.

The money would allow it to hire two more staffers, including an investigator.

“Like many other regulatory agencies, within our statutory duties we have a duty to investigate and we don’t have an investigator. It’s pretty ludicrous,” CSC Executive Director Kristin Izumi-Nitao says.

Another of those agencies, , strongly supports the CSC budget request.

“I see a critical need to increase the State Campaign Spending Commission’s budget,” Robert Harris, Ethics Commission executive director, says.

His agency is also facing an expanded workload as two new laws take effect Jan. 1. One requires lobbyists to specifically describe the legislative or administrative action they’re working on. The other requires legislators to report the names of lobbyists they receive income from.

But unlike the CSC, the Ethics Commission was allowed to increase its staff to 12 full-timers recently by making an investigator full-time and hiring a new analyst.

“This is enough to meet our current obligations, including the new mandatory ethics and lobby training requirements,” Harris says.

The Campaign Spending Commission is also making a bigger financial request from the governor this year: $2 million for a new electronic filing system designed to make it easier for political committees to report their revenues and expenses, and for the voters to see who’s getting money from whom.

The current system dates to 1980 and is held together with “Band-Aids,” Izumi-Nitao says. While her staff can still make it work, it would make sense to switch to a modern system while the current staffers are still around to aid in the transition, she said.

“We really do want to make it better and more user-friendly,” she says. “That’s our commitment. And I think we’re finding it gets more and more difficult with the current infrastructure.”

Making campaign finance information easy for political campaigns to provide and for the public to inspect gets to the heart of government transparency.

The governor has repeatedly said he’s all for reform. Making wise investments to improve the already solid work of the Campaign Spending Commission is good way to prove it.

Bigger-Ticket Items

One of the key reforms needed to reduce the power of special interests and level the political playing field is a full public campaign financing option for candidates who agree to its spending limit. Incumbent legislators their reelection bids, and a big reason is they generally have a lot more campaign cash than their challengers.

Sen. Karl Rhoads says he’ll reintroduce a bill to accomplish this for the third straight session in January after it almost passed in 2023 and was ambushed by a House committee in 2024.

Estimated price tag: $30 million per election cycle.

A lot of people pointed to that cost and said Hawaii simply can’t afford a “clean elections” bill. In 2025, that will not be a viable reason to oppose it.

Still, Rhoads says he also plans to introduce a less expensive measure for partial expansion of the public campaign finance system that is so underfunded that only four candidates used it this year.

The CSC is also bringing back a partial expansion proposal next session, and Izumi-Nitao says the commission could handle the extra work of administering it if it gets that $200,000 for staff expansion.

Another major reform proposal calls for conversion to a full-time Legislature. Senate and House leaders often point to tight deadlines to justify operating behind closed doors for the sake of expediency.

Rhoads co-sponsored by Sen. Stanley Chang, who described the Legislature’s current schedule as “four months of chaos.”

It would have required the Legislature to convene at least once a month and also would have prohibited legislators from holding other jobs, thus reducing potential conflicts of interest. Rhoads’ Judiciary Committee even amended the measure so that the Legislature would finally have been subject to the Sunshine Law that ensures open discussion of the people’s business.

The next stop was the Ways and Means Committee, which ignored the measure to death.

While the bill would have proposed a constitutional amendment to let voters decide its fate, Rhoads says it’s also possible that the Legislature could dramatically change its schedule through rule changes by which committees could be required to meet monthly but the floor sessions would keep the current limit of 60 per year.

Whatever the method, a year-round Legislature wouldn’t necessarily be all that expensive, says Colin Moore, a University of Hawaii political scientist.

“Our legislators receive some of the nation’s most generous salaries and are provided with comparatively good staff support,” Moore wrote last year. “Furthermore, most Hawaii lawmakers work year-round and relatively few have full-time careers outside the Capitol.”

Moore’s conclusion: “Let’s get our money’s worth by asking them to convene every month, rather than cramming a year’s worth of work into 60 days of bedlam.”

Realistically, it’s still going to cost more to convert to run a year-round Legislature.

But a government that runs cleaner and more efficiently because of these reforms will save us money in the long run.