贬补飞补颈驶颈 Legislature Begins 2025 With High Hopes For Solving Our Toughest Issues
On Opening Day, housing, fireworks, insurance and invasive species top lawmakers’ to-do list. But a green fee to address climate change and legalizing pot, not so much.
The state House and Senate are largely on the same page when it comes to priorities for the 2025 session that officially opened Wednesday.
Leading the list are stabilization of the condominium insurance market, strengthening enforcement of illegal fireworks, streamlining approval processes so developers can build more affordable housing and improving biosecurity to control and expel invasive species.
But House and Senate leaders are not in agreement on issues such as recreational marijuana. And some House members clashed over rules governing their own chamber.
Differences between the House and Senate 鈥 both of which are overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats 鈥 on what issues to enact and how to enact them may not have evaporated.
For example, the Senate approved bills for recreational marijuana over the past two sessions but the measures died in the House 鈥 something that Senate President Ron Kouchi reminded reporters of at a press conference following the floor session.
Rep. David Tarnas said he was working on an omnibus bill that would take into consideration not only recreational marijuana but also adjustments to the state鈥檚 medical marijuana program and related issues.
鈥淚 think the people in the state of Hawaii really would like us to address cannabis policy in a comprehensive manner, which includes medical cannabis, which has been legal for many, many years,鈥 he said. 鈥淚t includes hemp, which is legal as well. And it includes the adult use of cannabis.鈥
And, while both chambers are generally in sync with the priorities of Gov. Josh Green, a fellow Democrat, they are still not sold on the governor鈥檚 proposal for a fee levied on visitors through the hotel tax to pay for climate change mitigation.
Rep. Kyle Yamashita said he was cautious about embracing another idea from the governor: to use interest from the state鈥檚 Rainy Day Fund to help pay for part of climate mitigation. The state currently enjoys a healthy fund balance, but economic cycles can change, he warned.
鈥淚’m kind of hesitant to touch that because I believe we need to build the reserve up,鈥 he said. 鈥淢y concern is we had over a decade since the Lehman Brothers downturn of prosperity and then we had the pandemic and we had a drop. But the Fed just gave us so much money that it actually spiked and caused inflation.”
A better option, said Yamashita, might be to raise visitor fees at popular tourist destinations such as trails, something that Kouchi said he is open to considering.
Hanging over the Legislature’s to-list is a shared unease with what might transpire in Washington, D.C., when Donald Trump returns to the White House with a Republican-controlled Congress to support him. House Speaker Nadine Nakamura expressed concerns that 贬补飞补颈驶颈鈥檚 share of federal funding might be reduced.
贬补飞补颈驶颈鈥檚 vulnerability to events out of its control is underscored by the Los Angeles fires that are still burning.
Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, who is working on home insurance legislation, said the increase in severity of natural disasters has made crafting legislative solutions more complicated. 贬补飞补颈驶颈, he noted, is at risk not only for tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanoes but also wildfires.
鈥淲e are now seen as a risky state,鈥 he said, pointing out that 贬补飞补颈驶颈 was not considered an insurance concern after 1992’s Hurricane 驶Iniki. 鈥淏ut now that these catastrophes are getting so much attention, we have to deal with what’s happening in the marketplace now. So some of it is going to be our responsibility to stabilize.鈥
Jobs Wanted For Locals
The Senate plans to focus on workforce development coupled with education. The idea, said Kouchi, is to help young students not only with internships and apprenticeships but to help them find jobs in 贬补飞补颈驶颈 after school.
The Senate’s priorities involve advancing technology integration across campuses, aligning curriculum to workforce needs, supporting career and technical education and boosting student test performance.
The House is also interested in expanding training and internship programs to better prepare students for public and private sector career paths.
“Additionally, we are examining strategies to recruit and retain public workers in the State of 贬补飞补颈驶颈 as we face workforce retirements and prepare for upcoming vacancies,” according to a House press release.
Kouchi said Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, the Ways and Means Committee chair, would take the lead on education and workforce development. The Senate would also seek to generate new revenue streams, possibly through innovations in agriculture.
Kouchi and Dela Cruz also both favor land banking 鈥 buying and managing land with the intention of selling or developing it. Kouchi said land banking could lead to developing more housing and agriculture and even help when it comes to siting new jails and prisons.
House History, And Rules
In the House, Nakamura became the first female speaker in Hawaii history to take charge of a House floor session.
Nakamura thanked the new House leaders and her fellow House Democrats, who chose her as speaker for the 33rd Legislature in November. The discussions in the Democratic caucus that resulted in her selection for the top job in the House were not open to the public.
Nakamura said she turned to her 97-year-old mother, Mabel Maeda, for advice on how to handle the responsibility and challenges of her new role.
Maeda, who watched from the House floor as Nakamura spoke, experienced the full weight of governmental power in Hawai’i during the years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was orphaned at age 6, and her guardian before the war was a Tenrikyo minister who was taken away in the middle of the night and imprisoned in New Mexico, Nakamura said.
When she was older, she and other students were required to work at least one day a week in the pineapple fields to support the local wartime economy. Nakamura said she reflected on those experiences because “the decisions we make in this chamber will also reverberate for generations to come.”
“So when I asked my mother what advice she鈥檇 give me and my fellow legislators, she said that we
should try to be humble and respect each other,” Nakamura said. “She said to overlook the faults that we all have, and find the good in each other.”
Nakamura introduced the 11 freshmen House members, and called on all of her colleagues to work cooperatively on a House vision for 贬补飞补颈驶颈 that stresses the need for a “healthy, thriving and housed” state population.
“If we work together, if we set aside grudges, if we listen to each other, roll up our sleeves, and if
we direct our limited resources wisely, we can achieve this vision,” she said. “And when we disagree with each other, which might happen now and then, we do so respectfully and with civility.”
In what may be a sign of political friction to come, freshman Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto, a Democrat, and Rep. Kanani Souza, a Republican, voted against a routine resolution appointing House caucus leaders and making House committee assignments.
Iwamoto, who is a lawyer and a left-leaning Democrat, said the appointment of Rep. Linda Ichiyama as both vice speaker and a voting member of four House committees violates House rules. allow the vice speaker to serve as a voting member of only one committee.
Iwamoto also objected to the makeup of the House Finance Committee, which she said should have included another Democrat, according to the House rules.
The committees are supposed to be composed of Republicans and Democrats proportionate to their numbers in the House, which Iwamoto said requires another Democrat on Finance. There are 42 Democrats and nine Republicans in the House.
Souza, who is also a lawyer, voted against the resolution because she said there were changes made to the committee lineup and included in the resolution after the committee assignments were announced in a House memo and a news release to the public last year. She did not say what changes prompted her objection.
House Democratic Majority Leader Sean Quinlan replied that proportionality is “very poorly defined in our House rules,” and the House is in the process of updating the rules. He also said there is nothing in the rules specifically prohibiting the speaker or vice speaker from serving as committee members.
Republican Minority Leader Lauren Matsumoto thanked Nakamura for making an effort to reach out to the minority, and praised the new House leadership for “re-examining how we conduct the people’s work in this chamber.”
She called on House members to make fiscal policy changes that include eliminating the state income tax, and eliminating taxes on tips.
She also urged public disclosure of how much each bill before the Legislature will cost, a mechanism that in some states is known as “fiscal notes.”
That means “we have to know how much something costs before we vote on it. Currently 44 other state legislatures already do this, and it’s time Hawai’i does as well,” she said.
Yamashita, the House Finance Committee chair, said in a news conference after the floor session that the House is undertaking a comprehensive review of both state and county taxes.
Nakamura noted the Legislature passed an unprecedented state income tax cut last year that will reduce state tax collections by billions of dollars in the years ahead. “I think it would be a stretch” to now entirely eliminate the state income tax, she said.
As for fiscal notes, Yamashita said that has been brought up before, but “it takes resources and effort.”
He added that “it’s something we, at this time, we don’t have the resources to be able to put something out there.”
Gov. Josh Green is slated to deliver his State of the State address Tuesday. The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn May 2.
