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If you pay close attention to the Hawaiʻi Legislature, you know lawmakers have rejected a lot of major proposals to make state government more transparent and accessible.

But the fact that you can pay such close attention to the Legislature is the result of a dramatic reform that the Senate and House finally did adopt four years ago.

In 2021, both chambers began livestreaming all committee hearings and floor sessions and allowing remote testimony online.

It took a pandemic to finally make it happen. And it has turned out to be less costly and burdensome than many lawmakers who had resisted the idea had argued.

“It’s one of the biggest deals around,” said Sen. Les Ihara, the longest-serving legislator and an often-lonely crusader for reform since his arrival in 1986. “It’s been my dream from the beginning.”

Last year, the Legislature recorded 2,375 floor hearings and committee meetings, about the same number as every year since 2021. Before that, only a few hundred hearings were recorded, and those were from cable TV broadcasts.

No one has tracked how many people testify online, but having the option available for all hearings from many other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

����’s to provide citizens some form of online access to their proceedings, but in four years Hawaiʻi has gone from having one of the least accessible legislatures “to probably being one of the leading states in public access,” said Colin Moore, a University of Hawaiʻi political scientist.

Hawaiʻi lawmakers just began their fifth session since these changes took effect, and many observers assume the changes are permanent even though they aren’t written into statutes.

“You can’t roll it back,” Moore said. “The outcry would be enormous.”

Slow To Embrace Technology

Legislators have long had the ability to watch committee hearings in the comfort of their own offices. But for many years they didn’t share those closed-circuit broadcasts with their constituents.

A limited selection of proceedings was broadcast live on ‘Ōlelo Community Media and some neighbor island channels, and in 2016 ‘Ōlelo teamed up with Oceanic Time Warner Cable to begin offering on-demand recordings of some hearings.

By then, some legislative committees were also experimenting with taking remote testimony online.

Still, Hawaiʻi was late to the party. While its archives of recorded hearings via cable TV date back to 2016, by 2015, the NCSL said.

More committee hearings were being broadcast live on community access TV channels in 2018, but some powerful House committee chairs were not on board. Among those who prohibited the practice were Sylvia Luke (Finance), Scott Nishimoto (Judiciary) and Henry Aquino (Transportation).

Nishimoto at the time cited the expense, noting the TV broadcasts cost hundreds of dollars per hearing. Luke, who is now lieutenant governor, explained then that most bills before her money committee had already had prior hearings that in some cases were broadcast, so doing so again would be duplicative.

Aquino declined to comment at the time about why his committee was camera-shy.

There was some hesitancy to fully embrace the emerging technology in the Senate as well, Senate Clerk Carol Taniguchi recalls.

“We piloted a number of times this concept of taking testimony so people don’t have to come to the building and we can connect with them remotely,” Taniguchi said.

“It didn’t seem at that time that there were large numbers of people that were willing to do it,” she said of senators.

Then came 2020.

The Legislature convened Jan. 15, just days before the first cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in the United States. It suspended the session March 16, but many lawmakers and staff planned to keep working at the Capitol even as almost everyone started wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart.

When Sen. Clarence Nishihara tested positive for the virus, the building basically shut down.

The Age of Zoom was beginning.

A Freshman Senator Leads The Way

Even before he was elected to the Senate after serving one term in the House, Jarrett Keohokalole was agitating for the Legislature to step into the 21st century.

“Technology has presented us with a valuable opportunity to shine a light on the legislative process quickly and effectively,” Keohokalole, who represents Kaneohe, wrote in his 2018 Civil Beat Candidate Q&A survey.

“We should be livestreaming all legislative sessions, hearings, and briefings,” he wrote, and “allowing neighbor island residents to testify live, whether through video conference or a streaming mechanism like Facebook Live or Snapchat.”

Ihara considers Keohokalole a pandemic hero for convincing Senate leaders to move quickly.

“He’s the one who insisted on it,” Ihara said. “And leadership had high regard for him. He put himself out on the line, but at the right time and it worked.”

Keohokalole had no IT training, just a penchant for making things happen in cyberspace.

“I’m a millennial,” he said, adding members of his generation weren’t that plentiful when he joined the Legislature in 2016, although there’s been a considerable youth movement since then.

Keohokalole also had a friend and former staffer from his House days who was responding to the pandemic even quicker as a Maui County Council member.

An Assist From Molokaʻi

As chair of the Maui council’s Budget Committee, Keani Rawlins-Fernandez was about to embark on a month-long series of hearings when social distancing began in late March 2020.

“I took it upon myself to try to figure out how we would be able to meet online,” Rawlins-Fernandez said.

She laughs recalling the when she tried to help her colleagues — many of them baby boomers — figure out how to conduct their business remotely with BlueJeans software.

The county’s success with livestreaming and remote testimony caught the attention of Keohokalole, who connected her with the Senate Clerk’s Office to talk about how the Legislature could similarly negotiate the pandemic.

Like her friend the senator, Rawlins-Fernandez was a millennial with no IT background. But at that point, she said, leadership opportunities opened up for “whoever wanted it the most.”

Or as Keohokalole puts it, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

For Rawlins-Fernandez, it was more than helping out a friend. She represented the council’s Molokaʻi district and was more attuned than most officials to the frustrations of neighbor island activists who felt cut off from an “Oʻahu-centric” Legislature.

Land use, water rights and pesticide regulation were among the issues that Maui County interests tried to track as they played out in Honolulu. But they faced “the cost to have to fly to Oʻahu, to get transportation to the Capitol, to navigate your way to the conference room,” she said.

Remote testimony, livestreaming and archiving were long overdue.

Everybody Gets On Board

After completely shutting down in late March, the 2020 Legislature reconvened briefly in May and again in June, livestreaming some hearings but accepting only written testimony on bills mostly related to the pandemic. Some masked lawmakers attended in person, others participated remotely.

With the support of Senate leaders, Keohokalole continued to work with the Senate Clerk’s Office on technology issues. Big-screen TVs, video cameras and computers were purchased for conference rooms and mostly paid for with Covid funds. Processes were created for taking remote testimony online. 

Senate hearings for judicial nominees provided chances for dry runs on use of the new equipment. And as it became clear the pandemic had staying power, the House embarked on a parallel effort.

When a new session began in January 2021, the State Capitol building was still closed to the public but electronically wide open.

Both chambers hired temporary video production employees to supplement the efforts of their full-time staffs. Meetings were livestreamed on Zoom and archived on YouTube.

“I was fully expecting things to go haywire at some point in the session and for us to take a lot of criticism for some sort of malfunction, and it really never happened,” Keohokalole said. “The ’21 remote legislative session went really, really well.”

Technology-wise, so has every session that followed. The Capitol reopened to the public in March 2022, meaning citizens had three ways to testify on bills: in-person, online or in writing.

The archiving of recorded hearings provides connect-the-dots information to track the sometimes tortuous paths that bills take as they move from committee to committee, session to session. It can even shine a light on the political calculations behind legislators taking a certain stand one session and a different position the next.

The archives may have been “underappreciated” in the beginning, said Moore, the political scientist.

“I’m not even sure the legislators fully understood the possibilities for that, for advocates and journalists and others, when they agreed to archive,” Moore said.

Standard Operating Procedure

The fact that every hearing is now a video production has become second nature to committee chairs.

In the House’s seven conference rooms, the video staffers work in a corner. In the Senate’s five conference rooms, there’s no sign of them because they operate the equipment remotely.

Committee staff put together the list of those scheduled to testify online or in-person, but it’s a video producer serving as the Zoom host who gets things rolling.

“There’s always this little dance they do at the beginning of hearings where they say, ‘OK sir, it’s three minutes to the beginning of the hearing, you ready to go?” said Sen. Karl Rhoads, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And so then when you get right down to it, you’re like, ‘OK, it’s time. Can we go?’ And they start it up.”

Video cameras track the scene in every Senate hearing room, but they are operated remotely. In fact, many of the committee chairs never see a video producer and don’t even know exactly where that voice inside their laptops is coming from.

Not even Keohokalole knows where they are.

“I always think of it as someone who lives in the internet,” he said. ”They’re in some other room in the Capitol. You’re just one more member of a Zoom meeting. They stay off screen for the hearing.”

He suggested Civil Beat track down and check out the Senate’s video production room. But Taniguchi, the Senate clerk, denied that request, saying it’s a “staff area.”

Keohokalole is proud of how far the Legislature has come in using technology to improve public access. But he still meets with the Senate Clerk’s Office every year to discuss how it can be done better.

One enhancement was figuring out how to super-impose the number of the bill a committee is discussing so viewers of recorded hearings can quickly scroll to what they’re looking for.

Getting Their Faces In Front Of Legislators

Sometimes the online testifiers on those big-screen TVs outnumber those in the room. But Rhoads and Keohokalole agree that the opportunity to talk to legislators from remote locations has not resulted in more testifiers — just more convenience.

“For the dozens and dozens of just regular items of governance that come up every year, we didn’t get much participation before and we don’t get much participation now,” Keohokalole said. “But if we’re talking about abortion or legalizing marijuana or development, then we had lots of people before and we get lots of people now. It’s just easier for them.”

As chair of the Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee, Keohokalole even encourages state employees in nearby offices to save time by monitoring hearings remotely instead of sitting in the room.

But those benefitting most from the ability to testify online are residents of neighbor islands or rural Oʻahu who realistically aren’t going to make it to the Capitol.

Previously, their only option was to submit written testimony that might not be as impactful as getting their faces in front of legislators.

After the August 2023 Maui wildfires, members of the community group Lahaina Strong were closely following legislative efforts to help with recovery and prevention of future fires.

Some of them provided powerful testimony from Kāʻanapali Beach, where they maintained an encampment for about six months to draw attention to the lack of housing available to fire survivors.

The group’s founder, Jordan Ruidas, delivered online testimony a year ago in support of , which ultimately became a law allowing counties to crack down on vacation rentals.

“A majority of Lahaina fire survivors were still living in hotels,” Ruidas said, “It was very important for us to advocate to get them into long-term housing.”

She urged legislators to do just that as she spoke from inside a tent at the beach encampment while holding her 3-month-old daughter.

Lahaina Strong also submitted written testimony in support of the bill, but Ruidas thinks the online appearance was important.

“They can see who you are,” she said. “They can see your emotions. Like for me, they could see I had a baby strapped to me. People need to see the reality, and sometimes it’s hard to get that picture when you’re just reading written testimony. Legislators need to see the faces of the constituents that they represent.”

Is It Really Here To Stay?

Most observers doubt the Legislature would ever backtrack on livestreaming, video-archiving and accepting remote testimony.

It certainly wouldn’t be because of the cost, because all this is accomplished at bargain prices by government spending standards.

House Clerk Brian Takeshita estimates the House spent $160,000 last year on 12 temporary video producers and another $12,000 to $15,000 on the necessary internet connections. 

The Senate spent a total of about $96,000 for six temporary video producers and internet and captioning services, Taniguchi said.

While they are written into the Senate and House rules, these are adopted practices, not laws.

“I think the public would revolt if we tried to go backward,” Keohokalole said.

“It would be real hard to go back,” Rhoads said.

“The horse has left the barn with that,” said Moore, the political scientist. “I don’t think there’s any way to reverse it. It would immediately raise all these questions among the general public, ‘What are you afraid of?’ ‘What are you trying to hide?’

Then there’s longtime Republican Rep. Gene Ward, who’s not so sure legislative leaders won’t claw back some of the pandemic-era public access measures.

“If they did it, they would do it subtly, they would do it slowly,” Ward said.

Ihara, the longtime Senate veteran, is less concerned with losing these reforms and more concerned with what should come next.

“To me, this is a minimum,” Ihara said. “This is not the high point. This is the baseline.”

The Legislature exempted itself from the Sunshine Law that applies to county governments and still conducts most of its business behind closed doors.

“Everything recorded is the only thing in the public record,” Ihara said, “which is 1% of all the conversations.”

Civil Beat’s reporting on citizen participation in the Legislature is supported in part by the Solutions Journalism Network’s Building Democracy program.