Hawaii lawmakers scurry to advance flurry of bills past key deadline

Hawaii lawmakers made many compromises to position bills for potential passage this week while other measures fell to the wayside at the state Capitol on Friday, a pivotal deadline for over 150 pieces of legislation this year.

Casualties included a bill to legalize online sports betting in Hawaii and one to give the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands an additional $600 million to develop homesteads for beneficiaries.

Bills that cleared the hurdle included one to raise the state’s transient accommodations tax in part to help sustain Hawaii’s natural resources, and one to expand the use of cameras to ticket speeding drivers on roadways statewide.

Friday was the deadline for members of the Senate and House of Representatives on multiple conference committees to agree on language for bills where the Senate and House had been in disagreement.

At the start of the day, there were 162 bills scheduled for action at 60 conference committee meetings, and according to several lawmakers, the work to hash out lingering differences was for the most part relatively easy.

“I think this has been pretty smooth sailing,” Sen. Karl Rhoads, who has served in the Legislature since 2006, said a little after 2 p.m. “Feels pretty calm.”

A few hours later, with a 6 p.m. deadline near, the scene in multiple conference rooms got a bit hectic with some lawmakers running between rooms on different floors of the building to cast votes.

With action frozen on many bills, House Speaker Nadine Nakamura and Senate President Ron Kouchi extended the deadline by 30 minutes. Still, many bills stalled and cannot gain passage this year before the legislative session ends Friday.

The first committee hearing of the day started at about 8:15 a.m. on a bill largely aimed at overhauling a film industry tax credit program.

Sen. Lynn DeCoite, co-chair of the conference committee formed to agree with House representatives on terms for the measure, Senate Bill 732, said more time was needed to proffer a conference draft, or CD 1, for consideration by House members of the committee.

“We are working on a CD 1,” she said, describing it as a “simple change-out.”

The committee reconvened four more times, but no agreement was delivered.

No public testimony is allowed at conference meetings, but members of the public, leaders of state agencies and others who have vested stakes in legislation that were still in limbo Friday were following bills as they were taken up to witness outcomes in person.

Gov. Josh Green was among those walking the open-air halls between meeting rooms Friday, and planned to sit in on at least one meeting while staffers in his office attended others.

“In general, I’m just around to finalize deals,” he said, carrying his dog, Boba. “If there are any compromises that need to be made, I’m happy to help.”

Green was in a committee meeting room when a compromise draft of SB 1396 was agreed to. This bill proposes to raise transient accommodation taxes for things that include maintaining natural resources.

Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawaii Farm Bureau, had a list of 20 farm-related bills pending conference meetings Friday. By 10 a.m., Miyamoto had been to five meetings where 13 of the 20 bills were considered.

Of the 13 bills, three received a conference draft, two stalled with no further action planned and the rest were postponed until later in the day.

Bills that don’t get passed this year can have action resume next session in what represents the second half of the Legislature’s current biennium.

One high-stakes bill that failed to make this year’s cut would have legalized online sports betting. But House Bill 1308 didn’t survive conference negotiations after differing earlier drafts were approved on a 34-15 vote in the House and a 15-10 vote in the Senate.

“At the moment it’s very hard to get a compromise,” Rep. Greggor Ilagan, chair of the House Committee on Economic Development and Technology, said at a meeting for the bill at about 12:30 p.m. Ilagan offered that more work continue in 2026 to produce what he termed a better bill.

Another bill that was deferred until at least 2026 initially intended to give DHHL $600 million three years after the Legislature appropriated the same amount to address roughly 28,000 beneficiaries on a waitlist for homesteads.

Rep. Luke Evslin, chair of the House Committee on Housing, said House and Senate leaders overseeing appropriations did not give their approval for the bill. So Evslin, in concurrence with Sen. David Tarnas, tabled the bill.

A lack of such approvals from the House Finance Committee and Senate Ways and Means Committee also was contributed to many other bills, including some without fiscal impacts, fizzling out Friday.

For instance, SB 382 intended to limit how much a state procurement officer can share about competing bids for work requested by a losing bidder. Sen. Angus McKelvey said during a conference meeting that he hoped House Finance would “release” its approval for the bill.

“It sounds like that’s not the case, right?” McKelvey asked a counterpart in the House, noting that the bill had no financial component or fiscal impact.

“Sorry, no,” replied Rep. Jenna Takenouchi, a House Finance member. The bill was not advanced.

Some of the meetings Friday dealt with only one bill, while others had two or more bills under consideration for possible compromises. In one particularly heavy instance, 19 bills related to transportation were in one batch of rolling conference committee meetings led by Rep. Darius Kila, chair of the House Transportation Committee, and Sen. Chris Lee, chair of the Senate Committee on Transportation, Culture and Arts.

This batch of bills was first taken up at 9:30 a.m., and initially two measures were amended to conference drafts. One of them, SB 934, represents an accounting maneuver to protect $573 million in state funding for the city’s Skyline rail system construction.

Throughout the rest of the day, meetings resumed six times for the group of transportation-related bills.

Kila said he walked more than 2 miles inside the Capitol on Friday, mostly shuttling between meeting rooms.

“I’m exhausted,” he said around 3:30 p.m., despite catching a 10-minute nap earlier.

Of the 19 transportation-­related bills, 11 were agreed to with conference drafts, including three after 6 p.m. The last-minute action involved the speed camera measure, HB 697, and a bill to regulate electric bicycles, HB 958.

One of the transporta- tion bills that failed was HB 1167, which proposed a $1.5 million emergency appropriation for the state Department of Transportation to take over enforcement of a motor carrier law from the state Public Utilities Commission.