What’s unusual about the second session of the Hawaii Legislature’s biennium, such as the one that starts Wednesday?

Zombies. Thousands of them.

This year there are 2,858 carryover bills, the legislative equivalent of the undead. They exist because every measure that didn’t pass during the first session of the biennium last year is technically still alive.

But no matter how many times supporters of failed first-year legislation are assured that their measures will have another shot in the second year, they almost never do.

Indeed, over the past decade carryover bills have been reanimated and approved by the Legislature .0079% of the time, according to the calculations of Civil Beat columnist and former lawmaker Beth Fukumoto.

It’s not that a lot of failed proposals from last session won’t get another shot this session. Supporters of high-profile efforts to reform the tax code, establish visitor impact fees and legalize recreational marijuana use are almost certain to give them another whirl in ’24.

We already know that expanding public financing of election campaigns will be reconsidered, along with several other government reform proposals in the “sunshine bills” we were tracking last session.

It’s just that practically everyone connected with the Legislature prefers to introduce shiny new measures rather than bring back carryover bills — even when the language is pretty much identical.

‘Terribly Inefficient’

The Hawaii Campaign Spending Commission introduces a set of bills every session, and they are presented as new measures to the Senate president and House speaker. This will include slightly altered versions of several 2023 bills.

“We’ve never had a carryover bill revived, actually,” says Gary Kam, the commission’s general counsel.

For a decade, the commission introduced legislation every year to increase fines on super PACs that violate campaign contributions laws — “ever since what happened with PRP in 2012,” Kam says, referring to spending violations by the Pacific Resource Partnership, a proponent of Honolulu rail. “Every year, the commission introduced a bill, a similar bill. It wasn’t changed. And finally we did get it passed in 2023.”

Ten years, one proposal, 10 different bills.

“Customarily what the Legislature has done is they’ll reintroduce the bill and start from the beginning again, which I think is terribly inefficient.”

Rep. David Tarnas

Rep. Amy Perruso, chair of the House Higher Education Committee, considers her top priority this session to be pushing anew for expansion of the Hawaii Promise Program to offer scholarships to students at four-year universities.

But rather than resurrect House Bill 390 that proposed just that, she’ll introduce a new measure “with slight changes for the purposes of updating context and reckoning with budgetary changes,” says her legislative aide, Izzy Usborne.

Making those changes in HB 390 would have been another option, but “normally, in a biennium, I would generally say that bills should be reintroduced in the second year,” Perruso says.

Rep. David Tarnas, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, hopes to revisit several measures that didn’t make it through the Legislature last session. He wishes more of them could be resurrected rather than starting over with reintroductions.

“Customarily what the Legislature has done is they’ll reintroduce the bill and start from the beginning again, which I think is terribly inefficient,” Tarnas says. “I have always encouraged chairs to bring up bills that are still pending in their committee that should be heard.”

“So if there’s a bill that we passed out of the House and it’s still pending in Judiciary over in the Senate, rather than introduce a new bill, I’ll just go over to the Senate and ask Chair (Karl) Rhoads to hear the bill pending in his committee,” Tarnas says. “They can move forward with that, because I would prefer not having to do the same thing all over again and go through that process.”

There’s A Reason For Everything

Sen. Les Ihara, a veteran legislator, says lawmakers generally choose to introduce new bills rather than bring back old ones for practical reasons, not just out of force of habit.

For one thing, sponsors may simply want to avoid running into the same obstacle — usually a committee chair — for the second straight session.

“A new measure could potentially be tweaked to get a different committee referral,” Ihara says. “If one committee was a problem, you could tweak it in a way to avoid the committee or have another committee be the main reviewer.”

Other times, legislators might simply calculate that their proposal has a better chance of passing with a fresh start and a new bill number, Ihara says.

Even though he’s a proponent of using carryover bills when possible, Tarnas acknowledges there are sometimes reasons to address first-session issues with new second-session approaches.

For example, instead of resurrecting stymied measures to increase compensation for court interpreters and court-appointed attorneys, he says he’s reached agreement with Judiciary officials to have money for those purposes included in the proposed department budget.

In another case, Tarnas backed a criminal justice reform measure that passed the House but never got a hearing in the Senate. He now figures that House Bill 1336 sought to accomplish too much in a single measure. Rather than just try it again, he’s working to divide it into “four or five” bills that the Senate may find more digestible. 

 If you were pushing for a measure that didn’t make it past the finish line last session, now is a good time to contact legislators and lobby for its reconsideration.

Perruso thinks some carryover bills might stand a better chance this session because of the way they met their demise in the “chaotic” final hours of last session’s conference committee period.

One candidate is Senate Bill 1413, which simplifies the criteria to qualify for residency status at the University of Hawaii, a measure she says “impacts our young people and is a way to bring people home.”

Perruso says she’s not the only lawmaker who is asking: If a bill died simply because legislative leaders said they ran out of time, why not bring it back this session?

Still, experience shows that most carryover bills will not escape their zombie status.

Which means if you were pushing for a measure that didn’t make it past the finish line last session, now is a good time to contact legislators and lobby for its reconsideration — in its current form or, more likely, as a newer model.