Here we go again.

It’s that time of year when senators and representatives work together on hundreds of bills that have passed both chambers to resolve differences resulting from amendments.

Sounds almost idyllic from a public policy perspective, right?

Imagine legislators striving to put the finishing touches on measures to make sure they’re as good as they can be before sending them off to the governor to become new laws that improve life in the islands.

It should be an unhurried time when everyone gets their say and the policymaking unfolds in the open.

Unfortunately, none of this comes close to describing the conference committee period in the Hawaiʻi Legislature.

Instead, it’s a two-week frenzy that sacrifices the public good for the sake of backroom dealing orchestrated by a select few leaders, including the chairs of the Senate and House money committees.

Want to follow along as a concerned citizen? You might get a glimpse of the conferees as the process begins. Then it moves behind closed doors for negotiating and horse trading that sometimes bar even the majority of the committee members.

A changed bill might emerge days later with an explanation of what it now contains and a final committee vote in public, but no explanation of how it got to that point. Or it might not emerge at all because often, even though versions have already been approved in both the House and the Senate, measures die mysterious deaths dictated by the powerful puppeteers.

“I would like to see as few bills as possible kind of held hostage in that situation.”

Rep. Amy Perruso

The conference committee period runs for the next two weeks, but traditionally little happens in the first few days. Sometimes it ends with a “cattle call” in which dozens of legislators are herded into the same room to quickly cast final votes on bills whose latest amendments they may not even understand.

In a final burst of top-down intrigue after the conference committees are disbanded, the state budget bill is sometimes voted on before legislators have seen its final form.

Rep. Amy Perruso has been watching sessions end this way for six years and is one of many who would like to see changes.

“I think that conference committee actually can be pretty exciting, because we’re hammering out differences that we didn’t really address throughout the session,” she said. “But it’s also something of a black box, because there’s so much going on, and it does feel chaotic. I wish that we didn’t send so many bills to conference committee, because there’s just not enough time. A lot of good bills fall by the wayside.”

“I would like to see as few bills as possible kind of held hostage in that situation,” Perruso said.

House Minority Leader Lauren Matsumoto has seen her share of conference committee chaos as well in her 12-year legislative career.

“It’s always been kind of frantic, not the most efficient, effective way to do things,” she said. “I hope this year our conference committees start meeting earlier.”

“It’s a very interesting process that’s hard to explain to anybody that hasn’t been through it before,” Matsumoto said.

The Whole Session In Microcosm

Legislative leaders like to note that citizens can still contact legislators during conference committee and also insist they’ve taken some steps to address this end-of-session turmoil — there was no cattle call last year, for instance. But the reforms are so modest as to be mostly unnoticeable.

And the fact is, the conference committees, the cattle calls and the budget bill jam are actually the natural results of how the Hawaiʻi Legislature runs from opening day in mid-January to sine die in early May.

When each session convenes, more than two-thirds of all bills are referred to the House Finance and Senate Ways and Means committees. That means the money chairs don’t need to wait until the conference committee period to hold sway over the majority of the legislation — they can and do kill or alter many bills earlier in the process.

Secrecy is ingrained in every aspect of a Hawaiʻi Legislature that long ago exempted itself from the Sunshine Law that requires other levels of government to conduct the public’s business in public. At the State Capitol, committee meetings happen in open session with pubic testimony, but all the negotiations occur in private.

And the unnecessary rush of the conference committee period is indicative of the tight scheduling throughout the session. The state constitution dictates when the Legislature convenes but not when it adjourns.

We need a 12-month session.

Senate President Ron Kouchi and House Speaker Nadine Nakamura took a momentous step earlier this week when they opted to allow big pay raises proposed by the State Salary Commission to take effect.

They can’t possibly think legislators who receive $100,000-a-year salaries should work on a part-time schedule, can they?

Thus it’s reasonable to expect — no, insist — that the coming two-week crunch of conference committee will be one of the last such beasts.

The Issues About To Be Decided

Earlier in the session, as usual, committee chairs were quick to insert defective dates or blank out the dollars so that bills they approve would still have to go to conference committee — as if that period really were the time for reasoned consideration.

As a result, hundreds of bills will be engulfed in the maelstrom, some of them quite significant.

Aftermath of Maui fires: Hawaiian Electric Co. is asking the state to protect the utility from future wildfire lawsuits in hopes of protecting a credit rating that took a hit after the August 2023 fires.

Similar protections have been provided in 14 other Western states, but the Senate has disagreed with House amendments to Senate Bill 897.

Meanwhile, Senate committees amended House Bill 1001 to establish a fund to pay the state’s portion of a $4 billion global settlement, so both measures are headed for conference committee.

Sports gambling: Hawaiʻi would become the 39th state to legalize some form of sports wagering under House Bill 1308. The bill would only allow for online sports betting, while some other states have physical retail sports books where people place bets in person.

Hawaiʻi is one of just two states with no legal form of commercial gambling. Lawmakers have long been reluctant to legalize gambling over fears that it would lead to higher crime rates and strong opposition from community organizations and, in particular, religious groups.

But the House has disagreed with Senate amendments to the bill and there are a lot of unanswered questions, such as how much gambling operators would be taxed, what resources would be dedicated to gambling addiction and how the industry would be regulated.

Police pursuits: House Bill 277 would establish rules for when authorities can chase after fleeing vehicles.

Several high-profile police pursuits in recent years have ended with injuries or deaths of bystanders, costing taxpayers millions of dollars to settle lawsuits. This should be the work of the Hawaiʻi Law Enforcement Standards Board, created more than six years ago, but it has yet to come up with its own proposals.

Asset forfeitures: House Bill 126 would allow asset forfeiture cases only when property owners have been convicted of a felony.

Supporters say the measure would increase the transparency and accountability of the forfeiture process. But it is opposed by the Hawaiʻi attorney general and several county prosecuting attorneys, and the House has disagreed with Senate amendments.

Pay-to-play politics: House Bill 371 would expand the ban on campaign donations from state and county contractors to include their officers and immediate family members. It would also apply to officers of nonprofits receiving state and county grants.

This is the third straight session that an attempt has been made to close a gaping loophole in campaign finance regulations, but the effort has been supercharged by a Civil Beat/New York Times investigation last year, which found that donations from contractors accounted for nearly 20% of all campaign contributions since 2006.

The House and Senate must still agree on critical points including how contractors and nonprofit organizations will have to report who their officers and close family members are, and whether that information will be kept secret from the public.

Public campaign finance: Another proposal that has been pushed for years would expand the state’s public campaign finance system, currently so underfunded that few candidates use it. The idea is to even the playing field and give challengers a fighting chance against better-funded incumbents.

House Bill 370 is the latest effort at partial public financing. A measure for full public financing infamously imploded in conference committee two years ago, where it shrank repeatedly before being killed outright.

Taking The Time To Do It Right

Legislators have two years before their annual salaries jump from $74,160 to $97,896. They’ll be making $114,348 in 2030.

They were spared having to vote on the Salary Commission action when Kouchi and Nakamura ran out the clock on resolutions calling for public hearings on the raises and decided not to put the commission’s recommendations up for a vote.

Now all they have to do is explain to their constituents how the Legislature should change if and when it goes full-time, and they should do so before or during their reelection campaigns.

The current tight schedule squeezed between mid-January and the first week in May has always been cited as not allowing enough time to accomplish significant reforms. Now there will be time to do it right.

Some government critics say the shorter the legislative session the better. Don’t buy that.

No more allowing the money committee chairs to run roughshod over their colleagues. It’s a simple matter of changing the rules, requiring only majority votes.

No more conducting so much business in secret. The Sunshine Law should apply to at least most of their deliberations, with a possible exception for party caucuses.

And, God-willing, no more conference committee periods of just two weeks — far too little time to adequately deliberate so much legislation out in the open.

Some government critics say the shorter the legislative session the better. Don’t buy that. Running Hawaiʻi is a full-time job.