Roll with it: The final few days of conference committee (that is, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) at the Hawaiʻi Legislature can be maddening and exhausting to follow.

Often, committee chairs and their colleagues are ready to reach agreement on legislation only to be told by leadership and the all-powerful money committee chairs that they’ll just have to wait a little bit longer. Reasons are rarely given, which is deeply frustrating to the folks following all the bills.

That was the case Wednesday, when a good number of bills were “rolled over” to Thursday. It included bills beefing up the state’s partial public financing program for elections (’bout time, says The Blog), making it harder for law enforcement to seize property when investigating crimes (the trigger should be conviction and not being charged with a crime, as the bill currently proposes) and funding the state’s Kauhale Initiative and ‘Ohana Zones Pilot Program.

Also pushed to Thursday are bills to permanently add biosecurity to the kuleana of the state Department of Agriculture (the new name would be Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity, or DOAB), to figure out exactly what the new state fire marshal will do and to help stabilize the property insurance market.

The deadline for all non-fiscal bills to live or die is end of business Thursday, while the deadline for all fiscal bills is end of business Friday.

Civil Beat lights the spark: House and Senate conference committees approved a measure Wednesday that would allow the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs to automatically revoke some professional licenses of registered sex offenders.

Senate Bill 1373 cites an Oct. 24 story by Civil Beat Investigations Editor John Hill about a Hawai‘i acupuncturist and physical therapist who retained his professional licenses for years after he was convicted of arranging a sexual encounter with an undercover agent he believed to be a 13-year-old boy.

The bill preamble states the obvious when it declares that delayed action in such cases “places consumers at unnecessary risk.”

The bill includes acupuncturists, athletic trainers, chiropractors, dentists and dental hygienists.

SB 1373 authorizes the DCCA and certain licensing boards to automatically revoke and deny the renewal, restoration or reinstatement of a license to a licensee who is a registered sex offender. California and some other states already have such laws.

Nadine Ando, director of DCCA, said in written testimony the measure is aimed at “only those regulated professions and vocations that have close, physical contact with customers and clients in a private or semi-private setting such as health care practitioners; and where counseling and advising in a private or semi-private setting occurs.”

That includes acupuncturists, athletic trainers, chiropractors, dentists and dental hygienists, among others. 

The bill now goes to the full House and Senate for final votes.

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Criminalizing torture: It may comes as a surprise that Hawaiʻi does not actually define and prohibit the practice of torture.

After getting conference committee approval Wednesday, though, that is likely to change. Senate Bill 281 would make torture a class A felony. It describes torture as physical and mentally harmful acts such as burning, strangling, cutting, electrocuting and deprivation of food, water and clothing.

The bill has major implications for child abuse and Hawaiʻi has seen numerous cases in recent years of children who have been killed or serious injured by abusive parents and guardians.

One last-minute change was made to the measure: making an exception for starvation solely due to poverty. If someone intentionally starves someone, however, that’s clearly torture.

“Sadists do that, and it’s the most popular way of killing children in our state,” Rep. Lisa Marten said after the vote.

Patches of sunshine: Here are three more bills and one resolution that have already advanced this week:

House Bill 412 would expand lobbyist registration and reporting requirements to people who advocate for significant projects through the executive branch, meeting with the governor, staff and agency directors.

The need for conference committee deliberations evaporated Wednesday when the House agreed to Senate amendments to clarify that the new restrictions would not apply to “communications made solely for informational purposes, ceremonial interactions, or routine relationship building that do not involve advocacy for or against specific outcomes.”

House Concurrent Resolution 61, approved by the full Senate on Tuesday after prior approval by the House, asks the Legislative Reference Bureau to study how other jurisdictions produce fiscal notes that assess the costs of bills before they are considered by legislators.

Hawaiʻi is the only state that doesnʻt have some form of fiscal notes already, and as a result legislators are often asked to vote on a measure when they have no idea what it would cost.

Senate Bill 176, which increases the minimum threshold required to trigger an automatic recount of election results, cleared its conference committees.

Same goes for Senate Bill 1030, which specifies that election fraud intimidation includes carrying any unconcealed dangerous instrument, including firearms, within 200 feet of a voter service center or ballot deposit location.

Going nuclear: Hawaiʻi has an official goal of relying 100% on renewable energy by the year 2045, but The Blog and everyone else in Hawaiʻi Nei knows we are still heavily dependent on imported fossil fuel to keep things running here. Even with a growing portion of our energy portfolio coming from geothermal and wind, solar and wave, utility bills remain high.

Enter Senate Concurrent Resolution 136, which has a vote on the Senate floor Thursday. It would ask the State Energy Office to put together a nuclear energy working group to study the feasibility of Hawaiʻi using “advanced nuclear power technologies.”

According to the reso, the United States is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power and nearly one-fifth of the nation’s electricity comes from nuclear power. “Nuclear energy is one of the most reliable energy sources in the nation, with plants designed to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and requiring less maintenance to operate for longer stretches,” it states.

If Hawaiʻi did decide to go nuclear, it would take a two-thirds vote in each chamber of the Legislature. That’s because the state constitution has a provision that says “no nuclear fission power plant shall be constructed or radioactive material disposed of” in the state without legislative permission.

One Civil Beat reader asked if SCR 136 had perhaps undergone a gut-and-replace switcheroo, as it was originally intended to call for a working group on geothermal. Nope. Resos are not subject to the same restrictions as bills.