Fired up by the fate of a major pay-to-play bill that died in April at the Legislature, the heads of the Campaign Spending Commission and Hawaiʻi State Ethics Commission are stepping up their efforts to lobby for reform in the 2026 session that beings in January.

The cooperation between Kristin Izumi-Nitao, executive director of campaign spending, and Robert Harris, executive director of ethics, entered a new phase Wednesday when Izumi-Nitao appeared by invitation at the ethics commission’s public meeting.

The purpose was to hear insights and explore collaboration between the agencies. It was a meeting of like minds to shop-talk shared priorities — especially legislation to ban campaign contributions from state or county contractors, grantees, officers and their immediate family members.

Izumi-Nitao, Harris and company are building on a remarkable three years of legislative reform that began with the conviction of two former legislators who took bribes to influence legislation. That issue goes to the core of political corruption in the islands.

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Introducing Izumi-Nitao to his bosses, Harris said he looked forward to talking up opportunities to work together and to take questions from commissioners.

“Absolutely, thank you for having us,” said Izumi-Nitao, who brought along her new general counsel, Kristie Cruz Chang, who previously worked at the Hawaiʻi Attorney General’s Office. “We’ve always appreciated our relationship with state ethics. And of course, your executive director has been very collaborative, very communicative.”

Whether the out-of-the-ordinary get-together will result in more ethics and campaign reform for Hawaiʻi is an open question. Legislative leadership holds the most powerful cards, and they can — and do — kill bills they don’t like, regardless of how a majority of members, journalists, advocates and the public feels about them.

Readers of Civil Beat all know that story well: It led to the formation of a special House commission in 2022 to recommend ways the Legislature could clean its own house. Not every reform has been enacted, but state laws on campaigns and ethics have been notably strengthened.

But the work is not over, and Izumi-Nitao and Harris — who served on the Foley commission, as it is informally called — are the primary government officials leading the charge.

One-Two Punch

The pay-to-play bill, House Bill 371, was widely seen by supporters as an historic rewrite of campaign finance law. It would close a loophole in state law that has allowed millions of dollars to go to local political campaigns from people who are awarded big state contracts.

And yet, it died in the last hour of the last day of conference committee because House and Senate leadership wanted it to die. As is typical, no rationale was offered, even though the bill was unopposed by legislators.

Undeterred, Izumi-Nitao and Harris began discussing what they might do not long after the measure was dispatched in late April. HB 371 was Izumi-Nitao’s bill, and she and the Campaign Spending Commission are taking the lead in pushing for it again in the 2026 session.

What the bill will propose is a work in a progress, but Izumi-Nitao said it will use the last version of HB 371 as a launching point.

“We’re hoping to have the package ready by November for us to submit, and then we usually go over and start talking to the legislators about the bills to see if they have any questions,” she told Civil Beat.

The Ethics Commission wants to make sure reform continues and is adding a new segment to its monthly meetings where commissioners can brainstorm proposals and then put them on the agenda for action at future meetings.

That comes at the request of Cynthia Thielen, an ethics commissioner and former state legislator, who kicked off the brainstorming this past week with a proposal that she said would prevent unelected executive branch officers with procurement authority over contracts valued at more than $5,000 from soliciting campaign contributions.

The bill would include an exemption for First Amendment rights to express opinions.

Campaign contributions are recognized as a form of speech, even for businesses and labor groups — something the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 2010 in Citizens United. That ruling has allowed wealthy donors, corporations and special interest groups such as labor unions to spend wildly in campaigns.

Citizens United, as the Brennan Center for Justice describes it, is “a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the late 19th century.”

The state cannot overturn Citizens United, but it can improve ethical and campaign oversight locally. (Each county has its own ethics jurisdiction, but campaign spending is regulated at the state and county level.)

As Thielen explained at Wednesday’s meeting, her bill would ensure that a cabinet official has an ethical requirement that they “stay out of fundraising.” Fong called the proposal “very commendable.”

Combined, the proposed bills represent a one-two punch by the directors of the two watchdog commissions. It shows Harris and Izumi-Nitao are not taking no for an answer, a proactive posture that could lead to enacting new reforms next year.

Hits And Misses

Ethics and campaign reform can’t be done without the help of David Tarnas and Karl Rhoads, the chairs of the judiciary committees in the House and Senate, respectively. They and their staff talked frequently with Izumi-Nitao and Harris even during the frenzy of conference committee.

It included specific discussion of HB 371 which, even though it had been significantly watered down, remained a priority of legislators still working on the legislation.

Although the bill ultimately failed, Izumi-Nitao said she believes it can be brought back to life.

“The spirit is there,” Izumi-Nitao told ethics commissioners Wednesday in describing support for HB 371 during conference even as leadership sharpened its scythe.

But even the support and involvement of the judiciary committees doesn’t guarantee success. That was apparent in the epic fail of the other major campaign reform bill of the 2025 session: expanding partial public financing of elections. Tarnas and Rhoads worked to get the measure passed after a bill to enact a comprehensive public financing system died in Tarnas’ House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee in mid-March due to lack of House support.

Like the contractors bill, House Bill 370 (which also came from Izumi-Nitao) was quashed at the 11th hour. But the Campaign Spending Commission is not giving up on that idea, either, even though it has been shot down for several years now.

A key roadblock is that, even when momentum seems to be building for reform, legislators often dramatically alter bills during conference committee — a time when no public testimony is allowed.

In the case of the pay-to-play bill, HB 371, House and Senate leaders markedly enfeebled the measure by applying the contribution ban only to companies doing business with specific branches of government — the governor, lieutenant governor and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs — “essentially continuing the status quo for most elected officials and their campaign donors,” as my colleague Blaze Lovell reported at the time.

One major change that may benefit reform measures going forward, however, is the replacement of Kyle Yamashita, who chaired the House Finance Committee, with Chris Todd. (Yamashita remains a member of the committee.)

As Civil Beat reported after the purge, Todd said the new House leadership pledged to not “dictate policy matters” to subject matter chairs.

We’ll see how that works out. The Senate follows its own rules and protocol.

And all four of the Campaign Spending Commission’s bills in the 2025 session died. The Hawaiʻi State Ethics Commission did better, seeing all three bills from its package enacted, each of them regarding lobbying.

But another bill that the Ethics Commission backed, Senate Bill 1545, did not pass. It would have brought the legislative and judicial branches under the state’s Code of Ethics that prohibits nepotism in public employment.

Fong asked Harris whether he’d try to bring the nepotism bill back next year, wondering if the commission may be beating a dead horse. The executive director hinted that he might. In his testimony on SB 1545, after all, he wrote that the bill “promotes fairness, transparency, and public trust in government.”

Civil Beat’s reporting on the Hawaiʻi State Legislature is supported in part by the Donald and Astrid Monson Education Fund.