When Hawaiʻi state legislators running for reelection ask voters to keep them on the job next year, they’ll do so knowing they’re about to get big pay raises.

That seems like a good time for them to explain what they are willing to do to justify all that additional money.

One obvious answer comes to mind: work more.

Only three states — New York, California and Pennsylvania — currently pay legislators more than the $97,896 Hawaiʻi lawmakers will make starting in 2027, and all three have much longer legislative sessions than Hawaiʻi’s three and a half months.

Along with Michigan, they are the four states considered to have truly full-time legislatures by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But Civil Beat looked at those states and found that going full-time is no cure-all when it comes to running a transparent and efficient legislature.

Like Hawaiʻi, the legislatures in California and New York are dominated by Democrats and all three conduct much of their most crucial business in secrecy. Pennsylvania and Michigan, meanwhile, languish in partisan divides with one political party controlling each of their chambers.

Still, the shortness of Hawaiʻi’s session raises the eyebrows of legislative observers elsewhere.

What if their states only had three and a half months?

“That would be enough time for the budget and almost nothing else,” said Sam Mullins, senior reporter for the online news organization New York Focus.

It’d be pretty much impossible, said Chris Micheli, a longtime lobbyist and renowned observer of the California legislature who just published “California Government in a Nutshell.”

“You can’t get bills through the normal process in that short a period of time,” Micheli said. “I think it would also result in a lot of deference to the executive branch, who would be there all the remaining days of the year. So I don’t think it’s necessarily good for ensuring that there are co-equal branches of government.”

New York: Longer, But Still Rushed

If Hawaiʻi legislators stick with a three and a half-month session, they would be going it alone among the states that pay their lawmakers a true full-time wage.

Take New York, home of the highest-paid state legislators in the country at $142,000. Their session typically runs from January through June, and there’s frequent debate over whether it should be longer.

“We complain here, people interested in good government, about our legislative session being too short, Mullins said. “New York has 20 million people, and it is one of the more complex states to run. I would think we have particular need of a longer legislative session.”

The half-year session that unfolds annually in the Albany Capitol is indeed a free-for-all. A budget must be approved in time for the new fiscal year that starts April 1, and there are no limits on how many bills can be introduced by the 63 senators and 150 Assembly members. New bills can be thrown in the hopper at any time during the session.

During the 2023-2024 biennium, 22,307 measures were introduced and 1,701 were passed. The vast majority are never considered by the committees they are referred to. (Sound familiar?)

New York is the only one of these states that has attempted to cap the amount of money legislators can earn from outside employment.

How to instill some order near the session’s end? Secrecy, of course. 

In the New York Senate, an informal but all-powerful “working rules group” appointed by the majority leader is so exclusive that even some legislators haven’t heard of it. In closed-door meetings, it reviews still-pending bills and recommends which ones should survive. It processed about 600 bills in 2023 and killed half of them, New York Focus reported.

In the Assembly, meanwhile, the speaker doesn’t bother with such a group, deciding for himself which unresolved bills in that chamber will still advance.

After adjournment, legislators supposedly spend the rest of the year helping constituents, preparing new bills and holding occasional committee hearings — hence their full-time status.

New York is the only one of these states that has attempted to cap the amount of money legislators can earn from outside employment, but its $35,000 ceiling passed in 2023 along with the latest round of pay raises has been challenged in court by some Republican legislators and has not taken effect.

Pennsylvania, Michigan: Partisan Divides

The other three states considered full-time have the legislative calendars to prove it.

California has the second-highest legislator pay in the country at $128,215. Its legislature is almost always in session, from January to mid-September in odd-numbered years and from January through Nov. 30 in even-numbered years.

Pennsylvania has the third-highest pay at $110,015, with annual cost-of-living adjustments tied to the Philadelphia inflation rate. Its two-year session begins in January of odd-numbered years and ends in November or December of the following even-numbered year.

Now that’s full-time.

Same goes for Michigan, which pays its legislators a base salary of $71,685 but throws in a significant expense allowance of $10,800. Their sessions truly run all year, although with intermittent recesses.

None of these state legislatures operate under strict open meeting Sunshine laws that affect the ability to conduct the public’s business in private.

But efforts to pass legislation in Pennsylvania and Michigan are regularly thwarted by partisanship since party control is split in their chambers. In Michigan, for example, 1,303 bills had been introduced as of late August and only 12 had passed.

Suffice it to say these two states have their own transparency issues.

In Pennsylvania, the gut-and-replace tactic prohibited here by the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court is alive and well, especially for last-minute spending bills, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In Michigan, the governor and the legislature are exempt from the public records law, meaning they’re under no legal obligation to share public records with … the public. Massachusetts is the only other state with that exemption.

None of these state legislatures operate under strict open meeting Sunshine laws that affect the ability to conduct the public’s business in private. Either the laws don’t apply at all, or they exempt party “caucuses,” which can be as small as two people.

But hey, at least they pretty much have to show up for work year-round.

California: Different Paths To Secrecy

As an all-blue state like Hawaiʻi, California merits a closer look.

The Golden State has a lot more legislators (40 senators and 80 Assembly members) and the much longer session. But on paper, its legislative process is quite similar to Hawaiʻi’s.

A key difference is that California has both budget committees and appropriations committees. The budget committees are responsible for processing the governor’s proposed budget and navigating it to passage before the fiscal year begins July 1.

After that is when the secrecy kicks in.

The governor and budget committees often draft last-minute bills containing sweeping policy changes, insert token $1,000 appropriations to tie them to the budget and pass them with little or no opportunity for the public or affected interests to know what is happening. These so-called “budget trailer bills” take effect immediately, and there are dozens every session.

In California the chambers work out differences in bills without going to conference committee for reconciliation.

The appropriations committees, meanwhile, deal with expenditure bills after they are received from policy committees. But every bill estimated to cost the state $150,000 or more is moved out of public view through a process called “suspense files.” Twice per session, some of the bills are released, but hundreds die there with no public explanation.

The Hawaiʻi Legislature, of course, has its own brand of backroom dealing known as conference committee, theoretically the period when differing versions of bills that have passed the Senate and House are reconciled. With the clock ticking toward adjournment, dozens of bills die with nary a word of public explanation simply because they fail to gain “release” from the Senate and House money chairs.

California’s Micheli wonders why so many Hawaiʻi bills end up in conference committee. After all, the Democratic Party dominates here, just as it does in the Golden State.

“You shouldn’t really have to reconcile, frankly,” he said, adding that in California the chambers work out differences in bills without going to conference committee for reconciliation. If a bill passes one chamber and is amended in a second, the first chamber generally concurs.

“It’s doubtful that a super-duper majority Democratic house is going to put in hostile amendments that the other super-duper majority Democratic house is going to find objectionable,” Micheli said.

Hmmm. Maybe California Democrats cooperate a lot better than Hawaiʻi Democrats? Or maybe, just maybe, the fix is in here to push a lot of measures to conference committee where they can be killed by the money chairs armed with silencers.

Hawaiʻi: It’s Time For Action

Some Hawaiʻi legislators will tell you that with all their constituent services, they’re already full-time state employees despite being in session for just three and a half months. Others will say they don’t want to be full-time, especially if it means spending more time at the State Capitol.

But so far, none has announced plans to turn down the 32% raise coming in January 2027, raising their annual salaries from $74,160 to $97,896. Additional raises will follow, amounting to a 48% increase by Jan. 1, 2030, to $114,348.

While a longer Hawaiʻi legislative session won’t automatically lead to a more transparent one, it’s a crucial step.

Take away those unnecessarily tight deadlines and everyone can focus more rationally on the issues at hand. The many other reform proposals that keep getting shot down would have more of a fighting chance.

As Micheli said, it’s impossible for the Legislature to be an equal branch of government with a three and a half-month session. Too much is ceded to the executive branch and the bureaucrats who run state departments.

If you shortchange your constituents, you do so at your own political peril.

Affordable housing. Wildfire recovery and prevention. Responding to federal cutbacks in state-provided services. We need our legislators on the job to deal with these issues and many others as they arise.

If you shortchange your constituents, you do so at your own political peril.

Within the Legislature, opposition to extending the session comes mainly from those who would find themselves personally inconvenienced. They include some neighbor island legislators who dread more time on Oʻahu, and people who hold other jobs.

One legislator — a relatively effective one during session, actually — told me during a post-session interview that he is generally only available for public business two days a month for most of the year because of the demands of a separate full-time time job.

Sorry, but that should no longer matter once the public starts paying you a full-time wage.

It became obvious during the 2025 session that the Legislature is slow-walking any serious consideration of lengthening its work calendar. But the coming session is the last one before the pay raises kick in — and before the next election season.

Good luck trying to convince voters you deserve that additional money while sticking with a three and a half-month session.