On the Friday before the final week of the session, a scheduled budget conference committee meeting disappeared from the calendar without explanation.

Yet, anyone paying attention knew why. One committee over, the House and Senate were still fighting over Hawaiʻi’s income tax bill, and nothing else could move until they were done.

In my view, Senate Bill 3125 was the single most important bill of the session. The 2024 tax cut law, Act 46, promised income tax relief to most Hawaiʻi households. But those cuts were designed before federal budget cuts, tariffs and the Iran war rewrote the math for states across the country. By every major deadline this session, it was clear the governor, the House and the Senate knew Hawaiʻi couldn’t afford the revenue losses.

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This bill was the fix, but it wasn’t straightforward. Gov. Josh Green opened by proposing to halt the next stages of Act 46’s cuts and redirect relief toward families through targeted credits. The Senate countered with a version that preserved more of the broad income-tax-cut structure, while repealing major business and energy credits beginning in 2029 to offset the cost. The House did a little of both — preserving some cuts, adding a new upper-income bracket, increasing the top three rates and adjusting tax credits.

That fight played out in conference committee over the final two weeks of session, and the rest of the Legislature paid for it. The budget couldn’t move because the revenue number was unknowable until the tax bill was done. Other bills stalled while negotiators worked. Two weeks is a brutally short runway, but it’s also what forces lawmakers to stop deferring and make hard choices about the state’s endless needs and limited resources.

The final conference draft preserved the core Act 46 income tax cuts for joint filers earning under $350,000, with comparable thresholds for single filers and heads of household. More than 90% of Hawaiʻi households earn well below those thresholds, according to census data. For the lowest earners, the bill went further than Act 46, reducing rates in the bottom two income brackets beginning in tax year 2027 and again in tax year 2029.

The bill pays for that relief by adding a new 13% tax bracket for joint filers earning over $1 million starting in tax year 2027, and by sunsetting or repealing a series of business and energy tax credits between 2027 and 2029. Most of those sunsets are defensible on their merits. The one that isn’t so easy to set aside is the renewable energy technologies tax credit, the state’s primary support for rooftop solar, which gets capped at $40 million a year and, in the final draft, eliminated for taxable years beginning after 2029.

The case against sunsetting the credit is worth taking seriously. Limiting eligibility by income makes sense as a starting point. But Rocky Mould of the Hawaiʻi Solar Energy Association argued in Civil Beat that the credit pays for itself in private investment and lower grid-wide electricity costs for all users. He may be right. In which case, the $40 million cap should be revisited in future sessions. But this session, a tradeoff had to be made — and broad tax relief for more than 90% of Hawaiʻi households had to take precedence.

Other issues paid the price, too. Civil Beat’s Sunshine Blog documented the final-day chaos as bills got caught in the scramble, conference drafts were posted after votes, and calls for a longer session rang clear. Those criticisms are valid, and the compressed calendar makes a convenient explanation. But in my experience, if the Legislature has the will and the resources to pass something, they will find the time to do it.

With Senate Bill 3125, I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure they would get there. The easier path was to postpone Act 46’s cuts, sidestep the fight, and let the next session deal with the fallout. Instead, Hawaiʻi’s Democratic majority dug into the state’s actual revenue sources, made hard choices about which credits to keep and which to sunset, added a long-overdue top bracket for the highest earners, and delivered on a promise that was genuinely difficult to keep.

I’ve argued before that Democrats need to choose a clear vision and stick to it. This outcome was an example of exactly that. This session, Hawaiʻi’s majority put working families first. That’s worth saying clearly, even when the process that got us here was messy.