top of page
Δεν έχουν δημοσιευτεί ακόμη αναρτήσεις σε αυτήν τη γλώσσα
Μείνετε συντονισμένοι...

NEWS ARTICLES

Photos: Lawmakers, lobbyists and citizens kick off the 2025 legislative session

Hawaiʻi Public Radio

Jason Ubay, Mark Ladao, Ashley Mizuo, Sophia McCullough

January 15, 2025

Senators Mentioned:

Senator Ronald D. Kouchi
Senator Chris Lee
Senator Dru Mamo Kanuha
Senator Jarrett Keohokalole
Senator Lynn DeCoite
Senator Herbert "Tim" Richards, III
Senator Troy Hashimoto
Senator Henry J.C. Aquino

State representatives and visitors attend opening day of the 2025 legislative session at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol on Jan. 15, 2025. Jason Ubay/HPRNew year, new legislative session. 


Lawmakers, lobbyists and engaged citizens gathered at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol in Honolulu this morning to kick off the 2025 session.Some of HPR's news team spent the day alongside attendees. Here's what they saw.Live mele and hula kick off the 2025 Hawaiʻi House of Representatives on opening day.


Live mele and hula kick off the 2025 Hawaiʻi House of Representatives on opening day.Jason Ubay/HPR


Visitors to the Capitol are required to go through security screening.Jason Ubay/HPR


Community members gather in the open-air Hawaiʻi State Capitol courtyard on opening day.Jason Ubay/HPR


Members of the United Public Workers union attend opening day.Jason Ubay/HPR


From left to right: House Republicans Garner Shimizu, Diamond Garcia, Elijah Pierick, Lauren Matsumoto and David Alcos III on opening day of the 2025 legislative session. (Jan. 15, 2025)

Jason Ubay/HPR


First-year Rep. Matthias Kusch of Hawaiʻi Island, center, with Gov. Josh Green on opening day. Green appointed Kusch to the position after the death of former Rep. Mark Nakashima.Jason Ubay/HPR

Rep. Nadine Nakamura addresses the state House as speaker for the first time on Jan. 15, 2025.Rep. Nadine Nakamura addresses the state House as speaker for the first time on Jan. 15, 2025. 


Nakamura said investments into more affordable housing will be top of mind for lawmakers as they try to address the cost of living.Mark Ladao/HPR


First-year Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto cast the lone "no" vote against new House Speaker Nadine Nakamura on opening day of the 2025 legislative session. Ashley Mizuo/HPR


Hawaiʻi House Speaker Nadine Nakamura speaks to the press. She is the first woman to lead the chamber. Mark Ladao/HPR


Attendees wait to enter the House and Senate chambers at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol on opening day of the legislative session on Jan. 15, 2025. Senators and representatives have their offices on the second, third and fourth floors. The governor and the lieutenant governor are housed on the top floor. Jason Ubay/HPR


Senate President Ron Kouchi addresses senators and attendees on opening day of the legislative session on Jan. 15, 2025. Kouchi said many of the state’s problems can be traced back to one thing: housing. Mark Ladao/HPR


Senate Minority Leader Brenton Awa addresses the chamber on opening day of the legislative session on Jan. 15, 2025. Awa called for more support for locals and Native Hawaiians. He also criticized local leaders, pointing at Gov. Josh Green’s offer to house Los Angeles fire victims in hotel rooms, the Honolulu City Council’s recent 64% pay raise, and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s “ownership” of local media. Mark Ladao/HPR


Senate President Ron Kouchi, flanked by Senate Democratic leadership, speaks to the press on opening day. (Jan. 15, 2025) Mark Ladao/HPR


Representatives and senators usually open their office doors and offer food to community members roaming the hallways. Mark Ladao/HPR


The Hawaiʻi State Capitol building from across S. Beretania Street. Jason Ubay/HPR


Tags

Local News State Legislature

The Sunshine Blog: Here’s When It Pays To Be A Doctor — And A Governor

Honolulu Civil Beat

The Sunshine Blog

January 10, 2025

Senators Mentioned:

Senator Lynn DeCoite
Senator Jarrett Keohokalole
Senator Chris Lee
Senator Donovan M. Dela Cruz
Senator Henry J.C. Aquino
Senator Troy N. Hashimoto
Senator Donna Mercado Kim

Dr. Green goes to Washington: Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green has become the leading voice — at least for the moment — opposing the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.


Our very own Dr. Gov. Green was all over Washington, D.C., this week, lobbying senators and telling anyone who would listen about the time in 2019 when he led a medical mission to Samoa to fight a raging measles outbreak only to find Kennedy and his anti-vax campaign had gotten there first.

The country had experienced a drop in vaccination rates before the outbreak, driven in part by fear after the death of two infants in 2018 who had received a measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that had been improperly prepared.


But Kennedy has also been blamed for exacerbating the problem.

In 2019, just months before an emergency was declared, he traveled to Samoa and met with prominent anti-vaccination activists on the island. And then during the height of the outbreak, when children were dying, he sent a letter to the prime minister questioning whether it was the MMR vaccine itself that had caused the public health crisis.


By the time the outbreak had run its course, thousands of people were sickened and 83 died, many of them children.


Green, who is passionate and articulate about the problems that come when people refuse to get vaccinated, had an op-ed published in The New York Times this week and was featured in a Washington Post story and on cable media including CNN and Fox News. And he was trending on social sites.


“I have no personal animus toward Mr. Kennedy on a lot of his policies,” Green told Civil Beat’s Washington correspondent Nick Grube, who caught him as he was sitting on a plane waiting to take off back to Hawaiʻi. “I just have an absolute objection to having the secretary of Health and Human Services be against vaccines, and he is. He can say what he wants to try to mitigate the damage, but everyone knows about his vaccine skepticism.”


Green met with nearly a dozen senators from both sides of the aisle, including Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Ron Wyden of Oregon. He was reluctant to name anyone else, he told Grube, because they were worried about political fallout.


And besides, Green told Grube, he was really there on official state business like checking on federal cash that could and should be headed our way and other things of interest to Hawai‘i.


While in town he worked with two different advocacy groups, 3.14 Action and Protect Our Care, to push his message and coordinate meetings with lawmakers. Already 3.14 Action has featured the governor in one of its advertisements opposing Kennedy.


Green, who The Blog has heard would really like to be the country’s health secretary himself one day, told Grube he anticipates returning to D.C. in the future to crusade against Kennedy, including testifying before Congress if the opportunity allows. He’ll even talk to Donald Trump.


Check, please: Wednesday is Opening Day of the 2025 Hawaiʻi Legislature, so that can only mean one thing: state legislators will rush to hold campaign fundraisers before the opening gavel falls because they’re prohibited by state law from holding organized fundraisers during session.


The Blog is referring specifically to Sens. Lynn DeCoite and Jarrett Keohokalole, who asked for donations at Capitol Modern Tuesday night. It’s conveniently located right across Richards Street from the Hawaiʻi State Capitol.


On Wednesday night Sens. Chris Lee, Donovan Dela Cruz, Henry Aquino and Troy Hashimoto passed their hats at Bishop Museum.


Aquino, DeCoite and Keohokalole are planning ahead — they’re not up for reelection until 2028.

House bills proposing to end the acceptance of all campaign contributions during legislative sessions (not just at organized fundraisers) passed that chamber unanimously in the 2023 session but were not heard by the Senate.


Illustration of Hawaii capitol with sun shining in the sky


Civil Beat opinion writers are closely following efforts to bring more transparency and accountability to state and local government — at the Legislature, the county level and in the media. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.


The mysterious making of the rules: The rulebook dictating how Hawaiʻi lawmakers conduct the public’s business is a big deal. The Blog has long contended that many of the most urgently needed legislative reforms could be accomplished with simple rule changes.


With the start of a new biennium Wednesday, new rules must be adopted. Actually there are two rulebooks, one for the House and another for the Senate. And how they approach the task says a lot about the differences between the two chambers.


The House formed a four-member Advisory Committee on Rules and Procedures that has been reaching out to representatives for their suggestions regarding the rules.

The Senate, meh, not so much. Here’s how Senate Judiciary Chair Karl Rhoads puts it:


“I think the Senate tends to be a little more, what’s the word I’m looking for? You’re a senator. If you have a problem with something, you need to raise it. We’re not necessarily going to go look for you to solicit your concerns.”


Rhoads says he’s heard nothing about possible new Senate rules in the lead-up to the new session.

Which, come to think of it, is not so different from what the House is doing. Its advisory committee is meeting in private, much to the consternation of reform advocates like Gary Hooser.


The former senator writes in his own blog that current House rule No. 20 requires that the committee’s meetings be conducted openly:


“Every meeting of a committee of the House … held for the purpose of making decisions on matters referred to the committee shall be open to the public.”


But House Judiciary Chair David Tarnas points out that this House advisory committee is just that — advisory.

“They’re not making decisions,” Tarnas says. “They’re recommending and they’re advisory. The decision-making itself is when we vote on it.”


That will presumably occur soon after the Legislature convenes. That’s when we’ll know if either chamber is serious about limiting the power of conference chairs, preventing the money committees from controlling non-fiscal matters, eliminating anonymous bill introductions and so forth.


Hope springs eternal: And speaking of being serious about reform, a hui of good governance groups gathered at the Capitol Thursday to launch what they called “Good Government Lobby Day.” The goal of the Hawai‘i Alliance for Progressive Action, Our Hawai‘i, Common Cause and Clean Elections Coalition is to advocate for government reforms that will strengthen transparency, accountability and fairness in the legislative process.

“Welcome to your House of Representatives,” Rep. Della Au Belatti said as she welcomed some two dozen folks to Conference Room 325. She said she had not seen such a level of reform activity in her 20 years in the Legislature, adding that a revived Good Government Caucus at the Legislature is already working on bills.

Good Governance Lobby Day meeting photographed January 9th, 2024 House Representative Della Au Belatti (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)Rep. Della Au Belatti at the Good Governance Lobby Day meeting at the Capitol Tuesday. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024)

Rep. Kim Coco Iwamoto said the new energy for reform began in 2022 when two lawmakers were arrested for and later convicted on bribery charges. There had been a culture, she said, that allowed Ty Cullen and J. Kalani English to get away with corruption. But there’s a lot of new blood in the Leg today.


The groups, which spent half of the day meeting with other lawmakers, are pushing for a range of reforms including making public testimony on bills available early, doing away with anonymous bill introductions, taking non-financial bills out of money committees, enacting term limits and establishing full public financing of campaigns.


Women of the house: One-third (or 32.43%) of the total number of state legislators in the 50 states and territories in 2025 are women, a slight increase from just a few years ago.


The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are at or above the 50% mark of women state legislators, the highest representation nationwide.


How does Hawaiʻi do? Compared to many other states and territories, pretty good at 40.8%. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, for example, each have legislatures with less than 20% women members.


The Hawaiʻi House of Representatives now has its first-ever female speaker, Nadine Nakamura. Two women have led the state Senate, Colleen Hanabusa and Donna Kim.

A slew of new housing laws take effect this month to streamline building, protect tenants

Stateline

Robbie Sequeira

January 9, 2025

Senators Mentioned:

Senator Stanley Chang


A new row of homes is under construction in a Santa Clarita, Calif.

A new row of homes is under construction in a Santa Clarita, Calif., neighborhood in 2023. The state has enacted dozens of new laws to expand housing options and protect tenants — a trend expected to continue nationally this year. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)


Read more Stateline coverage of how communities across the country are trying to create more affordable housing.


New state laws taking effect this month aim to confront the nation’s ongoing housing crisis in various ways, from expanding housing options, to speeding up the development process, to protecting struggling tenants from eviction.


Similar bills are in store for this year’s legislative sessions.

The new laws include measures to combat landlord retaliation in Illinois and Minnesota, to seal eviction records in Idaho and, in California, to streamline the process for building backyard accessory dwelling units, known as ADUs.


Other states focused on the barriers preventing housing from being built by relaxing zoning laws to allow for new types of development, and put the onus on cities to make affordable housing available.


Surveys show most Americans, of all backgrounds, communities and political persuasions, want to see more housing built. The need, experts say, is overwhelming. Freddie Mac estimates the current housing shortage at about 3.7 million homes. For extremely low-income tenants, that shortage is more than 7 million rental homes, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.


“I expect that it will be a banner year for housing legislation, because many state legislators and governors ran for the first time on a platform that included addressing housing cost inflation,” said economist Salim Furth, a senior research fellow and director of the urbanity project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Now they need to deliver.”


Furth, who is tracking 135 housing-related bills this year, said he expects a return of last year’s popular issues: making it easier to build an ADU, allowing residential development in commercial zones, and streamlining permitting processes.


Perhaps no state did more last year than California, which enacted more than 60 housing-related laws. Most encourage more development in a state with an estimated shortfall of 2.5 million homes.


Among the new laws in California are measures that eliminate parking requirements for certain residential developments near transit stations, ease the development of more housing in existing neighborhoods, and strip local governments of the power to block some affordable housing in-fill projects except on the grounds of public health or safety.


The state also enacted several laws to encourage more construction of ADUs. Among other provisions, the measures offer up-front transparency on ADU regulations, encourage the building of ADUs in coastal zones, and offer flexibility for ADUs on multifamily lots.


Accessory dwelling units have gained a lot of bipartisan traction in state legislatures. Gretchen Baldau of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council praised new laws in Arizona and Nebraska that allow ADUs and modular homes on residential lots, and said she sees momentum for legislation in Delaware and Georgia that could allow for ADUs.


“Housing reform can be a tricky issue for lawmakers because the topic literally hits close to home,” Baldau, who is the senior director of the commerce, insurance and economic development task force for ALEC, as the think tank is known, said in a statement to Stateline.


ALEC has offered legislatures model legislation that would lower permitting and construction barriers to building ADUs, she noted, along with other model bills that would eliminate discretionary review and approvals and limit most third-party legal challenges to approved developments.

Tenant protections

Several new laws impose checks on tenant-landlord relationships.


New laws in Illinois and Minnesota, for example, prohibit landlords from retaliating against tenants who report code violations, seek repairs or engage in tenant organizing — the latter of which is robust in Minnesota.

Minnesota’s law also offers protections for tenants who report issues to the media, or who call for emergency assistance.


In Idaho, eviction actions filed on or after Jan. 1, 2025, are automatically shielded from public disclosure if the entire case was dismissed, is not pending appeal or if three years have passed since the filing date.

Idaho was one of at least three states, along with Maryland and Massachusetts, to enact laws last year that seal eviction records, according to a Stateline review. The laws have been hailed by housing advocates who say they will prevent a person’s eviction history from being used against them, though landlords argue eviction data is relevant to leasing decisions.


‘Housing isn’t just one issue’


With 26 state legislatures back in session as of Jan. 8, housing bills are slowly trickling in.


California, a bellwether when it comes to housing policy, has a few bills introduced that would ban the use of algorithmic devices to set rents, prevent local agencies from placing parking standards on ADUs, and create a new state authority to build and maintain social housing, a public community housing movement gaining momentum in some advocacy circles.


In Texas, two Republican lawmakers have filed bills that would override local ordinances restricting or prohibiting accessory dwelling units.


And in Maryland, Democrats say they plan to introduce legislation to speed development approvals for new housing, alongside tenant protection proposals such as a bill that would require landlords to have a legitimate cause for evicting a tenant.


Affordability, homelessness, economic mobility — they all hinge on whether we can provide enough housing.

– Hawaii Democratic state Sen. Stanley Chang


Tim Rosenberger, a legal policy fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, predicts differing approaches to housing: Red states will focus on increasing supply, while blue states will prioritize rent control, he said.


“With rates high and inventory priced far above what most Americans can afford, expect red states to pursue commonsense efforts to increase supply while blue states look at ways to try to curb prices,” he said. 


“Legislators must reject increased regulation, rent and price controls. They should jump at opportunities to reduce regulation and bureaucracy and unleash building.”


In Oregon, lawmakers are considering legislation that would impose rent control on mobile home parks and require indoor cooling in apartments with at least 10 units. The National Apartment Association predicts other states might consider rent stabilization measures as well.


Housing will be a chief priority for some state lawmakers going into the next sessions.


One of Democratic state Sen. Stanley Chang’s goals when he heads back to Hawaii’s legislative floor on Jan. 15 is to change how quickly the state uses its rental housing revolving fund. Under the current system, Chang said, roughly $519 million the state holds in the fund might not be spent until 2038.


“Housing finance reform has been our top priority for years,” he said. “This program alone funds over half of all new housing construction in Hawaii — it’s the primary way we produce housing in the state. If we tweak this program, we could get 10 buildings for the price of one.”

Chang added, however, that the scale of the affordable housing problem is too complex to boil down to one or two issues or solutions.


“Housing isn’t just one issue: It’s the foundation of everything. Affordability, homelessness, economic mobility — they all hinge on whether we can provide enough housing. It’s time to stop treating this as a side project and recognize it as a central priority,” Chang told Stateline. “This is a solvable problem.”

bottom of page