In its own slow, somewhat sulky way, the Democratic-dominated state Legislature appears to be giving Democratic Gov. David Ige most of what he wanted.
Clearly the biggest win for Ige is the Legislature’s continued support for Ige’s hurry-up offense plan to cool the public schools.
Air conditioning, or at least cooling, 1,000 classrooms by year’s end was the center point of Ige’s 2016 State of the State address in January. Since then he has lobbied for immediate passage of the $100 million request.
“We cannot delay providing relief to our students and their teachers whose success is being hampered by less than optimal physical learning environments,” Ige wrote back on March 10.
The House and Senate have batted back and forth various ways to come up with the extra $100 million and also dreamed up various random riders to hang on the bill. For instance, the latest version of the bill, Senate Bill 3126, requires the Department of Education to also include in each county at least one school that also serves as an emergency shelter to have an independent power “micro- grid” to run the school if regular power fails.
And DOE schools would be required to set a goal of being energy “net zero,” meaning that they are generating as much alternative energy as they consume by 2035. That’s far enough away that the Legislature could also mandate that the DOE shall provide each student with a free puppy by 2036.
The other overarching theme to Ige’s two years in office has been a steady complaint that Hawaii government is too slow in joining the digital revolution, still keeps too many records on paper and lacks a coherent system of implementing a cloud-based information system.
In the Senate version of the budget, Sen. Jill Tokuda’s Ways and Means Committee report pointedly notes that the committee “is intimately familiar with how outdated the Department of Budget and Finance’s budget software is, as well as the department’s (in)ability to transmit vast amounts of data or comply with reporting requirements mandated by the Legislature.”
To fix that, $600,000 was included in the budget for a new budget-reporting system.
Also noted was Ige’s complaint that the state payroll is mostly kept by hand. The WAM committee report notes that the “payroll system was developed in-house more than 40 years ago and is a paper-driven system with no on-line access.” Eight more employees and additional $300,000 were included to update the system.
The House and Senate now go into conference and will come up with a final budget that is expected to still be below what Ige recommended the state needs to spend.
The product from both Ige and the Legislature, though, is a budget that still just nibbles around the edges instead of fundamentally changing how state government reacts to its problems.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.
