Remember two things about the state budget.

First, there is a limited amount of dollars to spend, and second, there are an unlimited number of ways to hide it.

This year there is $12,874,418,668 for fiscal year 2015-2016 and $13,296,497,506 for the following year.

The catch is that only about half of that money is defined as "general funds."

To you a dollar is a dollar. To the akamai legislators there are actually 17 different types of dollars, ranging from general funds to various types of federal funds, some with arcane descriptions such as "general obligation bond funds with debt service cost to be paid from special funds."

What that means is that you can spend only general fund money; the special fund money is special, and it is reserved for special purposes and nothing else.

State Rep. Sylvia Luke quickly caught on to this after she became House Finance Committee chair- woman three years ago.

"Special funds were created several decades ago because it was a method of hiding money," Luke said in an interview.

"Today this changes the method of doing budgeting because it is kind of defective, it is not accurate," she said.

The money still comes from publicly paid taxes, but if it is designated to be spent on trauma care, it cannot be seized to pay school teachers.

Another way a clever bureaucrat hides money is by taking money that is supposed to be used to hire someone and instead, uses it for department needs, such as paying off vacation pay. It is not uncommon for state workers to retire with several years of unused vacation pay.

"For three years I concentrated on controlling the departments’ longstanding practice of holding back on hiring and using that position money for either vacation payouts or other operating expenses. To change that mindset — that was a struggle in itself," Luke said.

Essentially she told the bureaucrats that if they came clean on how much they were hiding for vacation payouts, she would put that money into the bureaucrat’s general fund budget and the money designated to hire a new carpenter or inspector could actual go to hiring someone.

"We want to expand this to all departments, so that when we give money to hire someone, they actually hire someone instead of using the money for something else," Luke said.

Getting the bureaucracy to ‘fess up to where the special fund money is hidden is a more complex challenge.

Luke pointed to money tucked away in special funds that are fueled by cigarette taxes.

Some goes to the University of Hawaii’s Cancer Center, some goes to special reserves, and some goes to several programs that also get money from other special funds.

"I don’t know how you do budgeting like that; how do we know what are the annual expenses? I don’t understand how departments can keep this funding straight, and that may be part of the problem," complained the Nuuanu Democrat.

Luke added that her Senate counterpart, Sen. Jill Tokuda, Ways and Means chairwoman, is also on the same quest to find more of the state money already hidden inside the budget.

What is clear, however, is that before state government can be transparent to the public, the state budget has to be transparent to the legislators writing it.

———

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.