 Aloha, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. This is the Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Today I'm thrilled that we have a guest. We kind of share a name. He's brand new Senator, Carl Rhodes, just recently moved from the House to the Senate, won his election. Congratulations to him and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. No, I think it's excellent. I was really thrilled. All of us were sad when Suzie decided she wanted to retire, because I don't know anybody who doesn't like Suzie, and her work ethic was what has always inspired me as well. Absolutely, yeah. She worked very, very, very hard. She still does, exactly. So when I saw the opening and when I learned that you were going to run for it, I was very thrilled because I'd also been following a bit of what you had been doing from the House, and I always had great respect for you as well, so I was thrilled about that opportunity. Thanks, appreciate it. So congratulations once again. Thanks so much. Looking forward to see everything that you're going to do now from the Senate seat, which is kind of what this episode is going to be about. So we're going to talk about, now that you're a Senator, I'm going to ask you real quickly to go over something we were talking about a second ago, and that is, what's the difference as far as your perception, having been in the House for a number of years now you're in the Senate, how would you explain the difference in the two Houses? Well, I mean, at this point, I'm the new kid on the block, and I probably don't fully understand the differences in my experience so far. I mean, and of course I observe the Senate quite closely because we have conferences, we have conference committees at the end of every session, and I'm working with or against somebody from the Senate. But my first impression, just being in the first caucus, is that it's obvious, but it really makes a big difference in the way the dynamics are, it's just smaller. So you have, even though the Democrats control the Senate completely now, we're the only, we're the first states since 1980 to have a one chamber that's completely one party, and all 25 Senators or Democrats, including me, and everybody gets in the room together and you can actually have a longer conversation where people can talk for two or three minutes and you don't feel like you're just slowing everything down because you're not talking in soundbites, and you can get away with that because there's only 25 of us, whereas in the Democratic caucus in the House, there was usually in the mid 40s, 43, 44, and it's a lot more people in the room, and if everybody talks for five minutes, every issue takes three hours to deal with. Which is one of the reasons why we go from 3,000 bills to 22. Yeah, well, 3,300, but yes, that's the, you just can't deal with everything in that sort of period of time. Yeah, which is, from the outside, it's one of the challenges that those of us who try to follow politics, we always are fascinated by it. It's like, okay, well, how were those decisions made? I'm not going to ask you to answer that question, but how were those decisions made? That's fine. As far as, okay, well, we have all these bills and, well, this one, we can't quite get to this one. Well, it meant that there was something in it that was a challenge, something in it that was controversial, maybe, something in it that it didn't have as high a priority as maybe something else. Or we didn't have any money. That's often one of the, that's the other big reason for not doing it, so we don't have any money. If it has to go through one of the money houses, or committees, then it ends up, okay. Yeah, so, okay, so that's just always been fascinating. Things that those of us on the outside take a look and say, you know what, I think this is important. I think this is valuable legislation that is really important now, and it got shelved, and we get left with why often. Well, I mean, those of us who are on the inside often are closer to the inside. Anyway, often have the same question. We don't, it sometimes takes a while to do this sort of legislative forensics at the end of the session to figure out why your bill died, and if there's anything you can do about it or not. And so for next session, you know, so we, you know, we, I've done that a number of times, and because there is, no one likes to kill other people's bills because there's, you always run the risk of somebody's going to kill your bill instead, and the next time around. And so there's a lot of effort going into covering your tracks about killing stuff. Now, I have to admit that I haven't done, I don't cover my tracks very well as chairman's judiciary committee. I killed a whole bunch of bills and at, I mean, just by not hearing them. And, you know, so people usually knew who had killed their bill at my committee. But your committee was one, is it, is it, it's the, if not, I think it's the second largest committee under finance, right? And how's, and on the house side, yeah, it's the second largest. In terms of just volume of bills that you get. So your staff had to be largest. There was a lot more to have to deal with anyway. Yes. Well, I've been telling people for a while that getting elected to the Senate is a demotion because I have fewer staff and a smaller, I'm thrilled to have a committee at all, but it's not nearly as important as a committee as judiciary in terms of volume of bills coming through. Sure. What is your committee? Your chairman? Waterland. It's unusual to get a committee in the Senate, or even more unusual in the House to get a committee as a freshman. But yeah, so I'm flattered that leadership felt that they could trust me with it. And I hope not to disappoint, but yeah, I mean, judiciary, I had three, I'd, we were like a small law firm. I mean, I'm an attorney and then we had, we had four, I had one permanent attorney and we hired three more during session. So we were, you know, a decent sized law firm and we don't have that anymore. I mean, there's like four of us in the office total. So you're, so that's part of the changes for you that you're dealing with? Yeah, but that's part of it. I mean, it's, I mean, the other big differences in, you know, I don't, I don't, it doesn't, it's not something I realized a long time ago and most people who are observant of the legislature know this, but in the House leadership tends to be more important. You know, you, the committee chairs, not everybody is a committee chair and you, they're still, the rank and file are important because you still got to have the votes to pass the bill on the floor. In the Senate, the tendency is that the committee chairs get what, the committee chairs tend to be more of a, more influential because almost everybody's a committee chair and they, and there is a certain amount of log rolling that's necessary to get anything passed and you don't want to cross other committee chairs if you can possibly avoid it. And so unless there's something really egregious, well, these are just tendencies we're talking about here, but in general, you try to work, you try to work stuff. I think it's also true that in the Senate, things are worked out more informally because there's fewer people and you can just, if you have a problem with the bill, you can go to the chair and say, you know what, I really don't like this section of this bill because of X, Y, and Z. And in the House, it tends not to be like that so much, just because there's just so many people that you can't talk to everybody with that sort of leisurely. It's still not leisurely in the Senate, but it's more leisurely than it is in the House, I think, is fair to say. I would say that that's definitely one of the things. The one session that I worked in 2015, I definitely noticed that because I was working on the House side. And I saw a number of bills that came through with things that we saw and how in depth we got into anything. I think I got more in depth into some of it than even the legislator I was working for got in with some of it. So it's interesting to see, okay, on the House side, you've got, we'll call it more time, more, I don't know if it's more time or how, more opportunity to dig deeper in and have those conversations because we never had those conversations. Well, and a lot of times, especially for the members who, the guys who have been, the men and women who have been around politics a long time, most issues you've already seen before. So someone comes in and says, I want to bill on term limits. I've spent quite a few hours thinking about the pros and cons of term limits long time ago, and I already know what I think. Well, then I want to have you come back to talk about that another time. Okay. So, you know, I know that when I was staff two, before I was elected, and I was also staff on Capitol Hill 25 years ago, and that was the thing that first impressed me, not necessarily positively, but it's just how quick decisions were made. But I think on, you know, after years of reflection on it, I don't think they are really made that quickly. It's just the thought for most people, if you've been around a while, there aren't very many new issues. Every once in a while, you get something that's novel, but most of the stuff is, most of the ideas have been around for a while. It's just whether it could get through this time around or... Or whether it's even desirable that it gets through this time around, as opposed to, or if it hasn't... So somebody's thought about it already, and almost always somebody's thought about it already. Okay, okay. That's a good, that's a good... Yeah, no, don't be a little bit reassured anyway, yeah. Yeah, I just remember, look, there's a lot more of what's the synopsis, okay, good, go, and as far as, you know, what the language is. When does, because I know, I do know that the bills get looked at word to word at some point. Several times, usually, yeah. Where is that within conference? Is that within leadership? Where does it get looked at at that level? Well, it usually gets looked at before you introduce it. So there's usually often several drafts of the bill before you even put it in. So the lawyers at the drafting agencies will look at it and the draft, not all the drafting agencies, not everybody who works for the drafting agencies are attorneys, but there is, and there's also... So there's somebody who drafts it, often as an attorney, then they have at least two or three layers of review before they even send the bill back to you. Well, then you as a member look at it and your staff look at it and say, yeah, but you missed, this should have been a common, not a period, or that doesn't even, that's not even what we were trying to do, you know, and then you send it back and you go through it all again. Change the intent. Right. And you do that again. And then when you hear the bill, you get a bunch more opinions about whether it makes sense or not. And those... So that's the, that's as you, as you come up with your idea, I want to do this bill, or someone brought an idea to you and said, okay, yes, I want to do that and I want to put that into a bill form. That's you, you spent the time coming out of your office to say, we want to introduce this bill. Right. And then it gets sent out, because it has to be signed off. There needs to be co-signers and co-sponsors for it. And as it goes through that process, and then it goes in and has a hearing. When it has a hearing, my guess is, because I was never involved on that side of it, my guess is that the committee has gone through it, has read through it, and has talked about it a bit before the hearing. And then they just want to hear what the community and the stakeholders and other testimony is about it. Is that correct how that works? Well, I mean, different chairs doing differently. That was, we, there were certain, so the process when I was judiciary chair, and like I said, I had more staff then, I try to do this now still, but it's not quite as thorough as I probably was when I was a judiciary. But, you know, you sort of do a first cut and you're just, and there's often there's duplicate bills that are almost identical. So you say, okay, some chairs will hear them all, but I usually didn't. I would just pick one that I thought was, if I wanted it to pass, I would pick the one that I thought was the most likely to pass because who introduces it also matters sometimes. So there's a first cut where you're like, no, I'm not going to hear that. I'm not going to hear that. Then there's somewhere I'm definitely going to hear and then there's like a group in the middle. And probably it's the group in the middle that at that stage gets the biggest, it gets the closest reading. You're like, okay, what does this thing actually do? So you read either you or your staff or either you or and your staff sometimes, read it very carefully and say, okay, does this, this and this. I'm okay with this, this and this, but I'm not okay with that and that. So let's hear it, but let's plan right now. Let's just say we're going to amend it unless we hear testimony or we get more information that says we shouldn't. So that, so then, so that they actually, I mean, it's in some sense, it's amazing to me that there are any mistakes left in a bill at the end of it because it's been gone over so many times by so many people. It's like, how can anybody have missed anything? But it still happens. I mean, we've even on technical, you know, technical legal issues, sometimes we literally will leave out. I remember a bill in Congress one time where they left out the enacting clause, which is like the first clause at the time. It says to be therefore enacted and they left it out and it passed the whole, went through the whole process and nobody noticed. Well, then it's not a bill, it has no effect. And it was a controversial bill. I don't remember what it was, but they had to come back, reintroduce the thing and revote on it. They didn't have to run it back through the committees. It's more a flexible process in DC, but. Because I could have, I would have recognized that as an opportunity to be had. I was against it. I was only four because I knew it wasn't a bill. Now that they have ways around it up there that we don't really have here. But it was, you know, sometimes that stuff happens. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of vetting. That's, it's important to, I think, hear that part of it to really go through and know how in depth these bills get looked at. Bills and resolutions and really everything involved. But it's also true though, especially, I think, probably, well, both in the House and the Senate, but you do have, as a rank, as somebody who's not on the committee, if you're not on the committee where the bill came through or came out of, you do have to rely on the chairs to not, to put things out there that are not vetted very well. And I, something, I mean, I was criticized sometimes for putting out bills that were excessively controversial. I mean, I vetted them. They would have, you know, they'd work, but the issue itself was controversial. Okay, well, I don't think that's a bad thing. No, not necessarily. No, and I'm, that was one of the things I promised myself when I was first elected, that just because it was controversial didn't mean I was not going to deal with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or difficult. I mean, that's the thing, the easy problems are solved easily. And then there's some problems that are almost, I mean, almost impossible to solve. And I, from a political perspective, you never want to fail, basically. You want to just say, I did, I accomplished this, I accomplished this, I accomplished this, I accomplished this. But if you do, if you're worried about wins, if you're only worried about wins, then you never take on the hard stuff and it just never gets addressed. And that, that isn't serving the public interest. I don't think so. Yeah, I mean. In my opinion, certainly so. I'm glad you agreed. But you have to, but you have to, I mean, I think, you know, realistically you have to have some kind of a balance. You can't spend all your time on impossible problems because then everybody thinks you've done absolutely nothing. You can't always fight upstream. Right. Exactly. Although I do a lot of that. All right. Yeah. Well, we're at our break, so we have to take a quick break. Okay. So when we come back, we're going to dig in a bit more as far as legislative agenda stuff is concerned. Okay, sounds good. Thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech, Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii Series. Once again, our guest today is new Senator Carl Rhodes. See you in a minute. Thanks. Hello, this is Martin de Speng. I want to get you excited about my new show, which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. We're going to broadcast on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Aloha. I'm Kawe Lucas, host of Hawaii is My Mainland, here on Think Tech, Hawaii every Friday at 3 p.m. We address issues and importance for those of us who live here on the most isolated land mass on the planet. Please come join me Fridays at 3 p.m. Mahalo. Aloha. My name is Richard Emory, host of Condo Insider. More than a third of Hawaii's population live in some form of association. And our show is all about educating board members and owners about their responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great association. You can watch me live on Thursdays, 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. each week. Aloha. Aloha, welcome back to Think Tech, Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, Politics in Hawaii Series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Once again, welcome, Senator Carl Rhodes. Thanks again, thanks for having me. So, okay, now we just had a good conversation about some of the, I guess, how things work a little bit. But let's spend this last segment talking about how you develop, other people will do it differently perhaps, but how you develop what your session agenda is from a legislative perspective. What bills you're interested in, what bills you're not interested in, how you even come to the bills that you want to bring forward. So how does that happen? How do you begin to develop that? Well, I have to admit, at least in my case, it's a rather haphazard process. There's different sources of where you can get your ideas, of course, in a world where there's multiple places to get news. But for me, I start usually with constituent requests. People will, as you are aware, I knock on doors a lot during campaigns and I knock on doors a lot when I'm not campaigning. And I do get ideas from constituents who say, you know, why is it that X, why do we do it that way? And I'll be like, yeah, that's a point. I'll be happy to put in a bill. And we've actually passed, I can think of two or three off hand of people literally that, I don't like to use the word literally because I can never, it's overused. But I think we've passed two or three bills, at least, that were directly from the door, from the doorstep to me to into the legislature we passed. That's huge, that's huge. And that doesn't really get conveyed a lot. So that's, I mean- No, and I think other members are, that's very common. You know, people ask me and people have a problem and they can't figure out why it's that way and they go to their legislator. And the good legislators, of course, are ones who communicate routinely with their constituents. And so I think quite frequently that's how, that's sort of the first level of, okay, we've got to introduce these, because these are the things that people are constituents have asked for. Sure. The other sources, well, some of the other sources are, I mean, I think it was Tip O'Neill who famously said all politics is local. If you don't deal with the problems in your district, you're not going to be there that long. Not that you necessarily should be there forever, but I'm, you know, you're, most people want to get reelected at least once. And so that's the other thing as I look at is, you know, neighborhood issues that I've noticed or that other people have brought to my attention, not even necessarily constituents who are specifically asking. But for example, one, an issue that I've worked on for years and it's one of these hard ones that we talked about before that you, it's almost impossible, but I think we're finally making some progress, but it's literally been like 10 years. So I represent Palama and I, for a while, I represented part of Kalihi too. We have all these lanes and it's true up in the sense, it's true in the new district too, up the new one in Valley and not so much in Putinui, but there are little privately owned lanes where the ownership is not known. We know for sure that doesn't belong to the state and it doesn't belong to the city. It belongs to a private landowner, but we don't know who. So the result is that no one is required to take care of it. The city hasn't authorized itself to take care of these lanes, but they don't have to. So if there's a major problem that they don't feel like dealing with, they don't. And they also don't do all of them. They're really short. They don't have very many people living on it or very many property parcels. They're not even authorized to take care of them. So to me, this is really fundamental stuff. I mean, in a private property system, you need to know who owns the property and we've spent years trying to figure that out, but that was something that, I don't know if anybody ever specifically said to me, can you please introduce a bill on this issue? But they certainly said to me, why do I have all these, why won't the city fix my potholes? And it's like, well, that's because, and after we dug into it a little bit, that's because we don't know who owns it. It's privately held by someone because somehow within the land court records or within the boundary surveys that have been done, it's- Initially, I thought it would be easy. I thought we'd just go in and so it's property. You gotta pay real property tax on it, right? So we went in, no one's paying real property tax. They're all devalued at a de minimis amount. I think it's less than $100 so you don't pay property tax on it. So I went from there and we have gone to all kinds of extraordinary measures to try to figure them out. Rawlins Lane, there's a little tiny lane down behind down near Thomas Hill Market. It's only like 100 yards long. It's too small for the city to take care of under their authorization. I finally did a title search, title guarantee and they came back to me after a couple of months and said, well, the last owner that we are aware of had invested interest died in 1975. You just got left. So that's kind of how it gets loosely abandoned for one reason or another and nobody- So theoretically somebody owns it, but you'd never be able to find them all. Because legally then who would then be that person's- Who the heirs. Who would the heir be so he would fall to that person. So I think he had six kids and then his kids, then his kids had kids and so, I don't know, there's probably 65 people who have some tiny 165th undivided interest in the lane. And none of them want to talk about it. None of them want to- Well, you can't even find them. We tried to find them to start with and after a while we're like, you know what, this doesn't even make any sense because even if we found them all, it's going to be a holdout. Somebody's not going to want to do whatever with it and- And in which case, at the very least, what if you say, okay, how about we have the state or city and county buy it from you? Right, or condemn it or- Condemn, do something and we'll take it, but- So last year it wasn't my bill, but we find, you know, other people have this issue too. So we finally passed a bill that sets up a commission to decide whether these lanes should be under county jurisdiction, under state jurisdiction. And then once that's decided, there'll still be a very difficult process of, they probably will all have to be condemned and, you know, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of them. So it's a long-term project, but- And there's a lot of cost involved in that. There's a lot of cost involved in the deal with it. So that's another source of, you know, sort of general, and for me, of course, and pretty much statewide, homelessness, of course, is another one that's obvious that I need to try to do something about it. You can target, you can always start with the top issues that we know everybody is concerned about. Education, housing homelessness, cost of living issues at all. Whether we're dealing with energy security, food security issues, whether we're dealing with prison reform, all these things get talked about on the media, so we know those are out there. And that's sort of the next level of the things that you introduced were something, you know, you've gone in discussion with friends or you've gone to a conference where they're like, you know, if we don't do something about this, this is going to happen, that kind of thing. Then you get bigger picture things that, yeah, they affect your district, but they're just as important to the rest of the state. It's not really a district issue at that point or not specifically a district issue. Now, how do you, I mean, and I also know there are crazy people like me who will show up and say, hey, I have this idea. Can you run this through? And every now and then you guys will and sometimes you won't, that's also how that goes. You end up, that's where, I mean, I'm not a lobbyist, but I'm an advocate, so I will show up with ideas and say, hey, can we do this? Yeah. And the more I have it fleshed out, the easier it is for you to even consume, let alone consider it. But then there are other groups that are the lobbyists that will show up and say, hey, I want you to do this and I want you to do that. And that's something you have to work with. Yeah, well, that's, and that is another source. I mean, I have introduced bills on behalf of interest groups. As Neil Abercrombie was fond of saying, you know, it's not that it's, everybody's a special interest, I'm a special interest, you're a special interest. There's not a problem with it being a special interest per se, the problem is, is it good policy? Does it hurt everybody else? Or does it just help that one interest? And you know, you've got a balance between them and that's, well, that's one reason I've always believed in public financing because a good politician will ignore their big donors when they feel like it's in the public interest. The mediocre ones may not so much and the really bad ones will actively court the special interest desires so that they can try to help them and they know they're less concerned about what the overall effects are. I would like that to be rooted out a bit more myself, but. But the interesting thing about that is I have introduced public financing bills. I mean, I've always managed, I've always raised plenty of money, but people are opposed to public financing because, well, I think it's mainly the Republicans for years that said, well, why would we wanna pay money for people to run for office? And I would answer that, yes, that's exactly what you wanna do because for the, like I say, the moral principle politicians are gonna, they're gonna tell their donors no when they need to, but not everybody's a saint, right? So you want, if you're gonna be beholden to someone, you should be, my preference would be that you be beholden to taxpayers, not to some, not to a particular interest. Yes, I think that makes perfect sense. That's a, we can delve into. Having said that, public financing is not a silver bullet because you still, you'd still, unless you radically change the system, people can still donate money to advertising about a candidate, even if the candidate doesn't give them permission, right? But I've always thought that if you believe that politicians are beholden to people, you should want them to be beholden to you, the taxpayer, not somebody else. To the taxpayer from your district, from your community. That's right. And also recognizing this is one piece of it that's important and it's coming from the house side definitely, you spend a lot more time with your constituents within your house district, talking with them, making sure that you're taking care of that home business, basically. But from the house side and the Senate side, both, it isn't just about your district, it's about the entire state. You're talking about how does this impact not just these roads, but roads across the entire state. How does this impact not just my, this neighborhood and this community, but what does this do, what are the repercussions of this on a grander scale statewide? That's right. No, and there's always a bit of a divided conflict of interest for all legislative leaders because you are responsible not just to your district but to the whole state. And that's where it gets really difficult from a decision-making standpoint. If you look at something and you say, you know what, this would really be beneficial to the whole state, but for my district, it's a disaster. You know, what do you do? I mean, that does come up sometimes. Perfect example, it's not in my district anymore, but the new, yeah, it's not a perfect example. It's an illustrative example. The Kapalama Military Reservation is going to be redone for to build a new shipping container yard. Well, the island of Oahu, we need it. That's how we get all our stuff, basically. We got, it comes through on a little harbor. But for the guys who actually live right there at Kapalama Military Reservation on the edge, it's a negative impact because there's all the noise from these things dropping down. So how do you, so you would need to go talk with them and say, oh, this is what's going on. And I mean, you either ignore them and it just is, or you go talk to them and try to explain it the other way, they're not gonna be happy. Yeah, well, fortunately in that situation, and this was probably foresightful on the part of the city, but the zoning is primarily industrial. Now, there's a lot of, there's grandfather, the people who are grandfathered in, but it's a relatively small number of people. But yeah, my response to that was I tried to convince the Department of Transportation and the state to take into consideration the noise issue more than they had been to that point. Now, whether they have and it's gonna work out okay or not, I don't know, we won't know until the thing's built and it's up and running. And there's a lot more involved in this. It's a good example of where the broader public interest probably conflicts pretty directly. It's a nimby, it's not in my backyard thing. Which is a hard, hard thing. Thank you so much. Unfortunately, our time has done a bit, so thank you so much. I appreciate everyone for joining us and for everyone who watched the show. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Thanks once again to Senator Carl Rhodes. We're hoping to have him back again to talk about term limits and things along those lines. That would be great. Happy holidays. Have a great holiday season. I will not be here next week, so happy new year. We will see you next year. Thank you to the staff and the crew here at Think Tech Hawaii. See you next year.