 Aloha, and welcome to Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcasts every Thursday from 2 to 2.30 from the Think Tech studios in the Pioneer Plaza in beautiful downtown Hololulu. We actually just got done with a whole lot of rain and some flooding. We got a break for a whole day, and now we're going to get another dose. So it's going to be an interesting week. In between all of this, we've had the legislature has been in session. They've been very, very busy. They just got done with the crossover. And we're very fortunate today to have two of the Republican Party leaders in Hawaii on the show today. And they're going to talk a little bit about what's been going on over there and what's in store maybe for later in the year. So we've got Andrea Topola, and we have Jean Ward, two of the Republican leaders. 40% of the whole caucus. There we go. We got almost the majority of the Republican Party here today. Well, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. And you beat the rain to come on over. So thank you for that. Hopefully, your prediction is not going to hold, because it said it's coming, but it's not going to be as fierce. If it's as fierce, we're really in trouble. Yeah, well, we're pretty soaked already. We don't really need a whole lot more for us to have some issues. But you did cross over today. You've been very busy. So thank you for coming over. And just to open up the discussion, Andrea, any comments about the session? How's it been going? Anything that sticks out? Well, the session is primarily divided into three. So we had the House bills, which we already had heard all of them. We had the Senate bills, which we just actually concluded last week. Now we're in conference committee. There was actually 548 bills that went into conference, which means that that's how many bills had a disagreement between the House and the Senate. Within those 548 bills, we go to different hearings where we decide what version we're going to go with, which one's going to pass on. So on May 1st will be our last votes, and then on May 3rd, the legislature is done. Really? You sure? So we convene at the third week of January. We always end the first Thursday of May. And so it's a really short session. But I know in other states, they actually have shorter than that. In Utah, 45 days done. But they don't, I don't think, go through the number of bills that we go through. No, our state is like notoriously known for starting off the session with, I think, over 3,000 bills that were introduced, which not only for legislators, but for the general public, that is a lot of pieces of legislation to keep track of. It is absolutely, my red chain. But only 200 or 300 come out the other end. Yeah. So we start and we really boil it down. But before we talk about any specific bill, I want to issue a caveat. Not a weather warning, but it's something like that. Because if you remember, Shakespeare said, beware the ides of March. In the legislature, there's this beware the ides of April. In April, there's this cloud that comes over the capital, almost like the Bermuda triangle in ships, planes, and bills disappear. So whatever we say is conditional that we think it's alive now. But it may get in that Bermuda triangle, win, and then soccer may go down. We'll never know how it drowned or where it went. Well, and I was just going to ask, a little lesson in civics. How does that happen? How the bills just disappear? Well, I think also what Gene's saying, which is a phrase people are getting to know, is the gut and replace. So there's a bill that might have gone away, but it might have been resurrected in a different bill. And so there is actually a bill that we were discussing that had to do with the funds for the tobacco settlement and for DLNR's forest preservation. Now, what does that bill have on this week? It actually has an appropriation for Kaua'i in there. So 100 million going to Kaua'i that was in this bill that previously wasn't in there. I think what Rep Ward is referring to is that the transformation and morphing of some of these bills is so quick with that many bills moving around that you really have to be very cautious, very meticulous that when you look through it, that it's the same thing that you saw two months ago, because it could be different now. I've got three bills that I want to make sure that I see don't disappear. Very dear and dear to my district, Hanama Bay. Say Hanama Bay basically is a bill about Bani-Axibenzone. Axibenzone is something in your sunscreen that not only kills and deteriorates the wreaths, it has an endocrine effect in women and men. And this is one of the things that we have many, many substitutes for, and it's one of the things that as we slowly kill off the wreaths, all we got to do is substitute another chemical. So that bill is going through, but I want to make sure that if there is a Bermuda Triangle that we follow it exactly as to how it particularly failed. The other one is a homelessness, poor one or villages. We, to say the least, have a homeless problem. Not only in Hawaii, but the state of Hawaii. The governor tried to say that, well, we actually for the first time went down in terms of homelessness. Actually, we went up. It was kind of a glitch maybe on some of the Neymar Island statistics, but it actually went up. So we need to do Ohana zoning or something rather than the status quo, because the brick and mortar is about a $3.5 billion solution. All we got to do is have alternate permanent housing, but with surround sound, social services for jobs, for mental illness, for drug addiction, and a number of other things. The third bill that I'm watching very closely is the rescue tubes, the Lions Club, the Waikai Lions Club. With the Kauai Lions Club sponsored where they're pulling free of charge those rescue tubes at China Walls, other beaches that are publicly so when people get floundering in the water, they can throw this baby out there and save lives. So that bill is alive because it's a good Samaritan. If you did use that, you wouldn't be brought to court. Pretty good chance that they're going to survive. So far so good. But as I said, this is the season of the Bermuda Jungle, and I don't trust it. It's not over until it's over. May 3rd, as she said. All right. Andrea, do you have any particular bills that you're watching? Yeah. Aside from the bills, we also want to be very careful that we watch the budget. So Friday, Rep Ward and I, we're both in the finance committee. And this is where the Senate and the House version are actually usually very different. But now this is not a bill where you can look at one page, page two, page three. The budget is hundreds of pages. And when we go through it, we're going line item by line item, saying, okay, what did they take out here? What did they put in here? What did they take out here? What did they put in there? So for my district, we just had the opening of our brand new library, not a Cooley last Saturday. So I'm trying to make sure the three positions for our librarians stay in there because we need those three positions. If anybody needs a library with librarians, it's that part of the island. Oh, yeah. So we've had Waianae Library. We also have Kapolei Library. So this is actually one of the newest ones in its very state of the art. It has a stage on the outside where community members can do performances. And if you know anything about not a Cooley, we have four schools in the valley. So every school is going to be in walking distance to the library. So we're looking for those positions. One of the things he brought up has to do with homelessness. So I'm also trying to make sure that we get funding for community courts. Community courts is a way to actually resolve some multiple offenses against people that have to do with homelessness that eventually make it where they never become whole, meaning that they'll have their license take away or they have $16,000 of fines were all related to being homeless, right? So community court is only three years old. It's been a waheewa. We wanted to come to Waianae. But if we don't get the $160,000 that's supposed to be in the budget, which I'm hoping is in the budget on Friday, then they cannot extend that court. It's only going to stay in waheewa. We don't have the funding to bring it out to where we are. And I'm also looking for the million dollars that got cut out on the Senate side for native Hawaiian education. So the House version had $1.5 million in it. And those are part-time positions for kupuna that teach in the schools. And people ask me this all the time, where are the Hawaiian teachers that used to come around? Well, it's hit and miss. One year it's in the budget, next year it's out of the budget. So sometimes we have positions for kupuna, sometimes we don't. So the House version 1.5, Senate version 500,000. That's a lot of jobs being cut. So I'm watching this budget, trying to talk with people, trying to push through it. One of my resolutions just got passed this week, and it had to do with urging the use of the correct Hawaiian names for places as well as the correct spelling. So I was excited that it passed unanimously on the House and the Senate. And that was one of the pieces of legislation that I actually tracked and introduced. So that's kind of what I'm keeping my eye out for. Our caucus had some bills that we actually introduced that one or two are still moving. A lot of them have died. We also play offense and defense. So we have to read very carefully through the ones we didn't introduce to make sure that it's not going to take raised taxes or maybe hurt our districts. So you've got to play both sides. You've got to make sure. Well, and because of the limited number of people that we've got as Republicans in the House, we don't have any in the Senate, I'm sure they give you extra staff to stay on top of all this stuff and work through all of this, right? Oh, I'm sure they would give us extra staff. It's unfortunately the opposite of that. But let's go to something that the people who are very concerned about. That's ethics in politics. Transparency. Your minority, five of us, charge the Bastille, if you will, on an ethics bill. This is if you're on a board or if you're on a commission, you can redact, hide, otherwise not disclose the amount of money you're making. Here too, everybody who's on a board or commission says, you know, I make between this amount of money and that amount of money. And now from the point of view of ethics commission, that's going to cover that up. And we fought to recommit it. And vigorously and hopefully somewhere on YouTube, there's actually that bill that says the ethics commission even included themselves or let's say they were in it as part of the people to be excluded. And it's all the other boards and commissions are very important. It has a lot of jurisdiction over land, a lot of jurisdiction over licensing, et cetera. Now, is this more than just salary ranges? Is it also conflict of interest type issues too? Yeah, so to kind of explain it kind of simply is that there are 12 boards and commissions that were suggested where instead of actually showing the dollar amount of how much, either how much they make or how much interest or stocks or bonds or investments that they have in possible companies that might be related to what they do on that board and commission, they're suggesting that they would still list it but not put the quantity. So some legislators are, oh, see, we're still going to put that they're getting money from such and such a corporation, just not how much. Well, you tell me, if you're on the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission and you're getting money from next terror or something, I'm pretty sure it would make a difference if we knew how much money we were getting. Of course, you know, $100 compared to $100,000 is a big difference. Right, and the 12 boards and commissions that were suggested to have their records redacted, these are big ones, PUC, Borderland and Natural Resources, HOY, HHFDC, which is our development corporation. So the only, the point of us disclosing this was to give people confidence that the decision makers are not conflicted by money. That's it. That's what it was supposed to be about. And so that's what our caucus is encouraging is that we don't pass something like this that's going to further increase the dish trust that already exists between people and the government. And, Reggie, it should be even a Democrat or a Republican issue. It's just simply the right thing to do. Transparency, I mean, that's the current word, right? I mean, that's the word terms of transparency instead of forward. And it was definitely a defensive move that we did, because we have to read through hundreds of bills that, you know, of course, our colleagues say, these are okay. They're fine. But we read through it, we open it up, make sure that, oh, that one actually doesn't look as fine as you said it did, so. Well, and to your point earlier, sometimes things change and it's not always obvious. Right. Well, and for the most part, the public can't keep up with some of the changes. So say, for example, let's do recycling. Five cents to 10 cents. People are, oh, no, the recycling fee is going up. Well, they took out the fee. And so now that bill is still moving, but it only encourages 70% recycling by year such and such. But who in the public knew that the fee got taken out? Nobody knows. So when you vote yes on it, they're, oh, so you're for increasing recycling fees. Oh, it got taken out of the bill. Oh, what does that mean? It means that it's not actually gonna be part of law if it gets passed. Oh, I didn't know that. And so, I mean, I have all kinds of compassion for people who don't understand the process, because I'm not a lawyer, and I've only been in the legislature for years. As a music teacher, I really have to make things very simple so that I can understand as well as I can communicate it to my district in a way that they understand. Well, you know, and even if you've been doing it for a while and you're a professional, Gene, you've been in the house for quite a while. You've got a lot of years built up, but things still happen that kind of catch you by surprise once in a while, doesn't it? You know, you've never seen it all. You know, Josuke just retired after almost 40 years, and he never knew what hit him until the last part of it. It's a constant learning curve, no question about it. One of the things that is different than what is perceived to be the case, we have a bill that's for service animals. It's called the Service Animals Misrepresentation Bill. There's a lot of people who have disabilities, mental, emotional, but some of them are out there faking that their emotional support dog are actually licensed with the physicians and permissions, if you will. And some condominiums have been saying, you know, we have a no dogs animal policy, and one wants to have a chicken as its emotional support. Some of the airlines had to push those things aside. So it's where the dilemma is that we want to give emotional support, but if it's a fake emotional support animal, there's really nothing in the law because this is under the Civil Rights Act, that these people are protected. And that hurts everybody. I mean, even the legitimate service animals that are there for a legitimate purpose are kind of looked at skeptically because there's so much fake animals out there. The real one was told to me by a man who was partially blind and deaf, he said a service animal will never bark at another service, particularly dogs. And when you see any of those who have been barking, like you go into a restaurant and then they start a tussle, you know that one of those is fake because the really trained ones don't do that. But that's a problem that's still circulating in various parts of the Bermuda Triangle. And we've had a guest on the show, Dr. Lucille Miller from Kauai actually, that had trained her own service animal and has been an advocate for service animals in Hawaii. And she'd been on government, you know, state boards. She's very vocal about the need for regulation in this area to make sure that, you know, the importance of the service animals aren't diluted by having all these fake animals out there. Yeah, it's been one of the interesting years to talk about animals because this year we had a bill about dogs and the restraining that they do on it, whether or not it's animal cruelty. We had a bill about feral cats and that was a huge discussion between people. In my district, we had a town hall about goats and the eradication of it to protect the watershed. So I think it's been a different year where it's really talked about some of these animal issues that for some people are very important. Including party animals. Drinking for flotillas. Outlawed, but then they'll die. We had a long conversation about that. That was a long debate on the floor. Let me ask that we take a short break and then we come back to this party concept again because we're tax season's over and I'm ready to slip into the party mode. So let's talk about that when we come back from the break. But this is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here with the leading senior Republicans in Hawaii, almost half of the party is here today. So we'll be back in about one minute. He's a service dog. Well, I could get a vest too. You're not even a service dog. He's trained to assist his owner. Well, I can do whatever he can do. Wow, did he just open the door? Yep. I can't do that. I can't do that either. He's trained for over two years to become a service dog. Man, I wish I could be a service dog. That's you. I want to know, will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone and I'll be your host, RB Kelly. See you there. Welcome back. This is Reg Baker, business in Hawaii. We're here today talking with Jean Ward and Andrea Tapula who are very active in the Republican party. They're the leaders in the party itself. And we've got a pretty active year going on. We were just finishing a conversation about regulation of parties. Right? There was the parties that we have the folks- Drinking flotillas, more specifically, Reg. The Kailua group kind of brought that to- It also happened in Waimea. It happened in Waikiki. Some of it portlock too-ish, but yeah. So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, this is when people had a flotilla, unadvertised event where thousands of people show up and the conversation we had with the legislature was, should people be allowed to drink alcohol on the water? Because what happened was when a lot of police, as well as dealing our officers, dole care officers and lifeguards came out, there was no law whereby they could punish them. They just said, get out of the water, this is dangerous. So that bill actually did die. But it could resurrect, but gotten replaced in the other things that can happen. Not likely or high probability, but it was one thing that had at least a public airing, if you will. But they do have some rules about the sandbar in Kailua, right? They do. So on land as well as on the beaches, it is prohibited that you drink in those areas. So police can't do stuff on the beach. When this incident happened, I'm familiar with the Waimea one, when that one happened, it was a lot of underage youth that had gotten an Instagram message the night before that camped out on the beach, then when they got out on the flotillas on the water, that's where the drinking happened was outside the beach area. But they were still underage. Oh yeah. So there's some rules on that too. They could do that, but some of them who are over the age of accountability, they're in the water, which that area is not actually prohibited to drink alcohol in the water. You cannot be inebriated and be a pilot of a boat or any moving vessel. So in that sense, if they were just passengers, they could get away with it, but for those who are piloting it. But basically, this is eight being those guys on the mainland who've done in Florida and other places, huge thousands of people. Spring break type stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like once in a random moment where we have incidents like that. Now, isn't there also some rule that says that you, if you're asked to prove your age, you have to provide ID. While you're drinking out in the sandbar, you mean? While you're drinking anywhere. You can be asked for it, yeah. You can be asked to provide your ID to show that you are of age. And if you're not able to do that, then you can assume that they're underage. Oh, that's true, because they'll be out on the water with no pocket, no ID. And of course, one of the rep's comments was, you know, our officers have better things to do. The fact of the matter is that no cop is gonna go out and say, hey, are you drinking on the water? The fact is that when we have an incident of that size, where it's just out of control, they were looking for a way whereby they could actually have a misdemeanor or a cop. The way they control it. Yeah. What's sad is they really won't get active with this until somebody dies. When somebody dies from it, they drown, they fall in the water, they hit their head or whatever. Then maybe they'll get serious about it. The street lights doesn't get put up until there's an accident at the intersection. Unfortunately, that's the case, unfortunately. All right, let's switch gears for a second. What's going on at the national level? You're the national committee, right? You are a CPA. It's April 15 tax days over. And the Tax Cut Jobs Act is impacting the nation. In a hearing last week in finance, it was brought to the fore that there are 600,000 filers in Hawaii. On the average, we were told by the Tax Foundation that each on the average in Hawaii is gonna have an $800 advantage compared to the previous year. So 600,000 times $800 is a $480 million that's supposed to go into our economy. That's impressive. On that national level, that is good. The other thing that I think of note, we are on the verge after 60 years of solving the Korean War, the South Korean and North Korean War is never officially ended. We are on the verge of that happening, but the national media attention in some ways more on Stormy Daniels and other kinds of portal subjects than the substance of what's going on on the international basis. Well, that tells you a lot where their heads are at, but what I heard just, I think this morning was that North Korea has now withdrawn their opposition for troops in South Korea. That's a major breakthrough. I didn't... That is huge. That was announced this morning on one of the announcements from, I don't know if it was the New York Times or the Washington Post, but they made that announcement. Did they say when and how many? It was just announced this morning, and it was just a little blurb that I saw, so I didn't read the whole article much. But the fact that they're making progress on that, while all the stuff is going on in Syria, all the weather problems, I mean, it's phenomenal how many balls you're gonna have in the air. What I did get a little giggle from was that they're trying to find where they wanna have this meeting. Yes, yes. But they're limited because they don't have a lot of commercial aircraft that can fly any long distances out of North Korea, so they have a short radius on where they're going to be able to meet. So they're trying to figure that out right now. Whoa, well, I mean, I already proposed the solution. We meet at the Eastwood Center or the Asia-Pacific Security Sunsets. He sure did. He proposed it. Hawaii is to be the Geneva of the Pacific. There you go, and all they gotta do is strap them onto a missile, and the missile can make it here, right? That's a good one, Reg. Well, and you know, I think that an important part is that we have a new administration, and on our state level, is we should be interacting with the departments a lot more. I mean, I think on our end, we have a little bit because of the rail debacle, so I've been constantly calling up to the Federal Transportation Administration, trying to figure out, are they gonna release the funds, which as of right now, they are not. So as of right now, the proposal from Honolulu City Council to the federal government has not been sound enough for the federal government to release the rest of those funds. We also, in my district, have been interfacing with the federal Department of Education. One of the hangers that's actually at Kalailoa Airport is owned by the U.S. Department of Education. They gave that to UH to do a flight school. UH never used it, flight schools closed down, so we're still trying to recoup that property. We also have the Department of Agriculture, which at the USDA level, the federal level, we have been out of the loop on the new initiative by our president called Rebuild Rule. States across the United States are asking the federal government to put money into infrastructure for rural communities. Wasn't that one of Trump's platforms? So they're dropping billions into states like Montana, Colorado, that want better streets and roads, but we are a rural state and we haven't been vying for any of this money. So I've been bringing it up to our Department of Agriculture as well as to our Department of Economic Business and Development because everyone's looking for money for infrastructure and rural areas in Waianae, in Kaua'i, in Moloka. These are areas that are really rural and we don't have the money to put into infrastructure. I think we need to get on some of these initiatives so that we can start to get those monies allocated for even homesteaders who actually need just farming equipment. They might need some irrigation ditches so that they can go back to making money and living off the land. These are stuff that we've talked about in our state, but at the point we're at, have we actually initiated these conversations at the federal level? Well, they're non-existent. You know, I get this vision of the Three Stooges and Lou and Costello going around Washington poking everybody in the eye. Who's at first? How are you going to ever get any money from them if you're constantly in their face? The serious thing that's going on at the federal level is that the Supreme Court is hearing the North Dakota case, which basically says you who are doing Amazon and eBay, you're either going to get taxed or you're not going to get taxed and that's going to be a huge decision because probably half the people now are doing shopping online and the state has also put in two bills, which means even if they don't rule for the taxation by the states, the state has already put those in. We have voted against that. We voted against that. I mean, it basically is jumping the gun. If the federal government wants to tax people online, then that decision's going to come out this summer. We don't need to be the first to raise our hand and say we'll tax them first because really we have enough taxes in Hawaii. We want to wait for the federal decision to come out so that everyone can proceed within the parameters of the law. Yeah, and that taxes is an issue that I just want to touch on. You should touch on it. Well, I was reading the report that came out and this isn't my words, but we're ranked, I think, the 48th worst state in the country for taxes. And as far as a sales tax, we are the worst. And I know it's not technically a sales tax. It's an excise tax. I understand that, but this is not new. I mean, this is something that we've been trying to deal with now for 20 years. And so is there anything currently being discussed to try and address this notorious reputation that we have nationwide? I mean, is the worst taxed the highest housing costs, the lowest wages? Unfortunately, when you have a one-party state, basically the Democrats are doing what the Republicans did. When you have a monopoly, you don't have that accountability. You don't have a checks and the balance. In as long as that's going to be the case, people are going to keep voting for the same thing unless there's a two-party system. That's the way the structure of democracy is. If you don't have a pro and a con, you're just going to go within the factions of the existing pro. I think that that part of the conversation is always missing because there's this mentality that we don't have enough, that there's never enough money we have to tax the people more. But really, when I say mentality, I mean it with all my heart. It's a mentality it's not real because we saw bills that would allocate 18 million into the Tobacco Fund that are just sitting there. We see funds like the Green Gems Fund, the Green Energy Management System. It's had millions in there. And how do we know that? Oh, because it got raided when we needed to cool the classrooms. So then all of a sudden, millions pop up. Oh, you know what? We got a couple million. We can throw out cooling the classroom. So there is money out there. Are we managing it? Are we being good stewards of it? No. And so when unions come forward and say, we need more money for education, let's tax the people, give it to education. Really what we should be looking at is, are we operating efficiently? Can we do more with less? And how can we give more money back to the people as opposed to if we just take more money from them to solve it? Nobody ever solved the problem by throwing money at it. Let me make this statement. And we're running out of time. We probably only have about a minute left. So it went kind of quick. But here's a statement. Sometimes people, particularly you're in the party in power. You want to move up. You want to get promoted. You want to get on more responsibility. So sometimes you don't want to be the nail that sticks up. You kind of go along with the flow and support things that maybe you don't really believe in, but you don't want to rock the boat because you want to continue your growth in that power structure. Is that a fair statement? Yes, absolutely. And I think that when we talk about this picture of cutting taxes, is you have to be able to say that I will measure my success, not by how many bills I passed or how many chair positions I've held, but how the quality of life of the people in my district has been improved. What if the measure of success was that? Well, that's a very noble goal. I'm afraid that a lot of people probably don't follow that. But that's not sad, but it's a good goal to shoot for. Jean, any final words? Beware of the ides of April. The Bermuda Triangle is hovering over us in the state of Hawaii. If you really have a bill you want to watch for, be an eagle and really zero in on it because it could disappear overnight, like those ships and planes that are at the Bermuda Triangle. All right, and I'm sure everybody knows what the Bermuda Triangle is, right? So it's that area out by Florida and Cuba that things just tend to disappear. And they never can explain it and no one ever gets accused of being the person or the quote event that doesn't. And the people in the finance committee and the WEMP committee, the speaker and the president of the Senate have got so many ways of putting the disguise and putting it to the side. So be aware that that's the season we're in. And there are probably gonna be two or 300 bills, as we said, coming out the other end. But those that we've talked about, we don't know how many of these are still gonna be alive after they see this. Well, Heather, have you come back on the show again? After me, third? After things kind of settle down and we can analyze what actually happened. This is business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We ran just a little bit over. My apologies, but I'll see you here next week, Thursday, two o'clock. Until then, aloha.