 Aloha. Today is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, entering the United States into World War II. The attack, beginning at 755 A.M. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, shocked the island of Oahu and then the world. Though there have been many theories about the foreknowledge of the attack, it is clear that the soldiers and civilians alike on the island of Oahu that morning were very much unaware. Today is a day to honor the fallen, a day to remember what should never be forgotten. Let's take a brief moment of silence. I hope this day, today, brings into sharp focus the gravity of what is at stake for the incoming president-elect, Donald Trump. There is much to be addressed. There is much to be concerned about. Globally, not just nationally. So, okay. Once again, let me thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I'm your host, Carl Kampanya. This is our Politics in Hawaii series. This is where we talk about what is going on here in Hawaii, how we are impacting policy, who is trying to impact policy, and really what the conversations are about. Today, I'm thrilled to have a special guest today, Mr. Chris Cofield, who has been part of the IMOA Alliance, which works on really a number of issues, and I'd like to have them explain that. But one thing he does is he helps advocate for and helps to write some of the legislation that gets introduced. So, I will say welcome to the show, Chris Cofield. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here. Excellent. Now, I'm hoping for a good conversation to learn. I want to learn something today. Okay. So, first of all, tell me a little bit about yourself and IMOA Alliance. So, what got you doing what you do, which has helped shape some policy? Well, it's interesting that we're talking on Pearl Harbor Day. I have kind of a personal connection. My grandfather was 17 years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, and he was actually near Pearl Harbor when the attack happened. And so, I grew up hearing the story about how when the attack happened, he was helping the medics to take people to medical centers in order to receive care. And I think that was one of the formative stories that, you know, you grow up with these formative stories that, in fact, he becomes an adult. And that really kind of instilled in me this idea that wherever you are at any point in time, whatever you can do to help somebody is what matters. And so, you know, later on in life when I'd gotten out of college, I had this idea of there's things that are happening at the legislature that impact my future, but young people don't really have a say. There wasn't a really big presence for young people in the legislature at the time. And so, I started this organization called IMOA Alliance originally to get college kids involved in helping to craft policy that impacted their own future. The first year, very few people signed up, but also that first year, there were some really important bills dealing with younger people. Like, anti-bullying bill was a really good example that we had gotten involved with. And there's an issue that I think touched upon, you know, a lot of younger people in Hawaii who had experienced that as kids. And so, we got involved in that and some people had seen that we got involved without our numbers starting to grow. And so, it became kind of fleshed out as an organization. And over the course of the first year, we got involved in a number of issue areas, honed it down to progressive economics, education, which I think is just so fundamental to our society, maybe the most fundamental issue in society. And human trafficking, because I had had friends who, a few years before I started the organization, had been trafficked and something I've been involved in ever since then, trying to combat in the islands. And over the last five or six years, we've burgeoned as an organization. We now have 350 members and are very active at the legislature every year. Excellent, excellent. Really fun. How do I become a member? Going to the organization's website, imuotlions.org, I can sign up there, just send us an email, and then we can provide information. It's really easy. There's no membership fee or anything like that. Okay, I'd sign me up. I want to be there. That's it. So, you're a citizen just trying to make a difference? Basically, yeah. And I think that's really the fundamental thing to understand is that any citizen can make a difference, right? If you have an idea and you want to create change in society, the only way it's going to happen is if you're the one who actually advocates for it and speaks out. Which means you have to know how to find your voice. Right. And how to find your communication. So, okay, you said coming out of college, did you take, did you have a political science background? What prepared you to be doing this work now? I was a political science major. That's really helpful. But I wouldn't necessarily say that being a political science major prepares anybody to work at the legislature. Being a policy major is a lot of very high theory, a lot of international relations, a lot of what's Hawaii's place in the world. Working at the legislature is really about building relationships. So, I think that one of the things that may have prepared me best for working at the legislature was actually just the act of trying to put this organization together and organizations I've been involved with in the past, where you're forced to go into the community and actually talk to people about what they're doing and try to, we call it capacity building in the education world, right? Building relationships that actually foster conversations about what matters, what's happening, what energy is there, what kind of partnerships can you create in order to implement different ideas. That's community boots on the ground. Exactly. And that's, so that, you have an idea. You go into the community to flesh that idea out. Right. And then you come out from that community, go to the next community, and that helps shape what this next idea or this next resolution or next bill might be. Exactly. Based on that input. Exactly. Whatever idea an individual might have. So, a good example, when we were working on the sex trafficking ban, Hawaii was the last state in the nation to ban sex trafficking, but we finally did it this year. Yes, thank you for that. The ban was first proposed in 2010, and it had been a number of organizations that have been working kind of in silos on sex trafficking as victim services providers. We're trying to push the law that aligned with federal law in order to give victims the legal and services health that they needed. When we took that to the legislature, just like any idea that gets taken to the legislature, there are a number of other organizations that come out and speak to your idea. And that will instill in you very fast this need to actually go talk to people about what it is that you're trying to do. I think any given concept, just any new law that passes has tremendous impact, no matter how small it may appear to be. And the number of organizations that, for anything to be implemented effectively, the number of organizations, the number of people that are involved who are affected by it need to be talked to about how you go about implementing it. What is the impact going to be? What's the process for actually, what does it look like in real life once it's not just a statute and words on a page? What's the lived reality of that experience? So the best, just like any effort, community building is really the best thing that somebody can do in terms of getting something done. Absolutely, because you may have the best idea in the world, but if you don't have the community support, if you don't have the stakeholder support, if you can get it into the legislature at all, if it gets introduced at all and no one testifies in favor of it, where does it go? We'll go into some of that process a bit more, I guess, technically in a minute, but that's the whole point. You need to make sure that for whatever direction the idea comes, whether someone has come to you and said, hey, I have this idea for a bill, I need some help, I know you know how to do this, can you help me shape my idea a little bit? And if it's something that you can agree with, perhaps, or whatever, I guess I would like to know that, how do you choose what to work on and not work on would be one question. So let's start there. How would you choose what you would want to work on and not? Well, the More Alliance has a set of principles that we abide by. We have a mission statement, and our position is that anybody, any member of our organization can bring an issue to the organization's attention at any point in time. And we send out a blast to our membership and a 50% of our members plus one or more. A majority of our members say to get involved in the issue, then we take a stand that comports with the mission statement. We tend to be a very progressive organization. And so we tend to get involved in very progressive causes. I'm also a consultant for the Hawaii State Teachers Association. And their process is very similar, right? I mean, they have, at least since the new president of HSTA has been elected, they've been very active at the legislature on not just the fundamental education issues in which we've been involved before, but what are the broader, what's a broader vision of education? How does it look like for social justice? What does that look like for, what family leave look like for teachers who are having children, right? And so that's the way that we go about selecting issues. And I think that the other thing that's for an average citizen to be, is one of the things that's really important is, if there's something that speaks to you, your voice matters. And it sounds so simple, and it sounds cliché, but it's not. It's maybe the most fundamental political concept that we can, we can cherish as a democracy. If you're not the one, if you're not speaking out to your issue about your beliefs, then your beliefs and your experiences are not a part of the conversation. They're not part, and you have to hope that someone else will bring it up. Exactly. Yeah. And nobody has the experiences that you do. And that's one of the things I, I, I have talked about this forever. I've been more involved in policymaking myself, and I've been more involved in the local politics scene for a couple of years now. But I was, before I began any of that, I was just your standard citizen who would vote and, you know, would do the best I could to learn what I was voting about, and try to make an informed decision. And that was that. Until one day, I realized or decided that, you know what, I there's, how about I go look and see what more there is. And I showed up. I showed up at, yes, I happened to be a Democrat. I showed up to the Democratic Party meeting and said, Hey, I'm a Democrat. How can I be more involved? And they went, Oh, are you a registered Democrat? I was like, What does that mean? Well, did you sign the card? I said, I have to sign a card. Okay, I didn't know I had to do that. So I immediately from day one, I'm learning, Oh, I have to sign the card. Now I'm a registered Democrat. Okay, great. How would you like to participate? Well, I have some thoughts. I have some ideas. I would like to listen. I'd like to find out what's going on and see where I best fit in. Well, one thing led to another. And I go from just being a citizen showing up saying I would like to be involved to eventually be coming into a leadership role within the party to eventually creating relationships with electives and helping to shape some policy through working groups and various other means to eventually running for office myself. I lost, but that's okay. It's not always about winning. But that I like to talk about that. Not it's not nothing to do with me. But other than I showed up and said, Hey, I would like to play a part. I have a voice that I don't even fully understand yet, but I want to help. I want to be a part. And because I just showed up one thing after another happened. So I think that is a huge point that you're making. And, and I bring up my story to say, anybody who decides they want to show up and help can. And that's especially true in the legislative process in Hawaii. We have more one of, if not the most open legislative process in the country. Anybody who wants to submit testimony can use them online. We have one of the most accessible. And again, if not the most accessible capital website in the country, if you show up, if you submit testimony, if you show up at the hearings, they're held at the Capitol, you're more than welcome to speak. Yes. And that's something that's a privilege we have in Hawaii that I think sometimes we take for granted. If you, in Arizona, New York City, in California, you can show up at the Capitol and watch all you up. But getting invited to a hearing is a tough gig. It's a tough gig. Being able to put any testimony in is impossible. The other thing is, we are peculiar here in Hawaii. When you look at that, there might be other states that have similarities, but none that are quite as open and available. You can show up to the Capitol. You can knock on the legislator's door. And maybe they'll have a minute, you know, for you at that moment, or maybe they'll just schedule something for you when they have an opening. But they're there. Yes, that's true. And they will invite you in. And they will listen to what you say, and they will give you some thoughts, and they will invite you to participate. That was the, that was the other thing that happened on my side. I started to show up and said, hey, what's going on here? What's going on there? And legislators just say, hey, you know what? I've got this committee. Maybe you want to join this committee to help flesh this out. Like, oh wow, okay. Great. Any person, you have to have the time, I guess, but any person who wants to participate, not just sit back, but be actively involved, I guess, can. And I think that's a peculiar thing here in Hawaii that we have. And whether we take it for granted or not, I'm not sure if it's taking it for granted as much as it's, I don't know how many people really know how accessible, number one, and then number two, how to begin, how to engage it. And that it is simple as just, hey, like that, or an email. And I think there's some responsibility on organizations like mine and other organizations, you know, the rule alliance and other political parties, for example. I think there's, we have a tendency, again, to work in silos, maybe not reach out to community as much. We have, in the legislature, we have something called a public access room, right, which has been around for a number of years. And the people who run the public access room and staff are just absolutely phenomenal about helping every day citizen navigate the legislative process and the complexities thereof. They provide trainings all the time about how the capital works. They're exceptionally knowledgeable, very friendly. But I, when I see their trainings, I've been to a number of their trainings, you know, every year I go to a number of their trainings. And I'm also thinking, why didn't I bring them out? Why didn't the Mua Alliance host like five of these, not just for our members, but, but, you know, for anybody who is interested. Why aren't, why aren't, you know, the people from public access room, speaking to every community on every island, how do we make that happen? And as involved as I have been, I didn't know about this. And I didn't know that those trainings existed. So if I didn't know about that and I've been an involved as I have been, the general public can't know about that. So how do we get that out? So we unfortunately have to take a quick break already. So we'll come right back and we'll talk a bit more. So thank you for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers, the Politics in Hawaii series. I'm your host Carl Campania. Thank you. Once again to Chris Cofield, our guest for today's one minute. Hey, how you doing? Welcome to Batchi Talk. My name is Andrew Lening. I'm your co-host. And we have a nice program here every Friday at one o'clock. Think Tech Studios, where we talk about technology and we have a little bit of fun with it. So join us if you can. Thanks. Aloha. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Kondo Insider. And we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at three o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners. And I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. Hi, I'm Keely Akina, president of the Grass Root Institute. I'd love you to join us every week Mondays at two o'clock p.m. for Ehana Kako. Let's work together. We report every week on the good things going on in our state, as well as the better things that can go on in the future. We have guests covering everything from the economy, the government, and society. See you Mondays on Ehana Kako at two o'clock p.m. Until then, I'm Keely Akina. Aloha. Aloha. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. I'm your host Carl Campania. Welcome, once again, our guest Chris Cofield from Imua Alliance, one of the organizations that helps shape policy. And there are others as well, but one that I appreciate, certainly with some of the things you've been working on, as far as education is concerned, and as far as traffic is concerned, two huge areas. And then the bullying piece, huge stuff. So I thank you for all of that. Okay, so this segment, let's talk about how a bill becomes a law. Let's talk about how an idea becomes a bill, and then hopefully can become a law. So, okay, I have that idea, and I think that it's an important idea, and I don't know how to get it into the legislature myself. I don't have the relationships, as you say we need, but I know you. And I say, hey, I have this idea. Would you be, would your group be willing to help me turn this into a bill? You take a look at it, you go through your process, your membership 50% plus one says, yes, we agree with this, you take it on. That's your process, right? Right. And then, and then what? First of all, what do you actually need from me, so that you know what to work on, and how to work on it, and then what do you do with it? So when someone brings an idea to our organization, one of the first things that we want to see is the research behind their idea and their position, we usually will get something like an email saying, this is really important to me, these are my experiences with this issue, and so our question back is, okay, so what, given your opinion on something, say education, all right, given your opinion on early learning, what does the research that you've done show on your position on early learning? Can you give us, can you bring that to us? And then we'll do our own research, we'll look at, we have a pretty exhaustive knowledge at this point of choir by statutes, the term for wise laws, we'll look at what, it currently exists in the statutory code already, and then see if what the concern is is already addressed, if there are ways they think that it can be further addressed through, for example, a budget appropriation, through funding, or if it's something that maybe there needs to be a working group put together to look at, maybe it's something that an apartment is tasked with doing, but isn't doing effectively, so maybe a resolution could urge them to do more, or is there something missing in the Hawaii statutory scheme that needs to be addressed? Do we need a new law? Or yeah, or the other piece that I think you mentioned, but just to be clear, is if there is already an existing law that we need to modify, or that we want to modify. Right, and that's actually probably the majority of the time that's actually the case, is there's something that exists to address sort of the broad scope of an issue, but either the way the scheme is written doesn't allow for, for the progress, or oftentimes, Hawaii revised statutes need to be updated, sometimes we find laws that were written in, you know, 1970 and haven't been touched since 1970, so they just don't address the modern era. And it only comes up if there's an issue, if there's a concern, if somebody felt that, wait a minute, this shouldn't be right anymore, this shouldn't be this way anymore. I think a really good example of that when I work on human trafficking, we're a services provider, one of the things that we see is that there's far more sex trafficking advertised through the internet these days than there is like street prostitution, right, but if you go and there is a law on the books about advertising for prostitution that applies to places where it's likely to occur, if you have like a business operating in the front like a massage parlor for trafficking, but it only applies to advertisements that appear in the paper or in telephone directories or all of these things that really aren't much use in 2016. No, exactly. So that's an example of a law that would need to be updated to accommodate, oh by the way, okay, okay, so all right, so we have this idea and you've asked for some additional research and okay, so fine, I need to go back, here's some more research, I'll give you some more research, you take that, you pull that together and then do you actually start shaping the resolution or the build, do you create the bullet points, how far do you go and does it depend on the subject matter and on what committee it goes to? I think we're a little unique among organizations and that we are happy to write actual legislation and take it to an office and say I've got an idea and I've written it out and I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to be effective is that we don't just go, for example, knock on a lawmaker's door and say I've got a concern that's been brought to us, we have some ideas about policy that needs to be shaped and can you help us to shape that within, you know, the legislation, we bring an idea that's written out and say we've got a thing for you to look at and what do you think? Okay, so the important part of that is, I think we all need to realize that our legislators cannot be experts on everything. They're all going to have specialties, they're all going to have their own personal interests, but they cannot be experts on everything. So if your organization does a lot of their work in an area that they don't know anything about and you've provided them with this that might suggest that they would be more willing to say, you know what, this makes sense. Let me take this the next step for you. I agree with what your point is. You made a good presentation for it. Let me read through this a little bit and we'll get through the process. So therefore they'd be more willing to accept yours because yours is more thought out. And as with experience, I would guess the more bills they see from you, the more they trust what you're producing and generating as well. Yeah, that's certainly true. Your credibility at the legislature is your calling card. The more that you can be a resource for a lawmaker in terms of the information that they need in order to support an idea, the partnerships that they can build in order to support an idea, that can really be, that serves you well at the legislature if they know that they can trust you to provide that for them. Politics is relationships key to know because it's all about that. And then I guess reputation and experience. Well, I think that's a key point because we think about politics in terms of institutional power. Like the legislature has power over the common man, but it's really not. It's more of a grassroots thing where the power is invested in the people and as much as people are getting involved in the actual crafting of power. It should be a grassroots thing. I don't think it is always a grassroots thing. Not always, but it can be if more people take a stand. And it will only become so as more people take a stand. So we need more... What I'm happy about is we get to introduce through this show your organization and maybe more people can be, I guess, participating in the process, maybe through your organization or just realize that there are ways that they can. So I think that's one of the important parts of this, I think. So, okay. So we take it from there. We say, okay, we have a few more minutes left in the show, so we'll try to wrap this up as quickly as we can here, but make sure that it's clear. Once you get this whole thing, you've got it written up to whatever extent that it is. It gets handed to a legislator. The legislator then takes that, and if they say they want to take to the next step, if it's the Senate, if it's the House, they take it to their legislative office, which in the Senate is the Senate Majority Office and the House is the House Majority Office. And they take it from there and they shape it into and create the actual bill format, the final bill format that will then be introduced. Now, would you say it's okay to go to one or the other? Or do you say going to both and we'll both introduce it? What's the best approach? We always go to both. It's called companion legislation in the legislature. Anytime that you introduce a bill in one House, we always try to introduce it in the other House. I mean, for the very obvious practical purpose of giving us two shots to pass the bill, there are over 1,500 pieces of legislation introduced in each chamber in every legislative session. There were 3,000 last year. Yeah, 3,000 in total last year. And that's just too much for any group of committees to take on. So you're always kind of competing with other ideas. And just for the very practical purpose of having more than one shot at getting your idea heard. I think bills sometimes, good ideas, can stall out in the process because of legislative deadlines. There are deadlines called laterals. They're filing deadlines that occur every few weeks. And if your bill doesn't make it out of its first committee or its second committee by those deadlines, then the bill is effective. Now, I have heard, just to build on that a little bit, I have heard that if your piece of legislation gets assigned to three committees, I heard that that's the sign of death. Yeah, the kiss of death is triple referral. There's plenty of bills that are triple referred in the past. It's just much easier if you only have one or two referrals because then you don't have to worry about passing your bill out of its first committee in the first two weeks of legislative session. Yeah, so obviously, if you bring a bill to the education chair, and the education chair takes it from that and the committee hears it, that's great. If there's any money tied to it, it necessarily must go to the money committees, either whether it's ways and means or finance. And then they have to see it, and then whether they agree with it or not or whether they even hear it as a whole other question. Depending upon what the subject matter is, it may actually impact the judiciary committee. So then all of a sudden, now you've got something coming out of education to finance, to judiciary, and next thing you know, well, there wasn't enough time to get through it all. A great idea, and we're going back next year. Exactly, and that happens all the time. It took us basically 10 years to get a sex trafficking ban passed. We finally got it done. So persistence is key. And I think one of the other things to note is that nothing ever comes out the way that it goes in because you can pass through all your subject matter committees and judiciary and finance, and then it gets into something called conference committee. Is that disheartening? It can be disheartening. It can be disheartening. To walk away from a hearing when you know that you have a proposal that's going to change the lives of a lot of people, like when we walked away every year before it got passed with a sex trafficking ban and then had to go back to victims who were literal sex slaves who we've been working with and saying, we can't get you justice, that's a heartbreaking experience. Yeah, I would imagine. And it was because of a legislative process which people can't understand. Why isn't this more of a priority? Why can't they? This is an obvious thing that should be addressed. Why did it get let go? And there isn't always an easy answer for that. No, sometimes it's because it's hard. I would imagine sometimes it's because it's hard. I think, yeah, the technicalities of that piece of legislation were really difficult. Sometimes we would get something into conference committee and then there's chaos in conference committee because a lot of there's hundreds of bills that are still fighting for competition. So the process will sum up what you just said as well. So it gets introduced to go through some committees in the House, for example. Once it goes through those committees and it gets approved, then it goes to the other side, okay? It makes the lateral movement over to the Senate side then. Right. The Senate then goes through their committees, they'll assign it and it goes to their committees and they'll change it as those committees see fit or not. And then they'll put it back to the House. Right. The House will then review whatever the Senate did to it and then they'll say, okay, we still agree with it and then they'll submit it to the conference committee. And if it makes it to the conference committee, it can still die. Yes. So it needs to then get through that process, which then goes through a whole lot of other agenda items. And then if it gets through the conference committee and passes, then it gets to the governor. Right. Correct. And then the governor has a say. Yes. And actually what happens to the attorney general reviews all the bills that have passed legislature and makes a recommendation to the governor about its constitutionality. And then the governor makes a decision about which ones to pass, sign into law or to veto. So you can see how the sausage making is tough. Yeah, very tough. And we have the shortest legislative session in the country which makes it even tougher. All right.