 To talk story with John Wahee, the last show we had, we had as our guests two prominent political pundits and we discussed what the governor might veto that was passed by the 2019 legislative session. Well today we have Hanahou a continuation of that discussion because we actually have a list of bills that the governor has notified the legislature that he is seriously considering vetoing. Now what does that mean? Well first off it means that any bill not on this list will become law whether it occurs as a result of his signature or by just his letting it happen. Now what that means is that he will not veto it and within 10 days it automatically becomes law. But anything on the list is subject to a veto. Does that mean that he will veto it? No, but he most likely will. So for the Hanahou session we have with us again today Chad Blair the governmental editor of Civil Beasts. Something like that. And we have Colin Moore who is the director of public policy center at the University of Hawaii. Now you can't get two more knowledgeable or interested people in what the governor does than these two gentlemen. Well you make a follow him around or something. Anyway he had his press conference yesterday. So one of the most interesting things that occurred at press conference is a bill that's not on here. Tell us a little bit about it. I'm guessing you're referring to the decriminalization. The decriminalization bill. I should have said that. Yeah we had a little inside of baseball. Colin and I both called it wrong. We thought that the governor would surely veto that. He had indicated as much saying look marijuana is illegal at the federal level. It's a schedule one drug. That's right up there with heroin. Although I was surprised that cocaine is actually scheduled too. I didn't check my notes because it's medicine. I suppose it is for some people. The governor who never smoked marijuana growing up by his own admission. And I thought for sure that wasn't going to make it. But this is now going to become law possession of three grams or less of We'll get you. I think it's like a hundred and thirty dollar fine. That's right. Not even a misdemeanor. Not even a misdemeanor. And here's the another thing that if you have this on your record it'll be clear. Well you can always trust the guys who never smoked. I suspect that this is not one he was really pleased to see go through. But there was so much pressure to do something about marijuana. He's got his children are in their 20s. And that generation just doesn't see what the commotion is about with regard to marijuana. In fact the governor said it was a tough call and wish there had been some provision to maybe educate the youth that this is actually a drug and some people consider that it does have serious problems. Yeah I think he said specifically that minors who pay this fine he would like to have seen them go to mandatory drug treatment programs. But to be clear this is adults only 21 years. So you know what we have here is I think basically society moving on you know and people just sort of getting past the two largest groups supporting the legalization of marijuana. A people over 50 and people younger than 30. You know it's all you guys in the middle. You know nice I am. All right. But you know he did veto one marijuana related bill this this cannabis bill indicated that he will be indicated I'm sorry it's indicated that would allow you to transport it between islands if you have a prescription. That's a very interesting. I can tell you I spoke to some folks just today in the medical cannabis community and they're very upset. Yeah I'm sure they are. You while you do have state sanctioned dispensaries on the four main islands. You don't have it on one eye and you don't have it on Molokai. So how are you going to you're not going to take a boat to get your prescription. Right. And then go back and I think they're going to be lobbying heavily. The governor over said look I don't want you to get in trouble with TSA when you're trying to take that medical cannabis on the plane. Well you know the TSA regulations basically say actually say actually say that their job is not to check for cannabis or for that matter almost any control substance. Their job is to check for anything that looks like it could be used in a violent way. You know some kind of terrorist threat. So they don't do look for it. Now if they happen to come across it they will report you to a law enforcement official but they're not going to check for it. And so that that exists. Now the governor actually I asked him about this you know and I said hey gov you know I thought we had a progressive image going here. What is this stuff. And he tells me and I don't know. So this is something people can he says that we already have rules in place that allow them to do this to go between islands. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. And well at least like maybe it's for testing. Just for testing. Yeah I think they did work that out. And so and there was something else he was not too clear about but he wasn't clear to me. It was a surprise actually. And speaking of Paco Lolo there was a third bill related to marijuana although this is not the kind of marijuana that will get you high. This is the industrial hemp bill. Oh marijuana light. Exactly. Well you'd have to smoke a heck of a lot. This is your CBD oil. This is something that Cynthia Phelan the state legislator that has long pushed for hemp is very upset about. Cynthia is really the mother of the whole idea of a hemp industry in Hawaii. So she pointed out two years ago the federal government in the farm bill was able to get hemp to not be a schedule one drug because it really is an agricultural crop. And this has allowed states to move forward in trying to develop hemp as a as an industry which has a history going back thousands of years is a very important fiber. But the governor did put that on his potential veto list expressing some concerns about enforcement of the law. And Cynthia is like it's not going to get you high. I mean what's the big deal here. That's three bills regarding marijuana. You know I'm not clear and we I didn't have the chance to talk to him about it or for that matter anybody from the government's office but what was the rationale for visiting that bill. I'm not quite sure. It would place it within the Department of Agriculture. I believe it's already in there but essentially would make it a permanent program and there were some other provisions. So enforcement kept coming up over and over again what I read in the veto message. But I'll admit it was a mystery to me. I didn't see anything concrete. You know I wonder whether there was one of those bills that you know had some technical put in the wrong department. There was one bill he did in fact said I can't pass this. I don't have the number in front of me but it was relating to what was this the. Oh here we are going through our paperwork. There's a lot of bills. When you see people doing this what you know is that it's fresh off the price. Let's go with what we do now. We almost got this before CivilV. We almost got this before CivilV. I can tell you it was not a very significant bill and remember it can always come back next year. The thing they got all the headlines and we were right on calling this one. You know it's not even called the Airbnb bill but that's what everybody calls it. It really has to do with short term vacation rentals. There's home away. There's Expedia. I think that's the same thing. Expedia owns home away. That's right and yet everyone calls it the Airbnb bill. Why? Because Airbnb wanted that bill to pass and it's not going to happen. That was the one bill. He for sure there might have been another one. He didn't even say this is my intent. He says I'm going to veto it. And he got cover because Kirk Caldwell just today the mayor of Honolulu signed bill 89 regulating at least one law. Remember we discussed that. There was this relationship between the counties and what the state was going to do. The governor said this bill had no enforcement and even though 46 million. This was the second bill I actually talked to him about before and I said what are you going to do with that? And he said something along the lines like you know we're going to tax them anyway. The minute Kirk collects his data then we know everybody who has it and then we can go and tax them. And that was a big problem with the state bill is that enforcement would have been very difficult. There wouldn't be this information provided. Airbnb has refused to provide. It's proprietary but in fact that's what shows you where these things are. That's exactly right. He says we're going to get to them anyway so this bill might be too clumsy. I mean other than Airbnb was there anyone, I mean even Donovan Delacruz who shepherded this through the legislature sort of said well I thought he wasn't surprised. Remember that thing passed by one vote. And it was impartially because they thought they had to fill these revenue holes. They did and then the tax revenue picture turned out to be rosier. I don't think anybody, we've been seeing it miles away. The real estate investment trust. This is a good bill. We were wrong and you were right again. The governor decided to veto it. I went with my gut. It turned out to be correct. He said the REITs bill basically would discourage investment in the state of Hawaii. That would be the Kool-Aid that you all drink if you're supporting the REITs and the investment industry. What's the reason he did it you think? Well I think he did it for that reason. And probably for the REITs and what probably happened was that people that are in that business and they're just you know a small group of them probably went to him and said look Gav, you know you're going to be the only, the second state in the union that does this. We got, we can go invest anywhere. I mean A and B for example is literally moving all of its assets through the mail. It became a REIT just a couple of years ago. You're right and you know and people do that. Now he was also, we sort of discussed this in past. The governor. Yeah the governor. So in addition to having those kinds of policy conversations, I'm sure that called up the pension fund. You know are we invested in REITs? Oh sure. Will this affect my ability to pay people like John Wahey retired governor? Is the state invested in REITs? The pension fund. The pension fund. Pension fund. You know. And these, that's good things to do. And you know so he says I got to save Wahey. I call him his future pension. Well what is? He asks for the non-profit sector. No pension. No pension. But you know what's happening. We have a 401K. Meanwhile well this is all going on you know they're running ads. Sure. And they're persuading people or at least they've persuaded enough people so there's no big uproar. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. But let me tell you the other side of that. The other side of that is like Michael Hall who wrote a letter to the editor of the Star Advertisement. You know I think they ought to pay that tax because as a corporation in the same business I got to pay that tax. Right. It's a corporate tax. I mean I don't think that, I mean he got a lot of cover from this campaign. I don't think there really was, I don't think the general public really understood what this bill was all about. It was too confusing so I don't think he had a lot of grassroots political pressure to let this go. So when there was an effort to tax real estate investment last session and four governors as you know got on a TV ad. This was for schools. This was to pay for. To pay for the schools. Yeah. But it was such a bad vehicle that you know immediately all of us jumped on board. Nobody else was on board on this one. You guys didn't actually talk to each other on the phone did you? I liked that show. It was a great ad. It was a great ad. Jugs. Neil. I'll never tell. I'll never tell. I'll never tell. You'll never kiss the tell. Hey Neil. Hi Dan. If we would actually talk to each other we might actually get something done. I think I already actually had like a rotary phone. Well let's, what else we got? Oh man we got to take a break shortly but we got to come back and talk about criminal forfeit. Oh yeah. Yeah that would be a good build to talk about. Alright we'll take a short break and we'll be right back. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week Mondays at 3 we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. I'm Marsha Joyner inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000 year artist where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all of the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Aloha. Back and here we are on a whole. We're looking at what the bills that the governor indicated that he intended to veto. Now I use that word intended specifically because it means he doesn't have to and if he doesn't then they'll become law but most likely he will. So we left off right at the point when we were going to discuss criminal forfeiture and criminal forfeiture is where the government uses its power of fascism or tyrannical government or something but what we do is we use as a law enforcement tool the ability to confiscate property that is allegedly connected to criminal activity. This is civil asset forfeiture that's another term for it. We're talking pretty much about police departments and prosecuting attorneys and if I remember correctly they can seize this property even if you haven't actually been convicted of a crime or even charged with a crime that could include a car or a house or cash. Real estate. And then often they get to keep it maybe auction it off and then they get the money. In fact I have a buddy who makes it like life's work to go to the auctions and one time he bought a motorcycle for a really like half price beautiful thing and he was driving down the street and some guy says that's my brother-in-law's bike. He says where's your brother-in-law's in the kill he's in jail oh he's a man I don't know if I should try. Well there's a case where somebody did actually commit a crime and had to serve but in many cases yeah but still he might be one of these angry types where you can't go. You know the governor said something I thought pretty curious in the press conference when he was asked about this which was well this is managed well by Hawaii we don't have these mainland problems and that seems absurd to me because in fact the state auditor found a lot of mismanagement of the state's civil asset for future program and money wasn't going to where it was supposed to and they weren't keeping appropriate records. ACLU of Hawaii just freaked out when they learned about this decision. I thought this was a good, well I don't know the technical part of the bill but I think the policy behind this bill was a good policy which is that you shouldn't be able to take some of this. Well here's what the actual bill says it's government-sponsored theft it is actually in the bill itself and that's a shame. Well yeah and you know it's interesting that on the political level though you know as a matter of politics that both the right and the left agree that this is in other words the Bernie Sanders types and the Trumps get together on this bill and say it's wrong to have civil for future laws. But there's a very powerful interest group that probably did get to the governor and always has defended this which is the police, the prosecuting attorneys, the attorney general and part of it is because they really have a... Maybe I shouldn't say this. I was going to see all the guys on trial now for criminal activity, that group. Yeah. Oh okay. No. That was careful. We should be careful about it. Maybe it's going to pay Keith kind of shares. Exactly. Exactly. But there is this perverse incentive because it's not just that this money goes to the general fund. It goes to pay for specific police programs and they rely on this money which is what they said but that's not a good rationale. No, no you shouldn't. I mean actually I come from the school that if the police need money then the government should be provided. That's correct, right. I mean they shouldn't be looking for money to enforce the law. I mean it as basic as you know the reason why they shouldn't be doing that is so that they just don't hand out traffic tickets to be handing it. Exactly. You're not supposed to be looking for crimes in order to keep your operations going. I mean that's real third world stuff. So you say it's rare and you would know for someone to signal the intent to veto and then to maybe change their mind? Yeah, it generally is rare because you know what will probably happen in cases like this is that oftentimes somebody will come back out and it'll be mostly on technical vetoes and they'll say but governor you know there's a severability clause in the bill which means that if this particular provision doesn't enforceable or doesn't meet the standards of law then it just gets pushed aside and the rest of the bill can go through. There's a couple of minor bills that I was surprised that the governor said he's going to probably veto Suicide Prevention Month. Although he's going to declare it a September Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month by executive order. Which is the normal way of doing it. So he didn't think a bill was necessary to go about it. It says here it was erroneously submitted to the governor. I don't understand the technical reason why that was a problem but it wasn't that he was opposed to this bill. So they'll still have that month in September. But by executive order not by statute. But the other one and I think this was Donovan Delacruz's bill as well. The surfing commission, I think the governor said we certainly honor that. It's a sport known really only to us, Yucca Hanamoku and so forth. But he says he doesn't want it in DAGs, the Department of Accounting. Yeah, that was strange because normally that kind of a bill if the governor was passing it would have been in DBED. Yeah, that's where it sounds like it should be. Because it's a kind of like promote the sport bill. Business, economic, tourism. And so you wouldn't put it in DAGs. And I can see all the DAGs people going up to the governor's office right now saying we've got enough to do because your last order to speed up the way we process invoices and so forth. And all of a sudden somebody says you've got to have a commission for surfing. Yeah, there was no money in the bill either. Can you imagine what the bureaucrats all said for each other when they saw the bill? It must have been screaming. It was like crazy. Did you want to talk about the condo bill? Yeah, I'm going to tell you about the condo bill. The condo bill is really interesting because what this bill does, it has a number of policy issues in it. Sounds like it was written by lawyers. Yeah, well first of all, this is a lawyer's bill. This is the bill that only first of all, lawyers would understand. And it makes work as a lawyer much easier if it passed. And secondly, if you lost on this issue before, this would have undone it. Okay, so what does this bill do? This bill allows associations, condo associations to evict to foreclose on one of their members who hasn't paid his dues. He might have paid his mortgage. He might own it. But it allows them to foreclose on a non-doing paying condominium owner or non-maintenance paying. Now, why is that an issue? Well, obviously an issue because some people don't pay their bills. Yeah, what it does though, it gives the condo association a lot of power. And the first thing about that is usually the ability to evict or foreclose is usually given to an entity that actually has an interest in the property itself like the bank and so forth. What the Hawaii Supreme Court recently ruled was that the condo association can't do that, cannot foreclose unless they have a contractual relationship with the property owner saying that they have the ability to do that. He says if you get contracted to do that, you can foreclose. But otherwise you need to do what everybody else has to do when they want to collect a debt. Just sue and take them to court. So this is about property. You don't go around evicting people. Well, the lawyers who lost that said, you know, you just made love really hard. So they went in, got a special bill. Now what was really onerous about the bill because up till then it's just policy. You know, whose side you're in is that they then reached out and said we are going to apply this legislation retroactively. Oh, I see. They're going to reach back and they're going to apply it to cases that have already been tried. Already been tried, already in the process, already in the suit and so forth. And what would have happened, you know, I can see a lawyer waiting to, you know, to like waiting to get his bonus because he just lost and won. But that's kind of the case. Governor, if I could just make a plug, you said this at the top of the show. When he signals the intent to veto, it also means that all those other bills are going to become law. And I think the veto intent somewhat obscured some pretty important bills. Yeah, let's go get... Just quickly, all mail-in votes statewide meeting by absentee ballots. That will now become... I just came from the science ceremony. It's a done deal. There will be automatic recounts in close elections. Which will allow us to go into and really investigate things like and hopefully avoid things like the top of the watergate. Exactly. Prison reform. Prison reform is going to show. To be really another bureaucracy is the word they use. That is correct. But the idea is to have an independent oversight of our troubled jail and prison system. That was the... The bail bill, there were two bail bills. One of them he is going to veto because it's superfluous. It's actually in the prison oversight. But the other one is unsecured bail, letting a judge determine, gee, maybe this guy doesn't really have the means to pay bail. He really shouldn't be sitting in OCCC until his court date. And that looks like it's going to become law. Anything else that's interesting in all of that? Because I tell you, there's a lot of interesting things past that are not on this list. And some other stuff, like, you know, for life of me, why do we need a bill to take away, stop vaping in the high school? Yeah, just do it. You know, like do it. Vaping is a whole situation there. But I think the governor had some concerns. If this were a principal or a teacher, a teacher would actually be able to confiscate vaping materials. There were some concerns about that. And yet so many people opposed vaping. But we allowed the cops to go in and grab the property. But you won't allow a principal to take a vape. You know, you know, well, anyway... I mean, it's not like they're doing it in the classroom. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to telegraph my political perspective by, you know, 100 percent. But you know, you can pretty much pick up on it. Anyway, thank you very much for... Our pleasure. For coming back and having fun with me. And hope to have you guys again. Anytime, Governor. Thanks for having us. Yeah, and maybe we can all call this a good session. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back in two weeks with another Talk Story with John Wahey.