 given Thursday. And this is Community Matters, and I'm Jay Fidel. More specifically, we're going to talk about how the coronavirus has affected the state Senate for that matter, the state legislature. With Jesse Broder van Tijk, who is with the Senate who does communications for the state Senate. Hi, Jesse. Thank you for joining us. It's really important that we talk to you. Thanks a lot for having me, Jay. Jesse, so where are we? Where is the Senate anyway? Are we in session? Not in session. Are we in recess? What does that mean? The Senate recessed its session, which means that they can resume the session with all the bills and nominations alive anytime later this year if conditions under the pandemic allow us to do that. So, if the Senate had adjourned, then they would have to start a new special session and start everything from scratch. But by recessing, everything remains alive. The day we found out we were going to have to recess for this emergency, the Senate did confirm General Hara to lead the Department of Emergency Management as the state adjunct general. So that was one critical thing we got through. Before the recess, the Senate also passed $10 million in emergency funding that Governor E. Gay had requested, but the House hasn't had a chance to pass that bill and didn't do it before the recess. So they would have to pass that emergency funding. Perhaps it would be amended to a higher number once we know what sort of resources the state needs. But the Governor assured us that they haven't the funds for now to do what they need to do. Okay, so what about, well, you wouldn't need a special session. You could just come out of recess when the time is right. Has it been discussion of when that might be? I mean, as you know, nobody really knows how this is going to play out. I asked everybody, Jesse, I asked everybody I talked to. I asked to show a number on the wall with doing over under on July 1st or something. So, okay, so right now you have some really important bills pending. And I guess the question that comes to mind is, especially in the funding bill, can't we find a way to do this by remote? I mean, everybody's doing everything by remote these days. I mean, it's, you know, education, government, not government, but the media for sure. And, and every way you look, people are on remote. I mean, I mean, there are cocktail parties going on a remote. There's a Passover satyr is going on a remote. Why not the legislature? This is absolutely been a crash course for all of us on remote meeting. And we've all used zoom and go to meeting and Microsoft teams and all these various things to figure out what works best for us. The neighbor island senators, I know we're all meeting regularly using some video chat software. And we're planning all senators and staff meeting next week using zoom, which can do, you know, hundreds of participants at once. The Senate special committee on COVID-19 is streaming all their hearings live on YouTube and Facebook and as well as live on a Lullo, which allows the public to watch the hearings live and provides transparency without having to have people in the room, which would violate social distancing rules. As you know, the CDC said no more than 10 people in the room. So they are using phone calls, video chats, and live streams to try to conduct business at least with this one committee for the crucial COVID-19 functions. That's not really complying with sunshine in the sense that nobody has a chance to talk. No, the public does not have a chance to participate in the conversation. I mean, right. And I understood that the governor sort of waived sunshine during this crisis. Am I right about that? I'm not sure about the the sunshine issue, but I know that the special committee is not accepting public testimony at this time. Yeah, okay. So that's good because you still have some action going on. Still have some conversations, some engagement with the public. It's very good. The public has, you know, by virtue of that, some information from the heart of the matter. But, you know, in terms of, you know, proceeding with hearings and in terms of, more importantly, in terms of, you know, voting on statutes and the like, bills to make them statutes. Well, to present them to the governor for signature as statutes. What we, you mentioned before the show that the constitution requires the legislature to be physically present. And I, you know, I really, I think we ought to, going forward, you know, when the time is right, we ought to change the constitution about that. And you said that you had, you had a request pending, request for advice pending with the attorney general to see if there was a way around that. But what would, what would be the way around that? The fact that it's an emergency? Right. Well, you know, it was, you know, as this emergency played out, our first goal was to see if there's some way we could preserve the session and keep it going without the neighbor island senators needing to fly back and forth and putting themselves and their families at risk and the rest of the public. The constitution specifically says that the members have to be present in person, um, on the floor of the Senate in order to vote. And I, you know, I think there are various reasons for that, such as it ensures that it really is that individual who was elected, who was voting, you know, you could have a situation where someone hats into the system, you could have a situation where the staff members doing the vote for the member or, you know, so there's just no question. You've got Senator X standing on the floor and she votes nay. Like we all see that it's on a LL there's no question. Obviously, the circumstances we're dealing with right now are not anything that people who wrote the Constitution could have ever envisioned. And in addition to that, the telecommunication technology that we're using right now would have been absolutely unthinkable when the Hawaii Constitution was written. So yeah, if you could have say, you know, Senator Kanuha from the big island on a screen voting and you can see that it's him and you hear him saying it, would that be sufficient? The Attorney General has advised that, you know, something that we could look at, um, you know, under the governor's emergency order, you know, I think most reasonably reasonable people would agree that it's a fair accommodation to make, but it is, you know, the Constitution. So nobody wants to violate the Constitution unless we're sure it's okay. You know, one idea that strikes me, let me run it by you and see what you think is, you could have voting, almost I wouldn't use the term straw voting, but it'd be sort of like straw voting, just as if, you know, we're going through the regular process and people could vote by remote and absent Attorney General opinion to that effect, allowing that. So okay, it would only be a straw vote and it would not be a legal vote under the Constitution. However, if you went through a whole bunch of straw votes like this and then you reserved a certain day, call it May 15th, a certain day when everybody flies in, everybody gathers, there's all kinds of, you know, special cleaning and hygiene and masks and gowns, whatever you want to ensure reasonable safety for the people in the square building. You have them all come in and you say, okay, we had all the straw voting. You guys, please raise your hands to affirm everything that was, you know, voted on in the straw votes. Say aye if you want to affirm that and they're in person and they vote and it's a matter of record, then they go home again. So their exposure is really limited. What do you think? I mean, I can tell you at this time that would be impossible because you can't even fly a neighbor island without being quarantined for 14 days. So you know, I'm hopefully optimistic that by May 15th that could be a possibility, but I think probably if we're being realistic, it's going to be much longer than that, unfortunately. One thing we did discuss was, you know, just voting with the Oahu senators in the room, which you could reach a quorum and you could legally have your proceedings. But of course, that disenfranchises all the people of the neighbor islands. Maybe you could have some back room agreement ahead of time. But of course, that's not the transparency we want to have. And it's not just the final passage on the floor that needs to happen. The committees still need to hear these bills. You know, we're just in the middle of session. The first crossover had happened. The Senate was just considering the house pass bills. They all have to go through the committee. They all have, they all have to have public testimony under the Constitution. The public has to be allowed into the room under the Constitution. Obviously, you know, we would like to look at things like teleconferencing witnesses and public testimony in, but legally, unless we have, you know, guidance from the governor and attorney general, they can't have a hearing without allowing the public into the room, which is too dangerous right now. Wow, it's a real conundrum. How about a promise to vote? I promise that when I get a chance, I will vote, you know, this way on that bill. And then I may get a chance sooner or later, but I've made a promise and the promise is verifiable. And you got, you know, you got maybe a video promise, something, something that you can prove up. This promise isn't going to be legally enforceable. So if the member wants to change her vote later on, when the vote is taken on the floor, that is legally binding. They can't change the vote done, recorded in history. Yeah, sanctuary. I mean, it's sanctified. Really interesting situation we find ourselves. You've never been faced with this before. And our systems don't really cover it. And there's no way, I mean, I don't know what the attorney general will say in terms of the emergency aspect. There's really no way under existing, existing law, existing rules, existing constitution to change it. So here we are stuck tied with our hands behind our back. Wow. So how much authority if you can help me with this? Does the governor have, how far can he go under his emergency powers? Do we know the boundaries? I mean, we're seeing how, how broad the emergency powers are. I mean, I think you and I, if we had talked a year ago today, we could have never imagined a scenario where the governor of Hawaii would ban all travel between the islands or mandate a 14 day quarantine between the islands or people coming from the mainland, right? All right. So one thing we know is the governor does not have the power to restrict people from other states from coming to our state because under the US constitution, only the president of the United States can make rulings like that. So, you know, the quarantine is their best workaround that they could come up with. So we can't say you can't come, but we can say if you come here, you need to stay in your hotel room for 14 days, pay for it yourself. If you go outside, we're going to arrest you. Now we can do it. That does discourage people. I don't know if it's a total discouraging, but I think some people are coming anyway and trying to slip through the net as we've seen. So, okay, well, we're going to find out, I suggest to you, Jesse, we're going to find out the boundaries of the emergency power because in this crisis, more things are going to happen. You and I cannot even predict now. You know, our world is in a transformation, our whole world. And so things are going to happen where maybe the governor says, well, you know, I think I'll take a whack at that. I'll try to extend that. Maybe my attorney general will give me a pass on that and we'll do this, that and the other thing in order to keep everything together. I don't want to see more of that. What makes the Senate special about this? Is the Senate and the Senate in the House, are they equally involved, equally, you know, involved in the absence of a session or during a recess like this? Or are they, or are neither of them directly involved? What makes you special in the circumstances? Well, the Senate and the House are continuing to operate independently. So I know the House Speaker formed his own committee on COVID-19 and the Senate formed their own. So, yeah, I mean, there's, there's nothing special. I think everybody in the entire world, like 8 billion people are trying to make adjustments to this and figure out how to move forward and do the most critical things. As well put. So can the Senate committee meet with the House committee? Are they talking to each other remotely? Of course. I don't, I don't, I'm not sure. I don't know what sort of communications that's happened between the two committees, but they certainly can talk if they would like to. Sure, sure. Well, what about, say, the Senate committee, the one that's meeting and doing, you know, social media and, and what are they talking about? What are their agendas like? Like what issues are they covering? Well, they, you know, they've only existed for a few weeks now, but they pushed really hard for the quarantine and for restrictions on travel, for screenings at the airport and in cruise ship passengers from arriving, more, you know, having General Hara step up into more of a leadership role, all sorts of things like that. You know, they've had a bunch of the departments that are involved, transportation, health, they've had the governor's chief staff, you know, we're trying to find a balance of, you know, demanding accountability and oversight while at the same time trying to give these departments as much time as they possibly can to deal with this unprecedented crisis. So we're doing oversight and, you know, ultimately all these departments are going to have to come back to the legislature later and answer for their successes and failures. So holding them accountable now and holding the purse strings for later. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's really important. So, you know, I wondered one thing, we asked ourselves this question earlier, is that where is the state government right now? Oversight, you know, even in a temporary way be valuable, but is the state employees working? Are they being paid? Are they in their offices? Are they at home? Are they closed? What's the status and does it depend on the department or what? It does depend on the department. Everyone's being paid and being expected to work from home if they're not working in the office. I, for example, I've been on a 14-day quarantine after one of the state senators tested positive for COVID-19, but I've still been working all day long every single day from this room you see here. And we've been experimenting with, you know, ways for our office to keep in touch. We've been using Microsoft Teams. Today we just started using Zoom and we're going to see if that works a little better. We've been communicating with Senator English, the majority leader who is stuck in this, in a home in Honomali right now. So, of course, they don't have the fastest internet connection in Honomali, but we're making it work. And so we're still continuing to meet on multiple islands and doing the best we can. And, you know, we're basically having to reinvent the wheel right now in the middle of a crisis when we've been busier than we've ever been, but everyone has to just keep going forward. What happens with an agency? I'm just picking one out of the air, but say the tax office, which is closed. If you wanted to go into the tax office, the door would be locked. Presumably the people in the tax office are working at home, but I'm not sure that they can actually bring these sensitive tax documents home and work on them. I'm not sure what they can do, even if they want to do something. And I don't know how they might serve as the public if anybody calls, for example, wants to ask a question. So how is that shaping up? Is there some system that the state has in general for funneling questions for organizing, you know, the work where the members of the staff engage with the public? Every department is doing this on their own, but I think that some places have skeleton crews in the building and other people working from home. Other people have figured out how to forward phone lines to cell phones or home lines. In our office, we have voicemails get sent to us by email. So if anyone calls the office line, we get an email right away and call them back from our home line. And I've been putting my personal cell number on press releases for reporters to have it, if they need to reach me in a timely manner. So I think a lot of departments that you call them, you can still reach someone or email them, but you definitely can't show up in person. Yeah. And Department of Health must be really, really, really, really busy these days in dealing with all the issues. So Department of Health, Department of Transportation, Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, they've all been picking up the slack and the folks who do the unemployment payments are really working hard. Unemployment went from 17,000 people filing one year ago in March. And in this March last month, 117,000 people. That's more than 10% of all the people in this island in the state. What about funding for things? We have a constitutional provision requires balancing the budget. We're not getting a lot of tax receipts these days. How can the state government pay the bills? Are we going to start printing money? I mean, in our own way, or are we just going to go in the hole? I mean, how are we going to deal with that? Yeah. Unlike the federal government, the state can't print money or carry a deficit. So they have to balance the budget. So I think that's going to be a challenge next budget cycle for sure. I think everything in the budget outline right now is depending on revenue projections and tax revenues that aren't going to be there. There can be a lot more expenses like this unemployment funding and all sorts of things that departments are doing. So it's going to be tough. Yeah, I'm going to figure out a lot of things. Well, it strikes me from watching the governor and for that matter the mayor, you know, come on and deal with the public every day and have press conferences just like in Washington. Because my theory is that one of the legs on the stool dealing with a crisis like this is public information, is public communication. For example, I was surprised that he suspended the Public Information Act a day or two ago. I didn't really catch why that was. But, you know, I think that public information is critical to keep the public on board, you know, to make them work together to keep them sufficiently helpful that this too shall pass. And you're right in the middle of that. You can see that better than most, you know, in the square building. And I wonder what you're doing, what your office is doing in order to participate in the governor's press conferences and in communications that are going out from various agencies to the public. Tell me how you spend your day, Jesse. There's absolutely a huge demand for information about this COVID-19 situation and all the major changes. And yeah, I mean, in my entire career, we've never had announcements as huge as, for example, everyone must stay at home indefinitely. You know, so it's really important that everybody knows what's happening. I mean, people are demanding things like this too, right? So people for weeks are like, you have to make the governor stop tourists from coming into town, even though the Department of Health reminds us that 80% of the cases that came from outside of Hawaii to Hawaii were from white residents who traveled and came back, not from tourists. But so, you know, we have to restrict Hawaii residents' travel as well as tourists. That's really an all hands on deck effort. You know, it strikes me that here we are, we're only a couple of weeks in actually, it's hard to believe. And I mean, I've been staying home. I've been doing this show from home as you are. And I'm thinking that I'm going to go stir crazy after a while. I think everybody's going to go stir crazy after a while. As you say, there's no real date on which we, you know, we're released from being at home. And I wonder, you know, what the plan would be, is, could be in dealing with the dynamic of this sort of thing. It's not going to stay the same. You have 1.4 million people in the state give a take. And they're going to get anxious after a while. And I don't know if they're going to demand more information, or they're going to get confused, or they're going to, I don't know, somehow get, you know, get anxious. And what do you do as a communicator when, you know, in the future, when the same process, the same stresses continue on and on. And of course, people change, they, you know, nothing stays the same. What's the plan if there is one? Absolutely. Mental health care is a component of this that is going to need to be addressed. And, you know, everybody's sort of focused on the immediate triage of trying to stop people from getting this virus and helping our healthcare providers deal with them. But there's a whole nother aspect of this that, yeah, people are stuck at home. People are watching the news and being terrified for hours and hours and hours and not turning it off. And, you know, being scared of their neighbors and strangers and seeing people in masks, you know. So I think, you know, I don't know that there's something that government can do to make everyone feel better. But I personally have been trying to reach out to all my friends and, you know, my friends do on Mainland and overseas and just check on them and see how they're doing, you know. So my high school friends and I've been doing big group chats together and catching up. And it's kind of nice, actually, because our geographical closeness is no longer a factor in who we talk to. And it's enabled me to catch up with a lot of people from over my life. But of course, I can't wait until I can go back out in Chinatown and have a good time like we used to. That may be after an indeterminate period, actually. I'm sorry to say. Well, you know, I think it's, I think you really hit on a number of important things that we have to be mindful of in the community. And I hope it doesn't start breaking down, but there's that risk out there. So the other thing I wanted to ask you is, this is really an important, I guess, a planning point, is we have learned, we've been thrown into a bath of cold water. Over the past few weeks, we have learned, you know, about transformations that come by surprise, about profound events that change our lives, and more of the community life. So you must be thinking about this. If you had your chance, and we can break this down, if you had your chance to make correction, to improve or modify the systems around you legislatively, in fact, governmentally going forward, what would you do? What would your, you know, bill in particular be as and when the legislature can make changes? As and when we can make changes in the Constitution, what would you want to do to prevent this kind of dilemma from ever happening again? Okay, well, I don't know if we can prevent another pandemic, but I do think that if there's a silver lining to all this, it's pushing us to embrace technology and, you know, telecommuting. One huge contributor to climate change and carbon emissions is everybody driving back and forth to work every day. And so we're showing that, you know, it is possible to function working from home and maybe in the future, you know, we'll work from home two days a week and go in three days a week or, you know, things like that. And we're also, you know, I downloaded the Safeway delivery app, and I got groceries delivered to me, and I never even occurred to me to do that before. And so maybe that's something we'll do in the future that I'll reduce our trips back and forth around town. Yeah, there's all kinds of things we're learning, isn't it? I mean, less than a minute as far as I'm concerned. One of the things I wanted to raise earlier, and I'll pick up on it now, is that public confidence is very important. And so we have some hot button issues that I don't think people are confident about, or trusting, for that matter, of statements that are made by public officials. One is the hot button of the masks. Well, there's three things, the masks, the tests, and the ventilators. And a lot of this is federal, I have to say. But some of it is state. And I wonder, you know, what's your thought about the importance of candor, even when the news isn't so good, rather than, you know, misleading people or confusing them or not, not telling them the real story. And we must be learning about that too, don't you think? Absolutely. I mean, this is a public health emergency and accurate real time information can help people make decisions that can save the lives of themselves and their loved ones, and their community members. And we saw on a federal level, I mean, it's a just perfect example, someone trying to spin something so it looks better. But in providing this misinformation to the public actually made the problem much worse, probably going to cause hundreds of thousands of additional deaths that could have been avoided if the president had just been honest with the public from the beginning. He doesn't have much credibility. His CDC director, Anthony Fauci has a lot of credibility. So people are turning to him. I've seen him on the national morning shows. But yeah, and, you know, masks, Mayor Caldwell just had a press conference right before we did this interview where he had everyone in the press comments wear a mask and he's now asking the public if they do need to go shopping and go into public places to please wear a mask to protect other people. You know, it doesn't protect, it's not going to protect you from getting it, but it's going to protect you from breathing out onto other people. So all these things, absolutely. I mean, even, you know, there was some cover up alleged from China when the outbreak first began, which delayed other countries from being able to prepare for it. So this is a great example. I mean, I just watched the miniseries Chernobyl as part of my binge watching where I've been on self-quarantine. And that's another great example of hiding the information caused a lot more people to die than needed to. If you don't mind a semi-personal question on this, you know, we've all been locked up. We've all been watching the news. We all understand that this is probably airborne. It only takes one, one particle of virus to infect you. And worse yet is that people can go through the whole process of the disease and never know it. Be symptomatic and they can be infectious the whole time, which makes you look at, you know, your neighbors and friends in a different way, which makes you look at strangers certainly in a different way. And, you know, we all, we all have our view of things. And I wonder what your view of it is now. How do you feel? Are you optimistic, pessimistic? Are you afraid? How much? I'm just talking about you and not a public official type statement, just how you're feeling. You know, because I go through these questions too, but I'm wondering how you feel about it. Yeah. Obviously, I wish that this wasn't happening. I'm a social person and I love interacting with people. And yes, I mean, every time I'm in an elevator or some public space, I'm like thinking about who that person is and where they've been and trying to size them up based on their appearance, which is not fair or an indication really of what they've been doing. I think, yeah, I mean, we're all getting suspicious of each other, but maybe I'm hopeful that we're going to come together and we're going to look out for each other and we're going to bring food to the elderly people in our neighborhood and we're going to come together and be stronger. And then when we finally get the green light to go out and be less than six feet from people, we'll enjoy each other's company and be kind to one another. At least that's what I'm hoping for. What a joy it will be to be able to shake somebody's hand again. A little silly thing like that. It seems ancient. It's so far into the past. Well, Jesse, thank you so much for helping us understand these things and getting a window on it. I think things will change. Things will evolve one way or the other or both, depending. And I would certainly like to double back with you in the future to take your, may I say, take your temperature again. Well, we'll do a good social distancing and take a shot after you buy it. Thank you, Jesse. Stay safe. Thanks, James. Appreciate it.