Despite rhetoric lawmakers chant over and over during the campaign season claiming voters can trust them as representatives of their constituents, it seems there is a growing cynicism in Hawaii. Despite rhetoric lawmakers chant over and over during the campaign
Despite rhetoric lawmakers chant over and over during the campaign season claiming voters can trust them as representatives of their constituents, it seems there is a growing cynicism in Hawaii.
This cynicism became apparent in a recent hearing at the House Finance Committee on a bill that would have allowed the consolidation of monies raised by various independent “friends of the library” to be handled by a centralized fund located within the library services section of the department of education.
It seems a memorandum of agreement has been under discussion over the past year which allows participants in the consolidated fund to hold fundraisers on library property and bars nonparticipants from doing the same.
This is an affront to those who have been banned from fundraising on public library property, as they believe they are helping local libraries. The reason for their resistance to consolidation is they believe this special fund could become the target of a future legislative raid.
That accusation is truly a sad commentary of how much the public has lost confidence in lawmakers to the extent that they do not trust them to keep their mitts off special funds. It should also serve as a warning to lawmakers that they have lost the trust of their constituents. While raiding special funds is the object of this distrust, the other part of the problem is many of them should never have been established in the first place.
Special funds created over the past 20 years were often used as repositories to hide what had been general funds and designating them for a specific use or purpose. In other cases, fees were created as a ruse to increase the government take from the pocketbooks of unsuspecting taxpayers — without calling the new fees taxes. Another reason was that many of the programs funded with fees that underwrite these special funds were not of a high enough priority to garner an appropriation of general funds.
An example of the latter effort was an increase in the marriage license fee to fund domestic violence programs. Lawmakers believe they were justified by some sort of relationship between being married and domestic violence. Similarly, increases in the state’s conveyance tax on all real property transactions went to fund affordable housing and programs of the natural area reserve fund. In the case of this latter program, it is now the possible beneficiary of the proposed single-use checkout bag fee sitting in the Legislature.
Because it is the beneficiary of a special fund, the program doesn’t get the kind of close scrutiny programs like social services and education receive because they are financed out of the general fund. No review has been conducted by the state auditor to see if the monies in special funds are being used efficiently and wisely.
Thus, voters have grown cynical about their lawmakers. When their top priorities are deciding how to spend the money they have and devising ways to raise even more, taxpayers ought to hang on with great fervor to their pocketbooks. At a recent hearing on establishing an environmental workforce, it was pointed out that a very similar statute was enacted more than a decade ago and had become dormant for the lack of funding. The statute remained on the books and only an appropriation was needed to revive it.
Then, once the subject of the appropriation was put on the table, the sharks began to feed, attempting to carve up what would soon be a pot of money that this program or that group could use. Feeding at the trough is a more accurate description of what followed, as group after group came to the table declaring that funds were needed to revive what is known as the environmental workforce.
Is there any doubt the taxpaying public is growing more and more disenchanted with lawmakers who appear only interested in spending more and more public dollars to sate their respective constituencies?
At a time when families are finding it even more difficult to survive and are setting priorities for their shrinking paychecks, it is no wonder that they grow even more cynical as lawmakers fail to set priorities for education and social services with their tax dollars.
Lowell Kalapa is president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii.
