Catching up on a couple of things … With no fanfare, comment or drama Gov. Neil Abercrombie wisely signed HB 575 to continue 5 percent pay cuts for legislators, administrators and judges for two more years, matching the cuts being asked of unionized public workers. The measure also continues a freeze on all step increases [...]
Posted tagged ‘Legislature’
Guv signs pay bill; Hanabusa continues house hunt
May 31, 2011Time for the governor to show if he’s got game
May 24, 2011The next few months will tell whether the Abercrombie administration is going to give us a new day in Hawai‘i or a lot of same old-same old. Even Gov. Neil Abercrombie admits his administration is off to a slow start, telling an O’ahu Democratic Party group that he and the 2011 Legislature didn’t live up [...]
Was the Senate heroic or peevish on unfinished business?
May 12, 2011State senators acted like there was something noble in their decision to rigidly enforce a procedural deadline, resulting in the Legislature adjourning with major business left unfinished. According to news reports, Senate President Shan Tsutsui choked up as he thanked senators for backing a leadership decision to cut off conference committees at exactly the 6 [...]
Abercrombie touts political diversity
May 10, 2011In a speech to O‘ahu Democrats over the weekend, Gov. Neil Abercrombie raised the intriguing possibility of supporting a return to multimember legislative districts. Hawai‘i had many multimember House and Senate districts until 1982, when a Republican reapportionment lawsuit forced a change to all single-member districts. It was one of the biggest bonehead moves in [...]
Rep. Belatti on legislative pay raises
May 9, 2011Rep. Della Au Belatti, a leading critic of HB 575 extending a 5 percent pay cut on legislators, administrators and judges, posted a comment Saturday after most people had stopped following the comment thread on our Friday post, “Legislators extend their pay cuts — for now.” Belatti was mentioned in some of the comments in that [...]
Legislators extend their pay cuts — for now
May 6, 2011Well, true to the word of some of our friends who post here, the Legislature extended the 5 percent pay cut on lawmakers, administrators and judges for two more years when the House accepted Senate amendments to HB 575. I’m glad they did the right thing — for now anyway. The issue may not be [...]
Pay raises for legislators not dead yet
May 3, 2011Legislators are going into the final days of their session with the possibility still alive of giving themselves big pay raises as unionized public workers take 5 percent cuts and constituents are asked to sacrifice more of their income to higher taxes. Both houses voted to extend for two more years a 5 percent pay [...]
Legislative salaries redux
April 28, 2011House and Senate conferees will continue talks at 8 p.m. today on HB 575 to extend a 5 percent cut on legislative salaries from the current June 30 expiration date until Dec. 31, 2013. Meantime, our longtime contributor Charles added a comment to my Monday post on the subject criticizing me for not mentioning arguments [...]
Time for Legislature to undo its mistake on UH regents
April 27, 2011I hate to say I told you so, but the political chickens of Democratic legislators are coming home to roost on their ill-advised decision to force the governor to appoint University of Hawai’i regents from a list provided by a selection panel. Gov. Neil Abercrombie yesterday withdrew two of his five regent appointments after they [...]
Will legislators share in the pay sacrifices?
April 25, 2011Most unionized state workers are looking at 5 percent pay cuts over the next two years, but it remains to be seen if their leaders in the Legislature will impose the same cuts on themselves. After being widely criticized in 2009 for taking 36 percent raises for themselves while demanding sacrifices from everybody else in [...]
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