The Unseen Stopper Committees

by Tom Yamachika, President, Tax Foundation Hawaii

Although we’re done with this year’s legislative session, there are still a few issues swirling that may shape our future legislature’s consideration of bills.

One of these is the fate of an informal practice in both the House and the Senate.  When conference committees were meeting on bills, it was not uncommon for the House conferees to wring their hands and say, “I’m sorry, but we haven’t yet received release from Finance,” or for the Senate conferees, in like fashion, to say that they haven’t yet gotten release from Ways and Means. 

Civil Beat calls this practice “the money chairs’ macabre tradition of not granting ‘release’ to many dozens of bills in the session’s final hours, thus derailing them.”

Whether this practice will continue remains to be seen.  The House sacked its money chair shortly after the end of session.  But the Senate’s money chair defended the release process:  “It is WAM and FIN’s responsibility to balance the financial plan inclusive of all appropriations,” he wrote. “This is why the fiscal release process to provide approval on funding bills and bills that have fiscal impact is so critical.”

So let’s take a look at the need for the fiscal release process.

According to Civil Beat, about two-thirds of all bills get referred to the money committees.  The fiscal release process applies to some bills that aren’t, including some bills that don’t seem to have any fiscal impact because they are not about money at all.  When Civil Beat was tracking bills having to do with government accountability, transparency, and reform, it found that many of them were referred to or killed by money committees even though there were no appropriations attached and the bills didn’t seem to have anything to do with money.  “Fiscal impact” apparently is not limited to bills with tax provisions or appropriations.

“I think it’s important to understand what fiscal impact means,” Civil Beat quoted House Judiciary Chair David Tarnas as saying. “It’s not just if there’s appropriations in there, but it’s also if it has any fiscal impact, whether it’s impact on personnel workload, maybe not fiscal impact this year, but it could potentially have fiscal impact in the future.”  Using this standard, everything would seem to qualify.  If you want the government to do something or stop doing something, it would have an effect on personnel. If the bill provides that people outside the government are to do something or stop doing something, presumably the government would have to enforce it, also affecting personnel.

The real question is whether we need or want a back-channel (one that the public can’t see) “fiscal release” process outside of the normal committee hearing process.  The process gives the money chairs veto power over pretty much everything even if the money committees never considered or heard the bill in question.

We think that there are already enough back-channel processes in our Legislature already.  The conference committee process is opaque enough with conferee chairs running the supposed negotiations behind closed doors and occasionally leaving out the other conference committee members as well.  Yes, the conference committees meet in public, but only to announce decisions that were already made and record votes on them with few, if any, dissents.  The fiscal release process perpetuates the impression that the conferees, including the chairs, are mere puppets.