Following his third State of the State address on Tuesday, Gov. Josh Green offered new details on his ideas for tackling two of the state’s biggest challenges outside of affordable housing: clamping down on illegal fireworks with citations similar to speeding tickets and felony charges for injuries or death, and finding the money to continue fighting climate change.
The governor kept “the overarching focus on housing and affordability” during a joint session of the House and Senate at the state Capitol, and he has proposed a balanced state budget over the next two legislative sessions.
But variables remain, primarily over unknowns of how Hawaii will be affected by hundreds of executive orders that President Donald Trump signed Monday following his inauguration and threats of Trump administration federal cuts to social service programs that would specifically affect Hawaii residents.
But after his speech, Green offered new details to reporters on how he would like to clamp down on outlaw fireworks following the New Year’s explosion in Aliamanu that killed four people and injured dozens more. And he also discussed increasing the state hotel tax by 1% as one part of a plan to help Hawaii respond to climate change and prevent a repeat of the 2023 Maui wildfires that killed 102 people.
When it comes to fireworks, Green wants law enforcement to issue citations up to $300 that he said would represent “a very direct and simple way” to deter illegal fireworks without requiring a “preponderance of evidence, like jaywalking or speeding.”
Green also hopes to make it a felony for anyone who causes injury or death due to illegal pyrotechnics.
The host of an event that includes illegal fireworks where “it goes wrong, you’re going to jail for sure,” Green said.
In addition, there should be more professional, public pyrotechnics displays to provide revelers an outlet to celebrate safely, he said.
“The problem is there are thousands and thousands of individuals that are shooting off these fireworks,” Green said.
He continues to push his plan to dedicate all of the $66 million in annual interest on the state’s $1.5 billion rainy day fund to address climate change, an annual funding approach he called “the scrape.”
Ensuring a reliable source of revenue would reduce the risk that future legislatures could cut climate change funding in tough, fiscal times, Green said.
Getting legislators to approve “the scrape” likely would require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, he said.
The rest of Hawaii’s climate change needs would get funded by a “small” 1% increase in the state hotel tax, along with Senate President Ron Kouchi’s idea to also have tourists pay new fees at specific state locations, Green said.
Hawaii really needs $500 million annually to respond to climate change, but Green said the combination of ideas would come close to generating $200 million.
The tourism industry has pushed back against charging visitors more fees in the past two legislative sessions.
So Green hopes “the scrape” will make increasing the hotel transient accommodations tax more palatable and less of a burden on tourists.
Green mentioned the risks of climate change repeatedly during his State of the State speech and spoke emotionally about the fireworks disaster in Aliamanu.
Much of Green’s speech Tuesday recapped the first two years of his administration working with legislators, including historic state tax cuts that residents will begin seeing in their paychecks this month.
If all goes well financially over the next seven years, Green said, Hawaii will go from having the second-highest tax burden in the country to the fourth lowest.
“A family of four making the median household income of $88,000 in Hawaii will see its take-home pay increase by more than $3,600 per year by 2031 when the tax reform has been fully implemented,” he said.
He kept returning to Hawaii’s high cost of living, which he called “the highest in the country” and continues to drive away residents.
“Too many people are forced to consider leaving the places they grew up in, and too many families have already left our state in search of a cost of living that’s much lower on the mainland,” he said.
“Two years ago the people of Hawaii told us loud and clear that they want us to find ways to make living in our state more affordable,” Green said.
He called the cost of housing in Hawaii “the highest in the nation.”
“Housing is the single largest expense for Hawaii families,” Green said. “It account for 38% of household spending on average. Even before fires destroyed nearly 4,000 homes on Maui in August of 2023, we faced an estimated shortage of 50,000 housing units statewide.”
Hawaii’s building regulations, he said, “have really driven the cost of condominium development up by 58%, making it the highest in the country.”
The lack of affordable housing has led to a shortage of teachers and health care workers, Green said.
“And more Native Hawaiians now live on the mainland than in our state.”
Green again singled out out-of-state property owners for driving up housing costs while reducing the state’s supply of affordable homes for working families.
“In Hawaii we have too many short-term rentals owned by too many individuals who live on the mainland,” Green said. “There are tens of thousands of housing units across the state — our state — that should not be short-term rentals. They should be homes for our people. Short-term rentals make on average four times what they would if the property were rented long-term to a local family — and 52% of these short-term rentals in Hawaii are owned by non-state residents, with 27% of them owning more than 20 units.”
Out of 89,000 short-term vacation rentals across the state, Green estimated that 75,000 of them are “illegal.”
Green repeated his plans to address homelessness and reduce the cost of treating homeless patients in hospitals by providing them with permanent housing, medical care and social service case management through his expanding tiny-home kauhale communities across the state.
“Many can only get medical care in our hospital emergency rooms, where the cost to care for a homeless person in Hawaii is an average of $82,000 per person per year,” Green said. “So when they are discharged, they go right back on the streets where they get sick or injured again.”
He cited a report by the University of Hawaii’s Center on the Family that found that homeless health care costs fell from an average of $8,000 a month for a homeless person to $1,965 per month six months after they were placed into permanent housing.
“Today,” Green said, “we have built a total of 17 kauhale villages across our state, with a total of 30 villages to be completed by 2026, which will provide over 1,500 housing units for the homeless.”
