House Speaker Scott Saiki leaves a legacy of addressing hard issues

It will be left to history to reflect the role of outgoing House Speaker Scott Saiki in legalizing same-sex marriage, helping to steer the islands through the unprecedented COVID-19 epidemic and his response to political corruption in the Legislature.

Saiki, 60, will leave the House after 30 years on Nov. 5 — the same day as the general election. He has no intention of returning to practicing disability and personal injury law or seeking future political office, such as running for the Honolulu City Council, Saiki told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in his office last week at the state Capitol.

But he’ll wait until January before deciding for certain what comes next.

Saiki does not get the credit he deserves after seven years leading the 51-member House, said Colin Moore, who teaches public policy at the University of Hawaii and serves as associate professor at the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.

“Probably Saiki’s biggest legacy will be his decisiveness,” Moore said. “He made the House a leader in policy discussion to the extent it never happened before. The House took the lead in COVID with his COVID oversight commission and Saiki deserves a tremendous amount of credit for that. History will treat his speakership kindly because of that.”

“Saiki wasn’t afraid to take chances,” Moore said. “He wasn’t afraid to try to solve problems rather than wait for consensus. It doesn’t always make you the most popular guy in the room, though.”

Saiki’s leadership gets little appreciation outside of the Capitol, Moore said.

“I don’t think he was very effective at communicating how he was leading the House to the public,” Moore said. “I don’t think it’s his personality, despite being a politician.”

In the biggest upset of the Aug. 8 Democratic Party primary election, former Board of Education member Kim Coco Iwamoto beat Saiki (D, Ala Moana-Kakaako-Downtown) in her third run to represent House District 25.

She has no opponent in November and won outright, joining an incoming class of freshmen House members in January.

Asked if he’s still processing the loss, Saiki said: “My major concern is I want to make sure that the House is going to be in good shape going forward.”

His longtime ally, House Majority Leader Nadine Nakamura, likely will be elected by House Democrats to replace Saiki, should Nakamura win in November.

As speaker, two factors played a role in keeping attention off of Saiki: His soft-spoken, methodical demeanor; and Saiki’s early years as a Democratic outsider under former House Speakers Joe Souki and Calvin Say — followed by Souki again.

The experience led Saiki to share the media spotlight with both Democrats and Republicans.

“It was on purpose because my thought was that every member of the House is elected and all represent a community,” Saiki said. “I was going to include the Republican caucus because I know what it feels like to be part of the minority. I was a dissident for 12 years in the House. In some ways it’s worse to be a minority in your own party.”

Reasonable wrangling

Saiki was responsible for wrangling even members of his own Democratic caucus who did what they wanted or what they believed, sometimes resulting in blowback on Saiki’s leadership.

In 2021, State Rep. Della Au Belatti (D, Makiki-­Punchbowl), chaired a House Investigative Committee empaneled, ostensibly, to look into state Auditor Les Kondo’s handling of two separate critical audits of management of state lands by two agencies: the Agribusiness Development Corp. and the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

But it became immediately clear that Belatti — a lawyer like Kondo — was going directly after Kondo himself as she repeatedly reminded him that he was testifying under oath and had the right to counsel.

The perception among critics of the hearings was that Belatti was doing Saiki’s bidding, an accusation he denied.

“People know that no one controls Della Bellati, right?” he said.

She remained chair of the Health and Homelessness Committee last session.

Saiki stood by House Finance Chair Kyle Yamashita (D, Pukalani-Makawao-­Ulupalakua) following a disastrous and embarrassing end to the 2023 session, during conference committee hearings designed to work out differences between House and Senate versions of bills.

There was so much confusion — blamed on Yamashita’s inexperience as Finance chair — that bills inexplicably died and legislators publicly complained that, in many instances, they had no idea what they were voting on.

In the final days of the 2023 Legislature, Rep. Amy Perruso (D, Wahiawa-­Whitmore Village-Mokuleia) stood on the House floor and told her colleagues that she was voting against the state budget because of the confusion.

Asked about his relationship with Perruso, Saiki said, “We agree to disagree.”

She remained as majority whip and chair of the House Higher Education and Technology committee this session.

And Saiki kept Yamashita as Finance chair this year.

“You have to give people a chance,” Saiki said. “Being Finance chair is one of the toughest jobs in the House. It’s on-the-job training and he had to learn. The first year was a steep learning curve for him. This past session he improved considerably.”

Moore said Saiki’s handling of fellow House members “makes you an effective leader. That’s how he helped hold his caucus together. The credit was spread evenly. That was important, but that’s also why the public didn’t have a firm idea of who Scott Saiki was. So it was easy for him to be framed as the person responsible for everything people don’t like about the Legislature.”

State Rep. Gene Ward (R, Hawaii Kai-Kalama ­Valley) told the Star-Advertiser that he considers Saiki a friend and appreciates his “deadpan sense of humor.”

But Ward pushed back at the idea that Saiki gave the six House Republicans their due, saying Saiki could be intolerant of their views.

“He struck my whole floor speech on the reason Hawaiians should be able to build in Kakaako, which is his district,” Ward said. “He took my whole floor speech, not a few words, and he struck that from the journal. … So in that kind of thing, he was a bit of a tyrant and undemocratic. Otherwise I consider him a friend, but also a foe.”

Getting to know him

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke met Saiki at the University of Hawaii while she served in the student Senate, along with the late U.S. Rep. Mark Takai, who was friends with Saiki.

Saiki was studying to become a lawyer at UH’s William S. Richardson School of Law when he met Luke.

“He’s a reformist at heart and started a pro bono program requiring (law) students to have pro bono credit,” Luke said. “He did that as a student.”

Asked to describe Saiki, Luke joked and said, “He always had a very strange, quirky personality that was unique about him. No one can deny he has a very dry sense of humor. I keep telling him to give it up because he’s not that funny.”

She followed Saiki into the House four years after he was elected.

Even after she was elected lieutenant governor in 2022, Saiki continued to poke at her.

Before Gov. Josh Green’s State of the State speech at the start of this year’s legislative session, Saiki acknowledged his old friend, whose family emigrated from South Korea when she was a child who spoke no English.

Saiki introduced Luke by calling her Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s supreme leader, before correcting himself to laughter from the packed House chamber.

Now that he’s leaving the Capitol, Saiki laughed and asked, “Who’s going to give her grief now?”

Saiki’s sense of humor belies the seriousness of the job and the challenges that often divide Hawaii.

Long before he became speaker, in 2006 Saiki and Luke called on House leadership to impose ethical standards on the members.

“The House needs to prevent self-dealing, which results in bad legislation and policy decisions,” they wrote in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at the time. “We must set higher standards and learn to enforce them — even against our colleagues.”

They also called for “immediate tax relief” and passage of “an aggressive renewable energy agenda.”

“It is time to put aside the old way of doing things,” Saiki and Luke wrote. “We believe that our generation and those that follow deserve a sharp and aggressive Legislature that will work for the public interest. We hope the House is up to the task.”

This year, the Legislature passed unprecedented tax breaks for all residents.

In the early days of the 2022 legislative session, former Senate Majority Leader J. Kalani English and then-Rep. Ty J.K. Cullen pleaded guilty to felony bribery charges.

Asked if he had any suspicions about their crimes, Saiki shook his head.

“We were totally surprised,” Saiki said. “It was shocking. I remember the day that it broke. We were on the House floor and members started seeing the breaking news while we were in the floor session. I came back to my office and saw a letter from Cullen resigning from the House.”

Saiki then created the Commission to Improve Standards of Conduct that made 28 recommendations intended to clean up state government, most of which are now law.

“He took a lot of criticism but that was the right thing to do,” Luke said. “People needed the Legislature to step up and address hard issues of reform.”

Handling COVID-19

In the summer of 2020 — with Hawaii’s economy idled by COVID-19 and with then-Gov. David Ige asking tourists to stay away — Saiki created the House Select Committee on COVID-19 to track and try to make sense of what was happening.

In late 2020, as the federal government announced it had developed a vaccine against COVID-19, Saiki said he learned that the state Health Department had no plan to get the vaccine into the arms of Hawaii residents.

So he went with officials from The Queen’s Medical Center and Hawaii Pacific Health to look for suitable locations and set up mass vaccination clinics at Pier 2 and the Blaisdell Center. They planned to start with senior citizens.

Within two weeks, 350,000 vaccines had been administered to kupuna.

In 2022, Saiki oversaw the creation of a new entity called the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority to replace the University of Hawaii’s stewardship of Mauna Kea.

The proposal to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea’s summit generated protests from thousands of demonstrators, most of them Native Hawaiians.

Saiki hopes the authority becomes a model to resolve other divisive issues across the state.

“I want to make sure that it succeeds so I’ll try to support it from the outside,” Saiki said. “I think that’s really important. Hawaii needs to learn how to resolve conflict, especially when the conflict involves culture, the environment and the economy, because we see over and over again challenges to different kinds of initiatives. We need to have a model to help resolve conflict and the Mauna Kea authority is going to be that model, not just for Mauna Kea and astronomy, but for other areas in the state.”

But he’s probably proudest of his role in getting same-sex marriage legalized in Hawaii in 2013 after voters in 1998 gave the Legislature the power to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples only.

Perhaps no issue has seen such a huge swing in public opinion in such a short time.

In 1998, 69 percent of Hawaii residents supported a constitutional amendment that marriage should be reserved only for opposite- sex couples. On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of legalized same-sex marriages last year, the concept enjoyed roughly 70 percent support locally and nationally.

This year, Saiki introduced a bill calling for an amendment to the state Constitution to repeal the Legislature’s authority to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Luke agreed with Moore that Saiki does not get credit for taking on difficult, divisive issues with the goal of finding resolution.

Specifically, Luke said, “Mauna Kea was something people didn’t want to touch. It divided the community.”

But Saiki, Luke said, “felt very strongly that if the Legislature did not take it on when the state needed leadership, it would just flounder and continue to divide the community. He brought both sides into a room and each one of those individuals left at the end feeling that they had gained a lot through hooponopono. It was about being heard and understood, having that connection. That was the crux of many of those issues.

“In your lifetime you only get so many chances to show true leadership,” Luke said. “When there was a need for leadership, he stood up and did the right thing.”