Now that the 2009 legislature has wrapped up its work, all the bills that were passed are available in a quick list on the capitol web site. Click on any bill and you’ll get a summary page showing how it moved through the process and who voted for and against at each point. There are also links to testimony, committee reports, and the text of each draft. It’s a wealth of information.

With all of the political posturing around the budget and tax increases, including Governor Linda Lingle’s veto event, there has been little explanatory reporting on the budget process.

For example, a story in today’s Honolulu Advertiser quotes Senate President Colleen Hanabusa on the budget conflict:

“Contrary to what the governor says, she has not given us options,” said state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, D-21st (Nanakuli, Makaha), speaking after the Senate session yesterday.

“Her option is to basically tell us ‘trust me,’ and I can fill a $300 million puka in the budget with collective bargaining (concessions) without laying off people. The problem, of course, is that we have an obligation to balance the budget and we can’t balance it on a promise to do something,” said Hanabusa.

This is contrasted to Lingle’s position, which follows immediately in the story.

Standing before hundreds of people massed in the state capitol rotunda Thursday, Lingle vetoed the tax increases, saying they would discourage investment, hurt small-business owners and hamper the visitor industry at a time when it is struggling. She urged residents to contact their lawmakers and ask them not to override her vetoes.

The problem is that it’s presented as a “she said – she said” standoff, as if it’s just a difference of political opinion, whereas the governor and legislature share an “obligation to balance the budget” established by the State Constitution and implemented by statute.

In 1997, the state faced a similar situation, and an opinion issued by the Attorney General concluded that the legislature could not legally adopt a budget relying on future unspecified spending restrictions to be made by the governor.

This is in response to your oral request for our advice whether the proposed executive branch budget that is submitted to the Legislature at the beginning of a legislative session must be balanced, i.e., that the dollar amount of proposed expenditures must be equal to or less than the dollar amount of anticipated revenues. We understand that it has been suggested that the budget could be submitted in an unbalanced condition, with the understanding that spending restrictions would be imposed after enactment so that actual expenditures would not exceed revenues and a balanced budget would result.

Short Answer
Although the express words “balanced budget” are not included in the Constitution or statutes relating to the state budget, the constitutional and statutory provisions do require a balanced budget by requiring a description of the proposed expenditures and the sources of revenues to pay for them. If there is a shortfall in resources to pay for the proposed expenditures, revenue enhancements to cover the deficit must be proposed or reductions in expenditures must be proposed to balance out the anticipated revenues.

You can read the full AG opinion (#97-01) along with the relevant parts of the State Constitution, Article VII, especially Section 8 and 9.

And these provisions have to be read in conjunction with the state’s collective bargaining law (Chapter 89 HRS), which requires the state, as employer, to “negotiate in good faith with respect to wages, hours, the amounts of contributions by the State and respective counties to the Hawaii employer-union health benefits trust fund or a voluntary employees’ beneficiary association trust to the extent allowed in subsection (e), and other terms and conditions of employment that are subject to collective bargaining and that are to be embodied in a written agreement…”

The governor, on the other hand, appeared to be trying to force certain contract concessions through the budget process rather than through good faith bargaining. The legislature was correct on legal as well as political grounds to refuse to go along. It seems to me that the news media failed in its obligation to make the legal framework understandable to the public so that this knowledge could have informed the rest of the political debate.