Will help during the COVID-19 housing crisis be one of the social services that falls off the slippery slope this legislative year, Eva Andrade writes about the Hawaii state legislature’s current session. Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash
LEGISLATIVE REPORT
The nation is dreadfully divided and families are struggling to get back to a more normal life. While local leadership begins cautiously to reopen the economy, the discussion continues on how best to help Hawaii’s residents. Therein lies the crux of where Hawaii’s legislators are focusing their attention and action this legislative session
The big question is how to continue to fund all the great social service organizations that have been the glue holding together the economy during the past year. In my opinion, whenever conversations turn to money, legislators do a couple of interesting things: they look at taxes and then they look at “potential” (new) taxes.
Many of the bills making their way through the process this session fall into the first category. Catholic Charities Hawaii, HOPE Services Hawaii and other organizations are vying for limited funding packages to battle the housing crisis, homelessness, COVID-19 relief, low wages and job insecurity. While the debate continues on which groups get what funding, one statement I have heard continuously during the past two months is “Don’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor.”
Catholic Charities has been tracking many bills this session, some of which could have a serious impact by taking away funding from programs that depend on it. For instance, the agency operates two programs that may be seriously impacted if funds are transferred out of the Department of Health’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division special fund. Cuts to this special fund would result in fewer critical services to high-risk youth.
Catholic Charities strongly supports a bill to make an emergency appropriation from general revenues for FY 2020-2021 for the general assistance program (HMS204) in the Department of Human Services to cover the emergency funding shortfall caused by the pandemic.
They also firmly back HB 1132 HD1, which would authorize the issuance of general obligation bonds for the construction of an affordable senior housing project on School Street. Other bills they support address income discrimination in rental assistance programs and human trafficking.
The second part, about “potential” revenue, is a bit more tricky. Financial windfalls were on the mind of legislators when they began discussion on problematic bills that would legalize gambling and recreational marijuana. No one denied the potential revenue of these community-destroying bills, but there wasn’t much acknowledgment that they would, most assuredly, “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” since the poor and marginalized are the groups most affected by these kinds of laws. Thankfully, the gambling bills fizzled out pretty quickly. However, as of this writing, the state Senate is poised to pass recreational marijuana and send it over to the House for further discussion.
Another troubling priority is the effort to expand the services allowed by advanced practice registered nurses to include aid-in-dying (assisted suicide) and abortion. While most legislators are open to permitting the nurses to perform these additional “practices,” hardly any asked why so many doctors and pharmacists refuse to do them. It seems logical to find out why professionals already trained to do these services decline. If the majority of nurses also refuse (as we expect), will legislators turn to other professional categories? Therein lies the slippery slope we warned about these past several years.
As we are only halfway through the legislative session, our work for justice for the poor and the vulnerable continues. We commend the hard work of our legislators and others in the community who have labored to keep our community afloat during this pandemic. As people of faith, the members of the Hawaii Catholic Conference will continue, without compromise, to be a voice of reason on issues of both social and moral importance.
Eva Andrade is the executive director of the Hawaii Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the Diocese of Honolulu.
