After the House Finance Committee approved a measure last week that could lead to higher electric bills to pay for Hawaiian Electric Co.’s wildfire mitigation efforts, Finance Committee Chair Kyle Yamashita reported the committee had received testimony from just seven people opposing it.  

But Rep. Elle Cochran, the lawmaker from Lahaina who cast the lone committee vote against the bill, says Yamashita was wrong.

“Way, way, way, all the way wrong,” Cochran said.

In fact, Cochran says, the committee received testimony from 1,100 individuals opposing the bill, all of them victims of the Aug. 8 wildfires that destroyed much of Lahaina and killed at least 101 people. 

The bill passed the full House Tuesday and if it survives conference committee will allow Hawaiian Electric Co., subject to regulatory approval, to issue special bonds it can use to pay for costs related to wildfire prevention. The bonds would be paid off with fees imposed on customers. 

In identical testimony, some 1,100 opponents blamed HECO for starting the fires and said shareholders, not customers, should bear the costs.

“As a proud Maui resident who is struggling to move past this horrific tragedy, I urge you to reject Senate Bill 2922 and demand that HECO’s shareholders bear the burdens of its corporate gross negligence,” the testimonies said. Each bore the name of an alleged victim and the address of property that had been damaged or destroyed by the fire.

Cochran blames Yamashita for not making the testimony public before the committee voted on April 3.

“I personally think he stifled 1,000 voices in Lahaina,” Cochran said of Yamashita, whose district includes upcountry Maui.

Yamashita did not return calls for comment. 

Does The Legislature Accept Written Testimony?

The flap over the HECO bill testimony speaks to a basic question about the legislative process: In an age when just about everything is done electronically, is the public allowed to submit testimony the old-fashioned way — as hard copy?

Answering that question can be daunting for the public, and even a lawmaker.

During last week’s hearing on the bill, Yamashita told Cochran, “You have to insert it online” for testimony to be made part of the legislative process.

Cochran said she later asked for clarification from House Speaker Scott Saiki and Majority Leader Nadine Nakamura but couldn’t get an immediate answer.

House Rules lead down a rabbit hole where there’s no clear answer. House Rule 11.5(1) says, “The public may attend meetings in person or via broadcast” and that “Meeting notices shall include instructions relating to public participation and public testimony.” 

But the HECO bill hearing notice has no instructions about submitting testimony in hard copy form. Instead, the electronic notice has a link to another web page where people can log in to the Legislature’s website or create a login. That page also says, “For information on submitting written testimony and testifying at the hearing, click here.”

Clicking on that link leads to a seven-page document titled “Legislative Committee Hearings.” There’s no information on that page about submitting hard-copy testimony either, but the document’s last item is a bullet point with instructions.

It says, “For special assistance: If you need an auxiliary aid/service, other accommodation, or are unable to submit testimony via the website due to a disability, please contact the committee directly: https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/legislature/committees.aspx?chamber=all.”

That link leads to the Legislature’s directory of committees, which has a link to the Finance Committee’s page including Yamashita’s office phone and email address and those of Rep. Lisa Kitagawa, the Finance Committee’s vice chair.

The bottom line, says Cathy Lee, public information officer for the House of Representatives, is that the public can submit testimony by hard copy, even though the preferred method is online. Additionally, she said, there could be delays in uploading hard copy testimony to the Legislature’s system.

In the case of the HECO bill, Cochran said it’s her understanding that approximately 500 pieces of hard copy testimony were delivered to the Finance Committee on Thursday, March 28, four days before the Finance Committee hearing. Some 600 additional pieces of testimony were delivered on Monday, April 1, she said. 

Lee, the House spokeswoman, had a different account. She said opponents tried to submit hard-copy testimony before the hearing notice was posted, so staff could not accept it. Then, the day of the hearing, the testimony was sent by email in a Google Drive file.

This missed the Legislature’s standard requirement that testimony be submitted at least 24 hours before the hearing to not be considered late, Lee said. It also was unusual to receive testimony on a Google Drive, which delayed the testimony from being put into the system, Lee said.

Regardless, the Finance Committee’s April 2 hearing — the first of two on the bill — did include some testimony opposing the measure. Lahaina resident Lars Johnson, for example, described the traumatizing experience of watching someone burn to death while trying to escape the fire. 

“It’s not like charcoal. It’s more like wax. You melt,” he said via Zoom. “And I watched him.” 

Johnson said HECO shareholders, not customers, should foot the bill for wildfire mitigation.

But individual proponents who also submitted identical written testimonies supporting the bill far outnumbered opponents like Johnson, as none of the hard-copy written testimony opposing the measure had yet made it into the record.

The opponents’ 1,100 hard-copy testimonies still weren’t in the record when the committee held another hearing and voted the next day. Cochran asked Yamashita where the testimony was, and Yamashita said testimony had to be submitted electronically.

“The way the process works, and it’s always worked this way, is you have to insert it online to get testimony inserted into the process,” he said. “That’s the process we’ve been following for the past several years.”

Two days later, on Friday, April 5 — more than a week after Cochran says the first batch of several hundred pieces of testimony were delivered to the Finance Committee — Yamashita issued the committee report, which is part of the bill’s official legislative history. The report describes overwhelming support for the bill, with testimony from powerful institutions like the Governor’s Office and the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii “and numerous individuals.” 

By contrast, Yamashita noted, opponents consisted of the group Lahaina Strong, the Hawaii Association for Justice “and seven individuals.”

By Monday afternoon, before a Tuesday vote on the bill by the full House, the opponents’ testimony appeared on the bill’s status page, despite Yamashita’s earlier statement that only testimony submitted electronically would be part of the process. 

Lee said uploading the testimony required printing it all out, stamping it “late” by hand and then scanning it into the system, all of which took time. If the testimony had been submitted electronically before the 24-hour deadline, everything would have appeared on the record for the Finance Committee hearing.

“But,” she said, “it’s up now.”