Honorable Robert Bunda

President of the Senate

Twenty-First State Legislature

Regular Session of 2001

State of Hawaii

Sir:

Your Committees on Transportation, Military Affairs and Government Operations and Tourism and Intergovernmental Affairs, to which was referred S.B. No. 1593 entitled:

beg leave to report as follows:

The purpose of this measure is to exempt counties from the definition of government agency except for the procurement code and health and human services contracts, allows the comptroller to determine a publication on each island to which the public can go as a source for notices from a government agency.

Your Committees heard testimony in support of the measure from the City and County of Hawaii Department of Planning and Permitting and Hawaii Newspaper Agency. Testimony in opposition was heard from the Department of Accounting and General Services, and Common Cause Hawaii.

Your Committees find that the purpose of section 1-28.5, Hawaii Revised Statutes, is to provide a uniform and consistent source for giving public notice to keep the public informed. To exempt the counties from this requirement does not meet the intent of the law, and deprives the public from receiving timely access to government information. This measure in its present form places all government bodies in the situation they were prior to Act 2, Session Laws of Hawaii 1998, because it completely exempts the counties from the public notice requirement and, in effect, negates the efforts of the Legislature to keep the public informed.

Your Committees amended the measure to allow the neighbor island county Directors of Finance to determine their own source of public notice for their respective islands, and to change the definition of "government agency" to include the Judiciary and the Legislature.

As affirmed by the records of votes of the members of your Committees on Transportation, Military Affairs and Government Operations and Tourism and Intergovernmental Affairs that are attached to this report, your Committees are in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 1593, as amended herein, and recommends that it pass Second Reading in the form attached hereto as S.B. No. 1593, S.D. 1, and be placed on the calendar for Third Reading.