Honorable Robert Bunda

President of the Senate

Twenty-Second State Legislature

Regular Session of 2004

State of Hawaii

Sir:

Your Committees on Health and Human Services, to which was referred S.B. No. 2618 entitled:

beg leave to report as follows:

The purpose of this measure is to require that funds appropriated from the tobacco settlement special fund and earmarked for the Healthy Hawaii Initiative be used solely for that purpose and not supplant general fund moneys.

Testimony in support of this measure was received from the Department of Health, American Heart Association, and Coalition for a Tobacco Free Hawaii.

Your Committees find that the supplanting of general funds originally appropriated to the Healthy Start program with tobacco settlement funds in the current fiscal biennium had a severe impact on the Healthy Hawaii Initiative, resulting in a forty-three per cent cut to the funds available to the Healthy Hawaii Initiative. Your Committees further find that this Initiative is a nationally recognized prevention strategy that works, and the current loss of funding has curtailed the Department of Health's efforts.

Your Committees have amended this measure to restore full funding for the Healthy Hawaii Initiative beginning on July 1, 2005, as well as end the supplanting of general funds with tobacco settlement moneys for the Healthy Start program beginning July 1, 2005.

As affirmed by the records of votes of the members of your Committees on Health and Human Services that are attached to this report, your Committees are in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 2618, as amended herein, and recommend that it pass Second Reading in the form attached hereto as S.B. No. 2618, S.D. 1, and be referred to the Committee on Ways and Means.