Oʻahu North Shore Sen. Brenton Awa said he will be the new Senate minority leader next legislative session.
This comes just hours after he narrowly won reelection in the general election, beating Democratic challenger Ben Shafer by a few hundred votes — as of Wednesday afternoon.
For the last two years, the Republicans in the Senate – Awa and Leeward Oʻahu Sen. Kurt Fevella – have not been able to determine a leader.
However, westside Republican Samantha DeCorte secured her district in the general election on Tuesday, defeating Democratic House Rep. Cedric Gates.
Awa will be the minority leader and DeCorte will be the minority floor leader. They are determining another leadership position for Fevella.
Awa explained that with three Republican senators, they were able to determine leadership for the legislative session that starts in January.
“We came together to establish minority leadership. So we’re well beyond the election already, we’re working on our caucus,” he said.
“We're establishing our caucus so quickly because we want to establish our minority research office. There are positions in there for example, an attorney, a director, and one position for communications.”
According to Awa, one of the first hires is Mark Talaeai, the owner of the popular Instagram account @MeanHawaii, which has almost 400,000 followers.
“What we want to do is expose a lot of what happens inside the Legislature,” Awa said. “So we bring him in and we expect that at minimum, a lot of these bills that go unheard of but really affect people once they're into law, we'll be able to give people more of a heads up so they can be involved in the process.”
Awa explained that because there was no minority leadership established, the funds for the office positions were allocated but not used.
He and the other Republican senators are working on putting forth two bills next session to prevent foreigners from other countries from buying agricultural land and property near military installations.
