State lawmakers are working on how they will spend millions of dollars generated for climate projects by the new Green Fee on hotels and cruise ships.
Two bills that would create more oversight for the selected projects advanced out of their first committees on Thursday.
The Green Fee is expected to bring in about $100 million a year to go toward three general groups of projects: environmental stewardship, climate resilience, and sustainable tourism.
The governor’s Green Fee Advisory Council recently released a list of recommendations on how the funds should be spent.
Rep. Adrian Tam introduced a measure that would require the state to create an online public dashboard tracking how much money has been collected, the projects it's being spent on, and outcomes from the investment.
“From what I hear from the residents as well as the visitor industry, we want to see transparency because we know that by showing transparency, it'll improve residential sentiment towards tourism as well as it'll help our visitors see that their money is going to be well spent to benefit the environment of Hawaiʻi so that their children and their grandkids are able to visit Hawaiʻi in the future as well,” he said.
Rep. Nicole Lowen also introduced a bill that would allocate portions of the Green Fee to special funds dedicated to particular issues like watershed conservation and wildfire prevention.
“Right now it's very discretionary process about how those, sort of get handed out,” she said during her committee hearing. “There's not any dedicated stream of funding that kind of comes out at the top, before the advisory council allocates this and that here and there, and then it goes to, directly to the finance committees, kind of as their secondary budget.”
Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission Coordinator Leah Laramee explained that there are benefits to having a steady stream of funding.
“There are definitely benefits to knowing that funding is coming in long term, because then you can make long-term planning,” she said. “I think also benefits of having the funding in a special fund, or in a fund where, as things shift and change, you're able to reallocate that funding because sometimes contracts fall through or weather might happen that will prevent you from taking those actions. So that just has a lot of failsafes that can really kind of protect the funding so it doesn't just not go towards its intended purpose.”
Both measures passed out of their first committee and will next be heard by the full House on second reading.
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