The Hawaiʻi Legislature opens for business on Jan. 21. Between now and the opening session, HPR will be hearing a lot about plans and priorities. From federal funding cuts to climate change, a lot of those priorities focus on Hawaiʻi's environment.
Top of the list: the “Green Fee,” a new revenue source, as of Jan. 1, funded by a 0.75 percentage point increase in the transient accommodations tax. It's expected to raise about $100 million a year.
What's the most effective way to spend that money? That’s a question that faced the state’s Green Fee Advisory Council — a 10-member group making recommendations on where and how to spend this revenue.
The council is chaired by Jeff Mikulina, a longtime environmental activist and policy specialist who’s also executive director of Climate Hawaiʻi. He sat down with The Conversation to discuss those recommendations, how the money will be spent, and a bit about the people who have been looking at the options.
Interview highlights
On how the council determined recommendations
JEFF MIKULINA: We've actually completed our work in terms of the evaluation, looking at 600-plus projects and coming up with our initial sort of recommendation, our portfolio for year one, and that's currently before the governor. We should be making that public within a couple of weeks. But really, evaluating it across a range of dimensions in a rubric, we were looking at results, readiness, relevance, relationships, and region for the projects. And then across three buckets. There was an environmental stewardship bucket, things we think of, habitat, coral reef, climate resilience, and hazard mitigation. So how do we become stronger than storms and sea level rise, and all the threats that we face? And then the third bucket is sort of a sustainable tourism, regenerative tourism. How do we improve the visitor experience and reduce the impact that visitors have on our natural resources?
On climate resilience projects
MIKULINA: It just shows how great the need is, how big the gap is currently for climate resilience, and then also a lot of just deferred maintenance on our natural capital in Hawaiʻi. So there is a pent-up demand, and looking at threads, certainly, climate risk is very high, particularly post-Lahaina tragedy. So fire was quite high. And those ranked very high, too. So it was a real challenge making those trade-offs and seeing what projects were ready to go that would really have a durable, tangible impact. The real magic happened finding projects that sort of transcend these buckets. So if we're reducing flammable grasses and putting in native trees or plants, we're going to be reducing runoff to the reef, possibly providing a visitor experience, increasing habitat. So there's some cross-cutting proposals that were really attractive, but it was striking that balance, what can we really execute in year one that's going to be visible, high impact, and really meet the standards of the law?
On federal funding gaps
MIKULINA: Here in Hawaiʻi, there was a loss of federal funding, of course, across so many sectors. But really looking at this from our vantage of, what are the needs, where are the gaps today? What are the geographic gaps that have historically been underfunded? And then, really, what are those high-risk areas where we need to dedicate some funding? So gaps have been created by loss of federal funds, but we were really looking on a forward basis of what's needed. What are the highest-impact projects that we can execute?
On the cruise ship industry lawsuit
MIKULINA: It's unfortunate that the cruise ships chose to do that, particularly when we know that the burden that all visitors have in Hawaiʻi and the desire to protect what you're coming to experience and explore, protect what you love. So it's unfortunate that they're choosing, or attempting to choose not to be a part of this positive effort, when every dollar we see coming in is really preventative medicine for climate change, but also improving that visitor experience. … So as far as our work goes, we're plowing ahead. We think that the state's going to prevail, and those dollars are going to come in. So our budget is still more projecting, and we're going to really stick with that until we hear from the courts.
This story aired on The Conversation on Jan. 12, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
