State lawmakers are pushing for stricter penalties on speeding, which has contributed to nearly half of all highway deaths and accounted for 236 fatalities over the past five years, according to the state Department of Transportation.

In 2023 alone, speeding played a role in about 60% of fatal traffic crashes.

During a town hall meeting Tuesday at Prince David Kawananakoa Middle School, residents of District 27 — Pacific Heights, Nuuanu and Liliha — voiced concerns about speeding on Pali Highway and in residential areas.

State Rep. Jenna Takenouchi, who represents the district, invited the Honolulu Police Department to weigh in. HPD officials noted that while the department frequently receives complaints about speeding in the area, about 95% of drivers caught speeding are residents of the neighborhood.

Honolulu police officials said residents who want stricter enforcement of speeding laws must be prepared for the consequences. They noted that while many call for more action, some later complain when they receive citations themselves. Officers emphasized that speeding is speeding, no matter how little a driver exceeds the limit.

Takenouchi expressed strong support for legislation this year aimed at imposing stricter penalties for speeding, which threatens public safety and contributes to excessive noise for residents.

House Bill 54, along with its companion Senate Bill 97, seeks to increase penalties for excessive speeding, elevating the charge to a Class C felony for a third or subsequent offense. The bills also give the court authority to order the forfeiture of the vehicle involved in the offense as part of the sentencing.

SB 97 was introduced by state Sen. Brandon Elefante (D, Aiea-Pacific Palisades-­Pearl City), who also chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee.

Elefante said he “constantly receives calls on excessive speeding” and has urged law enforcement to take action by citing and arresting those who violate speed limits.

He said that while law enforcement has been active in addressing the issue, speeding in his district persists, particularly from Friday to Sunday, between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.

The bill proposes that drivers exceeding the speed limit by 30 mph or more, or driving over 80 mph regardless of the limit, would face fines, license suspension, driver retraining and surcharges.

For a first offense, penalties include a fine between $500 and $1,000, a 30-day license suspension and either community service or up to five days of imprisonment. Subsequent offenses within five years would result in higher fines, longer suspensions and more community service or imprisonment.

Three-time offenders within five years could face a Class C felony, license revocation and vehicle forfeiture.

Under current law, excessive speeding is classified as a misdemeanor if a driver exceeds the speed limit by 30 mph or more, often considered a petty misdemeanor. Most speeding violations, however, are treated as civil infractions and do not carry misdemeanor charges.

“This is constant. This goes on almost every weekend,” Elefante said. “We have constituents who call 911, we have HPD that goes out and conducts their investigation and enforcement. It’s speeding, it’s noise but it’s also a danger to the community and those who need to use our roadways to get to their destination safely.”

Elefante shared that over the last weekend in January, HPD informed his office of two arrests for racing on the freeways of Pearl City and Aiea.

Furthermore, between Jan. 14 and 17, additional enforcement actions led to more arrests and citations related to racing and excessive speeding.

“There were four arrests, two for excessive speaking and reckless driving without a license,” he said. “Four citations and two reckless driving without a license, excessive speeding.”

HPD reported a slight increase in speeding violations over the past two years, with 25,700 offenses recorded in 2023 and 27,252 in 2024.

As of Jan. 29, HPD has already documented 1,503 violations for the year.

Standard speeding continues to be the most common offense, with 21,172 citations issued in 2023, rising slightly to 21,251 in 2024.

Excessive speeding saw a significant increase, with more than 5,000 citations given out in 2024, while reckless-driving violations rose to 602.

Racing offenses decreased to 247 in 2024 from 341 in 2023. The year-to-date statistics as of Jan. 29 showed that HPD issued over 180 citations for reckless driving and eight for racing, excessive-speeding citations are close to 200 and standard speeding violations already surpassed 1,000.

The city Department of Transportation Services receives about 2,000 complaints annually from across Oahu, with roughly half related to speeding concerns, officials said.

As a first step, the city asks HPD to increase speed enforcement in problem areas. If that does not resolve the issue, speed trailers — portable radar devices that display drivers’ speeds — are temporarily deployed as a short-term deterrent, though they can remain in place for only a few weeks.

For persistent speeding problems, midterm solutions are implemented, including road striping to create additional shoulder or parking lanes, which visually narrow the roadway to encourage slower driving. Additional signage and solar-powered flashing pedestrian beacons near schools also may be installed to improve safety.

Long-term measures require funding and construction, such as installing speed humps, median and curb modifications and roundabouts, which are larger infrastructure projects that often involve contractors and take more time to complete.

State Transportation Director Ed Sniffen said the state has installed 258 speed humps, which he credits with reducing overall crashes by one-third and major crashes by two-thirds.

Since 2019, Sniffen said, a location that previously saw 25 fatalities now has only one following the installation of a speed hump.

Sniffen said about 100 people die on Hawaii’s freeways annually, with speeding as a leading factor and excessive speeding accounting for 30% of those fatalities.

Both city and state officials are exploring ways to address the speeding problem in Hawaii. However, they urge residents and community members to take action by adhering to posted speed limit signs, as outlined in each county’s ordinance.

It was a typical scene at the Capitol: two Kauaʻi legislators getting together to discuss common interests and how they could support each other and the folks back home.

The sort of thing that happens at the start of every session.

But this was also a high-level meeting between longtime Senate President Ron Kouchi and brand-new House Speaker Nadine Nakamura, and the latter had a special request.

“She innocently in her folder slid over a bill,” Kouchi recollected with a smile the next day.

It was a proposal that could significantly change how the Legislature operates, and Nakamura wanted Kouchi to join the cause by introducing the same measure in the Senate.

“I don’t know if you’d sign it,” Kouchi recalled her asking, “but I said, ‘For you Speaker, I’d be happy to sign it on our side and we’ll see what happens.’”

And just like that, the often-proposed but seldom seriously considered concept of converting the Legislature to a year-round enterprise took on new life.

“I’m glad you signed that bill,” Nakamura said to Kouchi as the top two legislative leaders headlined Civil Beat’s Civil Cafe at the Capitol on Jan. 22.

Then she made her pitch.

“All of the county councils in the state are year-round,” Nakamura said. “They have a fraction of the state’s budget and they meet year-round because the work of the counties — and here at the state — is year-round. Emergencies happen year-round.”

“We currently have a 60-day session from the middle of January to the first week of May and we have these self-imposed deadlines that require us to not hear a lot of bills,” she said. “It requires us to write very complex bills in a very short period of time. We do not get the time to really work it as we would on the council side.”

She noted that she and Kouchi are both former Kaua‘i County Council members.

“I really appreciate that process and I think we should move toward that.”

Why It Could Actually Happen

Nakamura’s House Bill 1425 calls for the creation of a task force to study the logistics and ramifications of a 12-month Legislature.

Don’t roll your eyes.

This would not likely be one of those longstanding committees that eventually issues a report to be put up on a shelf and forgotten. In addition to the speaker’s sincere interest in the issue, the panel would be required to submit its findings to the Legislature at least 20 days before the start of the 2026 session.

More importantly, something occurred just five days after the Civil Cafe that likely removes a big obstacle to a year-round session: State Salary Commission members revealed they were considering bumping up legislators’ pay by 40%.

If that happened, there would be no further debate about whether the job is full-time. And If legislators are full-time, why should the session be so short?

“It would be good to pay legislators more so we don’t have to have that second job,” Nakamura said at the Civil Cafe.

Better pay and no outside employment would reduce conflicts of interest and could also lead to a more diverse group of legislative candidates, the speaker said.

“We are excluding caregivers, women especially, who want to come out and do this type of work, from entering state legislative offices,” she said.

Lawmaker salaries aside, there would certainly be other costs associated with the move to a 12-month Legislature, such as additional staff resources and travel.

“I know it is a big change,” Nakamura said. “The study group would really take a look at what are the different issues, what are the costs.”

The current 60 days for floor sessions might still be sufficient — they would simply be spread out over 12 months, she said. Meanwhile, bill-writing and committee hearings could proceed at a less frenzied pace.

Nakamura’s bill gets its first hearing Wednesday at 2 p.m. before the Legislative Management Committee.

In addition to her bill and Kouchi’s companion measure, Senate Bill 1514, there are two other bills this session proposing the conversion to a 12-month Legislature. The companion measures would put the question directly to voters via a proposed constitutional amendment.

One of them, Senate Bill 733, was heard Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was deferred, meaning it probably won’t proceed this session. The other, House Bill 770, does not yet have a committee hearing scheduled.

The Legislature is also waiting on a more modest study of the 12-month option that’s being put together by the Legislative Reference Bureau as the result of a Joint House Resolution approved last session. The LRB was asked to study the pros and cons of a continuous legislative session, what the calendar might look, and the salary needs for full-time legislators and staff.

What’s Really On The Table Here

Legislative leaders conduct much of the people’s business behind closed doors and wield near-dictatorial powers in open committee meetings and especially during the private negotiations that dominate each session’s final days.

They often point to the current tight deadlines (one sponsor of SB 733 has called it “four months of chaos”) to justify secrecy for the sake of expediency.

Each election season, legislative candidates are asked in their Civil Beat Q&As if they would support applying the Sunshine Law to the Legislature to stop most of those secret meetings at the Capitol. Many say they would — if the sessions weren’t so darned short.

Perhaps the time really has come to take more time.

Legislators long ago exempted themselves from the open meeting laws that apply to other government bodies. But a year-round Legislature could not only better oversee the work of 20 state departments and agencies and a $20 billion budget, it could do so in the light of day.

If the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate are open to operating more like the county councils on a 12-month schedule, shouldn’t they be willing to conduct their business out in the open just as the councils are required to do?

Senate Judiciary Chair Karl Rhoads said as much when he amended a year-round Legislature proposal two years ago to apply the Sunshine Law to state lawmakers. At the time, he noted that Hawaii had almost twice the population it had back in 1968 when the current legislative procedures were enshrined in Article III of the State Constitution.

Getting legislators to abide by the Sunshine Law won’t be an easy sell. But if they convert to a 12-month session, they would have plenty of time to do the right thing and allow the public to observe their deliberations, not just their committee hearings.

Some will say the Capitol just wouldn’t be the same without the old-fashioned horse-trading that goes on in private.

Not the same, but perhaps better.

What about the idea that what happens at party caucus meetings stays at party caucus meetings?

Again, it wouldn’t be the same if their constituents were watching, but it might be better.

Longer Sessions Already Possible

Even now, legislative leaders aren’t quite as rushed as they often say they are.

The State Constitution spells out when each session begins —  the third Wednesday in January — but not when it ends. Those 60 days of floor sessions could already be spread out over a lot more of the calendar instead of ending in early May. And committee hearings could continue in the intervals.

If they feel like they have unfinished business — and every session ends with that feeling — legislators can also extend a regular session for an additional 15 days or call themselves into special session for up to 30 days. Either of those options requires the approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate.

Still, a cleaner way to convert to a 12-month session would be through voter approval of a constitutional amendment. That’s because the constitution’s current timing requirements for the governor to sign or veto bills is tied to when the Legislature adjourns its regular session.

This session’s bills for a full-time Legislature, for instance, would give the governor 90 days to sign or veto measures, with no reference to the date of adjournment.

It’s becoming plausible to imagine a future in which better-paid legislators hold no outside employment and are unconstricted by artificial deadlines.

However it unfolds, a longer session holds promise for a more effective Legislature

Change is coming. Newer lawmakers are raising more questions about the top-down nature of things at the Capitol. The recent hour-long discussion on the House floor of its rules of operation was refreshing evidence of the shift, because those rules traditionally are imposed with no dialogue at the start of each session (as they still are in the Senate).

It’s becoming plausible to imagine a near-term future in which better-paid legislators hold no outside employment and are unconstricted by artificial deadlines.

Their only jobs would be addressing the many challenges facing Hawaii, which should be full-time work indeed.

The Hawaiʻi State Senate Committee on Judiciary passed Senate Bill 313 in a hearing Thursday morning, which would implement a wealth asset tax for assets valued over $20 million.

“SB 313 is a significant step towards creating a fairer, more equitable economy,” said Judiciary Committee Chair Karl Rhoads, who introduced the bill. “This legislation pushes for those with the greatest resources to contribute their fair share to the prosperity of our state. By moving this bill forward, we are tackling inequality head-on and working to build an economy that benefits all, especially those who have been left behind for far too long.”

If the bill becomes law, individuals with assets worth more than $20 million would pay a state tax on the value of their assets above that amount. For example, if someone has $25 million in assets, they would pay the tax on the $5 million that exceeds the $20 million threshold. The tax rate would be 1%. The Committee adopted Chair Rhoads’ recommendation to assess the tax every three years.

SB 313 would include assets like real estate, stocks, bonds, cash, art and collectibles, in the calculation. Those subject to the wealth asset tax would report their assets to the Department of Taxation and pay the tax at the same time they file their regular state income taxes. If passed, the bill as amended would be applied to taxes due after Dec. 31, 2029.

Sen. Rhoads has introduced similar legislation in the past – SB 925 in 2023, and SB 2389 in 2022.

Massachusetts has already implemented a similar state wealth tax, with the money collected aimed at funding transportation and education programs, and other states are considering similar legislation.