How can the state’s most powerful person have her name tied to one of the biggest recent public uproar for an act she did not plan and did not support? Read the story of Hawaiʻi Governor Linda Lingle and the Furlough Fridays.

In 2009, the State of Hawaiʻi was facing a severe financial crisis due to a recession. It is the responsibility of the executive branch to create the initial state budget, which is then submitted to the legislature and reviewed and amended by the house and the senate. Unlike the federal government, which can operate at a deficit, Hawaiʻi’s government must have a balanced budget.^[1] To deal with this financial shortfall, Governor Linda Lingle ordered three furlough days per month for most state employees. A furlough day is a day on which an employee will not work and not be paid. However, the Governor did not have the legal authority to furlough Department of Education (DOE) employees^[2] – the teachers – so instead she used the power she did have over the DOE and imposed significant budget cuts on it instead.  Unlike all the other states, where education is funded by property taxes from the local government level, Hawaiʻi has a statewide Department of Education that funds and regulates all public schools.^[3]

Governor Lingle cut $270 million from the DOE, which was 14% of the budget, and which was roughly equivalent to three furlough days per month per DOE employee. At that time, Hawaiʻi had no law establishing a minimum number of school days, although as a matter of principle it used 180 days, similar to most states in the nation. However, because there was no law specifying the number of days, furloughing teachers became a key bargaining point between the three parties to the teachers contract: the Governor, the Board of Education, and the teachers union, the Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association (HSTA).

Governor Lingle insisted at the time that her intent was never to cut the number of school instructional days^[4]; she thought that the furlough days would come from the teacher professional development days. However, that was not a requirement of the negotiation and the HSTA indicated that the planning days were crucial to maintaining quality of education, so the result was that the DOE approved “Furlough Fridays,” in which teachers were not paid for 17 days of instruction on Fridays during the school year, which closed the schools on those days, and dropped Hawaiʻi’s requirement of a specific number of days in school to the lowest in the nation, impacting over 170,000 students.^[5]

While some of the students were happy to be off on Fridays^[6], many parents were extremely upset, first, because it gave Hawaiʻi, already near the bottom on some measures of educational quality, the fewest days of classroom education per year of any state, and second, because working parents relied on schools to take care of their children during working hours. With the reduced number of school days, many parents scrambled for child care coverage for their young children. The outcry was immediate, extraordinary, and nationwide.

Much of the criticism was directed at Governor Lingle, including articles in the New York Times: “The teachers’ union, the school board, the Department of Education and Gov. Linda Lingle all share responsibility for the debacle; they all signed off on the new contract last month. Ms. Lingle issued a statement at the time praising it as being ‘in the best interest of teachers, our students and the general public.’”^[7] and the Wall Street Journal^[8] and criticism by the federal Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, stating that Hawaiʻi had taken “a step in the wrong direction. It’s inconceivable to me that this is the best solution for Hawaii.”^[9]

Some 700 parents and children rallied at the state capital to protest the furloughs, a move clearly aimed at the governor, as neither the HSTA nor the Board of Education has offices at the state capitol.^[10]

Some parents and their school-age children staged a sit-in the governor’s offices for 8 days, including 5 overnight stays, until two of the parents were arrested and 8 received citations.^[11]

The first Furlough Friday started in October 2009, when the legislature was not in session. However, a senate committee held a special hearing that fall asking for public opinions on Furlough Fridays, receiving 385 pages of testimony, much of which was extremely negative.^[12] The legislature then did what it could in the 2010 session. The legislature was not one of the three parties to the teachers contract, so they could not impact it directly. However, the legislature adopted a law requiring a minimum of 180 school days, which, if it had been in place earlier, would have thwarted cutting days of classroom instruction under the Furlough Friday plan.^[13]

At the same time the legislative session was going on, the governor and the other two parties met. They were at a stalemate, separated by about $10 million from an agreement that would have canceled Furlough Fridays for the following school year.  The situation was saved when local banks stepped in, stepping up to offer the state a $10 million line of interest-free credit to fill in the gap.^[14] The furloughs were ended after the 2009-10 school year, but remained linked to Lingle’s name.

What can we glean from this story?

The governor is not all powerful. The federal government is allowed to run at a deficit because the federal government is the branch that creates and maintains the country’s money. However, states are not allowed to run a deficit. The governor was required by law to submit a balanced budget to the state legislature for their review and approval. The governor could neither unilaterally create the budget – it is always reviewed, amended, and approved by the legislature – nor unilaterally impose a furlough on the teachers.

Once the contract was agreed upon, the furloughs were set in place until the contract was either reopened or it expired. The governor must follow the law just as the rest of us do.

As we saw in earlier chapters, there are 25 senators and 51 representatives in the state legislature. There are five justices on the Supreme Court. Only the executive branch has one person in charge, and that makes both awarding credit and assigning blame much easier. In this particular situation, there was a threefold agreement between the Board of Education, the HSTA, and the Governor. The average person in Hawaiʻi at the time probably couldn’t tell you the name of the head of the teachers union or the names of all the members of the Board of Education or even the Superintendent of Education. However, everybody knew the name of the governor. Therefore, for better or worse, Governor Lingle was assigned to blame in the public and the media for Furlough Fridays. This continues today, a dozen years later: when googling “Furlough Fridays,” the first result assigned the blame to the “Lingle Administration.”

Keep these questions in mind as you read:

The hands that do the work

Getting money into the hands that do the work: Executive branch funding: A surprising history.

Today, we think of the federal government as the largest and best funded of our three levels of government, but that was not always the case. At the founding of our country, it was the states who had the greatest amount of revenue due to the fees and taxes it imposed on public utilities, such as canals^[16] and toll roads^[17].

In 1837, the first great financial panic hit the states, due to many of them overextending their credit. In the place of states, cities and other local (municipal) government grew in financial importance as investors increasingly purchased municipal bonds that the cities and counties used to underwrite city-centered improvements, such as sewers and public transportation.^[18] “…State government receipts and expenditures were once small compared with those of local governments…. In 1902, local government revenues and expenditures were approximately five times as large as those of state governments.”^[19]

The federal government had a relatively small financial basis until 1940. This is because the federal government once concentrated on only a few tasks, such as operating the post office and the treasury. There was no federal income tax, and the federal government drew most of its money from custom duties and excise taxes. ^[20]

Then in 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, allowing the federal government to charge an income tax to help fund the costs of World War I.^[21] By the 1930s, “the state share of government debt was 86% of total government debt, and federal debt was only 1.5%. Local debt accounted for the remainder – less than 13%.” ^[22] Even after it gained the ability to tax incomes, “[u]ntil 1940, state and local government were responsible for most government spending and collected most government revenues, except during major wars.”^[23]

The federal government increased collecting income tax over time, and the federal government is now the major source of government funding in the United States, collecting taxes from citizens and businesses and redistributing some of it to states, counties, and cities to fund their public works. The chart above shows a pink wedge for each state indicating how much each state pays out per citizen in federal income taxes, and the additional green part of the wedge shows how much they get back from the federal government.

As of the date of this chart, 2019, 40 of the 50 states received more money back from the federal government than they paid in income taxes. Hawaiʻi is almost at the top of this chart, and its data indicates that the average income tax payment per taxpayer was $8690, but the state received all of that and more – $13,960 per taxpayer.

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State government in Hawaiʻi

The Hawaiʻi state executive branch has approximately 48,000 employees in 19 departments and divisions.

Most state executive agencies are managed by the state Department of Human Resource Development (DHRD), which, as noted above, acts as the state’s human resources office for hiring, management, and retention of the state workforce.  They manage over 14,000 state employees across 16 departments:

• Accounting and general services,
• Agriculture,
• The attorney general,
• Budget and finance,
• Business, economic development and tourism,
• Commerce and consumer affairs,
• Defense (for the state that’s the national guard),
• Hawaiian homelands,
• Health,
• Human resources development (the human resources arm of the state),
• Human services,
• Labor and industrial relations,
• Land and natural resources,
• Public safety,
• Taxation, and
• Transportation.

“Dragon drop”

Guess which of these has the highest number of employees?

There are also three large government units that the Governor has only partial control of, because the State Constitution or the statutes have set up a separate board to have direct control. The largest group of employees work within the Department of Education – over 22,000 people – most of whom are teachers, but also including school support personnel, including librarians, counselors, cafeteria workers, custodians, and administrators. The Department of Education, which runs Hawaiʻi’s K-12 schools, is led by the Superintendent of Education who administers the public school system in accordance with law and educational policies adopted by the Board of Education.^[24]

The next largest group are the employees of the University of Hawaiʻi System, which includes the 10 campuses, including Kapi’olani Community College. There are over 8000 employees,  primarily faculty, but also including secretarial and clerical staff, lab managers, facilities maintenance, and administrators. The University of Hawaiʻi has ten campuses which follow policies established by the Board of Regents.^[25]  The last separate group are the 2600 employees of the Hawaiʻi Health Systems Corporation, which provide acute medical care and long-term care for low-income populations, and which are overseen by the Hawaiʻi Health Systems Corporation.^[26]

The websites of all state departments, which lists their functions, their services, and their administrative rules (which will be covered in more detail in the following chapter) can be accessed through the ehawaii.gov website. We will take dive into one state department and one County department at the end of this chapter to show you how specific functions are determined and organized.

County government in Hawaiʻi

So how and when were the counties in Hawaiʻi created? And what duties do they have? The original Kingdom of Hawaiʻi had no county government: everything was under the rule of the Ali’i (Hawaiian chiefs). However, as early as 1840, the King and his chiefs “drew up a list of duties for ‘the officers of the city of Honolulu,'” although no city government was actually created.^[27]  There was also interest in creating these local governments in Lahaina and Hilo.^[28] Instead, all of the duties of government were handled by the governor of Oahu. There were additional discussions in the 1850s to create a city government, at least in Honolulu, to handle issues such as police, fire, health, water, and streets.^[29]  Nothing came of this during the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi or the short-lived Republic of Hawaiʻi.

After Hawaiʻi became a United States territory in 1900, there was no provision in the Organic Act that created the Territory requiring a city government, because the language in the Senate version of the bill said that the First Territorial Legislature “shall” set up local governments, but this requirement was watered down to “may” in the House version, which is the one that passed Congress.

Discussion continued in Hawaiʻi on the need for a local government of some type to handle the more direct services to residents. Not everyone found it necessary: one Hawaiʻi-based newspaper, the Gazette, alleged that creating counties and cities would merely create a larger body of “tax eaters” that would quadruple the tax burden^[30]; however support for local governments came from the neighbor islands, especially from Hilo, where residents felt that their interests were neglected in favor of those of a government centered in Honolulu.^[31]

One of the big discussions going on in  Honolulu is whether the new local government should just be the heart of the city (the Kona district of Oahu, from Maunalua to Moanalua) or should include the whole island. In December 1900, the Republicans organized a committee to prepare a city charter proposal, but that committee was divided over whether this new local government would cover the whole of Oahu or just the district of Kona.^[32] The majority ultimately decided on a whole-island approach. But at the First Territorial Legislature the following year, 1901, there was a “bitter disagreement” between and also within the two political parties, the Republicans and the Independents, about the size of the local government. ^[33]After major consideration and discussion, it was rewritten to form a whole-island government. The Republican version of the bill, which was a Kona district-only bill, died in committee, and the governor killed the Independents’ bill creating a whole-island county.^[34]

Congress sent a subcommittee to Hawaiʻi to review a number of issues in the new territory, including the issue of local government. After multiple hearings on five islands, the committee produced a report for Congress which stated that “the prevailing sentiment of a large majority of the people of Hawaiʻi favors legislation providing for organization of municipal, county, city and town organizations.”^[35]

However, the terms of the Organic Act were unclear and there were questions about whether the governing body for the new counties, the Board of Supervisors, needed to be appointed or could be elected, and also the issue arose of how the municipalities were going to be funded.

The Territorial Legislature again introduced a bill in the 1903 session with a proposal that created five counties, with two on the island of Hawaiʻi, and Governor Dole signed it but indicated that he thought it was possibly unconstitutional.^[36] The act was challenged in court, but meanwhile the elections for the new Board of Supervisors were held. The county did not include a mayor, just a seven member Board of Supervisors, but the newly-elected supervisors had not been in their positions for two weeks before the territorial Supreme Court found that the act was indeed unconstitutional, and the county government was dissolved.^[37]

In 1904, the legislature created a County Act Commission to hold public hearings and draft a better, constitutional county bill, and after much discussion, a bill with five proposed counties was introduced. Again it included five counties, each headed by a board of supervisors but without any mayors, apparently to avoid the expense of paying for their salaries.^[38] This bill was vetoed by the governor, but the veto was overridden by the legislature.^[39]

The duties to be transferred from the territorial government to the county government were unclear. Many of the duties often handled by counties on the mainland, such as education, public health, water supply, sewage disposal, and liquor laws, were retained by the territorial departments, while police and fire departments and roads and garbage disposal were placed under the county.^[40] Some of these duties would eventually be transferred to the county, such as the liquor commission, but this history is the reason that the public schools in Hawaiʻi are under the State, because we had a large-scale government (Kingdom and Territory) before we had any political subdivisions, and the Territory got to select which responsibilities it would pass to the counties and which it would retain. Other US states started with counties (or their equivalent, like Alaska’s boroughs) that divided these duties between levels of government from the start. Hawaiʻi therefore is the only state where public school education is solely in the hands of the state.

The Oahu County and its Board of Supervisors only last for a little over two years. It was thought that a strong executive head was needed and so a new charter was passed establishing the “City and County of Honolulu” headed by a mayor and a board of supervisors.^[41] This is the structure that was maintained until statehood in 1959, when the county charter was amended and the City Council replaced the Board of Supervisors in January 1961.^[42]

At present, the City & County of Honolulu, the largest county government, has over 8500 employees in 26 departments and agencies.^[43]

How many counties?

The 1905 act that established the counties^[44] established five of them: Oahu, Maui (including Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe), Hawaiʻi County, Kauai (including Ni’ihau), and Kalawao, which consists of Kalaupapa, Kalawao, and Waikolu on Molokai.  Kalawao was the community of Hansen’s Disease sufferers (formerly referred to as lepers) who has been exiled to a remote area of Molokai.^[45].  It is worth a look at the wording of the statute, below, to see how narrowly the county was described and who was put in charge of it.

    §326-34  County of Kalawao; governance.  (a)  The county of Kalawao shall consist of that portion of the island of Molokai known as Kalaupapa, Kalawao, and Waikolu, and commonly known or designated as the Kalaupapa Settlement, and shall not be or form a portion of the county of Maui, but is constituted a county by itself.  As a county it shall have only the powers especially conferred and given by sections 326-34 to 326-38 and, except as provided in those sections, none of the provisions of the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes regarding counties shall be deemed to refer to or shall be applicable to the county of Kalawao.

     (b)  The county of Kalawao shall be under the jurisdiction and control of the department of health and be governed by the laws, and rules relating to the department and the care and treatment of persons affected with Hansen’s disease, except as otherwise provided by law.

The only official designated for Kalawao, however, was a sheriff. See HRS §326-35, Sheriff, appointment, removal.  “There shall be no county officer in the county other than a sheriff[.]” Although the sheriff is authorized to appoint additional police officers,^[46] the sheriff’s only duty is to “preserve the public peace and shall arrest and take before the district judge for examination all persons who attempt to commit or who have committed a public offense and prosecute the same to the best of the sheriff’s ability.”^[47] As there were no officials appointed to handle any other functions, so some of those were transferred to the county of Maui, which includes the rest of the island of Molokai,^[48] and some were not provided at all, such as the lack of real property taxing power, as provided in the Constitution.^[49] Even the Hawaiʻi Department of Budget and Finance refers to Kalawao as a “quasi county.”^[50]

How are the county executive branches organized?

The mayor is the name for the head of each of the counties. However, there is no such second in command office called the “vice mayor” or the “lieutenant mayor,” as you might expect from the examples at the federal and state level. Instead, the name for the second in command at Honolulu county, the person who takes over when the mayor is out of the state or indisposed, is the “managing director.”^[51] Unlike the vice president of the United States or the lieutenant governor, the managing director is appointed by the mayor, and is not elected.

But first, let’s answer a road-related question that often comes up in Hawaiʻi:

How can we have Interstate Highways in Hawaiʻi? People often ask this question because they think that an interstate highway must naturally run between two states. However, that is not the only characteristic of an interstate highway. An interstate highway is a highway that it’s important to national defense, system integration, service to industry, and population. A number of “interstates” on the mainland actually do not leave their home state, such as I-45, which only runs through Texas.^[52] An interstate is a road built to standards that allow them to handle high volumes of traffic safely and efficiently at freeway speeds that serve an important public purpose.  In Hawaiʻi, interstate highway H1 connects to Pearl Harbor, H2 connects Wheeler Air Force Base, and H3 connects the Kaneohe Marine Corps Base.^[53]

Now let’s take a deeper dive into two related but distinct departments, the State Department of Transportation and the City & County’s Department of Transportation Services. It is common for many people and Hawaiʻi to think they are the same department, or as soon as they have the same responsibilities if they do know that there are two of them. However, they are quite different, although as noted in the videos, there is some overlap.

First let’s take a look at the state DOT.

Now that you have some background about the DOT, let’s take a look at the functions of the city and county DTS.

The other counties all have their own departments and agencies handling their transportation functions, and they have somewhat different functions. For instance, the Maui Department of Transportation also covers air ambulances, because their county is composed of islands separated by water. The County of Hawaii Mass Transit Agency operates the Hele-On bus while regulating passenger carrying vehicles is done by the Hawaii county Transportation Commission, and Kauai has its Transportation Agency that handles bus and paratransit services.

You should be able to answer all these questions

• Who is the leader and the second in command of the state executive branch?
• Who is the leader and the second in command of the county executive branches?
• How many state executive branch departments are there?
• Approximately how many state executive branch employees are there?
• Which state departments/agencies are not directly controlled by the Governor and why aren’t they?
• What are some key differences between the DOT and the DTS?
• How many counties are there in Hawaii, and which one is different?