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Chapter 10 Meeting the Legislature; or, Honoring the Honorables
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
10 The Hawai‘i legislative session is only about four months long, but it still has a huge impact on the work rhythms and loads of executive agencies. For many agencies, it can seem like everything else is put on hold during the mobilization prior to and during the session.This is even more the case if hotbutton issues bring legislators to the agency’s doorstep. During the rest of the year, a sensible answer to the question of what the director should know might be that she or he needs to know enough to make sound leadership decisions,provide support,and communicate with the agency’s various stakeholders. As we saw in the previous section, the response during session, quite different, is that the director must know whatever a legislator thinks she or he should.This points to the complicated relationship between department heads and legislators. Because they belong to different branches of government and are trying to fulfill different kinds of public responsibilities, their relationships can be difficult, even volatile, as is sometimes seen in public hearings. Chandler notes the importance of the director understanding this political dynamic. Much of this section focuses on the interesting issue of where legislators obtain their information.This has special importance because legislators inevitably will be uninformed about many of the myriad issues they have to vote on.Chandler comments on three different information sources—resources within the legislative branch,public hearings,and administrative departments—while mentioning several others. Each has advantages and limitations. For reasons that have little to do with the personalities of the individuals involved, the most complex source is the administrative department. It should be remembered that this description does not include those whose job is to provide specific information to legislators; that is, lobbyists. If Chandler had been director of a department that more directly affected the interests of large businesses, lobbyists would have been more a part of the process. A major difference between public and private organizations is the huge role that the state legislature plays in the life of the public ones.All policies affecting an agency must be passed by the legislature. Every budget item, Meeting the Legislature; or, Honoring the Honorables 52 program change, and employee position number must be approved by the legislature. Every question asked by a legislator should be responded to promptly, no matter how farfetched or difficult to answer. For example, an agency may be asked to predict the number of children who are likely to be abused or neglected next year. If the number provided is underestimated , legislators criticize the agency for not knowing its clientele. If the number is overestimated, the agency is criticized for trying to hoard money that could have been spent elsewhere. In Hawai‘i, legislation is often written with extensive detail, designed to provide very little wiggle room for agencies and to constrain their actions. Some legislators get overly involved in the details and daily workings of agencies. Others function more like board members of a nonprofit agency and remain at the policy level.Which legislator is selected chairperson of the subject committee thus affects an agency immensely. While it is the taxpayers who are ultimately the bosses of all public agencies and the legislators who are the policy directors,the community is often unfamiliar with this relationship. In public administration terms, there is a tug-of-war between efficiency and responsiveness.If an agency needed only to get welfare checks out on time, it could be done quite efficiently. However , the public sector staff must ensure that the recipients are eligible, talk to them, answer questions, answer phones, and be monitored by auditors at the federal, state, and local levels. In addition, staff members must respond to a huge variety of questions from the director, the media, advocates , and legislators. While it is the responsibility of the agency to provide as much information as possible, multiple hearings on different topics—Medicaid, child welfare , food stamps, job training, childcare, blind vendors, et cetera—require a significant amount of preparation time.The director must take along the division administrators to answer very specific policy or procedural questions , but they too are working on many other tasks and priorities. Clients often show up at these hearings with terrible stories that have a big impact and make a big media splash. Oftentimes, after the agency has researched the issue and complete information has been provided, the facts appear quite different. By then, however, legislators have...