The emergency that never ended, the price of a public record, and accounting that stops at the fund’s edge.

Most of what looks like criminal conspiracy in Hawaiian disaster recovery funding (or, more precisely, lack thereof) is not illegal concealment. It is fiscal federalism working exactly as designed.

Fiscal federalism 

This term is used to define the division of taxing, spending, borrowing, and financial responsibilities among different levels of government—typically federal, state, and local governments. This raises the basic question: Which level of government pays for what, raises which revenues, and bears which risks?

In practice, fiscal federalism includes:

• Revenue authority 
  who can impose income, sales, property, excise, or other taxes.
• Spending responsibility 
  which government pays for roads, schools, healthcare, disaster recovery, housing, policing, and other public services.
• Intergovernmental transfers 
  federal grants, matching funds, reimbursements, and revenue-sharing payments to states and local governments.
• Conditions on funding 
  requirements attached to federal money, such as matching contributions, procurement rules, environmental review, or program eligibility.
• Risk sharing 
  determining whether extraordinary costs—such as hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, or infrastructure failures—are borne locally or shifted partly to the federal government.

A simple example is disaster recovery. A county may own the damaged infrastructure, the state may provide matching funds or administer programs, and FEMA or another federal agency may reimburse a large share of eligible costs. Fiscal federalism describes that financial relationship and the rules governing who ultimately pays.

The term can also be used critically. Federal money may be announced as “$1 billion for Hawaiʻi,” for example, while the actual fiscal structure may involve federal obligations, state appropriations, county matches, loans, reimbursements, and private contractors. Understanding fiscal federalism helps distinguish who authorized the money, who controls it, who actually spends it, and who remains financially responsible when costs exceed the original allocation.

The Ladder

This series defines a five-rung ladder — appropriated → awarded → obligated → spent → built — and demonstrates the habit of officials announcing a figure from the bottom rung as though it belonged to the top. That habit is real and it is corrosive. But it does not require anyone to lie. Congress appropriates, an agency awards, the State obligates, a subrecipient contracts, a contractor builds, and each rung sits in a different legal regime with its own reporting system, its own fiscal calendar, and its own audience.

USASpending answers to appropriations oversight. HUD’s quarterly performance reports answer to program compliance. FEMA’s obligation figures answer to the agency’s management of its own liability. None of them answers to a resident in Lahaina asking whether the water main under her lot has been replaced.

The data is not hidden. It is non-aggregable. No statute requires anyone to produce the summed figure, and nothing in CDBG-DR, Public Assistance, or the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program requires reporting denominated in built things at addresses. The top rung of the ladder has no reporting regime attached to it at all.

That is the serious problem: accountability. It is also not anyone’s fault in a way that produces a name, because every official asked about it can truthfully point to a different agency.

What follows are three things that are not structural. Three specific, identifiable choices, made by identifiable people, that could be unmade next session or next month. These are the places where accusations should land, because they are the places where an answer is owed by someone in particular.

1. The emergency that has now lasted over three years

On August 8, 2023, Governor Josh Green issued the First Proclamation Relating to Wildfires. On August 9, the Second extended the emergency statewide.

On August 24, 2026 — three years and sixteen days later — he signed the Thirty-Second Proclamation Relating to Wildfires, which supersedes all thirty-one before it and runs through October 23, 2026.

Under HRS § 127A-13(a)(3), that proclamation continues to suspend, among other provisions:

• Chapter 103D, the Hawaiʻi Public Procurement Code, “to the extent that compliance results in any additional delays involved in meeting procurement requirements for selecting contractors in a timely manner”;
• Chapter 103F, purchases of health and human services;
• Chapter 104, wages and hours of employees on public works;
• Chapter 91, administrative procedure;
• Chapter 343, environmental impact statements;
• Chapter 269, the public utilities commission, “to the extent necessary to respond to the emergency during the emergency period”;
• § 127A-16(a)(2), suspending the $10,000,000 ceiling on Major Disaster Fund expenditures for a single disaster;
• § 127A-25(c), suspending the requirement that rules adopted under Chapter 127A be published in a newspaper of general circulation.

Each individual renewal is defensible. The cumulative effect is a governing regime that has outlasted that for which it was declared by a factor of roughly thirty.

What does this mean?

Chapter 103D is not primarily a fairness statute. It is a documentation statute.

Competitive sealed bidding generates a solicitation, a bid tabulation, an award notice, and a contract of record — the primary public paper trail linking a dollar to a vendor to a defined scope of work. Remove 103D and the middle rungs of the ladder go dark by operation of law, not by anybody’s decision to withhold. There is nothing to request because nothing was required to be created.

Two features of the Thirty-Second Proclamation deserve attention:

• The Enforcement section provides that no provision “shall be construed as authorizing any private right of action,” and that absent an express order from the Governor or the Director of Emergency Management, no provision imposes “any ministerial duty upon any non-judicial public officer.” The document creates authority without creating any corresponding obligation enforceable by a resident.
• The survival clause: after the emergency period terminates, “any contracts, agreements, procurements, programs, or employment of personnel entered into, started, amended, or continued by reason of the provisions of the proclamation … shall continue in full force and effect to the extent allowed by law.” Whatever was procured under suspended 103D outlives the suspension.

It is also worth noting what the proclamation does not suspend. Chapter 92F — the Uniform Information Practices Act, Hawaiʻi’s public records law — remains fully in force. The Chapter 92 suspensions are narrow and specific to the Sunshine Law: the physical-meeting-location requirement for Maui-based boards, quorum and voting requirements where Maui-based members are absent, the minutes-posting deadline, and the OIP concurrence requirement for limited meetings. The records law was never suspended.

That the instrument has become routine is easier to see elsewhere. As of July 10, 2026, the State Procurement Office lists a Twenty-Eighth Emergency Proclamation suspending Chapter 103D — for the axis deer population on Maui. A deer overpopulation problem has now suspended the procurement code twenty-eight times. Whatever else this is, it is no longer an emergency mechanism.

Governor Green signs each proclamation; Attorney General Anne E. Lopez approves it as to form.

Because HRS § 127A-14(d) appears to cap an emergency period at sixty days, the pattern of supersession every sixty days is a deliberate reset rather than a drift. Someone decides, every sixty days, that the procurement code should remain suspended. That decision has been made at least thirty-one times. It has never, to this author’s knowledge, been accompanied by a public statement of what specifically would fail if 103D were restored for the recovery phase while remaining available for genuine emergencies.

Opacity is free; transparency costs $1,005

Hawaiʻi’s records law is not weak on paper. Using it is another matter.

Under HAR § 2-71-31(a), an agency may charge $2.50 per fifteen minutes for search and $5.00 per fifteen minutes for review and segregation — effectively $10 and $20 per hour. The first $30 is automatically waived.

A requester who can demonstrate both the intent and the actual capacity to widely disseminate the information may receive a $60 public-interest waiver under HAR § 2-71-32 — a determination made by the agency holding the records, not by the Office of Information Practices. Copying and delivery costs are authorized separately under HRS § 92-21 and are not waivable at all.

Set against the volume of a disaster-recovery request, $60 is not a meaningful protection. OIP’s own published figures illustrate the gap: state agencies charged between $70 and $555 to six media requesters, and in fiscal year 2022 the Honolulu Police Department charged Civil Beat’s Nick Grube $1,005 for a single request.

Now the remedy side. A requester denied access may sue in circuit court under HRS § 92F-15. If they prevail, the court may — not shall — award reasonable attorney’s fees under § 92F-15(d). The award is discretionary, and it arrives only after the litigation.

Lay these two side by side:

	Agency	Requester
Cost of delay	$0	Rises with every month
Cost of denial	$0 unless sued and beaten	Filing fee plus counsel
Cost of enforcement	Defended by a deputy attorney general at no charge to the agency	Self-financed
Fee recovery	Not applicable	Discretionary, and only on prevailing

This imbalance does not require bad faith on the part of government. It requires only ordinary institutional self-interest operating over time. An agency that stalls costs essentially nothing. A requester who persists costs real money. Given that structure, systematic non-disclosure is not an aberration.

OIP’s rates were adopted in 1999 and, by the office’s own account in April 2023, remained unchanged at $2.50 and $5.00. In 2017 OIP proposed tripling them, to $7.50 and $15.00 per fifteen minutes, with a new $7.50 charge for supervising in-person record review. The 2023 legislative session saw HB 719, addressing fee caps and public-interest waivers, on which OIP and Civil Beat took opposing public positions.

The Legislature can make a § 92F-15(d) fee award mandatory for a prevailing requester, as several states do. It can raise the public-interest waiver to a figure calibrated to the actual cost of a records-intensive investigation. It can direct OIP to adopt a waiver presumption for records concerning expenditure of disaster-recovery funds. It has done none of these.

This is not fiscal federalism. It is a state statute and a state administrative rule, both amendable in Honolulu.

Accounting stops at the fund’s edge

The $4.037 billion global settlement is the largest single pool of money associated with the Lahaina disaster, and roughly a fifth of it is public money.

Act 301, Session Laws of Hawaiʻi 2025 (HB 1001, CD1), signed July 8, 2025, established the Maui Wildfires Settlement Trust Fund, administered by the Department of the Attorney General, and appropriated $400,000,000 for FY 2025–26 and $407,500,000 for FY 2026–27 — the State’s $807.5 million share. The remaining contributors are Hawaiian Electric (approximately $1.99 billion), Kamehameha Schools (approximately $872.5 million), the County of Maui, Charter Communications/Spectrum, Hawaiian Telcom, and West Maui Land Company.

Act 301 did impose a reporting duty. The codified provision requires the Department of the Attorney General to “submit a report to the legislature no later than thirty days prior to the convening of each regular session that shall include their receipts and disbursements of the Maui wildfires settlement trust fund for the prior fiscal year.” The Department appears to have complied: a Report on the Maui Wildfires Settlement Trust Fund is listed among its Reports to the Legislature for the 2026 Regular Session.

Credit is due. That is a real reporting requirement, it survived conference, and it was met.

It is also the entire accounting regime, and it stops at the fund’s edge.

Consider what happens downstream. Approximately 21,750 claimants have filed more than 94,000 claims sorted into ten categories. A panel of four private claims administrators — Keith Hunter, retired Judge Daniel Buckley, retired Judge Louis Meisinger, and Cathy Yanni — determines every award.

More than $1.1 billion has been held in a Bank of America trust account. The first award determination notices went out on June 17, 2026, each giving the recipient thirty days to accept or contest. Payment is structured as four annual installments.

Maui Circuit Judge Peter Cahill has capped plaintiffs’ attorney fees below the 25 percent requested. Medical insurers assert liens against individual awards; property insurers’ subrogation claims were resolved only after Allstate withdrew its appeal in April 2026.

Now ask what any statute requires the public to be told. Not about the trust fund , about the distribution.

• How much of the $4.037 billion went to each of the ten claim categories?
• What did claims administration cost, and who paid it?
• What was withheld for insurer liens and attorney fees, in aggregate?
• What was the net figure actually received by claimants?

No statute requires that any of this information be produced. Act 301’s duty runs to the trust fund holding the State’s roughly 20 percent, reports receipts and disbursements one fiscal year at a time, and is addressed to the Legislature. The administrators file reports with the Maui Circuit Court — Civil Beat cited one from April 2026 — but a filing in consolidated civil litigation is a court record in a specific case, not a public accounting regime. It has no schedule, no prescribed content, no standard format, and no audience beyond those who know which docket to search.

Map this onto the ladder and the shape is unmistakable:

• Appropriated is documented, in statute, to the dollar.
• Deposited is documented, annually, to the Legislature.
• Allocated, accepted, and paid are not documented publicly at all.

Note also that the settlement’s sibling program runs on emergency power. The Thirty-Second Proclamation suspends HRS § 37-77 (claims for legislative relief) and § 662-11 (compromise) “only to the extent necessary to allow the Attorney General to settle claims presented for payment from the One Ohana Bank Trust Account.”

The One ʻOhana Fund, now the Maui Wildfires Compensation Program, carries roughly $175 million in commitments; the Governor’s office reported in June 2026 that 79 claimants had received more than $111.5 million.

That is a per-claimant average above $1.4 million, which is consistent with a fund restricted to deaths and serious physical injuries — but the ordinary legislative-relief process that would normally scrutinize such settlements is precisely what has been suspended.

The Legislature wrote a reporting requirement into Act 301 and then drew it at the boundary of the State’s own checkbook. It could have conditioned the $807.5 million appropriation on public reporting of aggregate distribution outcomes across the whole settlement — the State was a defendant and a signatory, with the leverage to ask. It did not.

Speaker Nadine Nakamura introduced HB 1001; Senate President Ronald Kouchi introduced the companion SB 1320; both were part of the Governor’s package. The reporting clause’s language survived from the introduced version through CD1 essentially unchanged, which means no one tried to broaden it either.

What is being alleged

Three “interesting” choices:

1. A three-year suspension of the procurement code, renewed thirty-one times, that eliminates the documentary record linking recovery dollars to contractors — and does so silently, by removing the requirement that the record be created at all.
2. A records-law enforcement structure in which agency delay is costless and requester enforcement is self-financed with only a discretionary prospect of recovery, operating atop a fee schedule set in 1999.
3. A disaster settlement of $4.037 billion, roughly a fifth of it public money, whose only statutory public accounting stops at the edge of the State’s own trust fund.

Every one of these was decided by someone whose name is on the document. Every one could be reversed by a proclamation not signed, a rule amended, or a sentence added to an appropriation bill. None of them can be answered by pointing at a different agency, which is precisely why they are the right place to press.

Open questions

These remain unresolved:

1. What has been procured under the suspended Chapter 103D?
   Is there a consolidated public list of wildfire-recovery emergency contracts, values, and vendors? If the 103D notice provisions are themselves suspended, what — if anything — creates the record?
2. What has been done under the Chapter 269 suspension?
   The proclamation suspends the entire public utilities commission chapter “to the extent necessary.” Has any PUC procedural or substantive requirement been waived for Hawaiian Electric under this authority? This bears directly on the Wildfire Mitigation Plan cost-recovery work in Docket No. 2025-0156.
3. What does the Attorney General’s Act 301 report actually disclose,
   and at what granularity? To be obtained and read before any further claim about its adequacy is published.
4. Are the claims administrators’ reports to Judge Cahill accessible
   through the Maui Circuit Court docket, on what schedule, and with what content?
5. Have OIP’s 1999 fee rates been amended since April 2023,
   and what became of HB 719 (2023)?
6. How many § 92F-15 actions have been filed
   concerning wildfire-recovery records, and in how many did the court exercise its discretion to award fees?
7. Verification pending on the sixty-day statutory cap
   in HRS § 127A-14(d) as the driver of the supersession cycle; the sixty-day intervals between the Thirty-First, Thirty-Second, and preceding proclamations are consistent with it, but the statutory text has not been read directly for this post.

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