Lingle says
budget woes forced
her to veto bills
With an eye to keeping her administration fiscally conservative and pro-business, Republican Gov. Linda Lingle is finding that government can be defined as much by what you veto as what you pass into law.
At a news conference yesterday to explain why she vetoed 50 bills, Lingle said the economy forced her to stop many projects and programs, because the state couldn't afford them.
One bill would have provided emergency air ambulance service for Maui County at a cost of $611,000. Although Maui is her home island, Lingle said, "we simply can't afford it."
In reaction yesterday, House Speaker Calvin Say and Senate President Robert Bunda argued that the budget given to the governor was balanced.
But they acknowledged that new Council of Revenue budget predictions made since the state's money bill was approved cut the amount of funds available to the state.
Lingle insists the current budget is not balanced, because the Legislature didn't include $31 million needed next year for the statewide hospital system.
"Such action would only make sense if one assumed that all state hospitals would be shut down one year from now," Lingle said.
"This assumption is not realistic," Lingle concluded.
The budget, Lingle said, is out of balance by $230 million.
"The state must now make the hard choices to restrict spending and resist tax increases in order to create a healthy business climate that will lead to more and better-paying jobs and a quality standard of living," Lingle said in a veto message that sliced $11 million out of programs for private human services providers.
"When you include no money for the entire state hospital system, you just can't be serious if you continue to appropriate money for a variety of private groups," Lingle said yesterday.
Bunda and Say said they expect to hear from a variety of legislators and lobbyists who will ask them to go back into session to override Lingle's vetoes, but the pair said they were not sure there was a compelling need.
"If it is not a life or death situation, we will have to see," Say said.
Lingle pointed to a bill to require employers to provide employees with time for meal breaks as the sort of issue a Democratic governor would have signed.
"There are people who don't want the meal breaks; they would rather work a half hour and not take a meal break so they can go home and pick up their children after school," Lingle said.
"We think the employee and the employer should work this out themselves instead of the arm of government reaching into their business and telling them what to do," Lingle explained.
Say and Bunda said one of their biggest concerns caused by Lingle's vetoes was the issue of long-term care insurance.
Lingle called the program proposed by the Legislature a plan "to tax the poor to provide inadequate care."
The plan would have required all employed persons in Hawaii to pay $10 a month for a long-term care policy that after 10 years of payments would provide one year of benefits, calculated at $70 per day.
Lingle said she is asking the state departments of Health and Human Services to come up with a new plan.
Say, however, said the state has been working on the long-term care issue for 15 years and without Lingle buying into the concept, it will not become law.
"The governor and the Republicans are basically stonewalling an issue that will be a major problem in the future.
"When the problem occurs, don't say the Democrats didn't care," Say said.
Lingle's 50 vetoes are the second-highest amount ever rejected by a freshman governor in Hawaii.
Former Gov. Ben Cayetano holds the veto record with 83 in his first year. William Quinn, Hawaii's only other GOP governor, had just seven vetoes during his one term in office.