The 7 bills I will introduce on my first day in the House

By Tam Hunt · Hunt for House District 4 (Puna); www.Hunt4House.com

Campaigns are full of promises. Most of them are vague on purpose.

So let me do something different. Here are the seven bills I will introduce on my first day in the Hawai’i State House — not themes, not aspirations, but actual legislation, drafted and ready to drop in the hopper the moment the 2027 session opens.

Each one comes out of the issue work my campaign has published over the past six months, and each one answers a problem Puna people tell me about on the regular.

Bill 1: Fund Food Abundance Teams and Strategic Food Reserves on each island

Local food, local power!! This is my campaign slogan and these two issues are at the top of my agenda.

We import 85–90% of our food, and we are one supply-chain disruption away from empty shelves. A Food Abundance Team is a trained, certified local crew that converts an ordinary lot into a “Prep, Set & Forget” food forest — breadfruit, banana, cassava, avocado, papaya, taro — using the system Think B.I.G. Hawai’i and CTAHR have developed for our various climate zones.

An established food forest on a Puna lot can produce as much as 1,200 pounds or more of food a year and displaces $2,000–$3,000 in grocery spending. Forever.

FATs do for food forests what a good solar crew does for rooftop solar: they make it turnkey. My first bill will appropriate $5 million to take the program statewide — funding nursery capacity, crews, and a formal certification pathway being developed with UH’s CTAHR and the Ke O Mau Center. That’s hundreds of local jobs, from keiki learning a trade on planting crews to kūpuna serving as trainers and certifiers, and thousands of little insurance policies against the next shipping disruption. Fund the hands in the dirt, and the food follows.

The same bill will fund Strategic Food Reserves on each island that will be able to feed people in emergencies. The food reserves will be required to buy a growing percentage of food from local farmers. And rotate perishables out to food banks before the food expires. It’s a win/win/win. I wrote this bill last year (SB 3162), and it had many sponsors. It made it through the first committee with flying colors — only to die with no explanation in the second committee. I will bring this bill back for a second try, as a lawmaker this time.

Bill 2: A Good Government Reform Package — including district offices for the districts that need them

The corruption probe working through our state’s political class right now — indictments reaching all the way to the lieutenant governor’s office and the former chair of the Public Utilities Commission — is not a fluke. It’s the predictable product of a system where information is technically public but functionally buried in disconnected PDFs, where lobbying disclosure earned our state a D- grade, and where legislators have repeatedly killed the transparency measures our own Ethics Commission proposed.

My second bill will be a reform package: live-streaming and archiving of all legislative proceedings, an integrated and searchable online platform connecting bills to the lobbyists and money behind them, extended public comment periods so neighbor island residents can actually participate, real ethics enforcement, and constituent service standards for every legislator.

It will also codify the state’s shambolic Taxpayer Bill of Rights into binding law — today it is merely “aspirational,” according to the Dept. of Taxation — with a private right of action, real administrative appeal rights, and an independent taxpayer ombudsman, so ordinary residents finally have enforceable protections when they deal with the state’s tax machinery.

And it will include something most people don’t know we lack: funding for real, staffed district offices. Hawai’i legislators get roughly $9,900 a year under HRS §24–1 for “incidental expenses” — not rent, not staff, nothing close to an actual office. For a district like Puna — the fastest-growing in the state, an hour or more from Hilo and an ocean away from Honolulu — that means there is no door a constituent can walk through when the state loses their paperwork or cuts off their benefits.

Congress funds district offices as a matter of course because representation without local presence is representation in name only. My bill will fund them here, with a formula scaled to district size and geography, so sprawling rural districts like ours can get what they actually need.

Bill 3: Building codes and zoning for how people actually live — “innovation zones,” traditional communal living, and tiny homes

Hawai’i’s housing crisis is, at bottom, a legality crisis: the homes people can afford are all too often illegal to build, or at least not permitted. My third bill will revise state building codes and zoning enablement to change that in three ways. State building and zoning rules need to work closely with the counties, so this is quite a process.

First, innovation zones: designated areas — including Puna’s and Ka’u’s lava zones, where conventional codes were never a good fit anyway — with adapted codes for hempcrete, aircrete, bamboo, and earth construction, plus fast-track permitting. Done right, this turns our “hardest to build” land into a testing ground for green building, with the potential for 1,000–2,000 inherently more affordable homes and hundreds of construction and manufacturing jobs.

Second, communal living: legalize the co-housing, shared-kitchen, and multi-household arrangements that zoning codes written for 1960s suburbia effectively prohibit. Extended families and intentional communities are how people actually survive Hawai’i’s cost of living; the law should stop pretending otherwise.

Third, tiny homes: statewide minimum standards that make small dwellings and tiny home villages legal, safe, and financeable, instead of forcing people into unpermitted structures with no protections at all. Puna has thousands of people living this reality right now. Bringing them inside the law is both the compassionate and the practical answer.

Bill 4: Restore the state solar, small wind, battery storage, and EV tax credits

This spring, the Legislature did something I still find hard to believe: in the middle of an insane war of choice that has closed down almost 20% of global oil supplies, the state with the highest imported oil dependency, by far, gutted the Renewable Energy Technologies Income Tax Credit, the 35% credit that did much to build Hawai’i’s rooftop solar industry.

The bill added a certification process the solar industry called “so unworkable it would effectively freeze the solar market upon enactment.”

All this right after Washington killed the federal residential solar credit. It’s a massive one-two punch, and permit activity is already down nearly 30% year over year — in the state with the highest electricity rates in America, during the worst energy price shock in memory.

My bill will restore and stabilize the state credits: the full renewable energy credit for rooftop solar and small wind, an enhanced credit for battery storage (the technology that makes rooftop power work for the grid, not against it), and restored EV incentives so working families in commute-heavy districts like ours can escape punishing gas prices.

Every rooftop system is permanent rate relief that no war on the other side of the world can take away. Cutting these credits in 2026 was legislative malpractice. I’ll move to reverse it on day one.

Bill 5: Make state transportation funding follow civil rights law — fund by population

In September 2000, the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Civil Rights investigated a complaint filed by Puna residents and concluded, without hedging, that “the evidence supports the allegations raised in the complaint of discrimination.” The Hawai’i Department of Transportation was out of compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — it had planned around Puna, ignored our population, and modeled zero transportation alternatives for us. Corrective action was ordered within 90 days.

It never meaningfully came. By 2016, the receipts showed Puna — about 26% of the county’s people — had received about 5% of the county’s capital spending over sixteen years. We still have two roads out, almost no sidewalks or bike lanes, and Highway 130 carrying some 25,000 vehicles a day on what is functionally a two-lane road.

My bill will make the fix structural: it will require HDOT to allocate transportation and road funding in proportion to population and need, consistent with Title VI; require annual public reporting of spending by island and district against population, so a 5%-for-26% disparity can never again hide in the budget for sixteen years; and codify the enforceable commitments of the Navahine climate settlement — complete pedestrian, bike, and transit networks — with the districts that start from zero going first.

Puna has waited fifty years for the law that was already on the books to be honored. I intend to put it in the state budget process where it can’t be ignored.

Bill 6: Create an Office of AI Safety and Regulation

In 2024, the Legislature considered another bill that I wrote, the Hawai’i Artificial Intelligence Safety and Regulation Act (SB 2572 / HB 2176), which would have created an Office of AI Safety and Regulation within DCCA and required that high-stakes AI products demonstrate their safety before deployment in our state. It died in committee. What passed instead in 2026 — SB 3001, a disclosure and chatbot-safety law — is a welcome floor, but is nowhere near enough.

The AI tsunami is arriving faster than any technology in living memory, and Hawai’i should not be a testing ground for unregulated systems. When a company wants to deploy AI on our residents in hiring, lending, housing, health, or education, the burden should be on the company to show it’s safe and fair — the same precautionary principle we apply to drugs and aircraft. My bill will revive the 2024 framework: a small, expert office at DCCA with risk-based review, rulemaking and enforcement authority, funded by a scaled fee on the large deployers who profit most — not on small businesses or individual users. I’ve spent years litigating AI accountability in state and federal court; this bill will move that fight to where it ultimately belongs, the statute books.

Bill 7: Rebuild the PUC — and cut the oil link from our electric bills, permanently

Hawai’i has by far the most expensive electricity in the nation, and 2026 made it dramatically worse: the oil shock sent Big Island fuel surcharges up more than six cents per kilowatt-hour — roughly $31 a month for a typical household — while the agency that’s supposed to protect us lost about 30% of its staff and saw its former chair indicted in the corruption probe.

Here’s the perversity most people have never been told: much of our “renewable” power is still priced off oil. Puna’s own geothermal plant (PGV), which burns no oil at all, has been billing us at war prices — at an astronomical 32–35 cents per kilowatt-hour for wholesale prices during this oil price spike — because of an oil-linked contract structure that regulators approved decades ago and have been too slow to unwind.

My bill will be a two-part package. First, PUC independence and capacity: competitive salaries to end the staffing exodus, merit screening for appointments, a flat ban on commissioners and senior staff serving in any campaign role (it is remarkable this must be said), cooling-off periods, and intervenor funding so communities can afford expert participation in the dockets that set their bills.

Second, de-oiling our bills: a statutory bar on any energy contract indexed to oil, deadlines to replace the remaining oil-linked contracts with fixed-price renewable deals, real fuel-cost risk sharing so the utility has skin in the game, and binding procurement timelines for solar, wind, and storage at the 8–9 cents per kilowatt-hour they actually cost. Strong regulation is the only thing standing between a monopoly utility and a captive customer base. I’ve spent twenty years practicing before utility commissions; I know exactly where these bodies are buried.

Why day one matters

Any one of these bills would be a fight worth having. Together, they’re a coherent answer to the question I hear most: “What would you actually do?” Local food and local jobs through FATs and innovation zones. A government transparent enough to trust and present enough to reach. Lower electric bills through clean local power and a revived regulator (the PUC). Protection from AI technologies being deployed on us without our consent. And a transportation budget that finally obeys the civil rights law it’s been violating since before some of my constituents were born.

Local food, local power — and legislation ready on day one. If you think I’ve got the list right, or if you think I’m missing something, tell me.

[Claude helped to write this]