The Legislature is exempt from the Hawaii’s Sunshine Law and therefore runs by its own rules on when the public has to be notified of upcoming hearings. But blogger Ian Lind writes that lawmakers are already sidestepping their own rules to meet internal deadlines. 

He writes: 

Email alerts from the legislative information system at 6:42 p.m. and 6:47 p.m. Friday alerted the public of bills added to the agendas for Monday morning hearings before the House Agriculture and Housing committees.

The housing committee added HB1117 to its 8:45 a.m. agenda, while the agriculture committee added two bills and deleted two other bills from its 11:30 a.m. agenda.

The problem is that House rules seem to require public notice of Monday or Tuesday agendas before 4:30 p.m. “on the last work day” of the prior week.

Read the full blog post.