If passed, the first-of-its-kind fee would raise millions of dollars annually to protect the state’s natural resources and make it more resilient to climate change.
||| FROM HONOLULU CIVIL BEAT |||
In a major win for conservationists, Hawaiʻi is poised after years of debate to finally approve a so-called “green fee,” which would be paid mostly by visitors to help shield the island state from environmental harm and climate change.
House and Senate members on Friday approved the bill to create that fee during the last day of their pivotal conference hearings, in which the two chambers hash out their differences on bills behind closed doors and try to reach consensus.
A final vote to send the green fee measure to Gov. Josh Green, who strongly supports it, is expected next week.
“It’s a historic piece of legislation,” Green said Friday. “No other state has done something of this magnitude to have an impact fee that goes directly to deal with climate change.”
Under the bill, the transient-accommodations tax that visitors pay on their nightly hotel and short-term rental stays will increase by .75%, plus travelers who dock in Hawaiʻi on cruise ships will start paying that tax as well, to cover the new fee.
Green’s office has estimated the move would raise some $100 million annually. Those dollars would then be used to cover environmental projects across Hawaiʻi, along with efforts to make the state’s infrastructure and homes more resilient to natural disasters and the changing climate.
“When we started this, it was a wild moonshot of an idea. No one ever thought this was possible,” said Jack Kittinger, a leader with the Care for ʻĀina Now Coalition who’s spent the past seven years trying to get the green fee passed. — Jack Kittinger, a leader with the Care for ʻĀina Now Coalition
That stretch of time was marked, Kittinger noted, by a tourism boom, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then the devastating Lahaina wildfire.
“These are all things that have happened over the last seven years that have been tremendous, landscape-level shifts in both the tourism sector but also the climate challenge,” Kittinger said. “Through all that, we built a coalition that made this something that, instead of a nice-to-have, became something about our survival.”
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