Effort To Get Cruise Ships On Board With Green Fee Is Sputtering

By Marcel Honoré for Honolulu Civil Beat

Cory Lum / Honolulu Civil Beat

Some legislators worry the state will lose its case to uphold cruise ship payments and with it millions in environmental funding.

It was intended as a bit of a Band-Aid for the wounded environment, a bill that sought about $10 million a year from cruise passengers for harbor upgrades in case the industry wins its lawsuit to be exempted from the state’s new green fee.

Yet it quietly died last month.

That leaves the state in an all-or-nothing court battle to secure the approximately $26 million in annual cruise ship payments included in the original green fee law.

The fee put Hawaiʻi at the forefront of states seeking to address the islands’ daunting overtourism, natural disaster and environmental woes by adding a relatively small 0.75 percentage point increase on the tax Hawaiʻi visitors pay on their hotel and short-term stays.

In a last-minute compromise, cruise ships were added and for the first time asked to pay the full 14% tax charged by the state and counties combined.

The ships’ share of the state tax would go fully to the green fee, representing nearly a quarter of the more than $100 million the state expects to bring in annually.

Adding cruise ships, however, triggered a lawsuit in federal court just three months after the bill’s signing, and all cruise ship collections were later put on hold. Now, the fate of the cruise ship portion of the fee rests with a panel of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges, who listened to oral arguments on the matter last month in San Francisco.

Click here to read the full article published by Honolulu Civil Beat on May 7.