The Sierra Club testified on 80 bills and resolutions during the 2019 legislative session and 55 bills during the 2020 session. As the Hawaiʻi State Legislature runs on a biennium system, the 2019 and 2020 Legislator Spotlights are being released together.

The purpose of the Legislator Spotlights is to increase transparency in the legislative process and highlight the actions individual lawmakers took on priority environmental bills in the subject matter areas of sea level rise, clean energy, electric vehicles, stream ecosystem protection, single-use plastics, and land use.

It is inherently challenging to evaluate our legislators and these spotlights reflect only actions taken publicly, such as bills introduced, passed or deferred in committee, and the votes taken. Actions on bills were identified as good, neutral, and bad and placed on a color spectrum to display each legislator's position on various issues. Beneath the spectrum is a summary of specific actions on bills. 

The 2019 session was a normal 60-day session running from January to May. However, the 2020 Legislative Session recessed in March due to COVID-19 and reconvened for a few weeks in May and June. Majority of the environmental bills were not taken up when the legislature reconvened session and normal legislative processes were modified due to the pandemic. Due to the unusual circumstances of the 2020 session, for the 2020 Spotlights we have limited bills to evaluate and therefore omitted overall legislator rankings.

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