Hawaii's public safety contracts all came due at once. Between October 2024 and February 2025, four bargaining units declared impasse and handed themselves to the arbitration process the labor statute builds for exactly this moment: the police, the firefighters, the ocean safety officers, and one unit almost nobody writes about, the 402 state law enforcement officers of Bargaining Unit 14. Three of those four now have an award. This is about the fourth, and about the fact that two different clocks govern whether these officers ever get paid. One of them has a deadline the law enforces absolutely. The other does not appear to have a deadline at all.
Four Hundred and Two People
Bargaining Unit 14 is the state's law enforcement unit, established by the Hawaii Labor Relations Board in November 2013 and represented by the Hawaii Government Employees Association, AFSCME Local 152. Not SHOPO, which represents the county police. Not HFFA, which represents the firefighters.
It holds two groups who work for two different departments. The deputy sheriffs, who since January 2024 have worked for the state Department of Law Enforcement, staff the courthouses, the airports and the harbors. The conservation officers of DOCARE work for the Department of Land and Natural Resources. By DLNR's own account, roughly 130 of them patrol three million acres of state ocean waters, 3.2 million acres of state land, and 750 miles of coastline, across four island counties, with full state police powers.
The whole unit is 402 employees, all state, none county. That is the Labor Relations Board's own February 2026 count. For scale, the firefighters' unit is 2,046, the police 2,601, the ocean safety officers 467. Unit 14 is the smallest state public safety unit in Hawaii, and it is spread across every island.
Readers of our ocean safety article will recognize the unit number. Hawaii's lifeguards were moved into Unit 14 in 2013 and out to their own Unit 15 in 2020. Unit 14 has been law enforcement only ever since.
They Filed First Thing
Their contract ran July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2025. Here is the thing worth holding onto for the rest of this article: they did not wait for it to expire.
On February 3, 2025, nearly five months before the agreement ran out, HGEA declared impasse on their behalf and the case went onto the Labor Relations Board's docket as 25-I-14-207, HGEA v. Josh Green, et al. Under section 89-11 that filing starts the machinery: twenty days of mediation, and then, if the impasse continues, submission to a three-member arbitration panel whose decision is final and binding.
They were not alone. Hawaii's contract cycle produced fifteen impasse cases in fiscal year 2025, after three consecutive years with none at all. Four of those were the public safety units, and they arrived within fifteen weeks of one another.
| Unit | Case | Impasse filed | Award |
|---|---|---|---|
| BU 12, police | 24-I-12-194 | Oct 17, 2024 | Sept 24, 2025 |
| BU 11, firefighters | 24-I-11-195 | Nov 18, 2024 | Mar 30, 2026 |
| BU 15, ocean safety | 25-I-15-197 | Jan 28, 2025 | Jul 1, 2026 |
| BU 14, state law enforcement | 25-I-14-207 | Feb 3, 2025 | None on the public record |
Case numbers and filing dates from Appendix 5, "Open HRS Chapter 89 Cases," in the Labor Relations Board's fiscal year 2024-2025 annual report. Award dates for the other three units are from our own earlier reporting on each.
Every case in that table was still open when the fiscal year closed on June 30, 2025. Three have since produced an award. As of publication, we can find no award for Unit 14.
The First Clock, and What It Was Supposed to Do
Section 89-11(e)(2) does not leave arbitration open-ended on paper. It sets out a schedule:
The parties each pick a panel member and jointly pick a neutral chair. If they have not agreed on the chair within thirty days from the date of impasse, the Board requests a list of five interest arbitrators and the parties strike names within five days of receiving it. The panel then "shall commence a hearing" within one hundred twenty days of its appointment. It reaches a decision within thirty days after the hearing closes, sends the parties a preliminary draft, and issues the final award within fifteen days of that draft.
Read plainly, that is a process meant to finish inside a year. Unit 14 declared impasse on February 3, 2025. As of publication it has been eighteen months and nine days.
We are going to be careful here, because the obvious conclusion is not the correct one. Unit 14 is not being singled out. The firefighters took sixteen months and twelve days from impasse to award. The ocean safety officers took seventeen months and three days. Whatever is slowing these arbitrations down is slowing all of them down, and no unit in this cohort came close to the schedule the statute describes.
Unit 14 is not an outlier. It is simply the one still waiting. And that turns out to be the only thing that mattered.
The Second Clock, Which Nobody Can Extend
An arbitration award does not put money in anyone's pocket. Section 89-10(b) says all cost items are subject to appropriation, that the Legislature may approve or reject them "as a whole," and that if it rejects them, "all cost items submitted shall be returned to the parties for further bargaining." The statute's annotations record that the Legislature may reject cost items by failure to appropriate.
So the award has to exist while the Legislature is sitting. That is the second clock, and unlike the first one it cannot be stretched, because a legislative session ends on a fixed day.
The administration understood this perfectly and planned for it. In January 2026 the governor sent down a matched pair of empty appropriation bills, one for each unit still at impasse, as part of his package: House Bill 2272 for the firefighters, House Bill 2273 for Unit 14. Both carried zeroes in every funding column. The state's budget director said why, in testimony on March 16, 2026:
"The Department of Budget and Finance supports moving these Administration proposals, or similar bills, as collective bargaining negotiations are currently in progress and vehicle bills may be necessary if an agreement is reached or arbitration award is issued requiring an appropriation prior to the end of the legislative session."
Seth S. Colby, Ph.D., Director, Department of Budget and Finance, on H.B. 2272 and H.B. 2273Vehicle bills. Placeholders, held open, waiting for an award to arrive so a number could be written into them. The committees said the same thing in their own reports, and amended the effective dates to impossible ones, July 1, 3000 and then July 1, 2050, expressly to keep the bills alive for discussion.
Nobody opposed either one. The Department of Budget and Finance supported them. HGEA supported them. Across six committee votes and two floor votes on the Unit 14 bill, including a 25-0 vote on the Senate floor on April 14, the recorded no votes total zero.
Five Weeks
The firefighters' arbitration award issued on March 30, 2026, about five weeks before the session ended. Their vehicle bill went into conference committee and came out with real figures written into it:
Fiscal year 2025-2026: $218,194 in general funds and $832,498 in special funds. Fiscal year 2026-2027: $461,643 in general funds and $1,761,465 in special funds. Plus separate appropriations for the excluded employees on the same compensation plan.
Unit 14's award did not arrive. On April 9, 2026, the Senate Ways and Means Committee reported that for Bargaining Unit 14, "collective bargaining negotiations are currently underway." Their bill went into the same conference committee with the same blank columns, and there was nothing to write in. The last recorded action on House Bill 2273 is April 23, 2026. There is no conference committee report, no final reading, and the field where an act number would appear is empty.
An empty "Act" field could be a page nobody updated. So we pulled the same page for the previous year's Unit 14 appropriation, House Bill 1026 of 2025, which did pass. Its field reads "29," linked to the signed document. Same format, same bill type, same unit. The 2026 blank is not a display quirk.
The next state funding window is the 2027 session.
The ocean safety officers are the instructive counterexample. Their award landed July 1, 2026, ten weeks after the Legislature adjourned, and it did not cost them anything, because they are county employees and their cost items go to county councils by resolution year-round. The session cliff exists only for state units. Unit 14 is entirely state.
What This Looks Like From Outside the Room
None of the above is visible to a resident, or to an officer. Here is what is.
The state publishes a salary schedule for each bargaining unit, and a new one appears when a contract is funded. On the day we published this:
| Bargaining unit | Most recent published salary schedule |
|---|---|
| BU 11, Firefighters | July 1, 2028 |
| BU 03 and BU 04, White collar | July 1, 2028 |
| BU 14, State Law Enforcement Officers | July 1, 2024 |
Our own reading of the state's published salary schedule pages, retrieved August 12, 2026. Illustrative, not the full list of fifteen units.
And the state kept hiring into that frozen scale. On January 3, 2026, DLNR opened recruitment for 53 entry-level conservation officer positions against a division of roughly 130. The posting closed five days later, on January 8, with a cap on applicants. The advertised pay was $4,623 to $6,843 a month, roughly $55,000 to $82,000 a year, on the schedule last updated in July 2024. DOCARE's chief, Jason Redulla, thanked the Legislature in the announcement "for recognizing the importance of this work and for providing both the positions and funding needed to train and equip our officers."
He was right to. The positions were funded. The training was funded. The equipment was funded. What was not funded, because it did not exist in time, was a current rate of pay for the unit those fifty-three recruits were joining.
On the sheriff side, the Department of Law Enforcement's director told the House Finance Committee in January 2026 that his deputies earn roughly $20,000 a year less than county police officers and that his department was carrying a 27 percent vacancy rate. As Honolulu Civil Beat reported his testimony, experienced deputies run $60,000 to $89,000, while Honolulu police officers start at $89,736 and climb to $108,036 by July 2028 under a contract that is already settled and already funded.
"We really are hurting. It's important that I have parity so that I can recruit, so that our courts, our airports and harbors can be well staffed."
Mike Lambert, Director, Hawaii Department of Law Enforcement, January 2026The Gap, Stated Plainly
Nobody in this story refused these officers anything. That is the part worth sitting with.
The union filed on time, five months early. The administration wrote them a bill and called it an emergency. The budget office testified for it. Every legislator who cast a recorded vote voted yes. The arbitration process the statute promises them is running, and has been for a year and a half.
And 402 people are still on a July 2024 pay scale, because the one clock with an enforceable deadline is the funding clock, and the one clock that decides whether they have anything to fund has no enforceable deadline at all. An arbitration that runs sixteen months gets paid. An arbitration that runs eighteen waits another year. Nothing separates those two outcomes except the calendar, and no one has to decide anything for the second one to happen.
That is not a scandal. It is worse in one specific way: a scandal has someone to hold responsible, and a gap like this one just runs, quietly, on people who cannot see it and did not cause it.
Section 89-11 tells an arbitration panel to commence a hearing within one hundred twenty days and to issue its award within forty-five days of the hearing's close. Four public safety arbitrations in this cycle, and not one finished on anything like that schedule. The statute's timetable is either the law or it is decoration, and right now it reads as decoration to the 402 people waiting on it. The Labor Relations Board published the only public trace of case 25-I-14-207 fourteen months after the fiscal year it belonged to, which means an officer wanting to know where their own contract stands cannot find out. Publish the docket status. Hold the schedule, or say plainly why it cannot be held. Officers who filed five months before their contract expired have earned the right to know what is taking so long.
Where this comes from
Primary sources
- The impasse case. Hawaii Labor Relations Board, fiscal year 2024-2025 annual report, published August 2026. Appendix 5, "Open HRS Chapter 89 Cases," is the source for case 25-I-14-207, HGEA v. Josh Green, et al., filed February 3, 2025, and for the three comparison cases and their filing dates: 24-I-12-194 (SHOPO, October 17, 2024), 24-I-11-195 (HFFA, November 18, 2024), and 25-I-15-197 (HGEA, January 28, 2025). All four remained open at the close of fiscal year 2025. The same report is the source for the fifteen impasse cases filed in FY2025, thirteen of which concerned renegotiation of collective bargaining agreements, against none filed in FY2022 through FY2024. We read the case-number convention as fiscal year, case type, bargaining unit, sequence, and confirmed it against four cases whose unit we could identify independently.
- Award dates for the other three units. Bargaining Unit 12, arbitrator Russell Higa, September 24, 2025. Bargaining Unit 11, March 30, 2026. Bargaining Unit 15, panel chaired by Frederic R. Horowitz, Esq., July 1, 2026, with cost items filed with the Honolulu City Council as Resolution 26-166. These are documented in our earlier articles on each unit and are not independently re-verified here.
- The statutes. Hawaii Revised Statutes § 89-11(e), for the mediation and binding arbitration procedure, its thirty-day, one-hundred-twenty-day, thirty-day and fifteen-day steps, and for the fact that bargaining units 11, 12, 14 and 15 are all named together on the same impasse track. Hawaii Revised Statutes § 89-10(b), for cost items being subject to appropriation, the approve-or-reject-as-a-whole rule, the return of all cost items to the parties for further bargaining, and the annotation that the Legislature may reject cost items by failure to appropriate.
- The vehicle bills. H.B. No. 2273 and S.B. No. 3092, Thirty-Third Legislature, 2026, "Making Emergency Appropriations for Public Employment Cost Items," report title "Public Employment Cost Items; BU-14," transmitted as an emergency appropriation under Governor's Message No. 3, February 9, 2026. Source for every vote count, the blank funding columns in the introduced, H.D. 1 and S.D. 1 versions, the effective dates amended to July 1, 3000 and July 1, 2050, and the empty act field. Standing Committee Reports 275-26 (House Labor), 802-26 (House Finance), 3118 (Senate Labor and Technology) and 3667 (Senate Ways and Means) are the source for the committees' stated purpose in amending the effective dates and for the Ways and Means finding of April 9, 2026 that negotiations were "currently underway." Testimony of Seth S. Colby, Ph.D., Director of the Department of Budget and Finance, to the Senate Committee on Labor and Technology, March 16, 2026, is quoted for the vehicle-bill explanation. HGEA's testimony in strong support, submitted by executive director Randy Perreira, is in the same record.
- The firefighters' appropriation. H.B. No. 2272, enacted as Act 26, Session Laws of Hawaii 2026, is the source for the enacted figures. H.B. No. 1026 of 2025, recorded as Act 29, was used as a control on the meaning of an empty act field.
- Unit size. Hawaii Labor Relations Board Informational Bulletin No. 64, February 20, 2026, table of employees by bargaining unit and employing jurisdiction: Unit 14, 402 state employees and none in any county. The comparison figures of 2,046 (Unit 11), 2,601 (Unit 12) and 467 (Unit 15) are from the same table.
- The unit and the expired contract. The Department of Human Resources Development's list of public employee exclusive representatives, which assigns Unit 14 to HGEA and links the July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2025 agreement. HGEA's November 2013 announcement of the Board's establishment of the unit. The movement of ocean safety officers into Unit 14 in 2013 and out to Unit 15 by Act 31, Session Laws of Hawaii 2020, is recorded in the Board's annual report and in the Unit 15 arbitration award cited in our earlier article.
- The salary schedules. The Department of Human Resources Development's published salary schedule pages for BU 14, BU 11 and BU 03/04, read on August 12, 2026. The comparison of most recent posted effective dates is our own.
- DOCARE and the recruitment. DLNR's DOCARE division page, for approximately 130 officers statewide across four counties, three million acres of state ocean waters, 3.2 million acres of state land, 750 miles of coastline, and full state police powers. DLNR news release NR25-142, December 26, 2025, for the 53 vacancies and Chief Jason Redulla's quoted remarks. State of Hawaii recruitment announcement 26-0002, Conservation and Resources Enforcement Officer I, opening January 3, 2026 and closing January 8, 2026, for the advertised range of $4,623.00 to $6,843.00 monthly.
- The pay comparison. Honolulu Civil Beat, January 2026, reporting Department of Law Enforcement director Mike Lambert's testimony to the House Finance Committee, for the roughly $20,000 gap, the 27 percent vacancy rate, the $60,000 to $89,000 deputy range, the $89,736 to $108,036 Honolulu police figures, and the quoted remarks. That is the outlet's reporting of testimony, not figures we verified against a payroll record.
- What we could not establish. We cannot confirm that no arbitration award has issued for Bargaining Unit 14. What we can say is bounded: case 25-I-14-207 was open at the close of fiscal year 2025, the Board has not published a fiscal year 2026 report, no award appears in any public source we searched, and the state has published no Unit 14 salary schedule covering any period after July 1, 2024. If an award exists, we will publish it and correct this article. We also could not establish why this arbitration has run eighteen months, whether a panel was appointed and when, whether any hearing has been held, or what either party has proposed. We did not obtain comment from HGEA, the Department of Law Enforcement, DLNR or the Board, and nothing here should be read as any party's account of the delay. Corrections and documents are welcome through our contact page.