Gas cap from '02 law nullified
By Bruce Dunford
Associated Press
Gov. Linda Lingle has used powers given her under the 2002 gasoline price cap law to nullify price cap provisions that took effect Thursday until July 13, when the substitute gasoline price cap law passed this year takes effect and repeals the 2002 law, her office announced.
It's a legal technicality born of Lingle's decision last week to let the Legislature's 2004 bill, under which price caps wouldn't take effect until September 2005, to become law without her signature.
The price of regular gasoline in Honolulu would be capped at $2.33 a gallon under the law if it were enforced. The average price for a gallon of regular in Honolulu yesterday was $2.25, according to AAA travel club.
Under the state constitution, bills not signed or vetoed by the governor automatically become law 45 days after the Legislature adjourns its regular session, in this year's case July 13.
Lingle said last week she was letting the bill delaying the establishment of price caps on wholesale gasoline become law without her signature because it gives her more time to kill a plan she strongly opposes.
That's because a first-in-the-nation law passed in 2002 fixing Hawai'i's wholesale and retail gasoline prices to an average of the price at four West Coast points. Because the 2002 law remains unrepealed, the price caps went into effect Thursday.
The bill passed this year changes the price cap benchmark to a national average and delays implementation until September 2005, giving Lingle time to ask next year's Legislature to repeal the whole idea.
Lingle said that based on the experience of soaring gasoline prices nationally and in Hawai'i since the 2002 law passed, it's clear that the price caps would result in higher prices, create shortages "and rekindle the antibusiness reputation we've fought so hard in the last 18 months to overcome."
In a "written determination" released by her office Thursday, Lingle said if the 2002 provisions were allowed to take effect "affected persons would have to endeavor to comply with the maximum pretax gasoline wholesale price cap law, only to see such efforts expended for naught when the new basis for calculating the price caps and the effective day the revised price caps are delayed on July 13, 2004."
She said that the 2004 bill shows that both the House and Senate recognized that the 2002 law was flawed.
"Thus it is in no one's interest to have these flawed price caps be in effect for even a limited period of time," Lingle said, noting that the 2002 law allows the governor "upon written determination" to find that compliance would "cause a major adverse impact on the economy, public order or health, welfare or safety of the people of Hawai'i."
Lingle could have vetoed the 2004 bill and used the "written determination" to nullify the implementation of the 2002 law, but that could have invited an unwanted veto override session.
