Hawaii Sunshine Project

HawaiiSunshine.org is provided by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii as a free service to Hawaii's taxpayers. This powerful tool gives citizens the ability to investigate state (and soon county!) expenditures of taxpayer money.

In 2007, the Hawaii State Legislature passed Act 272 - which became law without the Governor's signature - calling on the Department of Budget and Finance to create a publicly searchable Web site showing all state contracts above $25,000. The site was, by law, supposed to be operational by January 1, 2009. While the state government allocated $250,000 to build the Hawaii site, the monies were not released by the governor's administration, and no site exists to this day.

With the state government still sitting on its hands, the Grassroot Institute decided to step in and build a government transparency site ourselves. The privately funded HawaiiSunshine.org is more comprehensive than the one Act 272 would have created, and cost much less than the $250,000 our state government would have spent!

The goals of HawaiiSunshine.org include the following:

• Recruiting hundreds (or thousands!) of "citizen auditors" to help us hold government officials accountable by investigating the ways they spend our tax dollars
• Creating a forum where citizens can develop innovative ideas for how government can save money
• Allowing citizens to flag (through "Pork Alerts") questionable expenditures, so that government officials are pressured to either justify or curb spending
• Empowering citizens to become more involved and influential in the political process

We continue to update and add new information, so subscribe to the email list and come back regularly!

Grassroot Institute of Hawaii

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii is a non-profit, non-partisan research institute founded in Honolulu in 2001. We aim to create a freer and more prosperous Hawaii by promoting the principles of individual liberty, the free market and limited, more accountable government. Through research papers, policy briefings, commentaries and conferences, the Institute seeks to educate and inform Hawaii's policymakers, news media and the general public.