Deferred Maintenance

by Tom Yamachika, President, Tax Foundation Hawaii

One of the problems that has plagued Hawaii governments at all levels is “deferred maintenance.” Simply put, it means there’s stuff broken and there isn’t presently money to fix it, so it has to stay broken until some future time when the money is available.

We’ve heard about deferred maintenance at the airport, at the University of Hawaii, at schools, and at other state departments.  In 2019, for example, a Grassroot Institute report, citing multiple national reports, stated that state deferred maintenance projects at that time included $240 million for the Aloha Stadium, $125 million for the Ala Wai Canal, $38 million for the state Capitol, $868 million for school facilities, $848 million for university facilities, $535 million for hospitals, $808 million for public housing, and $654 million for roads and bridges.

I’m not sure that there is any consistent or uniform definition of how deferred maintenance is to appear on a budget.  Wikipedia calls it a budget avoidance practice:  “Deferred maintenance is the practice of postponing maintenance activities such as repairs on both real property (i.e. infrastructure) and personal property (i.e. machinery) in order to save costs, meet budget funding levels, or realign available budget monies.”

Our government apparently has been trying to do something about it.  Since the 2017-2019 biennium, the Executive Biennium Budget has included an appendix giving us estimates by department of the deferred maintenance backlog.  The following table is from the appendices in the last four biennium budgets:

Of these entries, the three with the largest amounts shown are the University of Hawaii at $863 million for fiscal biennium 7/2023-6/2025, Hawaii Public Housing Authority (under the Department of Human Services) at $797 million, and the Department of Education (separate from the State Library System, coded as EDN-LIB) at $704 million.  The totals include all means of funding (general fund, special fund, debt, federal dollars, etc.).  The report might not be complete.  The Department of Transportation, for example, only reported totals for its Highways Division.  The Airports and Harbors Divisions either didn’t report or reported zero for all four biennia, and I find it difficult to believe that those divisions had no deferred maintenance at all in the past eight years.

Finally, the three entries with the highest deferred maintenance relative to operating budget (specifically, operating budget for FY 2024 divided by 2023-25 deferred maintenance) are the State Library System with 209.5%, deferred maintenance more than double the operating budget; Department of Accounting and General Services, which runs all state facilities, at 127.7%; and University of Hawaii at 66.8%.

Perhaps lawmakers should start taking a look at these departments if they want to prevent further degradation of state services.