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Green Fee background — Act 96 (SB 1396)

This wiki documents the historical and legislative basis of Hawaiʻi's Green Fee — Act 96, Session Laws of Hawaiʻi 2025 (Senate Bill 1396) — the law whose transparency needs the kuleana-portal proof of concept is designed around. The portal demonstrates how a registry-driven publication architecture could make stewardship funding transparent; this wiki explains why that funding exists and where it came from.

🌐 The live portal

kuleana.ainadesign.org — program overview, project directory, and toolkit documents, published from this repository by GitHub Actions to GitHub Pages. Every page it serves is generated from the versioned award registry (fictional sample cohort). How the hosting and domain work — and how the same site could move to a program-owned domain — is covered in GitHub Pages and Custom Domains.

Pages

Page	What it covers
Act 96 at a Glance	What the law does: rates, effective dates, projected revenue, current legal status
Historical Basis	The decade-long arc from "visitor green fee" concept to enacted law
Legislative Journey of SB 1396	The 2025 session chronology, from introduction to Act 96
Precedents and Context	Destination-stewardship fees in Hawaiʻi and worldwide
GitHub Pages and Custom Domains	How the demo publishes, how kuleana.ainadesign.org points at it, and the migration path to a program-owned domain
Sources	Every source used in this wiki

Claims and boundaries

This wiki is an educational summary prepared by Āina Design Corp as context for an architecture proof of concept. It is not legal or tax advice, and it is not a government publication. No government adoption, endorsement, partnership, or deployment of the kuleana-portal project is claimed or implied. Authoritative sources on Act 96 are the Hawaiʻi State Legislature and the Hawaiʻi Department of Taxation — where this wiki and those sources disagree, they are right and this wiki is the defect. Facts were verified as of August 2026; the litigation described in Act 96 at a Glance is ongoing and status may have changed since.