A new law aimed at reducing Hawai'i's large and growing backlog of unserved arrest warrants was enacted yesterday, but Gov. Linda Lingle said in a message to legislators that the measure is faulty and will have to be fixed next year.

The law empowers the state to hire retired police and other law enforcement officers to serve arrest warrants, but budgets no money to pay the retirees, Lingle pointed out.

And she said that while the attorney general is assigned the responsibility of drawing up administrative rules for the program, the measure does not say what state agency should be responsible for running it.

The Attorney General's office testified against the measure at the Legislature, but it passed both houses and was sent to Lingle Tuesday.

She said yesterday it would be enacted without her signature. "This bill, alone, will not accomplish the goal of reducing the backlog in unserved warrants," Lingle said in letters to the House of Representatives and Senate.

"It will be incumbent upon the next session of the Legislature to remedy the aforementioned shortcomings of this measure."

A resolution that would create a task force to find a permanent solution to the warrants backlog passed the Senate and is scheduled for a hearing today in the House.

There are nearly 77,000 outstanding bench warrants pending in Hawai'i.

More than 50,000 involve traffic court warrants for misdemeanor offenses.

An additional 11,000 warrants on O'ahu were held by police and the state Sheriffs Division for the arrest of individuals accused of felony and misdemeanor crimes, and Neighbor Island police departments reported backlogs totaling more than 15,000 warrants.

The agencies said they didn't have the manpower or money to serve the warrants, some of which date to the 1980s.

Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com.