MIN CHARTER 2019-03-29 (2018-2020) - Public Hearing

Home

Hawai`i County Charter Commission — Public Hearing March 29, 2019 just can't keep using stuff up without recouping, and I urge you to consider the ecosystem services side of it. Maybe it is not for you. Maybe it is for this director as the program develops. But I do believe that helping with the maintenance fund must happen and as you have already heard it has to happen in a timely fashion. I don't know if I would want to be the director of this. I think it would be a hard job, but I am sure that person is out there. Anyway, thank you very much for hearing me out. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you. If I could ask `Aina Akamu please to come to the table. DENNIS RIORDAN: Proposal No. CA -2 and CA -9 in support and Proposal No. CA -8 in opposition. MR. RIORDAN: My name is Dennis Riordan and I am representing myself. I would like to state that please don't' change the County Council terms. Two years is just fine and people should have figured out their job by then. If they are doing a good job they don't really have to go out and campaign that much. They can run on their record, so using that as a reason that we can't... that they have to have four years is kind of bogus in my mind. On the PONC fund, yes, we need somebody to run the money side of it and we need somebody to run the maintenance side of it. You gotta have somebody in the office that is writing the grants, taking care of the money, looking at the grants that the 501(c) (3)s are asking for, and then you have got to have somebody out there going around and looking at all of these properties and making sure that you don't have the homeless moving in, like we have down in Kona right now on one of... you know, I was involved in having to get those... the homeless camp out of PONC lands and it is because there is nobody that works for PONC and yet we own so much land that we should be taking care of it and making sure the neighbors aren't encroaching on it, making sure the 501(c)(3)'s are doing what they are saying that they are doing. So it is not a one person job. And I know everyone... nobody wants to hire a County employees and all the rest of that, but it has got to be a person that does... the person that does the office work is probably not the person that is going to be out there stomping around in their steel toe boots making sure that the land is being protected and the 501(c)(3)'s can be the people on the ground but you have got to verify that the stuff is being done that they say they are doing. The equipment that is being bought is being taken care of, it is there, it is being used and whatnot, and at the same time instead of each one of these 501(c)(3)'s getting their own five weed eaters, we could actually open up a little rental company that that person would run and you come and check out five weed eaters for your weekend project and then you bring them back all clean and they get checked in and now another 501(c)(3) can come and take them out the next week or however that would happen, but please keep the PONC money going and hire some people out of that fund so that it can become a useable system. Thank you. Page 6