MIN CHARTER 2019-04-25 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -10 April 25, 2019 Because if you have a devoted group of people who have an e-mail and they can turnout people to vote on a particular issue, and other people don't even bother to look at it, so it bothers me. Thank you. UNFINISHED The Chair directed the Commission to proceed to the next order of BUSINESS: business, Unfinished Business. CHR. ADAMS: Any other comments? Okay. I believe that without voting, a consensus is appearing to come forward. Alright, let's move into Unfinished Business, Communication No. 3 is the Formation of Ad Hoc Committees. At this time we are not looking to do that. Moving on to Communication No. 36, Transmitting CA -19 for Initial Approval, Proposal to add a new section to Article X, Financial Procedures, to prohibit the County from applying a minimum real property tax rate and unless otherwise provided for by ordinance, require that real property taxes be levied based on the assessed value of the parcel and any improvements thereto; as submitted by Commissioner Hopkins. This was postponed at our last regularly scheduled meeting of March 8th. There is a motion on the floor made by Commissioner Galimba and seconded by Commissioner Zelko-Schlueter to pass CA -19 on Initial Approval. At this time I would like to... because it was postponed, we can just start right? MR. HENRICKS: Correct. CHR. ADAMS: So we are in discussion on the motion and I would invite Commissioner Hopkins to speak to this. MR. HOPKINS: Yes, thank you very much for this and thank you for postponing it because I had missed the meeting where it was brought up and thank you for... Commissioner Galimba for bringing it up. I appreciate that. I am putting this amendment up here basically looking at an issue of inequality in our tax system. We have... I am not going to talk about you know, the major things where we have enormous distortions in our tax system right now with agricultural exemptions and a number of the other ones here with the assessment. I am not going to be looking at that one. I am particularly just looking at this one issue of minimum tax and for disclosure which I did put in the analysis there, I am one of these people that's hit with minimum tax on a couple of parcels that I inherited from my brother which hopefully I won't own for too much longer, but these parcels are appraised at about $3,000 and that is market price, and yet we pay $200 a year in tax on them. While at the same time we have parcels up in Hamakua and I put a very detailed analysis in there, of looking at things. We have parcels up in Hamakua that because they have used an agricultural tax Page 31