MIN CHARTER 2019-05-10 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -11 May 10, 2019 would in my mind take some strength of character, such as eliminating the ag loophole that if you basically have a fence, and you are on ag land, you get a... you are paying $200 instead of how many thousands. So your next door neighbor that has the same thing and is not on ag land isn't, and we could... you should ask the Finance Department what they would guess if that loophole would close. I would guess it would be 30 to 40 million. So... but, when I brought this up it was always "Oh Margaret, you are anti farmer", and there is an easy way to sort of look at it. Whereas you are really trying to provide for farmers and just not have people get through a loophole. There were a lot of other things including... such as having... taxing credit unions. Oh no, we couldn't tax the credit union... non- profit... so I just, you know, there are a lot of ways other than say eliminating the 2% or eliminating things that the people have wanted. So I just want to quickly say that. And you know I support all three of the proposals, CA -28, 29, and 30. CA -28 is allowing that you don't have to have sort of a majority of one party or another. You know it is very difficult to get sort of diverse people, male, female all the different criteria and people who are...want to be on Boards or some of them are told "don't say you are a Democrat because you will never get on it." And our State is a big tent party. There is a Republican wing, it is just not really a real criteria and I think if you even speak to Rose or the people on the Mayor's office you will hear the same thing about those difficulties and this would be good. On 29, and this would basically... saying... adding some real input by the General Plan and the Community Development Plans in terms of Capital Budget items for those areas. And if you read the Community Development Plan Ordinance, you see that it sort of... so the one area it really empowers that group, is to give advice as to Capital Projects. They go... it is really the one layer where people come to that group as like a first layer of government rather than going to the County as the only one. And I am not saying that maybe Mayor Kim is not listening, but I know that the prior Administration made a big point that they didn't have to listen, so I just think memorializing sort of that importance of that voice... you know it doesn't mean you have to do what is there but basically you are taking that into consideration and listening and really weighing where they go, North Kohala, is it Mahukona Park, is it doing this, and all the people come in and then they say "but nobody listens", so really I think that that would be very good and sort of giving... it would really bring the Charter into synch with the way the ordinances are written. And then lastly on the CA -30, on the Code of Ethics, it's, this is just giving it a little enforcement power. I know when a lot of the hearings were going on for Kenoi and I attended a lot of those hearings, it was always "well really there's nothing that we can do. We could recommend to the... we don't really have any power, so no big deal." So, you know it is important that we give them some fines and force of law and I think that just... you ask people to be on it and I know that the Chair here sat through a lot of that. And that you want to make a difference, and you want to make an impact and have people think that there is a reason for doing this. So I just encourage that and thank you very much. Page 4