MIN CHARTER 2019-08-08 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -14 August 8, 2019 MR. HENRICKS: I am going to ask you to stop asking questions because I am going to forget your first two. MS. TODD: I am sorry. MR HENRICKS: If you can remember them, I will be happy to try to answer them all. Your first question was... you know, that's a great question. I don't have it in front of me. I know that like the ballot language itself has to... I think it is... I believe it is 75 days, I believe that's August 23 before the general election. Somewhere around there and that is a firm date. There are also firm dates by which we must publish the full text with summaries in newspapers. I anticipate we will beat those dates and maybe do it more than once. We are going to provide an ample budget for voter education. We are not going to go bare minimum on that. As far as voting by mail... and so what will happen is because of Act 136, which we are you know, now a vote by mail state, everyone who is a registered voter will receive a ballot in the mail which will include all of the questions, Charter, Constitution, whatever they may be, including all of the contests. I anticipate providing some form of... a one page or something that would direct people for more information on the Charter amendments. Maybe even if we are able to get the summaries into a succinct... but realizing though that we are talking about 100,000 some odd ballots, so we have to be cognizant of how much paper we are putting in the mail and what that may add to our costs. But I certainly don't want to... I would like to at this point in time put something in with each ballot that provides a little extra information for people to reach out, and at least a website, something of that nature where people can find the full text, can find the summaries, can find the educational materials that we worked hard to produce. CHR. ADAMS: As far as timing goes, we are in the area of very... you see my hand. Yeah, we are dancing around. So the deal... I think the idea is the ad hoc committee would do its work over the winter time period. We would probably pull the Commission back together in the January -February time period. It gives us plenty of time to have the conversations that we would need to have and approve the language that would then allow us the education time as well as... now everything that we will be doing with the ad hoc would be to work with the legislative branch in the Clerk's office anyway. Even though we are very bright people, they do this for a living. And so you know, well you are all very bright people. So the idea would be to have that expertise as part of what the ad hoc committee is doing as well and then bring the ballot questions back to the Commission hopefully as a final. But of course they could always be reviewed by the entire Commission at that point. And as we pointed out, this will be an open meeting, a regular meeting and so it would be subject to Sunshine Law provisions, noticed, testimony, all that kind of stuff. So hopefully that answers a little bit about that. Page 19