2021-09-23 Redistricting Commission minutes (3rd Session)

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KOSSOW: Mr. Lopez. LOPEZ: Thank you. That’s a great question because it puts us on the spot here. I personally do not believe I can deliver a plan within three weeks unless I can get a resource to work with me to answer some of my questions, my obstacles, why I can’t get from here to there, and what options do I have. I need somebody to hold my hand if you will. Left the way it is, I don’t have any confidence I can have a legal best-effort plan in three weeks. KOSSOW: I would like to also remind everybody that Item 1 on the new business, we also have questions for support staff regarding the ESRI site and how to utilize the online tool. So if you have any questions, we can take it there. Also, if you want to, we can also set up a call into the support staff to ask them any questions as well. Is there any other discussion? Ms. Lui. LUI: Yes, just thinking about Mr. Lopez’s comment there too. Yeah, I mean my first try didn’t—it failed the test of validation there and so even if I were able to come up with what I think is a good plan, if we all come up with plans, they’ll be different. I’m thinking in terms of our timeline, what are we going to cover in each meeting because we’re going to have a lot of discussion among each other as to the boundary lines of our various districts. So, I’m just not sure what the process is. So we might be able to each produce a plan in three weeks but that’s not good enough. KOSSOW: Mr. Akamu. AKAMU: Mahalo, Chair Kossow. If I could, I’d like to ask the Commissioners to take a look at the draft timeline that Mrs. Nakamoto had proposed at our last meeting. Taking a look at that timeline, we do have five weeks in there for Commissioners and public to thth create plans which is scheduled for September 9 through October 13. I would propose that we add one month to that five weeks to extend the timeline for the public and the Commissioners to create plans. That would push all the other dates out approximately by one month. I would also ask if Mrs. Nakamoto would be able to help us to add that one month in there. Also secondly, I’d like to suggest to the Commissioners that, I believe the five weeks that we have for public hearings is enough time so I don’t think we would need to essentially extend time for those public hearings as I believe we’d probably be doing them mostly virtually, probably. I’d just like to put that out there to see if we could use that, to add the additional time. Secondly, I would like to ask a question of our Corporation Counsel to see if they could assist us in drafting our letter and using the Attorney General’s petition as our basis for having the need to also extend our timeline based on the State Reapportionment timeline being extended. So if we could that, and align that with this request to the Mayor because I believe that’s part of where our authority lies and comes from. Just wanted to put that out there for thoughts and discussion from our commissioners. Mahalo. 16