2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MR. HOFFMANN: Well, again, from my perspective, I used the information that I got. I’m not certain that the council ever put out a public statement. I don’t remember that happening. I don’t know how the other council members used it. I know I did. In one or two areas, that came out as I remember, in November, December, January of last year, and was part of the reason I included two things on my list of proposed suggestions for budget changes when I was a member of the ad hoc committee, which my other two colleagues didn’t sign. They didn’t want to make any changes so I was overruled. And also ended up on the list of things that I had for that May session that we had out in Kona with Mayor Kenoi. So, I got value out of it. MS. WONG: One last question that’s way out there. This island is, a lot of it is East and West Hawai‘i discussions. The county council people are elected by districts. What if it were changed to just North, South, East, and West so that there would be four council members. Would that be a bad choice? And not even a doable choice at this point. Would that be a bad choice to cut down the amount of council representation? MR. HOFFMANN: Yes. First of all, I wouldn’t recommend that. First of all you have to have of course by Charter as well as by State constitution, there’s got to be adequate representation at local level for numbers of people. So, you’d need more than four. I think that’s true. I have to go back and look at that. But this island is not a geographic. It cannot be subdivided into geography, despite what you hear. I don’t think you’ve ever heard me talk about an East, West divide. In fact I’ve avoided it for a number of reasons. I don’t believe in it. First of all, I thinkits poison to cooperation by everyone on this island. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of the East, West rancor comes and is generated by the East side members, not certainly by us. That being said, I don’t want to see any division of the island, you know, into separate counties and different things. That’s nonsense. We are one island. The system isn’t broken. Some of the people need to be changed maybe. And some of the people have got to change the attitude as to how things could be done. But the system is not wrong. The system ain’t broken. We need to work more effectively. We need to cooperate more effectively and remember that many of the things that we put forward are not here just for political posturing and everything, but are the honest and sincere assessments that we receive from the people in our district. I can say that. And I know several of my members on the council who had done their homework and were out there knocking on doors and attending the town meetings feel the same way. We’re disappointed when we don’t get that type of cooperation from our other council members. In my opinion, bad idea. MS. WONG: Bad idea. MS. NICHOLSON: Patricia, did you have anything? MS. PROVALENKO: I have a couple of questions. One is our subcommittee is based on revenue enhancement and collections, so we’re currently looking at what the other counties are charging for various fees. So, we were kind analyzing that. And something that has been brought up to me by several people is the real property tax. And my understanding and Bill can correct me if I’m wrong, is that we can start charging real property tax as construction starts instead of waiting till the building permit to be completed. I understand that there could be sizeable money out there that hasn’t been addressed, that’s waiting. Because you can have building permits that are out there 19