2010-11-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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6. DISCUSSION OF SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT PRESENTED AT OCTOBER 22, 2010, AND NOVEMBER 3, 2010, MEETINGS A. Operations, Budget, and Consolidation Report. Ms. Wong had distributed a handout. She and Bill Takaba had met with Ron Takahashi, Warren Lee, BJ Leithead Todd, and Nancy Crawford. She had tried to make her report more factual than interpretive. Ms. Wong basically read her report to the commissioners. See her report on "meeting summaries" dated October 12, 2010. The Chair asked Ms. Wong if there was anything in her report she wanted to include in their draft recommendations. Ms. Wong said some of the items were already noted. Ms. Leithead Todd felt very strongly about eliminating action committees. Ms. O'Hara said she agreed with eliminating action committees, having been on one herself, and that it should be up to Planning to move CDP guidelines forward. Planning is developing the expertise internally, and the action committees are just an added expense. Ms. Wong said her gut feeling was to agree. The Chair said she also was involved in an action committee, which had been specifically requested because it was felt the county would ignore the things in the CDP. The action committee tried to ensure that things in the CDP came to fruition, because previously they had not. She felt action committees were needed. Ms. O'Hara said that the last CDP which came out of Puna was never adopted. It sat on a shelf at Planning and was ignored. If a CDP is adopted by ordinance, it is a requirement of Planning to implement it. Otherwise, a community's recourse would be to voice its concerns to the Council. Ms. Leithead Todd's point may be that action committees are redundant because a community can get involved instead. She believes the community can now trust Planning to implement a CDP. The Chair said they could specifically talk about what Ms. Leithead Todd brought up and see if they could come to a resolution, or they could talk about the boards and commissions brought up by her one at a time and try to get a handle on them. It could be a future agenda item. The latter was agreed upon. The Chair said she wanted to start moving towards drafting a report and listing recommendations, to make sure none were lost. Ms. O'Hara brought up Nancy Crawford's section of Ms. Wong's report, where she had discussed the high cost of video broadcasting council meetings. She noted that Lincoln Ashida had also submitted input on the high cost of videotaping meetings, stating that the council is not required to videotape as many proceedings as they do. 24