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YAGONG: The DAE -1 can have some copies made, my staff can — staff, would you help
<br />me? Thank you. Now with that said, certainly the thing that your concern is whether or
<br />not it's appropriate for a Council member to utilize his picture. So I kind of want to
<br />share my thoughts with you on that, but also reiterate that again, every single dime that
<br />we spend is for a public purpose or a governmental purpose. I think it's important for
<br />everyone for the commission to understand how this came about, you know, as far as we
<br />utilizing the picture for an ad. Commissioners, for myself, I was elected to be on the
<br />Council from 1996 to 2002, so I was on the Council for six years. Then I was off the
<br />Council for four. I decided to come back, and I was able to win back the seat that 1 had
<br />previously. The beautiful thing about that is that I didn't have to go through a learning
<br />curve. The experience that I had for the six years was actually invaluable. And the fact
<br />is, the administration that was in when 1 was on the Council was still in. So it's not like I
<br />had to go through a whole reacquaintance process. So —in other words, in January and
<br />February, for my office, we hit the ground running. We didn't have to learn anything.
<br />We knew what the issues were, and we hit the ground running. And obviously, if you pull
<br />out the paper for the Tribune - Herald and West Hawai `i Today, you will find you just go
<br />back and look, you'll see there's something happening with our district, with me as a
<br />Councilmember. There's something going on. We're either on the front page, or the
<br />back section of the front page, because we were informing people of these meetings and
<br />letting them know what was going on. We did that through publicity releases. In other
<br />words, we ran a release of the meeting that we had, we sent it in to both newspapers, and
<br />they would print it. Now they would either do that, or they would look at the ad and send
<br />out the release and say, this is of importance. And they would actually call me and they
<br />would actually write an article. So we were getting like both ends of the spectrum. We
<br />got the article written and we got the publicity release. It was fantastic. And our
<br />meetings were well attended, until one day they didn't run the publicity release. It was a
<br />very important meeting that we had, and the release wasn't run. It didn't run in the
<br />paper, in both papers. We did have the radio announcement. We did have the blurb in
<br />Carol Yurth's article, Hamakua Times, but the main paper for this island did not run that
<br />meeting. Obviously the first person I blamed was my staff. Nah, just kidding. So I told
<br />Steve, I said Steve — Steve, it didn't run. We've got to get the word on what happened. So
<br />he emailed the Tribune - Herald and actually spoke to Mr. Armstrong, you know, as far as
<br />the ad not running. So Mr. Armstrong did reply to the ad, and he replied in an email.
<br />And his reply to Steve was this —this was on February 12. He said, Steven, the best way,
<br />and I'm not being facetious, to ensure something is printed in the Hawai `i Tribune
<br />Herald is to buy an advertisement. And you know what? Mr. Armstrong was absolutely
<br />right. What we were doing —we were lucky the first few, you know, the first few months.
<br />We were lucky. But basically what we did was, we took an important issue and we rolled
<br />the dice and said I hope they cover it. And we were lucky. But they didn't cover this one.
<br />So what we came to realize was that what we do is too important not to provide notice.
<br />What we do needs to be read, needs to be told to people. If we don't do it, no one knows
<br />that we're not doing our job. So with that email that Jason sent, what we did was —we
<br />said we've got to start running ads. And that's when we began to do it. Now when we
<br />first started running our ads, we ran text ads, which means it's the words you know,
<br />where, when, why, and call Dominic if you have any questions and so forth. And we ran
<br />a couple of ads, and it did not have an impact. It was very poorly attended. There was
<br />no publicity release, no— obviously people didn't read the ad. In fact, one of the
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