2009-09-23 Board of Ethics Minutes

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any of you would know which particular evidentiary rules or guidelines would apply in a ethics board setting. So there are very strong considerations, it really needs to be looked in carefully. Primarily what I'm going to say is this. I testified extensively when Brenda Ford initiated this ballot initiative at the Council level, and for the Council to now try to pretend as if they weren't aware of the consequences in the language in HRS statute 46- 1.5, section 24, subsection (a), is preposterous. That is ridiculous on the face of it. I can show you reams of pages of my testimony to them, explaining to them precisely the problem they were heading towards, where a person who wishes to fight an administrative assessment can drag it on for at least a year. And I suggest that they stick with the earlier provision in the Charter as it was, which said that all violations shall be prosecuted it didn't say they were misdemeanors, but it said as a misdemeanor. And I would like to point out that the County itself has many opportunities to seek injunctions. For instance, if you have a County employee that is not obeying the Code of Ethics, there's nothing that stops the County from going and seeking an injunction against that person to stop that particular behavior. You open a can of worms, and when I say you, I'm meaning the County Council of Hawai `i opened a can of worms when they went to go to this administrative fines situation. The truth of the matter is, 26 HRS 46 -1.5, section 24, applies to all administrative fines, such as if a planning director wants to hit somebody with zoning violations, again, one of their strongest moves is to go right to the Circuit Court and seek an injunction while all of the proper procedures 46- 1.5(24), as they exist, are in operation, are in play. The truth of the matter is that the Planning Director and all the County departments I don't think they've ever gone after anybody. There may be one to three cases in the past three years where they've actually gone to seek administrative fines. So this thing is becoming an issue here. In reality, how often do you think this Board will actually exercise its fining functions rather than giving people warnings, advising them, and other proper venues and avenues are open to the County of Hawai `i to stop improper behavior. And of course your Board is very important in notice notification to a person and allowing a person to request, a County employee to request from you. So I feel there's a little bit of humbug going on here, the County acting and the Mayor acting as if we need to change this law now, as if they weren't aware of the consequences of that section 24 that I referred to. So I'll be looking at this closely. There are very strong matters to be considered here. Thank you on that one. On Petition CHAIR: --Mr. Rees, just to point out, you're four minutes, and we're limiting this to three minutes. We have a stack of people wanting to testify on this. So you already have four minutes. REES: What does that mean? SCHOEN: Mr. Rees, though, you were going to testify on another item on the agenda. REES: I was, and I'm sorry I went long. I didn't realize I was over the limit. SCHOEN: Were you going to testify on other matters? REES: Yes, I was.