2015-05-13 Regular Session Minutes Board of Ethics

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audits now being done. If the Ethics Board does not act for some reason, I hope County Council will use its power to act on ethics cases. For the future, we may need another way to address cases involving the Mayor or County Council members since they are the ones who choose Ethic Board members. As for Mayor Kenoi, I hope he will best serve his future and the future of our island by having the courage to resign. Thank you. Ms. Kahakalau: Thank you very much. 3) Alex Achmat(Kohala)signed up to testes on agenda item 4d,Petition No. 2015-03. Mr. Achmat: Hi. Good morning. My name is Alex Achmat and I live here in Hawi in North Kohala and voter in District 9. I wanted to start out my comments by saying thank you and I'm not sure if the person I'm saying thank you to is in the room. The person I wanna say thank you too is the whistle blower. The person who said this is too much,this is enough and leaked the information that allowed us the people unusually uninformed to find out what's going on. There's a maxim that's says that money corrupts and a lot of money corrupts a lot and it seems that that's the kind of situation we're in. Not only nationally, but here at our County level there's two (2) sets of rules: one is for people with power and money and one are for regular people. We've seen this practice over and over again. Ten(10) years ago, we had a scandal on the island it was called"Hookers, Hot tubs and Hawai`i" and it was about David Cunningham. Who was a representative in the House of Representatives who spent $6,000 a night the Hapuna Prince Hotel being woo'd during $50,000 junket by companies accompanied by people in the CIA Dusty Bogo whose number three. He ended up going to jail for taking bribes and for playing fast and loose with donations and gifts in our backyard ten(10) years ago. He also somebody blew the whistle and we need that, we need people to say enough. Then we had the Jack Abram off case and there again we had a whistle blower. It wasn't that the courts or somebody delved into him and found him guilty. It was somebody who knew some scandal and leaked it that got him arrested and put in jail and all the corruption exposed. We need the whistle blowers, we need people to have the courage to come out from behind a kind of roughshod administration who demands people to cooperate. Who's looking for pliable members on their Councils to speak out? In the last election, we had big money interest coming into our Counties spending hundreds of thousands dollars. In Maui, it was the same thing over half a million dollars. These people are not voters, they don't live here but they finance politicians. Again, in my summary I'd like to say that we what to