1999-03-17 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 14 of 104 RAY: I think we’ve got the funding in hand, so that’s -. ROSS: Okay. RAY: Good. ROSS: But it also pertains to other things. I want to impress upon you that the charter, the County Charter is, so-to-say, the constitution of the County. It is comparable to State and Federal constitutions. It is on a smaller scale, but it is a form of constitution, so it is a very important document. And I’m just going through some things that I have already said. I must tell you that I’ve read the 34 pages of minutes of the previous meeting, and I was not greatly impressed, but after all, you were just starting and so on, so I hope that there was no public, there were no publications and so on. And you are in a situation, I understand, where you have to learn, you want to learn and so on, you’re looking for sources, and there are sources. So I won’t go into that. You are willing. You feel obliged to do that already, so I don’t have to point that out, but it’s important. Now, there is one more thing, procedural thing that I have to say after reading the minutes, as far as regular meetings go. You have to indicate a time and place. You cannot say, well, we do this or that or whatever. You can announce a special meeting by having the chairman announce it in the previous meeting plus publication in the paper. I see when you go around the County, I see a lot of special meetings coming up. I don’t know how you handle that. You can ask Corp. Counsel, maybe he knows the solution to that, because many committees, maybe the Planning Commission, Mr. Balog, can tell you, fill you in on that because they traveled around quite a bit, but when you meet in different places, there are special requirements that you have to meet, and you want the public from that location there because why would you travel half-way around the Island and then get one person or nobody or three people or something? So I think it’s very important. I mentioned the TV already. The County Council put its work on TV. These people started doing that for nothing; I don’t know if they’re paying right now. Maybe they are, because there’s more coverage, but in the beginning, they did it at no cost. And I think that you can get them, you know, to do that. And people can watch what you do on TV, at six o’clock it starts at night, you know, in Kona a couple of days later than Hilo, and so on. Anyway, I leave that to you; I just mention it. Now I want to call some items and you don’t have to make notes because they’ll appear in the minutes, but I want to call out some items that I think are of importance for you to look at to either change or put into the new charter, and I’ll just run through them -. RAY: Henry. ROSS: Very quickly. RAY: Henry. ROSS: Yes. RAY: This is really -. ROSS: This is -. file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 3-17-99.html7/1/2011