1999-05-12 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 10 of 37 YUEN: In already. BETHEA: It was already? YUEN: The third kind of issue is just the purely technical, what I would call purely technical issue, and that’s where you have provisions in State law that are -, that supercede things that are in the Charter, and you need to fix them because they read differently. And even though the lawyers can sit there and figure out that in this -, you know, and I don’t remember what exactly they were, the lawyers can sit there and say, well, this thing in the Charter is no good because it contradicts something in State law which -. In some cases, the Charter will supercede State law, but in other cases the State law will override the Charter. If you leave them in the Charter, people get confused, or people will pick up the Charter and they’ll say this is the way it is, and it just causes the lay person to get confused. Those kinds of -, the third area of issue was the kind of area that I think the Commission largely left to me to figure out what were those things. They had some input, certainly from Corp. Counsel and some of the departments that have run into some of these things. So I think that it works well to make a decision on the big things fairly early on. And then I think that we -, on the other things we pretty much marched through, section by section, as a way of just keeping things in order and just trying to keep track of -, sometimes you’ll do something in Article II that then you’ve got to change something in Article XI at the same time and we would keep track of that. But for the most part, after dealing with the big questions, we pretty much just went through things in order. Looking back, it was interesting for me, we have four or five binders like this from -. I don’t know if you saved yours. BETHEA: No, I didn’t. YUEN: I’m a pack rat. HERKES: Each of you have four binders like that? YUEN: Pardon me? HERKES: Each of you have four binders like that? YUEN: Yeah. We had a lot of -, we had a binder probably that’s just minutes like this, and then I wrote a lot of things. There’s some background materials, other people’s charters, things from the mainland, civics textbook type things on different forms of municipal government. I was -, and we have all these press clippings that I was looking through, which are very interesting. And I realized that one of the things that happens when you’re working on a Charter Commission is that there’s -, your -, a lot of the work is inspired by things that have happened in the past few years in the County government that have caused problems or have issues that have come up, and I -. That’s not a bad thing, you know, that’s the natural thing. You’re going to react to certain things that have come up. Before the last Charter Commission, there had been a controversy involving the Police Department which is still not completely resolved, but there was a controversy involving the Police Department and the Commission and the powers of the Commission, and that led, I think, directly to some of the things that were proposed as changes in the Charter. file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 5-12-99.html7/1/2011