1999-05-12 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 11 of 37 Mayor Akana had passed away, and that led directly to some suggestions about what-, and changes in when you have a special election to fill a vacancy, when you wouldn’t have a special election. If the period of time was quite short, you’d just let the Managing Director carry over until the next regular election, those kind -, those are a couple of things. The budgeting things -. BETHEA: Yeah. YUEN: Had been a point of contention between the Council and the Mayor for several years before, and that was a reason for trying to work on that. I agree with Bob that we didn’t -, the last Charter Commission didn’t really solve that. And I don’t know, again, with a perspective of looking back on a few years, the same kinds of issues still come up between the Mayor and the Council, and I think that some of that is just inevitable in a government involving separation of powers and different power centers -. BETHEA: Yeah. YUEN: Looking to assert their own authority. The Charter should be as clear as it can be, but there’s always going to be some give and take on those things. So -, and I -, and probably there are things that have come up in the last few years that are going to be part of the agenda and part of what the public expects for this Charter Commission. L’ORANGE: On the budget, I was very uncomfortable with it, and it seemed to me like a timing thing. And the problem was that neither the administration or the County Council was willing to give us any recommendation or to work together to work out a solution that worked. And we didn’t know anything about the subject, really. But you know you got to wait until the State comes up with their thing and the timing seemed pretty short. BETHEA: Tight. L’ORANGE: Tight between the State budget and the other. But we didn’t feel that anybody, at least I didn’t. We knew there was a problem, but we didn’t know how to fix it, and neither the Administration nor the County Council or the finance people gave us any recommendations that we could -. BETHEA: Exactly, because we didn’t know, or the County wouldn’t know what it was going to get from the legislature until the legislature was over, you know, what was going to come, so it was very difficult for the County to plan. There was, however, and I don’t quite have it in my grasp, another fundamental difference between the counties, and that was how detailed the budget was, because that got into questions of what was the authority of the Mayor to transfer funds within a department and this and that. Do you remember that, Chris? And I think here we had a much more detailed budget than elsewhere, which kind of tied the Mayor’s hands. There was a difference between transfers within a department and transfers between different departments. In other words, the Council could pass a budget that is so detailed that the Mayor can’t do anything; yellow pencils are $1,346 a month or something. I remember that being something that at least it concerned me. And that raises one question is that if -, for those of you who are like me and didn’t have much of an understanding of how the budget system works, I would really focus on trying to get as much understanding about that as I could. Tie one thing back to what Chris said, this whole thing about City Manager, get it out of the way quick, one way or the other. You may really decide, after doing some reading about it, it’s something you want file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 5-12-99.html7/1/2011