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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 20 of 37
<br />not sure who did that. As I read through this, I was surprised at some of the things I did that I didn’t
<br />remember doing.
<br />RAY: Okay.
<br />BESS: Thank you.
<br />RAY: Roland.
<br />YUEN: I think the secretary was full-time, huh?
<br />BETHEA: Yes, full-time.
<br />YUEN: Full-time.
<br />HIGASHI: Question, did you have verbatim minutes?
<br />YUEN: Practically.
<br />L’ORANGE: Yeah.
<br />YUEN: Yeah. Practically verbatim. I don’t think 100 percent, but especially more at the beginning we
<br />did, yeah.
<br />HIGASHI: Another question is who formulated the ballots, the ballot questions? Was it the Commission
<br />or County Clerk?
<br />YUEN: We had a little bit of a conflict with that, with the Clerk’s office, and the -, we wanted to lump
<br />more things together that -, where it’s particularly the -, what we considered the housekeeping items,
<br />and so you voted on them as a block. And the Clerk, at that time, the -. The Charter was a little bit
<br />ambiguous as to how, who would make the decision. The Clerk, then, didn’t like that and wanted them
<br />all broken up. And I think the Commission -, the reason the Commission wanted to lump them is that we
<br />had about, I think 19 different things, and the concern was that people would be overwhelmed by having
<br />to vote on so many and that they would just tend to just, the hell with it, I’m going to vote no on all of
<br />them, which isn’t the way it turned out. But in order to make a better package for the voter, this
<br />Commission had wanted to lump a number of the different things together to come up, so there would be
<br />fewer things to vote on. The Clerk made us break them all out, but in response, partially, to this conflict,
<br />the Commission -, one of the things that was put on was a change that said the Commission, basically
<br />had the power to determine the form of the ballot.
<br />HERKES: Did it pass?
<br />YUEN: I remember the Clerk saying, well, there’s a feisty bunch out there. So that’s -. And the voters
<br />approved it, so now the Commission -. And, you know, you can only go so far with this, you know.
<br />One of the things, if you go back to, if you go back to the very early attempts to have a Charter, they
<br />were -, I don’t know if it was deliberate or accidental, but they failed because of the way the ballot was
<br />set up, and you can sabotage a ballot proposal. And part of the reason why the single member, just to get
<br />this, the single member and the two years were put together was to keep it from being too confusing,
<br />because otherwise you’d have to vote on -. Because all the people that were in favor of two years were
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