1999-05-12 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 21 of 37 only in favor of it if you went to single member, so you didn’t want it -. Rather than have an if and only if type of question on the ballot, which people have enough trouble dealing with the kinds of questions that they get, but one that would only -, the two years -. The other way of doing it, the way to break it apart would be to say that only if single member passes, we would then -, are you then in favor of having two years? There’s also a way, and I won’t explain how to do this, but there was a way of setting it up so that it would almost guarantee both of them have lost, you know, where you have multiple kinds of things that you have to check on. So this comes up and, you know, the -, my approach always is, you know, you don’t -, you present it to people, you let them vote on it, you win or you lose, and you don’t try to rig the ballot. But, you know, it can be done, and if you go back to -, and there’s a court case on this where the first, the first Charter was voted on back in May -, right when Shunichi Kimura was the County Chair. The way the ballot was set up was that there were, and I don’t remember exactly how it was done, but there were three or four alternatives, and there were inconsistencies in them, and if you didn’t -, and unless one out of four got over 50 percent, then there wasn’t going to be a Charter. And I think, perhaps, coincidentally or not, this was a period where the Charter was -. Before this, the County Clerk was elected, and after the Charter called for the County Clerk to be appointed, then the County Clerk set up how the ballot was going to be on the Charter. HIGASHI: So -. YUEN: That’s a long answer to your question. HIGASHI: So in the final end. YUEN: Yeah. HIGASHI: Did the Commission formulate the specific question? YUEN: Right. Right. HIGASHI: Okay. YUEN: The Commission will formulate how the thing is worded on the ballot and if any proposals are joined together. HIGASHI: And as to form, the County Clerk decided -. YUEN: Right. HIGASHI: How the questions were bunched together or were left independent? YUEN: The County Clerk, basically, last time, did not let the Commission join certain questions together and forced them all to be -. HIGASHI: Is it now your opinion that -? YUEN: Broken apart. HIGASHI: What is permissible? I mean, you meant through this once. Do you think -? file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 5-12-99.html7/1/2011