1999-05-12 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 25 of 37 L’ORANGE: Academically. YUEN: Academically. L’ORANGE: Academically, I liked the idea, but my problem is how do you hire the person? I mean, just -. HERKES: I know. L’ORANGE: The practical, how do you hire? Who do you hire? We don’t have an awful lot of Managing Directors in the State of Hawaii, I don’t think, that would be willing to work for what the County would pay them. Yeah, that’s just a practical -. HERKES: Right. BETHEA: You know, that’s why I think one of the suggestions I made is find out about that, and if you’re interested in it, and everybody circulates the material. And then I think that’s a decision that you need to make fairly early on because if you’re going to go into that type of government, unless you just lift something from somewhere else, some other city that has it in the charter, that’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of time. So I -, which doesn’t mean you don’t do it, but if it’s just not going to fly, there’s no point in spending a lot of time. So I think what I was recommending, and I think we tried to get it out of the way early, and I think there was some people who thought, you know, that’s pretty good, but my goodness, you know, we’ve got to get this out in a year and a half or something, didn’t want to make a life’s career out of, you know, converting the system completely. HERKES: Didn’t take them more than six months to do it from the Board of Supervisors to the mayoral. L’ORANGE: Marni, it also seems to me, I can’t say this specifically, but it seems to me that there might have been a group that was strongly pushing for a Managing Director. It wasn’t looked with a lot of favor that their input was -. HERKES: Okay. L’ORANGE: Very useful. And I think there was some of that there, too, that for the public input who was pushing for it was not looked with -, and I’m not talking about Sherwood. HERKES: No, I know that, yeah. YUEN: I don’t think that it was ever voted on because I think it was certainly discussed and it was discussed early, and there was -, certainly everybody wanted to get informed about it, and after hearing about it, I don’t think that -, I think it was plain that, you know, it wasn’t going to get passed by the Commission, so it went -. I’d just like to make one comment, from a legal point of view, and that is that you have to be aware that State law must have somewhere between 50 and 100 references to what the Mayor does in the county, and things like -. HERKES: That probably did it, Chris. YUEN: Things like declaring a public emergency; the Mayor has the power to do that. Rules and file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 5-12-99.html7/1/2011