1999-05-26 Charter Commission Minutes

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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSIONPage 6 of 42 HERKES: Considers that -. WURDEMAN: It’s very -, it’s been disputed very hotly. HERKES: I’ll bet. WURDEMAN: As to whether that is sufficient, and in my own mind, I doubt that it is. RAY: Okay. IRVINE: You know, I -. RAY: Ms. Irvine. IRVINE: Yes, thank you. Everything that I’ve read so far in model county charters or the Government Finance Officers Association recommend that some kind of performance measures are in place for county programs or just general organization. It seems to me that you’re kind of throwing out the baby with the bath water to say, well, we don’t need program review when they could set up, very easily, performance measures that are meaningful. I mean, for example, you know, to get things running more smoothly. For example, at Wastewater, where they are apparently billing people for $3.00 fees for dumping, which is the most cost-ineffective thing I’ve ever heard of in my life because, as we all know, it costs way more than $3.00 to send a bill out. So I can’t see throwing out everything, although maybe defining program would help or -. WURDEMAN: Yeah. Well, the Council has inherently an oversight function, and it should be allowed to exercise that, and it should be allowed to -, I suggest, to initiate program reviews should be within its authority, but to require that every program be reviewed, and what the consequences of not reviewing them are -. The one that always comes up is the marijuana overflights, and every time there’s an agenda item involving the marijuana overflights, the advocates for marijuana come to the Council in great numbers and scream about there’s no program review. Now, I’ve thought at some length about how you would evaluate the success of the marijuana overflight program, you know, and I don’t know -, I haven’t come to any quick conclusion. I mean, how do you measure it? By the number of plants they pull up or the availability of the product on the street or -, I don’t know. IRVINE: Any one of those could be used as a parameter, plus the, you know, the social value, say, of not having people stoned on the streets or something like that. I mean, they can take in things other than money. But I bet it would either be financially a good idea or not, and I don’t know which way it would go. RAY: Ms. Herkes. HERKES: I think those measurement standards are not something for us to set up but they’re something that we can certainly endorse being set up. And it says once every four years. For 200 programs, that would be 50 a year. WURDEMAN: Yeah, weekly, roughly. HERKES: That’s about -, that’s about four a month. And I think that in the interest of budget and time, file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 5-26-99.html7/1/2011