1999-06-16 Charter Commission Minutes

Home

Page 10 of 11 DORN: Good evening. There’s one area of the Charter I would like you to take a look at and that is regarding the initiative referendum process. It would open the doors wider to democratic participation in our government, I feel, if the requirement was lowered to 10% of, I believe, of the registered voters voting in the previous election instead of the 15%. The 10% is still a huge number of signatures of registered voters to gather. It would certainly not ever be done frivolously and yet, it would make the process, the democratic process, available to more people who feel strongly about getting certain issues before the public. And I also want to speak against holding special elections for all the reasons everyone else has. My personal friend, Joe Okita, just told me yesterday, he’s head of the Hawaii Housing Authority for this island and he just came back from serious budget talks in Oahu and he said they’re strangling them with the budget cuts and they expect them to do the same amount of work and provide for the same amount of people on less and less money and he said they were cutting the homeless budget in half. Now these are all state monies coming in, not county monies but the county is going to have to take up the slack somewhere because they are very worried because the homeless population is going to swell, people are going to be camping again on Onekahakaha Beach Park even though they’re not supposed to and the county’s going to have to take up the slack and it just looks so bad to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, I hear maybe it’s $500,000, on a special election. I’m not sure if that’s accurate but that is what I’ve heard. That’s a huge amount of money when the same issues could be put forth to the voters in the general election and like Julie said, there would be a much greater turnout so the results of that election would reflect the people’s opinions more than a special election would. So that’s all I have come to say. RAY: Okay, thank you. Any questions? IRVINE: I didn’t have any questions of Kathy but does anybody have that figure on special election, the amount we were given? I know it was three hundred and something when I first found it and then it went to four hundred or - RAY: I wouldn’t want to say. There are lots of figures and scenarios floating around. IRVINE: Okay. RAY: I was talking to some folks today about the logistics of holding a special election. While you say, well, you could do it 45 days after whatever, my understanding, the logistics are such that to hold a special election early next year, we’d pretty much have to be done in the next month or so. DORN: Say that again. You have to be done in the next month if you want to hold a special election? RAY: There’s a considerable lead time logistically to trigger a special election so I don’t understand that either so I think it may not even be a possibility. SANTANGELO: We should clear something up. We have no intention of finishing up next month. RAY: Yes, we are just getting started. DORN: Alright, thank you. RAY: Okay, thank you. Anyone else to testify? Then that concludes our public testimony. Thank you all file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 6-16-99.html7/1/2011