1999-07-07 Charter Commission Minutes

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Page 13 of 23 BOCHE: Aloha everyone. Thanks for having us here and coming out for this little meeting. What I put together is pretty hastily done and not in any real presentable form but there are a few issues I’d like to raise at least in this initial round of public meetings. You’d mentioned the special elections and I would like to echo the nay on that just because of the timing, the expense and the fact that more people are going to come out for a presidential/mayoral election or a general election than we could expect to see in a special election in January so, just in terms of public participation, I think making the acceptance or putting the Charter amendments or the whole draft of the Charter, if you’re going to go that route which I guess, you’re empowered to do so by the Charter. Doing that in conjunction with an ordinary general election would be my recommendation. I’m really concerned that I’d like to see diversity of representation in County government, particularly on the Boards and Commissions. And I want to come back to that theme a couple of, several times here. But I want to give a couple of general comments and one is the need for public discussion and that public discussion is not taking place at the present time in any other the - not in the newspapers and not in the County Council meetings and the public discussion about how our County government works and what would be the best for the County. Should we have a Managing Director? Shall we have a Mayor? Those kinds of public discussions will only occur if you people choose to put those proposals on the ballot because only once they go on the ballot will we actually have a public discussion and the costs and benefits can be more thoroughly aired in public. And by limiting yourselves to having the smaller number of issues, maybe, oh let’s just choose three or four and put them on the ballot and see how that falls out, is actually, in my view, would do a disservice to the whole process which we wait ten years for. And so I would encourage you anyway, to put - don’t be afraid to put a whole lot of issues on the ballot so that we get public discussion because that’s what democracy’s about. John and Mr. Martin, you brought up the idea of having a two year Council person elect a five year Planning Commissioner or Water Commissioner, okay. I think that’s actually a good idea because it will, for somehow and for some reasons, and there are of course, certain exceptions, some Council Members, most Council Members want to get re-elected. Okay, not all of them. But if they get elected to their first two year term and they then appoint some dodo to whatever commission to represent their district, they may hear about it in the next in the two year election cycle and so there’s actually some checks and balances there in terms of the effect on the community. That Council Member is then held accountable for his or her appointments. And then I wanted to disagree with Mr. Boyd on exactly now these appointments take place. I would like to see, and this is Section 13-4 right in the Charter which deals with Boards and Commissions. And I haven’t actually come down on a favored scenario but the two that make the most sense to me, in order to get this diversity, is to either have the County Council appoint the Commissioners, with the approval of the County Council, so there is an approval body. In other words, if Mr. Elarionoff says well, I want to appoint Dick Boyd to the Water Commission, the other Council Members get to review his qualifications and whatever, and be able to then say yea or nay, much as they do now with the mayoral appointees. So there is a check and balance. So I would favor that very strongly and it’s not just, you know I don’t go to the Water Commission. That’s almost like the fox guarding the hen house. I mean it could be. I don’t really mean it is but it could be. So that would be my recommendation. The other one, the other possibility is publicly funded nonpartisan elections. And I stress the publicly funded ones because these Boards and Commissions are not paid, I don’t think. Their expenses, I guess, are paid but it’s somehow the expenses of holding the elections and I don’t mean campaigning, but I mean, and I think maybe that the County needs to experiment with publicly funded elections as a way of maybe having kind of campaign finance reform and to do it for the Boards and Commissions might be real beneficial in terms of our learning curve as to how that might work and it wouldn’t be so charged as to have all County government being, or the County Council being - you come right out of the thing, oh, file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 7-7-99.html7/1/2011