1999-07-07 Charter Commission Minutes

Home

Page 3 of 23 informal opinion is that logistically, it probably wouldn’t even be possible to have a special election even if we wanted to. One dynamic that we didn’t discuss or didn’t look at initially which I’ve become very much aware of, is that this is, the year 2000 is a presidential election year and all the resources and apparatuses that are really geared up to deal with presidential elections would probably preclude even being able to do a normal election unless we finished up almost immediately and got something on the decks for say January and as I explained the process, we’re really just getting started in terms of marching through the Charter so I would expect, but there again, this is just an informal opinion, that we’re looking at whatever suggestions we come up with on the year 2000 ballot election is how it will go. So this evening, this is meant to be just input from the general public but since we haven’t gotten a whole lot of turnout, we’re having a little bit of back and forth dialogue, if that’s appropriate, with some of the speakers but I just want to stress that this Commission has not formally discussed anything yet in terms of Charter amendments so everything is just a possibility at this point. Our first speaker this evening is Bill Graham from Kohala representing himself. Bill. PUBLIC TESTIMONY GRAHAM: Good afternoon. I haven’t prepared in depth the specific things I want you to deal with specifically or anything like that but of course, it’s sort of - the mind kind of accumulates concepts and ideas over the years. First off, since you did bring up the special election thing, I would like to sort of say nay on that. I think that would be a mistake to try to do that. I think the general - RAY: Bill, can you think of anything or any possible change to County government, in your mind, that would warrant a special election because that’s really how we’re looking at it? If we thought there were something that was so major, we were trying to look at it, I think, in a positive sense of engaging the public in a really dynamic process and change. I know the numbers on special elections are pretty dismal, right? So generally it tends to work out the opposite, that you get fewer people participating in a special election but I just wondered if you had any - GRAHAM: I would only say that if at these meetings you’ve been having, you were having big turnouts and a lot of people were talking about the same thing that they really needed done then somehow, in response to the public need as expressed by the public, you might want to accelerate something but clearly that’s not what’s going on so it seems inappropriate to me. RAY: Okay. GRAHAM: On the general thrust, I think the thing that most strikes me is sort of the balance of power with the Council vs. the Mayor. I worked on that single member district issue that came through ten years ago where the Council was changed from being at-large Council members to single member districts. At the same time, the Council term got put from four years to two years and just as an aside, that was sort of a bad hooking together of two different concepts. So I hope you all, this time around, when two concepts don’t have to be hooked together, you don’t hook them together at all. But in any event, at that time, like our current Mayor, Steve Yamashiro, was on the Council and he was even saying prior to the voting by the public on this issue that he perceived it as being a large swing of power from the Council to the Mayor if in fact we got single member districts along with the two year terms which is in fact, what we did get. The two year terms got thrown in also. So getting to my point, my point is I don’t think you guys can fuss around with the terms of Council Members anymore because that’s been file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 7-7-99.html7/1/2011