1999-08-25 Charter Commission Minutes (2)

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minutes 8-25-99Page 36 of 60 whatsoever, but there’s a safeguard because a large number of signatures are required in a compact time frame. That’s 25% of the persons registered in the last election. The other procedure, impeachment, states that a hundred voters may sign a verified petition - YOSHIYAMA: Point of order. While I appreciate all these comments, I don’t know if they’re on the agenda. SANTANGELO: This is a Statement from the Public. YOSHIYAMA: Yes, a Statement from the Public on agenda items so that’s why I’m concerned. If we’re going to do it this meeting, we’re going to do it every meeting and I can see, if Al was here as a County Clerk, it might be different. RAY: Yes, why don’t you just get us those things in writing. KONISHI: Okay, I have it - but I can talk about election stuff, right? RAY: Yes. KONISHI: Okay, last one then. Initiative and Referendum. I’ve a bunch of comments on that. We learned a lot in the ‘98 initiative process and it highlighted some areas that I think need to be fixed up. First of all, I want to state for the record that the administrative burden on processing the petition was hugh and it came at the time when we were getting ready for the 1998 elections. And I’d say there are only two reasons why we made it through the process. One was our Civil Service staff just worked incredible amounts of hours doing this, just about giving up their family and home lives and also, I want to acknowledge that the Petitioners Committee was cooperative. Had they not been cooperative, or had they been down right uncooperative, I don’t think we would have made it either. And based on those experiences, I have some suggestions. First of all, shelf life of signatures. The older a signature gets, the more difficult it is for us to validate because I think it’s been estimated up to maybe 20% of the registered voters move between elections. So they sign the petition, they put their address. We run it through the computer. We see the name but a different address. That triggers a whole different set of validation processes. It takes a lot of time. Therefore, I think, in fairness, signatures should be valid for one election cycle only. In other words, from the day of a General Election to the time you submit before the next General Election, but that should be it because beyond that, it just increases the difficulty to verify it, and who knows, maybe people change their minds in two years. I don’t know. It’s just a suggestion. Secondly, under our present Charter wording, people get two shots at the petition. They get to turn in the petition and if they don’t have enough signatures, they get to come back with second petition and then we go through the verification process all over again, and not only that, we’ve got to make sure the signatures we’re verifying the second time are not duplicates of the first time. My suggestion is that if a Petitioners Committee comes within a certain shortfall, like for example, 2% or less of what they need, then they should maybe get the second shot. If they’re kind of off, it increases the chances that we’re going to make mistakes or not do it right, etc. Wording, this was a tremendous problem. As much as we tried to be fair in wording, all I did was get people upset with me and everybody thought that I was juicing it for the other side. I don’t know how the heck that is humanly possible but that’s what people thought, and I think that’s just natural because people are passionate about their causes. My suggestion is, on the wording, that it be a committee of four people that writes the question. The Clerk appoints somebody. The Petitioners Committee appoints somebody. They appoint a third party to be on the file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 8-25-99.html7/1/2011