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minutes 12-08-99Page 4 of 31
<br />YUEN: I have to say that this section is really a dead letter. It just doesn’t have any effect as long as a person files suit within
<br />the applicable State Statutes of Limitation. The fact that they have not made a claim to the County Clerk is not going to bar
<br />them. There’s overriding Statutes of Limitations that apply. I would say that it is probably not worth troubling the public to
<br />actually remove it from the Charter, but it does not actually have the effect that it says in the Charter.
<br />IRVINE: I guess that’s the other thing I was going to ask, about this two years, because there’s not anything about Statute of
<br />Limitations, but maybe, it’s just a worthless section.
<br />YUEN: Yes, it doesn’t mean anything.
<br />IRVINE: If we rewrite this whole thing, we can omit it.
<br />YUEN: If we were starting from scratch, you would probably take it out. What happened is that there have been Court
<br />decisions that say that there’s a Statute of Limitations and you follow that, and not the Charter.
<br />RAY: Sue.
<br />IRVINE: No.
<br />RAY: Anybody else? John.
<br />SANTANGELO: Harry, what about a bi-annual budget? There’d been talk about that.
<br />TAKAHASHI: I believe that, too, we dropped because we did write up a bi-annual budget proposal at one time, but I think
<br />our Corp Counsel indicated that that also violated State Statutes.
<br />SANTANGELO: And because we’re a political subdivision at the behest of the State. Okay. Thank you.
<br />RAY: Harry, I know you received this submittal from the Legislative Auditor’s Office, and we just passed this out on
<br />Saturday, and I don’t know if everybody has had time to fully digest it. But since you are here, and since you were a
<br />Legislative Auditor in one of your past lifetimes, I thought we might take the opportunity. Basically, the issue that the Leg.
<br />Auditor’s bringing up is the way the office functions now in terms of the appointments is subject, pretty much, to entirely
<br />political patronage. The Council is elected. They form a majority. They elect a Council Chair. The Council Chair appoints the
<br />Clerk. The Clerk appoints the Legislative Auditor. They divvy up the committees, and the Committee Chairs get to pick their
<br />staff. The staff, because of that, ends up doing a lot of constituent work, rather than really servicing the committees first and
<br />foremost. And then, this other huge issue of serving as an actual auditing department, that whole function, which is pretty
<br />much totally ignored, or beyond the capabilities of the Leg. Auditor’s Office in terms of how they function. So, Connie gave
<br />us some language, some suggestions, and earlier this evening you mentioned to me the Council Services Office at the City
<br />and County; how they function. Is there anything you can share with us in terms of solutions on this?
<br />TAKAHASHI: Having worked as the Leg. Auditor for the County of Hawaii, having worked with several Councils, I feel
<br />that a Council needs to have the capability to conduct proper research, as well as proper investigations. However, I would
<br />tend to concur with Connie, that the patronage process may hinder the effectiveness of the Office. Now, how do you take the
<br />patronage out, I’m not sure, because it’s not necessarily so, that, I think, the Civil Service system will work for the way the
<br />office should run, because looking at the Civil Service system, they tend to be very rigid, the staff in the Legislative Auditor’s
<br />Office do work in a very broad spectrum of assignments. So, I think that the Council deserves to have a staff that can provide
<br />them the proper information, the proper research. The problem right now, I think, all of the staff gets co-mingled and much of
<br />the staff actually respond to the Council members rather than to the Auditor. So, it would be very difficult for the Auditor to
<br />direct the staff under these conditions. In fact, when I was the Auditor, I had prepared some documentation to provide for six-
<br />year terms, however, I believe at that time, I proposed that the appointment of staff would be solicited by the Auditor, and the
<br />list would be whittled down and submitted to Council for approval. Just so that, at least, the Council members would feel
<br />comfortable with the quality of staff being hired. There were two tiers of staffing; one staffing would not go through that
<br />process, would be the patronage positions, which would do the constituency work for the Council members.
<br />RAY: That’s the Clerk’s Office.
<br />TAKAHASHI: They would have fell under the Clerk’s Office. The Community Reports would have been done by the
<br />Clerk’s Office at that time. So, the staff at the Auditor’s Office would be pretty much kept to researching work, investigation
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