2000-02-05 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 02-05-00Page 11 of 66 the language from what was in Gary’s draft. I followed the Honolulu Charter and I changed it very slightly as a suggestion. There are two changes from the Honolulu draft. One change is that instead of ‘charges’, I used the word ‘reasons’, and I think the word ‘charges’ implies some kind of misfeasance in office, like taking the fire truck joy riding, or - I don’t know what the Fire Chief would do. It seems to me that the Fire Commission should be able to remove the Chief for things like inefficient functioning of the department, which I don’t know really fits into a statement of charges. So, that’s one change. The second change, and this is really up to this Commission, of how easy they want the procedure to be to remove the Chief. The Honolulu Charter, and actually our Charter for the Police Commission, says that you cannot remove the Chief until you’ve given the statement of reasons and the Chief has had an opportunity to respond to them at a hearing. And what that implies to me is that you can’t do it all in one meeting because you have a motion, you present the statement of reasons, and to me, when you say you have an opportunity at a hearing to respond, it doesn’t mean you just, okay, what do you say about that, and that’s it, and you’re out of there. I wrote this so that it didn’t say at a hearing, and so this could actually all be done in a single meeting. And it’s up to this Commission if you don’t want to have them be able to do it that way, then say at a hearing. Otherwise, just leave it stated like this. Then it would have to be on the agenda; evaluation and retention of the Chief; and then they would have a meeting, and somebody would make a motion, ‘I think we should get rid of the Chief because the Chief hasn’t upgraded the equipment or they bought the terrible radio system, it doesn’t work’, or something like that. And then the Chief would have the opportunity to respond to that, and then the Commission could vote, and if they voted to remove the Chief, that would be the end of that. So that’s what this language is meant to do. RAY: Comments to that? Gary. YOSHIYAMA: I move for incorporation of legal counsel’s amendments. HIGASHI: Second. RAY: So, you’re voting to support the facilitation of the removal without that whole process? YOSHIYAMA: Right. RAY: George. MARTIN: I think that Gary’s original draft had the same language but now Chris is just making a change to that language so it’s actually an amendment to your original. YOSHIYAMA: Yes, incorporating the change. IRVINE: No commission is going to go through a meeting and say these are the reasons we’re going to fire you and vote to fire them, are they? MARTIN: Why not? RAY: I think we did get testimony that that’s actually the way the Police Commission had operated in the past. On Monday you’re in and Tuesday you’re out. But, hopefully, we’ve progressed in terms of our political behavior. We have a member from the public that would like to make a comment, since you folks are here. AKANA: Eddie Akana from Waimea. I just want to know, during the hearing now, if the Fire Chief’s job is on the line, at that time can he have an attorney at the hearing and all that? YUEN: Yes. If you have a hearing, yes, the Fire Chief could have an attorney. RAY: But we’re suggesting not having a hearing. IRVINE: Right. YUEN: Not saying that there is a formal hearing. There is an opportunity to the Fire Chief to respond. Let me just say that I think, typically, just to give a typical situation where a Director is hired and fired by a Board or Commission, you could take the Superintendent of Education, for example. The firing is done quite quickly. It is a typical thing. When it happens, it file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 02-05-00.html7/1/2011