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minutes 03-11-00Page 14 of 17 <br />meeting last week and there were probably close to 25 people there, about 15 of them, I think, are Commission members, and <br />there’s tremendous participation in that from all aspects, all parts of the island, all walks of life of people, and so on. It’s a <br />good question. I don’t honestly know the answer to that. <br />MARTIN: How do we have this one set up? As far as what, though? No geographic. How’s about one of the Commissioners <br />come from their department? <br />RAY: Well, we can look at that, yes. Okay, thanks. <br />HOLSCHUH: Thank you. <br />RAY: Steve Bowles. <br />IRVINE: John, could I just ask, were we going to have copies of the Charter here? I mean, the County probably has an extra <br />20,000 copies of this thing lying around in the basement, and we should get them out to the public at this time, because we <br />will be re-doing it. <br />HENRY: I can ask but they usually charge. <br />HERKES: Tell them we’re not going to buy them. <br />IRVINE: Well, it’s time to give them away because it’s not going to be valid for that much longer, if we have a bunch of <br />them. <br />RAY: We’ll follow up on that. Steve. Can you use the mike? <br />BOWLES: Yes, I guess I can. I just want to make some quick comments. First, I wanted to thank you because I happen to <br />agree that the Council, as it stands right now, is broken, and I think it needs repairing, and I would be supportive of the <br />approach you’re taking. I’m not sure that we want to have a Council, though, that’s the size of Oahu’s to represent that group <br />of people. I totally sympathize with John’s problem of geography since I work all around this island, as well as around the <br />State, and I know how difficult it is to go from point to point. I can imagine what they have to deal with when they have to <br />deal with people to people. <br />HERKES: Well, I used to work with a State Representative that had a bigger district than this island. <br />BOWLES: I had a couple of points that were just spinning through my head while we were going through this. One is a point <br />of confusion that I run into all the time, and it’s driving me crazy. We have a Water Department which has a Commission. I <br />would like to see that Commission change from Commission to Board. The Island of Oahu has the Honolulu Board of Water <br />Supply. I would like to see us have the Hawaii County Board of Water Supply. And the reason is because the State, in it’s <br />infinite wisdom, created the Statewide Commission on Water Resource Management, and people refer to it as the Water <br />Commission. And then people in this county who don’t know anything about the State, call this Commission the Water <br />Commission, and there’s incredible human confusion out there by the people who don’t know the system. And this is an <br />opportunity, to me, to just clean it up, change it to a Board, get rid of the word ‘Commission’ because we can’t change the <br />State’s, but we can change the County’s. <br />MARTIN: Can I ask a question on that? <br />BOWLES: Yes. <br />MARTIN: Isn’t the State one an ad hoc commission? <br />BOWLES: Oh, no. It’s the most powerful body in the State now. <br />MARTIN: I know it is and I know there’s been a lot of controversy with some of the things that they’ve been proposing, but I <br />thought once they were done with the work that they were doing - <br />BOWLES: No, you’re confused, and this is part of the problem. There was a Review Commission of the Commission’s <br />file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-11-00.html7/1/2011 <br /> <br />