2000-03-11 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 03-11-00Page 2 of 17 are most likely to have the most experience and interest in running for an island-wide race, so to preclude all those people from running for a four-year term just seems, kind of, impractical so that’s why we came up with that suggestion. Number 3., the County Managing Director. If you haven’t seen the more detailed summary, this is a pretty wholesale reworking of the whole Executive Section of the present Charter, and we took some language out of City and County, Maui, a Charter from Lexington, Kentucky. But, basically we’re restructuring the whole Executive Section to create a Department of Management, and the Managing Director would be basically in charge of that whole department, which would include all the County Departments. The way it is in our present Charter, it has some departments assigned to the Mayor, some to the Managing Director, and a separate section on Boards and Commissions. So, in addition to that, there’s some significant language that we feel empowers the Managing Director position. If you look in Section 6-1.3, some additions there are: ‘Recommend to the mayor the annual operating and capital improvement budget; evaluate the management and performance of each executive agency’, and (e) ‘Prescribe standards of administrative practice to be followed by all agencies under the managing director’s supervision.’ So, this one’s a little bit hard to follow. In terms of how it’s presented, you’re going to have to get a copy of the old Charter and go through, and compare this new language. In other words, because it’s a whole new section, it’s not ramsayered out or underlined, these changes, so you’re going to need to go through that in some detail. And in the next couple of pages also, you’ll see there are a number of changes, but basically puts the Managing Director more in as the Chief Operating Officer of the County, and places him in that chain of command as the Chief Administrative Officer. HERKES: Or her. RAY: Or her, excuse me. So, basically the intent is for the Managing Director to be the Chief Operating Officer of the County. But in terms of the way the position is appointed, it’s still appointed by the Mayor and I’m glad I thought of that, but the one significant change there is it does require Council confirmation whereas the present Managing Director position does not. So, it does put the Council more in the loop there. Fire Commission. This language is pretty much lifted out of the City and County of Honolulu Charter. We followed it. The one exception is the language dealing with the removal of a chief by the Fire Commission is a little more liberal and easier to implement, the language that we’re suggesting in this. In other words, the language in the City and County Charter around this is a little more cumbersome in terms of the process it would require to remove the chief. So that’s the major difference in that. If anybody else wants to chip in, if there’s anything I’m leaving out that you think is significant. Department of Environmental Services. This is a major change. This basically takes two of the divisions of the Public Works Department and creates a new department. It takes the Division of Solid Waste and the Division of Wastewater and creates a new department to be focused, of course on those two, as well as recycling programs for the County. Additionally, we’re recommending an Environmental Services Commission be attached to that department. The genesis of this is the Administration had proposed to us moving the Wastewater Division to the Department of Water Supply, and we didn’t like that so we were talking a lot about different scenarios of how divisions might match up and what might make sense, and this is what we came up with. It would be a new department so in terms of a cost-of-government issue, certainly there would be a new department head, probably not a deputy, but we think in terms of the efficiency and focus, this would, and should, be actually a cost savings method of streamlining and better management of these two divisions. We are still discussing the Environmental Services Commission. We haven’t voted on that, just how that would be made up and exactly how that would work. There’s been some questions raised about calling it an advisory commission, would that need Council confirmation, and what the make-up would be in terms of possible geographic requirements as far as the Commission members. So, that’s still a discussion that’s ongoing. Planning Department functions. There again, the major language change that’s being proposed here came out of an Administrative proposal to create a Division of Permitting, to take all the subdivision duties out of the Planning Department and switch them over to Public Works. So, rather than doing that, what we’re recommending is deleting language in the present Charter that would allow the Administration and the Council to do that if they wanted to. So, in other words, so those functions are not required to be. They still could be, but they’re not required to be in the Planning Department in regard to subdivisions. So, it just says they ‘may’ be transferred or shared, but they may not be. The two other changes: one is in the last Charter, as part of a Charter Amendment, there was language in there which deleted the ‘adopting rules and regulations having the force and effect of law’ and I’m embarrassed to say, since I voted on that - I was on the Council actually and voted on that being put on the ballot, I’m not sure just why that got passed, but our attorney, who also was very embarrassed that he didn’t recall it being on the ballot last time and picking up on that as an issue, did red flag it as an issue here, and didn’t think file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-11-00.html7/1/2011