2000-03-25 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 03-25-00Page 26 of 34 CHRISTOPHER: Good afternoon. My name’s Dr. Michael Christopher. I wanted to offer a couple general points, and then offer my specific comments on some of the amendments. My general comments come from the fact that, while I don’t claim to be an expert on all these issues, this is my field, human development, and I do teach an introductory course on the global history of urbanization, which is really what you’re talking about here; the process of moving to an urban society, and all the changes that are involved in it. And I’m a little disturbed about what appears to me to be the logic of how the whole Commission is working. It seems to me that you haven’t adequately clarified what it is you want to do, or what results you want to get. And you seem to be looking at the mainland and saying most people are doing it this way. Maybe we should consider doing it this way. The problem with that is if you look at city and county government across the United States, especially compared to the rest of the world, it’s a mess. It’s a real mess. It’s not just a mess here, it’s a mess all across the country. What you should be doing is trying to figure out what results do you want to accomplish, and then search to find those places that have successfully achieved those results. And those results tend to come in three categories; you want honest government, you want efficient government, and you want high participation. We do badly in the first two, but we do very good, in fact, just about the highest in the nation in terms of participation. Hawaii still has the highest participation rate in local government of just about any place in the country, and every place else, it’s been declining. There are places in the country where people are elected on 5% of the eligible voters to local government. I mean participation has been dropping drastically for two generations, and some of the solutions that are being proposed here are closely linked with that general decline. One of them is non-partisans. As you said, if you look at the history, there was a time when most local races were all partisan. Now most are not partisan. There was a time when you had 90% participation in local government. Now you have an average of 20% participation in local government. Those two trends have gone in the same direction. Non-partisan -- I’m not saying it’s always the cause but it’s closely correlated with, and it has to do with, some of the reasons that Keiko mentioned. They have to do with, sort of, decline of parties, the increasing costs, media driven aspects, and all sorts of things like that. But, it’s not a universal process. There are exceptions. And you should be looking at the communities that have higher participation and trying to imitate them rather than simply saying most people do it this way. Maybe we should consider doing this way. So I wanted to give a couple of specific comments. I mentioned non-partisan. There is a correlation between non-partisan and lack of participation. It doesn’t absolutely have to be that way, but that’s the way the trend usually goes. Political parties, while anybody who’s ever been active in one knows that they’re not a pleasant process. Generally speaking, political parties have been more progressive, the membership, and have pushed for more things than the people that those parties actually elect. The parties tend to be more progressive if you - Just read their platforms. They advocate all sorts of things that are very popular, but the elected officials never actually implement. You take that away. They never even have to address those issues. Parties, even today, as weak as they are, and they’re very weak, often times they’re just a sort of label for five guys that do everything - Even today, they are a thorn in the side of politicians that don’t want to respond to unpopular issues, or issues that require significant change in the status quo. The at-large districts. There’s, I think, a number of areas that need to be thought about there, and it also is very important to think about them in their connection with the Managing Director position. I actually think that the position that you’ve come to on the Managing Director makes the most sense, and it is, I believe although I don’t have real scientific, quantitative evidence, the direction you’re going to see things going, and this is why. If you have a Council based Managing Director, it tends to work well in one situation -- highly homogenous communities in which everybody sees things the same, shares a common culture, and there’s not a lot of diversity. And it works well with all at-large Council seats. When you go to Council district races and you have a Managing Director, what happens is you end up, specifically if you have a community that has a great deal of ethnic and cultural diversity, as we do, you tend to get Council districts that begin to play on these differences – East side, West side, haole, local. All those sorts of things become bigger political issues, and the Managing Director, the person who’s supposed to be responsible for coordinating everything, becomes basically a hostage to this kind of politics. If you have all island-wide then it can work, but then you’re raising the cost tremendously of getting involved so while you increase the efficiency, you lower the participation enormously. And so, I often don’t agree with many of the people on this Commission on issues, but I think the compromise that you’ve come up with, of professionalizing the Managing Director, but still having them appointed by a Mayor who still is a strong Mayor, but being approved by the Council, preserves the best of all situations. And there’s one other key issue there. Counties, or cities, or any government, need two things. They need management and they need leadership. They’re very different characteristics. Good managers are traditionally terrible leaders. Good leaders may or may not be good managers, but there’s no real correlation between them, particularly in a community where you’re going to undergo huge change, and this is one place where you’re going to see that the old way of life is gone. You need an elected official that has vision and whose job is leadership, to clearly articulate, okay, this is where we were and this is where we’re going. Only a Mayor can do that. A Managing Director cannot, and never has. And if you look around the country, at places where cities have been most innovative, where they’ve gone from being a complete chaos to now being - Actually, the most innovative parts of American government, they’re strong Mayor system. Now, you may not always agree with them, like Guliani, or something like that, but no one knows the name of a famous County Manager reformer. There’s no such thing. There’s never been one. They’re very good in a stable, homogenous, unchanging file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-25-00.html7/1/2011