2000-03-25 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 03-25-00Page 28 of 34 measure all those sorts of things. When you start governing based on results rather than throwing money at things, or who screams the loudest, it changes the whole nature of government. All these other things you’re trying to fix by a rule here and a rule there, they tend to disappear. You give more autonomy to the actual departments. If they do something half of what they thought it was going to cost, you don’t take the money away, you leave it in the department so that they can further their mission and their goals, whatever it is, and invest in long-term. It encourages them to think long-term. Right now, if you don’t spend the money that you get within the budgeting period, they take it away and put it back in the General Fund, so at the end of every budgeting period there’s this rapid thing -- Oh, we’ve got some money left. Let’s spend it on something. We gotta spend it on something or they’re going to take it away. I mean it’s ridiculous. And so they spend it on all sorts of things with absolutely no thought. And the other one is the one that Keiko Bonk mentioned, an ongoing Civil Grand Jury process. What you do is you basically allow anyone to nominate themselves. Then they’re screened for conflicts of interest, criminal records, that sort of stuff, and then you do a random poll. You pick however many, nine or ten or however many you decide, out of that. That way, there’s no money involved in it and as long as it’s truly open and honest picking, you can’t rig having certain kinds of people getting on this. It changes all the time. You stagger it so that it’s a year-long appointment but every six months - They’re staggered so they overlap six months. And these people are basically responsible for investigating for the whole government, not just for Fire, for this, whatever, the whole government. They have the powers of subpoena to investigate any corruption, or any conflicts or interest, or any citizen complaints, and if they don’t find anything, they just go on. If they do, they hand over criminal indictments and then the Prosecuting Attorney takes it from there. You add professional standards, Civil Grand Jury, and outcome based budgeting; all these other problems go away, or are drastically diminished. Otherwise, every ten years you’re trying to, essentially, rewrite your Constitution, because that’s what the Charter is. I think that the history of this process has been rather depressing, and I think, to get back to specifics, the island-wide districts is going to turn back the progress of ten years. Basically increase participation, while the rest of the country’s participation has been going down, it’s been going up, or staying the same, on this island. You should look at why. I mean, people might be angry, but they’re more involved than they are in most places. That’s a good thing and it should encouraged, not discouraged. Thank you. RAY: Yes, Mike, anything you could give us in writing in regard to Charter Amendments addressing the budgeting process - CHRISTOPHER: I can give you a recommendation for one book that, sort of, covers all this, and it’s broken down - RAY: It would be a lot more helpful if you’d do the homework. CHRISTOPHER: All right. I’ll pull it out and give it to you but the reason I recommend the book - RAY: You know what they say at the Legislature. You write the bill for me, right? CHRISTOPHER: The reason I recommend the book is because it is broken down into specific, like bulleted sort of stuff. You don’t actually have to read the whole book, and it gives specific examples for each place that it’s worked. And it’s called Reinventing Government. It was a best selling book. HERKES: Oh, I have it. I’ve read it. CHRISTOPHER: It’s a best selling book. But I actually have a summary of it that I used in a class, an outline which I’d be happy to give you. RAY: Okay, but we’re interested in specific recommendations in regard to changing the Charter because I think Maui County follows a similar budgeting process, but I don’t think they changed anything in their Charter. I think that’s just something they did administratively. CHRISTOPHER: It’s not something that you have to have a Charter Amendment for. The Mayor could do it on their own, and I know Keiko, it’s her intent to do it. But it’s also something that the Charter Commission could require and that way, you don’t have to worry about a future Mayor deciding, hey, I kind of like the old pork front policies, let’s go back to that. RAY: Okay, thank you. Sue? IRVINE: A couple of things. We did get quite a bit of input from Finance on this, and didn’t get a clear picture of exactly what we should do to change things. Possibly, you do have one real specific - They kept saying, well, we’re going to program based budgeting, but you want to go one step further to outcomes based. If you have a suggestion like that, I think it’s great. file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-25-00.html7/1/2011