2000-04-01 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 04-01-00Page 2 of 22 We’ve been meeting since last February. We’ve held 29 meetings to date, which included nine public hearings to date. All the meetings are publicly noticed, and in addition, for the public hearings, we’ve sent out informational packets to, I think, 280 community civic organizations around the island, prior to holding both sets of public hearings. We did six public hearings last summer, and we’re engaged in four public hearings right now. So, prior to that, we sent out informational packets to a pretty comprehensive group of organizations around the island. We’re presently discussing 19 proposed amendments. These are amendments which have, or did have, a pretty strong level of support by a majority of the Commission members, but we haven’t even voted on some of these in a preliminary fashion. Anyway, they’re all subject to a final vote before we go forward, but not necessarily will all these appear. In fact I feel pretty comfortable saying a number of them, we’ve already pretty much reached agreement, we probably won’t go forward with. And there are some other suggestions that have come up from the public that we will be considering. But we wanted to engage the public with something concrete sooner rather than later because, generally, folks aren’t interested until they have something before them to look at. So, we wanted to come out, even though these are somewhat preliminary in nature, sooner rather than later. We hope to wrap up our final proposed amendments with the ballot language by June or so, and then have a fairly lengthy time before the election for general education on the proposed amendments that we’ll come up with. So this is the last of the four public hearings that we’ve got scheduled right now. We’ll be holding regular and extra Commission meetings, in the next month or two, to come up with a final product. So, I want to briefly run through - I guess you all have copies of the proposed amendments that are up for discussion today. Does anybody need to testify immediately, prior to me running through these? I’ll go through them pretty quickly. Del. PRANKE: The only thing - Apple and I have a noon meeting but we’re not in any rush. I don’t want to jump ahead of anybody. RAY: Going through them, one through nineteen. The non-partisan elections. This would basically effect all County elected officials. Should this pass, everyone running at a County level would run on a non-partisan basis. This has been adopted by every other county in the state; by the City and County of Honolulu about eight years ago, and by Maui and Kauai more recently. The way this process works in the election is if in the Primary you win 50% of the votes plus one, you win outright. Otherwise, the top two folks go on to the General. If item number 2 should pass, in other words, creating at-large seats, we’ve also addressed that and proposed language in regard to how the at-large seats would work in the Primary and the General Election, and basically for the three at-large seats, the language suggested today is that the top six voters in the Primary would go to the General. If there were six or fewer, there would be no Primary. There would only be a General Election. So, we’ve tried to follow models that are most commonly used in other jurisdictions across the country. And these, like I say, are very common. In fact, I think close to 80% of all similar jurisdictions have non-partisans at this point in time. It’s pretty routine how these things work other places. Number 2, the Council to include at-large seats. This is probably the item that we’ve received the most amount of testimony on. Probably the most controversial. This would change our present Council representation from the nine single member districts, running for two-year terms, to having six single member districts and they’d be the same districts as the State House of Representatives. They’d be six single member districts running for the two-year terms, and then the suggestion is that we’d have at-large seats which would run for four-year terms. We’re up in the air about exactly how we’d implement this, and the effect on term limits. We had term limits kick in in 1996 that created four two-year terms for the County Council. So, we’re in a little bit of a dilemma as far as should this pass, when to implement it; what effect it would have on the term limits. And a couple of possibilities are that you could implement it in 2004. In other words, it wouldn’t take place until four years after it was voted in. I don’t really like that idea of pushing it that far into the future. If we were to implement it in 2002, there are couple of things we could do. We could make the first at-large term for two years only, and then after that the at-large seats would be for four-year terms. If we did that, it would have two pluses, in my mind. Number 1, it would make the terms concurrent with the Mayor’s term. And the plus of that is a lot of people that are in favor of the four-year terms - One dynamic that they like is that you’re training Council people and grooming them to run for the Mayor’s race. In other words, these would be island-wide elected Council terms, and logically people that may be interested in running for Mayor. So, if that were the case, it would probably make sense to have those terms run concurrent with the Mayor’s term, in the same cycle. The other thing that would do is it would avoid any conflict with the term limits because the first suggestion we came up with a proposal is that we would allow a one-time exception in 2002, when this kicked in, to allow any of the seated Council members to run for a four-year term, so if you’d been in office since 1996, and you were allowed to run for a four- year at-large seat in 2002, it means your term would be extended to ten years instead of eight. So that would be the practical effect of that. But that would also create a term that wouldn’t be concurrent with the Mayor’s. So, I like the idea, and I’m going to be arguing but we’ll see how it comes out, for the first at-large term being for two years only. Then it would be concurrent with the Mayor’s and wouldn’t conflict with the term limits. But in any case, all this depends on whether it passes or not, in the first place. Another dilemma in regard to creating these at-large seats, and doing away with the nine Council seats is its effect on Boards and Commissions. In other words, presently we have two Commissions that are tied to the nine Council districts, Planning and Police. We’re also recommending, in here, tying the Water Commission to the nine Council file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-01-00.htm7/1/2011