2000-04-01 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 04-01-00Page 3 of 22 districts, and we may be expanding that to some other Commissions. So what happens if you vote in this new scenario, you do away with the nine Council seats. We don’t want to follow the six single member districts and the at-large make-up. We’d like to maintain the Commission positions tied to the nine Council districts. So, we can come up with language in the Charter which basically ties it to the nine Council seats as they existed in the year 2000. Practically that, sort of, addresses it, but it’s, sort of, messy too, and it would make it open to challenge in the future as things change in the future and you no longer than the nine district seats. In other words, somebody could challenge; well, does that make sense in the future as the make-up of the population changes, and whatever. So, we’re trying to figure out a way. I think the majority of the Commission would like to maintain the Commissions tied to those Council seats, but we’re not quite sure how we’re going to deal with it in terms of the proposed language to the Charter. And there’s not a perfect, clean way to deal with it if we are, or if you folks are, to do away with the at-large seats. Number 3, it says here Strengthen the Authority of the County Managing Director. This is another item we spent a lot of our time on, looking at the model of a Council Manager form of government vs. the strong Mayor form of government. We spent probably more time looking at this one, and looked at more material than anything else. The Council Manager form of government, in effect, does away with the Mayor, or makes it more of a figure head type position, or more attached or involved with the County Council than the Administration. We chose, instead, to recommend addressing pretty major changes in the County Charter in regard to the Managing Director, and hopefully, encouraging the Administration to use the Managing Director more as the Chief Operating Officer of the County, more the day-to-day, full time operating officer in charge of the day-to-day business. And the way we’ve addressed this is we’re suggesting rewriting the entire Executive Section of the County Charter, more along the lines of how Maui County has organized. And, basically, instead of separate sections in the Charter which deal with the Office of the Mayor and Departments, and the Office of Managing Director and Departments, and Departments connected to Boards and Commissions, creating one single Executive Branch County Departments, Chapter 1, where everything is under the Department of Management and the Managing Director. And we’ve also expanded the powers, duties and functions of the Managing Director, especially in terms of fiscal management, and in terms of calling out the role of the Managing Director and that whole process. And expanded the role of the Managing Director throughout the Charter, where in some sections it only mentions the Mayor, we’ve included the Managing Director in the chain of command, and the clear direction is to have the Managing Director more involved in the day-to-day management. That being said, this is still very much a strong Mayor form of government. The Mayor would still hire the Managing Director. One suggested addition that we’re putting forward is that the County Council would confirm the position, where they don’t now. Right now, that position is not subject to Council confirmation, so it would be in the suggested language. But this is still a strong Mayor form of government. We’re just trying to move it, in our mind, to what we think would be a more professional and efficient way to run the County government, but it still is subject to how the Mayor wants it to run, so that’s the bottom line. Number 4, a Fire Commission. Basically we followed the model of the City and County of Honolulu, to create a Fire Commission which, like I say, is pretty much based identically on the language in the City and County of Honolulu. It seems to operate there efficiently on a relatively small annual budget. It seems to have had a real positive influence on taking some of the politics of how that department works. And so, that’s the recommendation there. Number 5, creating a Department of Environmental Services, or Environmental Management. This suggestion would take two of the six divisions presently under the Public Works Department and break those away into a separate department, which would be called a Department of Environmental Services, or Management. The two divisions are the Waste Management and the Wastewater Divisions. So that would create a new department which would also be mandated to focus on waste diversion and recycling activities. Another activity which would probably fall under their purview would be the non point source pollution programs. The thought there is with the increasing complexity of the regulatory regime, especially in these areas, that it would be good to deal with this in a separate department. Also the size and complexity of the Public Works Department, with the six divisions now, it seems like a positive reorganizational move to split those out. This would make the change mandatory but the Council would have to pass an ordinance, and exactly how this would be restructured would be settled later in terms of the Department Head and whether they’d have a Deputy, or how all this would work. But our thought, if done properly, this would be a more efficient and a more cost efficient way to run government. We don’t anticipate any extra cost, in fact, hopefully just the opposite. In addition, we’re also suggesting creating a Commission that would be attached to this department. It would be an advisory Commission, but hopefully engage the general public more in these issues and also be an advocate for setting rates for these two departments. This is an area that the County Council has a tough time dealing with politically, setting these rates. So the Commission wouldn’t be empowered to set the rates, but hopefully would have a positive influence on engaging the public more in terms of more responsible rate structures. Number 6, this is entitled 6 and 10, Planning Department functions. There are two areas here. One was generated by an Administration initiative where the Mayor and the departments came to us early on in the process and asked that we create a Division of Permitting in the Public Works Department, and to remove all the subdivision functions from the Planning Department, and to move those over to Public Works. And their rationale is that this would be a more efficient way to file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-01-00.htm7/1/2011