2000-04-01 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 04-01-00Page 5 of 22 that they’re addressed differently in terms of professional standards and, in our mind, the pay rates tied to these. So, we will be coming out with some corrections there. Also, in the sections in the Charter, some of these job qualifications don’t appear in the Charter Sections, and they’re, kind of, lumped in in a section in the back of the Charter. We are going to try to clean that up, and have the Department Head qualifications dealt with in the Charter in the sections where they appear. Impeachment. There are two suggestions being proposed here. One is to do away with one of the grounds for impeachment, and that’s the term ‘maladministration’, which the feeling is that there is no clear legal definition for that. It’s more suggesting a grounds for impeachment is you don’t like the way somebody’s doing their job vs. they’re not breaking the law, like under malfeasance, that type of legal definition where they’re required to do something by law and they’re not doing it, which seems to be more of a grounds for impeachment vs. maladministration. So, that’s trying to address that issue. Also, we’re suggesting raising the threshold in terms of the number of signatures from 100 to some number. We initially suggested 3%. We’ll probably lower that, and we also have to deal with a somewhat thorny issue of where the signatures come from in the single member districts, whether we would allow signatures island-wide to effect the impeachment in a single district, or whether we would restrict it and how that would effect the number of signatures required. Obviously, you wouldn’t necessarily have the same level of signatures if you were restricting it to a district impeachment process vs. an island-wide. So, we’ll come up with something that, hopefully, makes more sense in regard to that issue, and we’ve gotten some good testimony and suggestions in regard to that. By increasing the number of signatures from 100, which the court will handle, we’ve also had to come up with language which would request the verification of the signatures, and it pretty much follows the way it’s done now with recall and referendum – just setting forth a procedure for how the signatures would be verified. So that will be part of the suggested language dealing with the signature verification. Number 13, Special Counsel. This is a request from the Corporation Counsel to do away with a potential dilemma where Corporation Counsel is required to hire special counsel, and right now the County Council has to approve that. They would still have to approve funds being appropriated for this, but it would remove a potential conflict if the Council decided they didn’t want to approve it, and Corp Counsel felt like they had to appoint special counsel, they would be allowed to do that and would eliminate a potential conflict where the Council didn’t want to go along with that. The Council would still have to approve the overall funding, the funding appropriation, for hiring special counsel; in other words, that category in the budget. In other words, the Corporation Counsel couldn’t hire counsel, the effect being going beyond the appropriated amount in the budget for special council, so by this passing, it wouldn’t increase the authority of the Corporation Counsel to increase spending more money in the budget category. The next, Board of Appeals. This was a suggestion that was tied to creating the Division of Permitting, which we’re not going forward with, so I think we’ll probably eliminate this, as far as moving the Board of Appeals at this time. And then, should that be brought forward in the future, then that could be addressed appropriately at that time. Department Head Qualifications. Just going through and trying to beef up the professional qualifications for the different Department Heads. Police Commission. This taking some language we like - I’ve been representing in the last few hearings that this is language that came from the Fire Commission, and our counsel reminded me at the last public hearing that, actually, this language is coming out of the Police Commission from the City and County of Honolulu. Not from the Fire Commission. So, we’re taking some language we liked from the City and County Police Commission, inserting it in the body of the language for the statement of policy section on the Police Commission. So, basically that’s taking some language that we liked in regard to the overall statement of policy from the Police Commission from the City and County, recommending that to go into the Charter for the Police Commission, and also adding a couple of additions regarding review of department’s operations and requiring an annual evaluation of the performance of the Police Chief to be submitted to the Mayor and the Council. So, those are the two additional suggestions there. Water Commission. The suggestion there is to change the Commission make-up from the nine members tied to six larger geographical districts to the nine Council districts. So the effect of this is you’d have more island-wide geographical representation on the Water Commission than the way it works now. And the way it works now is it allows the Mayor to appoint nine Commission members much more heavily from East Hawaii than West Hawaii. So this would mandate a wider geographic distribution, as is mandated in the Police and Planning Commission. Salary Commission. This would change the way the salaries are set for the Department and the Deputy Department Heads. It would allow an appointed Salary Commission to set these salaries. And this is a process which is very subject to politics. The net effect is it is awfully difficult for an elected body, i.e. the County Council, to offer raises. My experience, and the experience of a number of Commission members, is that you go years and years and years without salaries being increased for the Department Heads, and they tend to get really out of whack, not only with the Civil Service salaries in the file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-01-00.htm7/1/2011