2000-05-10 Charter Commission Minutes

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Transcript of Meeting of May 10, 2000Page 6 of 62 The other thing is the proper qualifications for Department Heads. This is really a critical issue in the good functioning of any government. If you take the Department Head qualifications away, you leave the door open for favoritism, appointment of people who are not qualified but happen to be friends of so and so, etc., etc. We don’t ask a surgeon that hasn’t gone to medical school to take out our appendix and we shouldn’t be asking a non-engineer to make engineering decisions. So we ask you very, very sincerely to pay heed to these things. They are very important. Thank you. RAY: Okay, thank you. Marshall Blann followed by Walt Kriewald. BLANN: Thank you for the opportunity to voice my opinions. I’ve had a chance now to study the document which I picked up at the Waimea reading. I have a series of comments; some a little bit substantive, the other a little bit more nitpicking. To go out of order before going into the order of the list from Waimea, first thing was the Audit Department. My understanding was, because they hadn’t done an audit in eight years, we’re going to change the name to Legislative Research. Now, it might be the reason they haven’t done an audit is because none of them appointed has any accounting experience or auditing experience. The Mayor may have his reasons for appointing people like that. RAY: This is part of the County Council Office. It’s not part of the Administration. BLANN: Okay, thank you. What I was going to say is any governmental agency that has $180 million annual budget, or even a smaller, needs to have an accounting done every year, if it’s not. In fact, it, I don’t think, should be done by the Audit Department. So, if they’re not doing that, I’d say get rid of the Audit Department. (indiscernible) be done by an independent national auditing organization. RAY: By the way, the County is audited by an independent national auditing agency every year. BLANN: Are they? Oh, okay, thank you. I’m relieved then because I thought that wasn’t. The next item I wanted to mention is I don’t know if it’s possible to put some sort of an ethics conflict of interest resolution before the County to vote on. It’s nice to brag to my friends from Texas that members of our Council from Hilo and Puna get contributions from as far away as Long Island, New York, and that they’re appreciated by corporations that far away, but I think when they vote on issues effecting those corporations, it would be ethical and correct for them to recuse themselves. I think the voters of this island would go along with that. I think it would be nice if they had a chance to vote on that. All right, now I’d like to go to some of the specific items. I would say I’m not in favor of the at-large, as I stated last time. The Managing Director. I don’t know that it’s stated but I would think he should have the same professional qualifications as a County Manager would have, though I would prefer that there be, in fact, a County Manager. On Article V, Section 5-1.2, I would just suggest a small change of wording. It says ‘the mayor may serve for more than two terms but shall not serve more than two consecutive full terms’. I’d suggest changing that ‘may serve for more than two terms, but shall not be elected to more than two consecutive terms’. Conceivably one day, you might get someone unscrupulous who might resign just before the end of the term, as it’s worded now, and run again for re-election. That would not be in the sense of this. So if we just said ‘shall not be elected to more than two consecutive full terms’, I think that would take care file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 05-10-00.html7/1/2011