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• an election. Is that possible? YUEN: No. In some states, you will see judicial opinions that come out from their Supreme Courts entitled "In re ballot question such and such". I'II double check this but I'm almost certain that you can't do that in Hawaii. There are declaratory judgments but they require actual controversy between parties. You have to have somebody sue somebody else over a declaratory judgment and then you can't take it directly to the Hawaii Supreme Court. It starts off in Circuit Court and Circuit Court is not going to be good enough. You would have to start off with two people that had opposing points of view on this and they would bring a suit to Circuit Court and then you would have to get the loser to appeal it to the Supreme Court and it's very likely that all of the Courts would decline to hear it in advance of there being a real question because it's just something that's being contemplated at this time. As I mentioned - BESS: I'm not suggesting that we do it at this stage of the game prior to the time that the Charter Commission suggests that we change the form. We take action. We're presenting this amendment. Now it's going to go on the ballot at some point in time down the line. Then you've got something that's real and perhaps, you could talk the AG into suing us but to do it through the Court rather than through the AG's office. S YUEN: It would be highly desirable to be able to do this and it makes so much sense and the kind of thing you're talking about - I think we've all seen things that have happened where governments have taken certain actions and things have gone on, sometimes for years, and then it finally gets to the Hawaii Supreme Court and it gets thrown out when, if people had known when it was even being contemplated that it was not going to be legal, that they wouldn't have started off down that road. I hate to say you can't do something. It would be a creative kind of case to try to get the Hawaii Supreme Court to make a decision on this before it was actually brought up to the voters and it would be a first if we got them to do it. I don't know that they've outright said that they won't do something like this but it would definitely be a first. BESS: I guess the thing that concerns me about all of this is that when you listen to the legal arguments here, well, do we have a choice. My feeling, number one, is that the State law is very clear about structure and organization and if this isn't structure and organization, I understand that you can't give a 100% limitation, but I would hate the legal arguments to preclude us from considering this issue because one of the things that I find attractive about this form of government is that from the limited testimony we've had, and in observing the way County government has been functioning, it appears that there's a real dissatisfaction with separation of powers, that everybody's talking about more balance and that the Council wants to perform more functions that, perhaps, border on being administrative, if not administrative. I'm not taking any position here with regard but the way it's working is that you have two 17