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• serve two things. When you're talking about the balance, I think, both, in our Federal
<br />government and in our State government, the balance is achieved by the President
<br />representing all the voters, and then we have the Congress which is single member
<br />districts around the country, so you have the balance of the local issues, which Dan
<br />Inouye and these guys are dealing with, and also the national issues. We have the
<br />same thing here. The Mayor, island -wide, and the Council members, and in fact, I
<br />believe on our island, I mean those of you who have been on the Council know better,
<br />probably the Mayor has even a little more power vis-a-vis the Council than the U. S.
<br />President has vis-a-vis the Legislature. So I feel the body, as a whole, voting certainly
<br />has its place with the Mayor's election already. The other thing, I think, is more specific
<br />which was a real issue back when we were not single member districts here, places
<br />like Kohala and all, you get in a situation where one urban area like Hilo, all the
<br />politicians would have to cater to Hilo because that's where the bulk of the votes was
<br />coming. So, essentially Hilo's interests could dominate the island. Maybe in the future
<br />it'll be Kona's interests. I don't know that. I'm not complaining about Hilo but just the
<br />centralization of power. If you go three island -wide districts on the Council, now we
<br />have three districts just in Hilo, and two in Kona. Three just in Hilo. Probably if we
<br />knock it down to six individual districts, you're going to have only two in Hilo, then you
<br />also have three island -wide, so again, if the island -wide districts are mostly controlled
<br />by Hilo, five out of nine are controlled by Hilo. Control is a strong word, of course, but
<br />essentially you're pulling back to the same problem we had before.
<br />SANTANGELO: And, mind you, my dialogue with you is simply to bring information
<br />and get opinion, but again, we go back to that and right there, there was maybe a little
<br />bit of talk of territorialism. Remember, we have got a census coming up right now.
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<br />GRAHAM: Right.
<br />SANTANGELO: And these districts are going to change drastically, and we haven't
<br />talked about this much, but in this six single and three at -large, you're not getting rid
<br />of single member districts.
<br />GRAHAM: I understand. It's just diluting the impact of single member districts,
<br />that's what I'm saying. And you're increasing the island -wide impact.
<br />SANTANGELO: But your opinion is very important and that's the only reason that I
<br />entered into this dialogue. I don't want to lobby for anything specifically because we
<br />haven't even talked about it, but thank you.
<br />GRAHAM: Sure.
<br />RAY: Just so you know, and for the record, we have not formally taken
<br />up this discussion yet, but we definitely will be, and members have expressed their
<br />interest in introducing something along those lines, and that's one of the models, the
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