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• HERKES: I don't know how I feel about it either but I'm investigating as fast as I can. Are you aware that we are the only county in the state that does not have nonpartisan elections now? BOB JACOBSON: Yes I am. HERKES: And so that gives us some experience with the other counties who have all chosen to go nonpartisan. They have all voted in favor of nonpartisan elections so I'm doing as much homework as I can to find out why they did that. Why the other counties have made a decision that that's the best way to go so I think there are a lot of us involved in partisan politics in a lot of different ways and I share some of your concerns and I thank you for expressing them but we are trying to do our homework and find out why the other counties have done that. BOB JACOBSON: But certainly before you go into this, there is all these other aspects of it that come into play and look a little bit further abroad than just say, Oahu and Kauai, where really it came up - HERKES: I want to look to Maui really. They just did it. BOB JACOBSON: And I think there are other areas that you should look at also in terms of that. It's not a simple issue. RAY: Okay, thanks Bob. Kathy Dorn. And Kathy's the last speaker signed up so if anyone else would like to sign up to speak this evening, please do so. DORN: Good evening. There's one area of the Charter I would like you to take a look at and that is regarding the initiative referendum process. It would open the doors wider to democratic participation in our government, I feel, if the requirement was lowered to 10% of, I believe, of the registered voters voting in the previous election instead of the 15%. The 10% is still a huge number of signatures of registered voters to gather. It would certainly not ever be done frivolously and yet, it would make the process, the democratic process, available to more people who feel strongly about getting certain issues before the public. And I also want to speak against holding special elections for all the reasons everyone else has. My personal friend, Joe Okita, just told me yesterday, he's head of the Hawaii Housing Authority for this island and he just came back from serious budget talks in Oahu and he said they're strangling them with the budget cuts and they expect them to do the same amount of work and provide for the same amount of people on 12