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HAWAII COUNTY CHARTER COMMISSION Transcript of Public Hearing March 11, 2000 Waimea Civic Center Waimea, Hawaii Members Present: J. Ray, S. Bess, M. Herkes, R. Higashi, S. Irvine, G. Martin (from 9:15 a.m.), G. Yoshiyama Absent: E. Alonzo, K. Balog, D. Kurozawa, J. Santangelo And 6 members of the public in attendance. The meeting was called to order at 9:05 a.m. RAY: I'd like to call the 1999-2000 Hawaii County Charter Commission Public Hearing to order. It's Saturday, March 11th. We're at the Waimea Civic Center in Waimea. Attendance. Present at this time, myself John Ray, Roland Higashi, Steve Bess, Marni Herkes, Sue Irvine, and Gary Yoshiyama, and we're expecting a couple of more folks to come in. If nobody objects, prior to Statements from the Public, if anybody's in a hurry and would like to go ahead and make a statement before I go through a brief summary, they're welcome to do so. So would anybody like to do that? Otherwise 1'd like to run through briefly a summary of where we are right now. So is that okay? And on the table there are the short form summaries that we mailed out, as well as more detailed summaries. Initially I want to make it very clear that this is very much a work in process. We're very open to input on what we've suggested, as well as anything else that the public may want to submit. We understand that even though it's kind of late in the process for us, that generally people don't engage things like this until they get a little further along and they have some meat to chew on and whatever. So, that's why we've been pushing to get proposed amendments out as quickly as possible. So, like I say, they're very much in progress and there's lots of things still to be decided, and a lot of votes still to be made, especially in terms of the language and the refining of some of these proposals. So we'll be doing that over the next couple of months before we take our final votes on the proposed amendments, and of course, all that will just be proposed for the election, which will be voted ori by the general public in November. Going through the proposed amendments as listed in the summary, first the non- partisan elections. I think that's pretty clear as far as, not only what that's all about but, how that would work in terms the Primary vs. the General Election if someone wins 50% plus one votes, they automatically win in the Primary. Otherwise, the top two vote getters go on to the Special Election. There's also an explanation that deals with the