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<br />brought forth with signatures representing, I think, 20% of the registered voters in the
<br />prior election; and by Council ordinance which is pretty common. The County Council
<br />can vote to bring forth a Charter Amendment and then it appears, if it passes by six
<br />votes at three Council hearings, then it would appear on the next election. And all
<br />three methods of amending the Charter all appear at a General Election for the general
<br />public to vote on. So, in any of these cases, they're just proposed amendments that go
<br />in front of the voters. So, that's the process in all three cases.
<br />We're an eleven member Commission appointed by the Mayor, approved by the
<br />Council. We have an appropriated budget of $130,000. The last Charter Review
<br />Commission expended $113,000. That was the one about ten years ago. Our chief
<br />costs are labor costs. We have a full time Administrative Assistant with a home office,
<br />Legal Counsel, meeting costs and .public notice, and then fairly substantial printing and
<br />advertising costs to get the final product out for the public to understand, just general
<br />education, leading up to the election. To date, out of that $130,000 appropriated, we
<br />have expended a little over $50,000 and have about $80,000 remaining.
<br />We've been meeting since last February. We've held 29 meetings to date, which
<br />included nine public hearings to date. All the meetings are publicly noticed, and in
<br />addition, for the public_ hearings, we've sent out informational packets to, I think, 280
<br />community civic organizations around the island, prior to holding both sets of public
<br />hearings. We did six public hearings last summer, and we're engaged in four public
<br />hearings right now. So, prior to that, we sent out informational packets to a pretty
<br />comprehensive group of organizations around the island. We're presently discussing
<br />19 proposed amendments. These are amendments which have, or did have, a pretty
<br />strong level of support by a majority of the Commission members, but we haven't even
<br />voted on some of these in a preliminary fashion. Anyway, they're all subject to a final
<br />vote before we go forward, but not necessarily will all these appear. In fact I feel pretty
<br />comfortable saying a number of them, we've already pretty much reached agreement,
<br />we probably won't _go forward with, And there are some other suggestions that have
<br />come up from the public that we will be considering. But we wanted to engage the
<br />public with something concrete sooner rather than later because, generally, folks aren't
<br />interested until they have something before them to look at. So, we wanted to come
<br />out, even though these are somewhat preliminary in nature, sooner rather than later.
<br />We hope to wrap up our final proposed amendments with the ballot language by June
<br />or so, and then have a fairly lengthy time before the election for general education on
<br />the proposed amendments that we'll come up with. So this is the last of the four public
<br />hearings that we've got scheduled right now. We'II be holding regular and extra
<br />Commission meetings, in the next month or two, to come up with a final product. So,
<br />want to briefly run through - I guess you all have copies of the proposed amendments
<br />that are up for discussion today. Does anybody need to testify immediately, prior to me
<br />running through these? I'll go through them pretty quickly. Del.
<br />PRANKE: The only thing - Apple and I have a noon meeting but we're not in
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