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MR. TUCKER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am President of Friends of <br />Puna's Future. As an individual, though, I would like to start out on this address issue as <br />far as for verifying people's identities. It occurs to me, in my reality as an individual, I <br />live on a street in which the county, last year, changed my house number and my street <br />name. And I'm sitting here right at the moment wondering if I would be a verified <br />signatory based on a street address that the county changed on me, as well as the street <br />number; so I'll have to look into that. <br />But basically, I would like to expand a little bit on our written testimony which Friends of <br />Puna's Future provided regarding CA -15, the 2% Land Fund. I'm hoping you have all <br />had a chance to read it this past week. We have been kind of intrigued by the arguments <br />presented to the Commission regarding the effect on the budget of the 2% Land Fund and <br />how it might reduce the flexibility of the Council; we wrote about that in our testimony. <br />In our testimony that we provided we highlighted some spending habits the county has <br />had and we were showing some examples of some things that were excessive spending in <br />some areas of tens of thousands of dollars and in some areas of hundreds of thousands of <br />dollars, and in some areas of millions of dollars, and in some areas of tens of millions of <br />dollars. <br />We submitted our testimony on January 29, 2010 and on February 4, 2010 we were <br />fascinated to read in the Tribune Herald regarding the impact fees being discussed. I'll <br />read one paragraph to you. "The County Council is considering impact fees on new <br />construction as an alternative to the County's current reliance on fair share contributions <br />from developers. The alternative came up Tuesday during a Finance Committee <br />discussion of a report that showed the County has collected only $8.1 million of $108.5 <br />million dollars developers have pledged." Now in addition to the tens of thousands and <br />hundreds of thousands we discussed in our written testimony, we now have a report of <br />$100 million dollars falling through the cracks herein the past few years. When Tim <br />Rees testified earlier about the lack of heavy lifting as far as addressing budgets, we <br />really think that trying to apply budget issues to the 2% fund is really missing the point. <br />The County has its own obligations to balance its budget. It has ways and means to do <br />that, which it has not been pursuing as yet; and its really not, in our opinion, appropriate <br />to be weighing, judging, or trying to put on the scale the effect of the 2% Fund from <br />voters. Now, in addition, I have just been reading the Legislative Auditor's report from <br />the Highway Fund. And while I have the Executive Summary here, it is rather <br />interestingly filled with phrases as far as the management of the Highway Fund, which is <br />a substantial part of our budget; phrases like the county has collectively failed to establish <br />recommended practice and practices, have not incorporated industry standards, has <br />historically failed to establish a tone at the top that requires outcome based planning, and <br />in the conclusions from the Legislative Auditor's office, one of the sentences applies to <br />this mission here for our Charter Commission and CA -15, it says we need to know where <br />we want to go as a County, how and when we are going to get there, what tasks need to <br />be completed and when, and what performance measures need to be implemented. Now, <br />this is where the 2% fund is functioning. It is where we want to go, how we are going to <br />14 <br />