CHC 1979-02-20 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

The commission evolved a charter but there was a great deal of confusion when it went out on the ballot. It went out in the regular general election of 1966. As I recall that second charter there was, you 'd have to go back and dig the ballot out at the County Clerk ' s office. But I think you would find that there was something like twenty-five or thirty alternatives that people could vote on. It was an extremely confusing situation. The charter went to the council and the council could propose alternatives to the Charter Commission ' s recommendations. If they proposed an alternative it had to go on the ballot. So we had alternatives concerning apportion- ment, we had alternatives on almost every issue. It was a very confusing ballot. With another provision that worked against it , it required a majority vote, I think it was 'of, the registered voters , for the thing to pass . Now the manner of counting the votes then worked against the charter. The multiplicity of alternatives worked against it and as a result it too was defeated primarily on technicalities. The technicalities being the fact that even though the overall approval for the charter without the alter- natives carried a plurality of votes it was not a majority and therefore that charter was defeated. This led in turn to the appointment of the third Charter Commission in 1967. By mid 1967 I had left the county government and was back in private employment and Chairman Kimura at that time asked if I would serve as the chairman of the third Charter Commission. Which I was very happy to do. We had mostly experienced commissioners in the sense that all of them had been exposed to the work of the two prior commissions in one way or another so that everybody had some idea of what the ball game was all about. We did have the fairly tight time schedule. One of the things that had been determined from our previous experience with the two unsuccessful charters was that putting the ballot on the general election tended to submerge the charter to other interests. To the interests of the political campaigns themselves. Therefore it was felt that a special election would focus attention on the charter. Meanwhile, the various county officials realizing the difficulty of the way the law was written concerning counting the ballots did prevail upon the legislature to change that so that a simple plurality of those voting in that election if they approve the charter would be sufficient to pass it. The charter was completed at a fairly early stage. We then embarked upon a very extensive schedule of hearings throughout the island. We went into almost every little nook and cranny. I think Akira can tell you that we had at least two, sometimes three, hearings in almost every district. We vena back not only once but twice and three times. We never closed a hearing until the last person who wanted to speak had spoken. We let everyone have their say. We tried to answer every question that came up. We spent some real long nights believe me. But I think that in a way it paid off. -11-