CHC 1979-02-20 - Laserfiche WebLink

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There were very few alternatives. We pur- posely kept them down to just two. I don ' t know how many of you have seen this but this is the charter ballot of the special election in which the charter was adopted. There were just two propositions. One. .shall the proposed charter of the county be adopted and two. .an alternative on represen- tation. And that was it. Well , this did get it out. Whether it was the selling job that we did or whether by this time the people were less reluctant to change. Whether they understood the proposed:.=-changes better or just what the reasons were for the successful passage at that time it is a little hard to say. But I do think that because of the special election the interest was focused on it and it did pass. And that brings us to the document that you are reviewing today because one of the things that was written into this was the proposal, or the requirement for a mandatory review every ten years. And of course this was adopted in 1968 and ten years have gone by. At this time I would be very happy to try to answer any questions. Remember that memory turns dim after ten years but I ' ll be glad to try to answer any questions that you may have as to any specific item in this or the rationale for it. Perhaps giving you a little background on how and why some of these things are in here might be helpful . So if I may at this time, Mr. Chairman, I 'd like to throw it open to questions of that sort. I won ' t guarantee you that I can remember everything but maybe Akira can help me out on a few. MRS. KOBAYASHI : Mr. Koehnen , I thought that you were going to talk about the city manager form of govern- ment. Could you perhaps give us a short synopsis as to why the strong mayor form was chosen over the city manager type. MR. KOEHNEN: That goes along with why the strong mayor. Prior to the enactment of this charter we had a very weak mayor system here. We had the chairman and executive officer of the county who was elected at-large, county wide. We had three supervisors from East Hawaii , elected at-;large from East Hawaii and three from West Hawaii . And that was it. To begin with that probably would not have stood a constitutional test because only East Hawaii voted for theirs and only West Hawaii voted for theirs and there was a big imbalance in population. So I don ' t think that would have sold under the one man one vote concept. However the main reason for the idea of strengthening the mayor was the fact that the old county chairman really had no authority to speak of. He was a member of the board and he couldn ' t do a doggoned thing on his own. One of the biggest items that an executive has to control an organization is the budget. Under the old setup there was no specific responsibility as to who would make the budget. You couldn ' t find a thing in the law that said -12-