CHC 1979-02-27 - Laserfiche WebLink

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And our guideline at that time was primarily the difference between what we saw as administration and what we saw as policy. Because the whole idea of the strong mayor form and for that matter the county manager form is a separation from administration and policy. I would assume that the beef that the council has right now is that the administration is entering into policy. Maybe they are, I don ' t know. I 'm not close enough to tell. MR. TRULSON: Mr. Koehnen, we 've had some testimony regarding redistricting of the County Council. Mr. Garcia had one proposal today. We have had others. Could you remember perhaps how you came about to the present structure where we have six districts, three at-large. MR. KOEHNEN : I can remember that very well because that was and will be for this review body one of the most pressing issues. It always is. it is an emotional issue. You go to people in Kona and they feel very uptight because they think they are not adequately represented under the present system. Interestingly enough the present system was actually a compromise that was proposed by Ichiro Shikada who was the Kona representative on the commission. But it was really a compromise. We were working at a time when the supreme court had just come out with several of their decisions concerning the one man one vote idea. We were very concerned with trying to conform to the supreme court ' s decision as to what would be an acceptable form of representation and what acceptable apportionment would be. We had a difficult time coming up with figures. The census had, the last census was the 1960 one which was quite some time before. The figures on that were not all that good. There had been population shifts obviously. So we could use the State Department ' s planning figures on population and their estimates. We could use the census figures. Or use- the registered voters. There are any number of criteria that you could use to say this is what the popu- lation of Ka'u is or this is what the population of some other area is . Ultimately we came down in discussing repre: ,_: sentative, or the concept of district representation. We came down to the fact that Ka'u is the smallest entity and if you took the population of the island, or if you took registered voters , or whatever you took and you worked out the numbers you came up with a council of something like eighteen members. We thought that was a little much. At the same time there were some who wanted pure- at-large. You know in theory I think you might argue that pure at-large is the most perfect form of representation . But here again it was obvious that in a pure at-large there might be too much dominance by Hilo being the major population center. So we went through innumerable plans and we finally came up with this when Shikada proposed this and he finally was able to garner enough support for it and that is what we came up with. -15-