CHC 1979-02-27 - Laserfiche WebLink

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I heard someone say the other day that this idea of residency requirement was unconstitutional. I would tend to disagree because as I recall we had a direct decision by the supreme court that was quite similar where you could stipulate residency as long as everybody got to vote on it. And that is really what we have on the other than the pure at-large seat. Now, the other thing that enters into that is that under the old system we had East Hawaii and West Hawaii. As far as other subdivisions between East and West Hawaii you get down to the traditional geographic district. North and South Hilo don ' t seem to fight too much. Basically you had Hilo, Hamakua, Kohala and there is a little bit of feeling between North and South Kohala but basically Kohala would sell. You had Kona and it didn ' t matter too much be- tween North and South Kona, and you had Ka'u. So you were trying to come up with something that would give you. . .make the numbers come out and there was a very strong feeling that if you were going to go district you had to go those districts. Now maybe you could have gone Ka'u, North Puna, North Hilo, South Hilo, North Hamakua or just Hamakua maybe, North Kohala, South Kohala and two Konas. You might but here again you've got the numbers problem. _ So what we came up was something that seemed acceptable then. Now, if people are willing to go representative district which is what Councilman Garcia was suggesting, I don ' t know, maybe that would be fine. I see no great problem there. At that time, they didn ' t seem to want to go that way. They felt that was fine as far as the state was concerned but when you get down to local government that wasn ' t what they wanted at all. Maybe things have changed. Ten years changes a lot of things. MRS. IWAMOTO: Mr. Koehnen , can you explain why the councilmen ' s terms were set for four years? MR. KOEHNEN : Yes , there was a lot of discussion over the expense of the election. And certainly it is higher now than it was then. So whether you could really get people to run for two years was a question. The other thing that came into p'lay:.was that once we decided on the business of the at- large election because basically that is what you have-, you _ have at-large with district residency in some cases, it was obvious that campaigning would be more expensive so to sort of to amortize the expense of campaigning, four years seemed better than two. Also from the point of view of the administra- tion , it was pointed out by almost all of the existing officers at that time, existing elected officers, that two years was not enough time to get a program through and that if you really were going to have a program you needed four years to implement it. Once we decided on four years for the administration as the proposer of programs, let ' s say, then you could also make -16-