CHC 1979-03-13 - Laserfiche WebLink

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I 'd like to ask. you first how you would like me to proceed. I have a little presentation here which I think will take about fifteen minutes. Would you like to have that or would you rather just ask questions about our deliberations ; why we made the recommendations in our letters to you or note CHAIRMAN SAKATA: You may proceed any w'ay you want. I think it probably would be much better if you present your testimony at' th:eZmeeti.n.g;Yfst so we can understand what is going on and then we can- ask questions. MR. MOSS: Fine, thank you very much. First, I 'd like to sayj:jaust one thing about the West Hawaii Committee so you will know who we are. Basically, we are a group of non- partisan, concerned citizens in Kona. The original purpose of the organization when it started about ten years ago was to try to get a little bit better representation for Kona and a little more attention from the government for Kona and West Hawaii problems , insgeneral. However, we have. come a long way since that initial period and today we are much more interested--we are still interested in Kona, obviously--but we are more inter- ested, particularly so today in things that are of general interest to the citizens of the Hawaii County. Our members have had world-wide experience in many fields and we average a little bit over 22 years in the islands each. We meet once a week. We 've had quests quite often for luncheon . We've had the - Mayor; we 've hada majority of the County Council ; we've had department heads ; we 've had people from the mainland occasionally come in. We try to get as much information as we can on various subjects and we try to make our expetise and our background experience available to anybody who would like to take advantage of it. We started studying the charter back in November because we feel it is probably the most important • political event going on in the county for this year and it is going to set the pace for the county for the next 10 years. I 'd like to take the points we made in our letter to you of late February sort of right down the line and try to explain to you how we think they meet the objective, our determin- ation objective of reestablishing the people as the de t ation of the form of government we get here as opposed to the growth of big government in this county Into the past 10 years under the present charter. For example;' in the past 10 years the county population has grown 27% but the county employees have grown 65%. The operating budget, corrected for inflat,ion , has increased 100% and the debt service, again correctdd forme-_. inflation, has increased 120%. The.. county debt has rise-from $10 million to '$40 million. That is not corrected for inflation. That is just plain dollars. And we are running $5 or $6 million a year of more debt as we go along. Well , somewhere, it seems to me this has to stop and one of the things that we are looking at here is the reestablishrnent ,of somescontrol over the growth of this government. ,- f'2- -