CHC 1979-03-13 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

It is a. difficult problem with the one man, one vote concept to divide up the county in such a way that you can be reasonably even in the number of people per councilmember. Having played with a lot of ideas , we finally {said, based on the representative districts , the state rep- resentative districts today, the four districts , we would like to keep nine members on the council and the magic to nine mem- bers on the council is we have been told by students of political governments, that at county level about 10,000 people per representative is a good ball park number. We don ' t have quite 90,000 in the county now but we have more than 70, 000. So allowing for a little growth it looks to me like nine members is a good number to try to keep. Besides which, that is the number we have on the present County Council so you are not shac,ing up the apple cart too much. To get these nine people we think you should elect two from District 1 , which is Ka' u, Puna and the south part of South Hilo; three from District 2, which is all the rest of. South Hilo including all of the city; two from Distr =act 3, which has North Hilo., Hamakua and North Kohala and two from District 4, which is. South Kohala, North and South Kona. There: is considerable -controvers. y as to what the population particularly of West Hawaii is today. The Kona Chamber of Commerce thinks that there are, based on some statistical , research, there are, much more likely, in the neighborhood. of 25 , 000 people in Kona today rather than, the official figure of about 12, 000. I know that you have to base your represen- tatives based on official figures. You can ' t takeunofficial estimates. So to try to get around that problem, I looked at ?G' the number of registered voters in the various districts and if the allocation that we haves•as that you would have a-- that the District 3 , which is the North Hilo, Hamakua, North Kohala would actually not be entitled to two representatives. The spread between the District 3 which is the lowest number of voters per representative, which would be about 3,500. The highest representative district would be District 2, Hilo which would have one representative for about every 5 , 300 voters. There is a spread there of. one-to-one-and-a- half. In other words, the high number of voters per repre- sentatives is one-and-a-half times the low number. You say, maybe this isn ' t very good as far as one man , one vote is concerned but the state representatives have almost exactly that same ratio of high to low where you have the five representatives in the 4 districts in the State House. representing the county. So that is , to me, the obvious wayof electing the County Council There is one other thing that has to be said here though. I think very definitely you should put in the charter, provision for automatic redistricting at a given time. I don ' t know what form this takes but it is pretty obvious that 8 -