CHC 1979-06-26 - Laserfiche WebLink

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MR. ODA: Consistent with what? MR. ISHIDA: As to validity. MR. ODA: Well , you can give the reapportionment commission any amount of authority that you want. MRS. KOBAYASHI : Mr. Chairman. I cannot :a.gree with Mr. Ishida' s comments because for one thing it seems to me. . .well , this is a personal view, here we are, we have been meeting for what, 23 weeks on the Charter Commission, and now we are going to say, well , we have studied the charter but we don ' t know enough so we are going to give the composition of the council back to the reapportionment committee. It seems like what we have been doing this is for naught. We were together on the subcommittee _ on the reapportionment of the council and, I think we discussed the various concepts and if you give the reapportionment commission the authority to take away the mixed district and at-large that I think this commission is agreed on , that we are going to go 5 from a district and somebody at-large. You are saying that you are willing to give them the power to go completely at-large if they want to, or completely district if they want to. To me that would be defeating what you are doing right now today and I just cannot agree with :you on that. Why are we even a Charter Commission, then? MR. SCHUTTE : Mr. Chairman. I would like to side for a minute with Gloria. Mainly from that standpoint. I would expect that the direction this commission gives the reapportionment committee, or commission, would be very, or to some degree very explicit and not necessarily give them 'carte blanche so that they can do whatever they want to do. But give them a direction by which they may change depending on the residency census of 1980 or '83, or whatever it may be. I don ' t know if Mr. Ishida meant to give that commission or turn over the total responsibility of coming to a decision on this particular portion of the charter by passing it over to the reapportionment committee at a later date. I would like to get his views on that again. Was this your reason for addressing this or was that a misconception? MR. ISHIDA: If I follow your question correctly, Mr. Schutte, my position is this that if we do limit it now to a 5-4 or 5-2 situation and we say that the districting should be limited to five as far as the reapportionment is concerned, I think what we are doing, in fact, is we are tightening the authority of the commission because if we are attempting to go to district representation , I think then they should be given some authority to see whether the districting should be expanded instead of five, maybe seven , maybe nine single members. This is the thing that I have wrestled with the past-. week . If we are going to honor or attempt to go towards redistricting in a more district type of representation, that -13-