CHC 1979-05-22 PH - Laserfiche WebLink

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presented by the Chamber of Commerce and our West Hawaii Com mittee; as a result of observing the council at work in Hilo; studying the budget hearings and the figures themselves ; and also reviewing the concerns;--of the citizens that have appeared to testify with you starting in N aalehu and completing last week in Waimea. If we are to have good county government, we have to have good men in it and basically the impact of those men are most important in the two classifications that we have, the mayor' s office and the membet's of the council . Whether we have a good mayor or not is the direct • responsibility of the voters. There is nothing much that can be done to help them on that regard. As regards to the council , we could have refine- ments of the Charter Commission , but frankly, there is no way you can legislate good government. So, the question is how do • we get men of integrity and good capability in the offices of the council? These are the two facets that I am interested in addressing because I think perhaps this is the most important thing that can come out of these Charter Commission hearings. As has been said earlier this evening, I 'm in favor of nine district elected councilmen. The advantages are very clear and so I ' ll take them up in the course of defending the number of nine and also as to how we get them. Presently, the council is organized as nine members and the mechanics of the day to day council are grouped about those nine members so that we don ' t necessarily want to confuse change for progress. By leaving them nine we do salvage a great deal of good work , day to day mechanics of input. The question is more or less than nine? If we had fewer than nine we would have the problem that there are a number of major committees. If you have fewer people you have to double up in some cases. By leaving it at nine your major committees are assigned to one individual and he has the time to do his home- work and do his study and consultation without being overburdened. Furthermore, as we have seen with Mr. Xawahara' s unfortunate absence, when a member is absent for some time the functions of the council are handicapped. So, that if we have nine we get along reasonably well , but if we were down to five or less , we'd be having a marked change in the functioning of the council . So, here again the number nine seems quite reasonable. Also, we have had reference to the historic number of nine districts and there would be no need to upset that. Actually, the districts themselves are subdivided into election precincts. When we come to the question which was raised recently about what happens with the changing of the census you wouldn ' t have any major shifts in districts , names or other- wise, but you would perhaps have a movement of a precinct from one onto the other to keep a , reasonable balance of one-man , one- vote. This is going to happen in every census and therefore the mechanics would exist. The same would happen if we were a larger state and had more representatives . Since we only have -10-