CHC 1979-05-22 PH - Laserfiche WebLink

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• Now, for those of you who are going to be making statements; will you please approach the microphone located in the center, over here, and after you have finished making your statements will you please remain standing before the microphone so that commission members who have any questions may ask for clarifications or any other comments from you based on any concerns or questions they might have. Please introduce yourself at the time that you begin your statements. As the Chairman has stated , we request that you keep your statements to no longer than ten minutes in length to accommodate all persons who wish to speak . If, for any reason you have to exceed ten minutes we will certainly be flexible about it but we would like you somehow to be guided by the ten minute rule. We won ' t cut you off in the middle of a sentence, or anything like that, but please try to be timely on that point. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. CHAIRMAN SAKATA: Thank you, Mr. Oda. Before we start , are there any of you in the audience who would like to sign up to testify? Anyone? If not , we will go into the public hearing and the first person to testify will be Mr. Webster Nolan. Mr. Nolan. MR. NOLAN : My name is Web Nolan. I am the editor of West Hawaii Today. I have only a couple points I would like to raise here for your consideration and they deal with the election of the county council. The position of our paper is that we feel that the so-called at-large election of county council members is somewhat injurious to the political strength of West Hawaii residents. By West Hawaii , I mean Ka' u, the two Kona districts and the two Kohala districts. The three elections that we have had in Hawaii County under the county council system have seen 9 council members , or 8 out of the 9 council members , elected at-large were from Hilo and the 9th is from Hakalau, which as you know is only twelve or thirteen miles from Hilo. The one thing I want to stress is that we are not , the newspaper is not complaining about the treatment that we have had in the council . The issue here, as I see it, the only issue is balanced representation for West Hawaii and for East Hawaii too. So we are opposed to the at-large and we favor a one member, one district election of council members. In connection with that, since the population has not been accurately counted for at least ten years , and some people in West Hawaii feel that it has not been accurately counted at all , it seems impractical to suggest that the commission could set up a reapportionment system for the coming election in 1980. Our paper is suggesting, and I think other groups in West Hawaii are suggesting that the commission consider establishing some kind of a mechanism to go into effect after the federal census is completed in 1980. -3-