MIN CHARTER 2019-01-25 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -7 January 25, 2019 BRENDA FORD: Proposal No. CA -7 and CA -13 in opposition and Proposal No. CA -9 in support. MS. FORD: Thank you very much. My name is Brenda Ford. I am a former County Council member. I served four consecutive terms. I am also the co-author with Debbie Hecht of the PONC (Public Access, Open Space and Natural Resources Preservation Commission) fund and the PONC maintenance fund which we ultimately had to put into the Charter to stop Mayors from stealing the money or not funding this PONC fund. Let me start though with the two-year to four-year terms. I oppose four-year terms. While on the Council I can tell you that I worked with some very talented, brilliant, hard-working, constituent focused Council members. I also worked with some liars, some lazy people who only showed up to vote and in fact some of those people used to leave the council chamber during testimony. They didn't care what the public had to say. They already knew what they were going to do. We need to be able to get rid of those types of Council members as quickly as possible without going through recall which is expensive and time consuming or doing an impeachment type process which requires a civil case in court. We shouldn't be doing that. I hear people talking all the time about how hard it is to run for a position that you are already working in and I am telling you it is the truth. It is very hard to do it. It means you have to work extra hard to get out and meet your constituency and convince them that you are doing the job they want you to do. By the way, they know you are doing the job or they know you are not doing the job. Some of the people that I discuss and I will not be mentioning names, sometimes served only one teen, sometimes two terns. So, the public is very aware what Council members do and we need to trust them. We need to be focused on the people. It is not about the comfort of a Council member and oh, do they have to work extra hard to win an election. It is about what the people need that person to do and if the person is really doing it. Please take into consideration the constituents that each of us have had to represent and their needs are important. The phrase servant of the people is the most important phrase you will ever learn as an elected official and there are so many elected officials who really think that when they get elected to something, they become a king or a queen, or an emperor or something else. It becomes an autocracy and that needs to stop. So I don't support the four-year terns. Now, I am going to go fast on the first two. I do not support 13, CA -13. I do not support CA -7. I do support CA -9. Here is the problem that we have got with County government. In 2011 as a Council member, I went into the Disaster and Emergency Fund and it was woefully underfunded. That is what we are supposed to be using, the funds from that. It was underfunded. I went to the Finance Department, I talked to Deanna Sako, I said "I want to create this fund with a minimum of $500,000 a year put into the emergency fund because if we get into a big problem, we aren't going to have the money." "Oh no Brenda, we can't do that. We could never support that. $250,000 is the most we will do." So, I passed Page 10