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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -8 February 8, 2019 <br />BRENDA FORD: Proposal No. CA -7, CA -8, CA -13, and CA -16 in opposition and Proposal No. <br />CA -9, CA -17, CA -18 in support. <br />MS. FORD: My name is Brenda Ford. I am a former Council member and I am a <br />co-author with Debbie Hecht of both the PONC and the PONC maintenance <br />funds. As mentioned I do not support CA -7 or CA -8, I do support CA -9. I <br />support CA -12, do not support CA -13 regarding the PONC. I do not support CA - <br />16, I do support CA -17, the Disaster and Emergency Fund, which I will talk about <br />separately here in a moment, and I support CA -18, to transfer the duties to the <br />Department of Finance. I am going to leave most of the comments regarding the <br />PONC and its maintenance fund to Debbie and I am going to talk to you about the <br />Disaster and Emergency Fund. I want to commend Bobby Jean Leithead-Todd <br />for taking the initiative to write this legislation and put the Disaster and <br />Emergency Fund in the Charter where it truly belongs, so that it does get funded. I <br />have sent over amendments to this to you and I hope they have been handed out. <br />Mine are colorized in red and I don't know if yours are, but I did follow the <br />appropriate fornat for making changes. <br />So let me start in Section B, there is a phrase for natural and human caused <br />disasters or emergency that is repetitive throughout this section. Instead of <br />keeping it in the subsections, I put it into the statement 4(B) it should read For <br />natural or human caused disasters or emergencies monies in this fund shall be <br />utilized only and then it just goes on to the list. Number B (5) to pay for <br />operational expenses of the County after disaster or emergency and the County is <br />unable to realize revenue at sufficient levels, this belongs in the budget <br />stabilization fund. I have stricken it out of this section of the Emergency and <br />Disaster Fund completely. It is in the wrong place, and I have added a couple of <br />sections down at the bottom. <br />Page 2, E and F, one of the constant complaints that I have heard while I was on <br />the Council for eight years and for the four years since I've been on the Council, <br />is the public and the Council cannot tell what funds are being expended for the <br />disaster or the emergency and that is because the line items in the budget do not <br />allow for transparency. These two sections, E the emergency fund shall have a <br />section in the budget with subcategories showing where the funds originated, <br />that's in the revenue section, and where these funds are being expended, that is <br />what E and F do, so the public can say in the case of the Puna disaster, the <br />eruption disaster, we got X amount of dollars from the County, X from the State, <br />X from the Feds, and this is what we spent the money for, Road A, X amount, <br />Road B, X amount, Outbuilding C, X amount. We need to have that type of <br />transparency. Government is too lacking in transparency and this is not a good <br />thing for the public or for the Council, so I am encouraging you to do this. Again, <br />I commend Ms. Leithead-Todd. I really appreciate it, and the last thing I want to <br />mention on this is she put a reasonable amount of 20 million dollars for a cap. <br />This is a good amount but please remember that in the newspaper recently, the <br />Page 5 <br />