Aloha, I'm Lawrence Carnicelli.
I'm coming to you today to talk to you about the upcoming ballot.
Well, not only will you be voting on the president and congressmen, senators, and council members,
but you'll also be voting on charter amendments for the Maui County Charter.
The Maui County Charter is basically our constitution.
There are five amendments on the ballot, and I'm going to just go over those briefly to
try to help you understand what it is that we're trying to do.
The first one is withdrawal of signatures from supplemental petitions.
Basically when you sign a petition, you can withdraw your signature.
There are also supplemental petitions.
This charter amendment basically will say that you can withdraw your signature from
a supplemental petition as well.
The next one is review of supplemental petitions.
And basically what this is doing is it's saying that the county clerk can take 20 days to
review a supplemental petition and figure out whether it's valid or not rather than 10 days.
The next one is the emergency management agency.
Essentially what this is doing is just renaming the civil defense agency to the Maui County
Emergency Management Agency, basically just a clerical thing.
The next one is the approval and qualifications for various directors.
Basically what this is doing is saying that the council will approve the nominations of
aid directors and the managing director, but it also puts in another thing in saying that
the council can also put qualifications for those directors as well.
So if you vote for that, if you vote yes, that's what it is that you want to do.
The last one is for the office of council services attorneys.
Now we have the corporation council, which is basically the county's attorney general.
You have council services, which is basically the attorneys for the council, and then you
have the county council.
What this is saying is that at times when it's needed, that the county council can hire
council services to represent them instead of just corporation council.
What happens is sometimes there can be a conflict or maybe there's going to be outside, they
have to hire an outside attorney, and this is saying that the county council with two-thirds
vote can hire council services to actually represent them.
In addition to the five charter amendments, we're also going to have two state constitutional
amendments, the first one being relating to jury trials in civil cases.
Basically it's just moving the threshold from $5,000 to $10,000 for jury trials.
The second one is relating to the disposition of excess revenues.
Essentially what this is saying is if there is a surplus in the budget that the legislature
could go ahead and appropriate the funds to either general purpose bonds or to unfunded
liabilities.
If you vote yes, you're saying that they can go ahead and do that.
Those are the two state constitutional amendments along with the five charter amendments.
More importantly, I hope that you have a vote.
Thanks.
