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Capitol View
THE Honolulu City Council is becoming something of a petri dish for political experiments. City Council is subject
of experimentsFirst, in the spirit of nonpartisanship, the Council dropped the political party designations, although no one has trouble finding Councilman John Henry Felix at a GOP conclave or Chairman Jon Yoshimura hanging with his Democratic Party buddies.
Nonpartisan city administration is one of those sleek, modern ideas for government. The rhetoric goes, "There are no such things as Democratic sewers or Republican parks, so why should the city administration be partisan?"
The answer is that the parks may not attend the GOP caucus, but the Council and the mayor are certainly from the ranks of the major political parties and they do their wheeling and dealing and favor-dispensing with all that in mind.
The second experiment foisted upon the Council was limitation of terms.
Although it is a national debate gaining popularity across the country, term limits has always caused the state Legislature to shudder when even the mention of it comes up.
If a nonpartisan City Council is supposed to be more efficient, then the term-limited Council is supposed to be more responsive.
According to the reformers' thinking, municipal government can have too much of a good thing, even if it is the trusted city father who faithfully fixes the streets and attends all neighborhood board meetings.
We have a healthy worry about letting one person in the top job stay too long. Governors and mayors get two terms max and they are out.
Apparently we hold our senators and representatives a bit more dear. We keep them around for as long as it pleases us, because we trust them to do the right thing, they have built up expertise in certain subjects, they are powers within the legislative body and besides, if we didn't want them there we would just vote them out.
Those rascals on the Council, however, are another matter. They have term limits, apparently because we have to watch them like a hawk and boot them out after two terms.
Now that we have gotten the Council out of politics and nearly out of office, those left are going to get religion and run clean campaigns -- not cheap campaigns, just clean campaigns -- because they will get the money to run from the taxpayers.
THE League of Women Voters, along with Common Cause, the Green Party, the Sierra Club and Life of the Land, wants to try out public funding for candidates who refuse contributions from private sources.
The idea, and it is a good one, is to keep businesses, unions and rich single-interest pressure groups from buying politicians.
As Toni Worst, one of the clean-politics campaign leaders says, "Campaign financing is one of democracy's most crippling problems and nothing will change unless citizens roll up their sleeves and take action."
The fight may be just, but it is also controversial as even the reformers are not sure exactly how to clean up the Council.
Bob Watada, Campaign Spending Commission executive director, points out that the problem with politics isn't really money, it is the amount of money spent.
Watada reasons that if money is the corrupting factor, the way to save those political souls is to keep them away from the bucks in the first place.
The end result, however, is likely to be yet another Council petri-dish experiment, fuzzy and not very useful.
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He can be reached by e-mail at rborreca@pixi.com