This referred to 62-13, Hawaii Revised Statutes, which allowed an impeachment petition to be filed with only 25 signatures. The charter amendment increased the signature requirement to 100 signatures. There is little discussion in the charter commission minutes on the issue of payment for defense of impeachment proceedings. That is still up in the air, but my shotgun opinion on that would be, no. It can be initiated by the county council, itself, or whomever.
Any person can initiate that.
Impeachment generally goes through the failure of the official to act or not act, or whatever, so for the county to pay for that defense sounds a little unusual, you might say. Yes, and on the other hand, if you only have a hundred electorates that can initiate impeachment proceedings, if the guy is kind of unpopular, takes an unpopular position in the county council, he can be taken to court a lot of times. You mean for bringing, let s say, a frivolous action. I suppose it might be possible, but I haven t seen any situation like that. I know, for example, under certain kinds of lawsuits, if you lose the case that you initiated, you can be charged for attorney s fees that are incurred by the other party defending it.