By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

Next week, Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris will present his annual State of the City address in which he will review accomplishments of the past year and outline policies and plans for the coming year.

Immediately afterward, the media will catch up with members of the City Council for their reaction. It will go one of two ways: Council members will say Harris was good on the nuts and bolts issues but failed to paint a broad vision. Or they will say he did a good job of painting idealistic visions for the city but he failed to provide enough specifics.

But no matter which way the reaction goes, it will be just that: reaction. This is a continuing bother for the council, indeed, for almost any legislative body. While political theory says the legislators set policy and the administrators execute it, it hardly ever works that way.

Inevitably, the mayor, the governor or the president ends up being the policy driver. The administration has initial control over the budget and over departmental decisions that tend to control policy no matter what the legislators want.

And now, the Honolulu City Council is trying to do something that might change that dynamic. These council members, most of whom are in their first term, came to the realization that about all they were doing was reacting to policy initiatives sent down by the administration.

In an attempt to change that, the council has begun an ambitious effort to come up with its own broad set of policy priorities — general guidelines on what it wants for the city over the next year and for the next decade.

The effort is called Priorities Long-Term and Now, or PLAN. Get it?

But rather that coming up with its own list of priorities, the council is asking the public and city employees for ideas and suggestions. This effort includes community meetings, departmental visits, and a survey which is distributed in council districts and is also posted on the city's Web site, www.co.honolulu.hi.us/council.

The survey is rather intriguing. It is a window into the policy challenges faced by both the council and the administration.

The Harris administration is somewhat unhappy with the survey, arguing that it tends to tilt issues toward the council's point of view and away from the administration. There may be some of that because it is almost impossible to build a perfectly neutral survey.

But most of the questions seem fairly straightforward: Do you want garbage picked up once or twice a week, even if greater frequency costs more? Do you support recycling? Should the city put priority on parks and recreation or on basic services? And so forth.

Council members are quick to point out that this effort will not produce a specific policy document or a locked-down program that will stand in opposition to that proposed by the administration. Nor will it end disagreement among council members.

Rather, it is an effort to allow council members to be more pro-active, to become more than simple yea- or nay-sayers on what the administration has to propose.