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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -10 April 25, 2019 <br />Mayor have sole discretion in selecting these people and so I strongly support the <br />idea that the County Council would be able to appoint or at least nominate <br />positions that would then be approved by the Mayor. I agree that there is a lot of <br />Board positions to fill and the Mayor has many other duties besides vetting those <br />positions. But when you have got people that are qualified and are not selected <br />and you are told by the Mayor's assistant that there need to be far more applicants <br />so the Mayor has more to choose from, you have to ask what the benefit of that <br />discretion is and for that reason, I support CA -31. <br />And with that, I thank you very much for your time. Mahalo. <br />CHR. ADAMS: Thank you. If I could ask Mr. Warshauer to please come to the <br />table. <br />Ms. Paik-Mander. <br />KOOHAN <br />PAIK-MANDER: Proposal No. CA -18 and CA -46 in support. <br />MS. PAIK-MANDER: Hi, is this on or do I need to... it's on, yeah, okay. Hi my <br />name is Koohan Paik-Mander and it is great to see all of you here. Thank you for <br />all of your hard work. I am, I do serve on the PONC Commission but I am here <br />speaking for myself and I do have an anecdote to share, but first I would like to <br />say what I do professionally. I am a development director. That means I am a <br />professional grant writer and I write grants to large foundations for the non-profit <br />that I work for. It is flabbergasting to me... so I am speaking on first CA -18 and <br />then CA -46. I am appalled... it is really confusing that we would not want to pay <br />staff working on the non -profits from my perspective because when I apply for <br />grants, if we don't' have salaries set out for each of the people at our non-profit, <br />we are not even... we are just going to be thrown away as a grant application <br />because these foundations and I am talking about Ford Foundation, Bill Gates, I <br />mean they know that you need to support a project if you want to see it succeed <br />and if you don't have that support you end up spending more money. <br />I'll give you an example. I wanted to cut corners putting up a staircase in my <br />home, so I didn't want to hire a contractor that would have been three times the <br />amount of a guy that said "don't worry, I can do it for you." He couldn't get the <br />angle straight, totally messed it up, had to fire him right, and then I still wasn't <br />convinced. I still wanted to save money cause I would still save money if I hired <br />this other guy, so I did. I am cutting corner, you know, I don't really have the <br />support, I am not giving him... just not qualified basically, I didn't want to spend <br />the money, okay, to make a long story short, it took me three non-qualified people <br />saying they could do the job before I finally hunkered down, bought a licensed <br />contractor, did the job right, and it ended up costing me so much more money. <br />Okay, I see the same thing happen on PONC. I have only been there for a year, <br />but what is happening is you know, coming from a non-profit background to see <br />Page 13 <br />