MIN CHARTER 2019-06-21 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -11 June 21, 2019 budget impacts were, and there was no process in place to allow the public to understand what the fiscal and regulatory impacts would be to the County. For example, when they created these departments, there was no analysis that you needed a department head with the requisite salary, that you needed to have a secretary, that you might need to have a deputy for the department, and then if you had a board or commission assigned to that department and created for that department, then you needed funding for meetings. So it is just like our struggle to pay for things like mileage. And in the past before we had this facility, we used to have to rent places and it was a huge fiscal impact to the County, and my concern going forward is that there needs to be more of an analysis of what are the regulatory impacts, what are the impacts on staffing, what are the fiscal impacts, and the flexibility I think... issue is whether... and here I am the one that proposed the disaster fund which was already in Code, but I wanted to set a certain amount, and yes, it reduces flexibility, but on the other hand I think sometimes the Charter is designed to take some of the politics out of some of the budgetary decisions, so there is a balance. So I definitely have concerns about amendments to the Charter and the creation of boards and commissions as well as departments without a fiscal analysis. But I don't know that my concerns are echoed or adhered to as much by other Commissioners. You know, part of that is that my perspective comes from having run departments and having had that impact on our budget, where you know, something gets created and then we are like there's no budget for it, where are we going to find the staff? And I am robbing Peter to pay Paul. And so I just express the concern that going forward, when proposals are put forward, that there needs to be feedback from the departments and there needs to be an analysis of both the fiscal impact as well as the staffing impact. Sometimes it is like we had to rent places to house new departments and pay rent, and that wasn't envisioned when we made Charter amendments. You know, I think we... right now in a period of growth it is not as much of a concern, but you know, every indication that I have is that we may be headed for a recession and when you have fixed costs that you can't move around, I think it will create difficulty for the government in terms of flexibility if we hit a recession in the future. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you Commissioner Todd. Let me check with Hilo first. Any comments in Hilo? Okay. Seeing none, Commissioner Rice. MS. RICE: I would agree with Commissioner Leithead-Todd about... especially if a new department is submitted as a part of the Charter program... but we don't have... to my knowledge, we have no boards or commissions in our amendments, new ones, and we have no departments, so we're expressing a concern about something that isn't in our amendments and it seems... although those are legitimate concerns, that they are not relevant to our submittal. The discussion of the finances does have relevancy to some of our amendments, but again, I would say that it could be more generalized where some of the Commission, not all of us agree with that. Page 13