2019-04-24 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board April 24, 2019 The State or us, the Employers group, submitted a 1.2% request. That submittal was initially rejected by the union and came back to us for a counter proposal. They requested a counter proposal. The information we got from UPW was that they wanted 3%—a 3% adjustment. And so, when we had additional negotiations this past—last week Thursday—we were able to sit down and meet with the union and talk story and explain to them why 1.2. And the reason was because if you do a 1.2 annually, at the end of the two-year period of time it comes out to, like, about a 2 point—it’s, 1.2 something. So, about a 2.5% increase—and that is analogous to a step increase for a two-year period of time as opposed to their request for the 3% would have been a 6% over that two-year period of time. So, fortunately, reasonable minds won out and last week Thursday. UPW accepted the 1.2% re- adjustment for this year as well as for next year. So, that just has to be ratified by their members. So, I’ll be going out to ratification this week and next week. SHOPO’s in a four-year contract and we’re good to go. There was no re-opening. SHOPO rejected a request—or didn’t submit a request to re-open negotiations, so they’re good for four years. So, hopefully, by the end of this year everybody will be on a four-year contract. The only drawback with that is—we usually start renegotiating about a year before the contracts expire. So, that doesn’t give us much time—downtime. We’re going to go right back into the mix with re-negotiations. The second area I wanted to touch upon is in regards to these work comp numbers—so it’s my work comp division. I may have mentioned to you at the last meeting that I did a work comp re- org. I was fortunate during this recent period of time, I had held a recruitment for a new supervisory manager for work comp. I was really fortunate, we had an interested application from another department in the County. And she applied, and she interviewed, and she’ll just— head and shoulders above all of the other applicants. She had 11 years of previous private experience in the work comp arena with Hawaiʻi Case Management. And that was a private sector, they did work—they had managed work comp claims and issues and the like for private businesses. And she did that locally for about 11 years before she joined the County three years ago, and her background is tremendous. So, I was fortunate enough she accepted the position. So, she starts—she came on board two months ago—I mean, two weeks ago. And so far, it’s been tremendous. She’s taken the reins of the work comp division and she’s—her thoughts and her goals and what she wants to achieve really aligned with my—what we wanted to achieve as a (inaudible) and she’s already effectuated a lot of those changes. She was—because of her significant background and experience she was well-received by the staff. So, so far, we’ve had a lot of positive—I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from the staff during this transition period of time. I’ve made it a point to go and independently meet with my work comp staff—like, if I see them outside taking a break, I’ll sit down and talk story with them, and just try to get some feedback and information. And one of the things—I guess one of the tidbits of information that they provided me with was the fact that this—the new—Sommer—leads by example. Page 7