2019-12-18 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board December 18, 2019 or the duration associated with. This was what, how many months and months of—every day you're in that heightened alert. With a hurricane, you're prepared three days before you start rationing everything up. The hurricane will pass through, then you'd do whatever your recovery is. This one, the incident was daily for all those months— CHR. NAMAHOE: Yeah. MR. BRILHANTE: —and it was just a—it was a unique situation and we learned a lot from it. And that's part of the reason we're coming up with some of these plans is—as it relates to safety and training associated with safety. We had a spike in work comp claims. We've even had a spike in work comp claims with the current situation up on Mauna Kea with the police officers. Now we know, okay, there's some concerns with altitude sickness. Who would have thought that? Oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But for those long duration of periods of time that they're up on the mountain, we've had several claims of altitude sickness. And so, that's something we're addressing as well. We—the day they took down that structure up on the mountain, we had a OSHA violation because we didn't properly provide safety equipment and training for our police officer who was on top of the pallet. So, we got dinged for that. And so, now that's something—oh, okay, now we set up a training program for these individuals. It's unfortunate but oftentimes it takes an incident for everybody to have a better understanding as to what's required and what's the importance of why we have these requirements in place. So, it's all part and parcel to each other. Number 2 goal is continue to expand the supervisory training program as I alluded to earlier. We're going to do another co-hart. We're hoping for at least 30 to 35 students for this coming year. Same program. It's going to be a 12-month, two-days a month training. We're going to- 11-12 different areas of management. We're also going to open it up to the department heads and deputies as well. We'll get them on board. We're going—the other thing we, kind of, missed during the supervisors and managers invitations is there's a unique group of employees. They're HGEA Unit 2. So they're supervisors and managers but they're not on the EM level. They're on a lower level because what they do is they supervise UPW—blue collar workers. So, we're going to open up the training to that class of employees as well. And so, they come under HGEA but they're technically UPW supervisors, so they're not as high level as the EMs—the Excluded Managers—but supervisors, nonetheless. So, we're going to open up for that group of individuals as well. And that's going to be a separate class that we're opening up the training for. Goal 3 is implement a new County-wide recruitment and examination procedures to ensure a fair and equitable selection process for all the qualified candidates. I'm not sure if you knew that that Page 14