2019-12-18 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board December 18, 2019 everything. So, it's kind of like, out of sight, out of mind—less work for them. So, to get the departments to buy into the light duty—the return-to-work program—it's, kind of, there's a little task, there's some finesse involved. But, so far, we've been—the departments have been really receptive and very helpful. Safety department. We continue to develop our County-wide safety training program. We're continuing to work on the re-org and we submitted a request to fund our unfunded training position. So, hopefully,with that going forward, we'll be able to provide more training, too—for County-wide safety training and that was something I mentioned in our goals. Budget. We submitted our budget. Again, we had to do three submittals. First was status quo, second was five percent reduction, third was eight percent reduction. We met the status quo, obviously. We were able to meet the request for the five percent reduction. Unfortunately, two of the things I gave up were support and expenses associated with Salary Commission and with the MAB so—but, it's—they wanted us to identify areas where we could cut. So, that's what we did. Because the mileage reimbursement, the lunches—all that type of stuff comes out of our budgets. So, we said we'll give this back to the Administration as far as funding those expenses so. And then, we weren't able to meet the eight percent. If we did a eight percent, the only eight percent—realistic--eight percent budget we could come up with reduction in our budget was if we eliminated staffing—and that's the last thing we're going—we have the ability to do. I met with Finance. We did a pre-budget briefing with finance—the finance director and deputy director, and the budget people—and they're understanding of where we are—a small department. You can't cut—we don't have trucks, we don't have equipment, we are very limited as to what capital-type of expenditures we have. So, it is what it is. One of the things I did, was I did submit a supplemental budget. And I explained that during my budget review that the basis for the supplemental budget is because we've cut training to the bone here—and I don't have the ability to send my people for outside training. The only type of training we do have is, like, internet—if there's a program or a training on the internet, we can jump in. But, even that, we have to be very careful as to what the price is. So, I requested a supplemental budget so that we could afford being able to send our people to training. I think one of the, for me, the reason I felt that that was important—we'd be able to afford that to our staff is—so much of what we do is cutting edge. We have our labor relations division and, like, J would attest to the fact that anytime you're dealing with legal concepts, legal principles, legal precedent—it's always changing. A decision in Ohio yesterday could affect how the Hawaii courts view something going forward. Or the way an employee was handled in California—especially in California—through their labor relations board or something has such an immediate and direct effect on how we should be treating our personnel going forward. Page 22