2019-12-18 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board December 18, 2019 So, that being the case, we've been very successful settling—whatever agreements we've had. To date for HGEA, we've had generally—we've come within two-year increases of about 6.5 to 7.1 percent increases for a two-year period of time, which right now in this economy that's pretty good. And I think what kind of messed us up—not messed us up—but what made it a little bit more difficult was when SHOPO—police went in, they were granted a lump sum payment of 1,800 to 2,000 a year for two years because, specifically, to address recruitment and retention issues. For police, we do a recruitment—we're doing a second recruitment `cause we don't—we can't find enough qualified applicants for a single recruitment. And then, the issue with retention is that they'll be in our department for, like, five years and then they qualify for lateral transfers to mainland jurisdictions and the pay is so much higher in the mainland and cost of living a little bit lower. So, we've had a lot of officers leave and go to other mainland jurisdictions. So, that bonus was specifically to address the recruitment and retention issue for police. So, when we're negotiating with fire, of course, fire said they want exactly what police got. So, fire ended up with a lump sum bonus but it was unfortunate because we don't have those same issues with fire. For example, in City and County of Honolulu, they do their annual fire recruitment. They're only allowed—they only open the portal—the recruitment portal for less than 12 hours because it fills up. In 12 hours they get more applicants than they can process. So, they just open it up for a 12-hour period of time, they notify that—and it's very similar to here, too. And we don't have any of our fire department guys come looking to move to other jurisdictions because we take care of our fire guys. So, once you give one person, one entity a bonus, then everybody wants the bonus. So, that's the biggest issue right now, is everybody wants bonuses—even HGEA. And so, that's what we're, kind of, dealing with. The unfortunate part is, these are all two-year contracts. They all retro back to start of the fiscal year July 1st, 2019. So, starting next year, we're in the next two-year cycle of negotiations, so we're not going to get any break. We're going to be dealing with the negotiations right off the bat from next July as well. And that's—so, as far as that goes, that's my report. Happy to answer any questions or address any concerns. MS. YAMADA: You're going to do the Quarterly Reports? MR. BRILHANTE: Yeah, the quarterly reports were submitted in your packet, right, your binders. And each division—the only division that we weren't able to get the most up-to-date information was the ADA/EOO. And the only reason for that was `cause when the manager retired, she closed her computer access—we shut down her computer access and her information was on the computer. So, as a matter of fact, we just had her in this morning. She came in on Page 24