2021-04-26 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board April 26, 2021 haven't really focused our energies on our training division. When I initially took the directors' position, we brought in a new Work Comp. manager—Sommer Tokihiro, she is doing an outstanding job. The office is night and day -180 -degree change in the approach to their work. But now, we have to focus our attention to the earlier stage and that's our Health and Safety Division. So, one of the things I touched upon during the council hearing was our future attention to increasing the footprint of our Safety Division. I just submitted a supplemental budget request to create two new positions in our safety division. We currently have two positions and I'm hoping with the addition of the two training positions that we'll be able to accomplish two things. One is to reinstitute a stronger annual facility inspection program. We go in and we do safety inspections of our facilities. Because we've been so shorthanded, we haven't really done that for a while, at least a decade. The second area that I would like to address is the fact that we need to offer more training to our employees. And by "more training" I think internal training. The days of sending your staff to Oahu for safety training is over. It's just not feasible, from an economic standpoint. When one guy's out—who's doing the job back home. Accordingly, the second position I'm looking for is a trainer position. We would incorporate driver training and safety training together. We wrote out those requests, submitted it to council. When I spoke to the mayor, he was fin favor of it. Hopefully, we'll get the same response from council. So, going forward, that's what on the table for our Health and Safety—and going forward. We've been working really well with this current mayor and his staff. Last week I had the opportunity to attend the mayor's leadership training. It was a two-day training at the Civic the tennisI'm sorry, the EKS tennis center. And it was really worthwhile. The mayor brought in a professional trainer from—originally from the mainland but he's recently relocated to Kona. And it's an outstanding job he did. I think it gave me, and I think it gave all the managers, his department heads, and deputies, the opportunity to get to know everybody and to put a face to names and to just have a better understanding and better feeling as to what the Administration's goals and priorities are moving forward. And to be a part of that, I felt it was really beneficial for me. Under current negotiations, you may have heard that all of the bargaining units that we have employees who are members of—contract expires at the end of June this year. So, we're in negotiations currently with all of the bargaining unitsHGEA, UPW, SHOPO, and Fire. Our current position is to maintain status quo, no raises. So, last week we got word that UPW, Unit 1, ratified our proposal, with zero percent raises for the first year and a re -opener for year two. And what that means is we will keep it status quo with the zero raise, but next year, we'll Page 6