2021-11-19 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board November 19, 2021 CHR. CABANAS: Oh. MR. BENNER: specifically to this purpose. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MR. BENNER: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: And I'm assuming this is for both branches the Executive and the Legislative Branch. MR. BENNER: Yeah—all branches. Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. And then, I need to kind of go back to Ms. Mathews question. How are you going to market this to the employees and members of the public so that they trust this process. Because let me tell you something trust is the most important thing. The most important thing in everything we do here. Not only the Merit Appeals Board but in all the 21 departments. And, right now, there's a lot of people that don't trust a lot of government, whether it's locally or nationally. So, it just concerns me a lot. I'm retired, but like I said, I lived and worked through whole nightmare that led up to the audit. And having created the Recruitment/Examination Division, I'm very passionate about making sure the division is still intact, `cause it was intact. So, again, how are you going to market this to the County employees and members of the public so that they know this hotline—and, frankly, I don't really like the term "whistleblower"—it could be an "integrity hotline," "reporting hotline" but how are you going to market it so that people will trust this whole process and this is not just a seed we throw out to people and then they start laughing at it. MR. BENNER: Yeah. I understand and appreciate your passion on the issue. And you're absolutely right. We need to make sure that this is stood up in a way that gains confidence to the individuals who might interact with it. I wouldn't be able to provide you, probably today, with the granularity of how we would go ahead and deploy a marketing campaign. Those are things that we will be cognizant of and we can provide that, I guess, to this Board at a future point in time. We have made some changes in our office over the last couple of years where we have changed from the Legislative Auditor to the County Auditor, which has gained us additional independence and really positioned us to be in a good place to be able to independently perform this function without being unduly influenced by either branch of government. So, we're positioned well. Page 22