2018-03-29 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board MS. NAMAHOE: Thank you. March 29, 2018 MR. BRILHANTE: So, Mr. Allan Yokoyama, he's happy to answer any of your questions. You can say a few words. MR. YOKOYAMA: Yeah. I'll start up—it's an honor and a pleasure to serve on the Board. I look forward to working with each and every one of you. There's a big learning curve. I'm glad I have a good mentor. And, unfortunately, Julie's leaving but I know we're leaving it in both David and Judge's hands. So, I look forward to that. And, by all means, let's engage and discuss further. I have some ideas that I would like to set forth and, definitely, having a small portion of it -23 years of doing risk management mostly a great part of it in construction in Honolulu. I would like to extend those experiences in risk management and insurance and how we can apply it here in the County. Very much a lot of learning—how County does it versus the public sector, but it's a good learning experience. Other than that, Iby all means, let's start the planning ahead and go forward but just today was more the introduction and I appreciate the fact that I'll be serving on the Board. MR. BRILHANTE: Thanks. Great. So, as to other areas on—from—what I want to do is just touch upon some of the current—going on with some of our divisions. From the Administrative Division, we were—an offer was made and accepted to a new to fill our Specialist position. So, Dee Ann Sadayasu, who's the division head, has—we have made an offer to for her assistant, a Specialist, and it was accepted. So, that individual will be starting on April 16. This person has a large amount of County experience. She's coming over from another department. We conducted, I think, internal recruitment. She'll, primarily, be assisting with organization and notification of the County -wide benefits program that we provide to all of our employees. And she'll also be administering and monitoring our County's budget and fiscal programs. So, she'll provide a lot of assistance to Dee Ann and take off a lot of those additional responsibilities to Dee Ann. As far as our Labor Relations, we're in the process of settling two employee grievances. Lee Botelho has been working hard and Corp. Counsel has been providing great assistance. John Mukai has helped us tremendously. One individual is, kind of, like, a three-way departmental agreement between the County Clerk, Aging, and ourselves—transferring one of the individuals to address her concerns. And the second one is a settlement involving a Finance Department employee. So, we've reached a tentative agreement on both of them and settlement agreements are being drafted. So, those are two—any time we go through the grievance procedure and it actually goes through arbitration there's significant expense to the County `cause we're pretty much foot the bill. And so, by these settlements, we're, kind of—it's, kind of, a win-win for the County. The employee's happy, `cause our employees are all valued. And then, we're happy because it costs us, in the long run, significantly less money. Page 10