2022-07-18 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board July 18, 2022 MS. MATHEWS: Because those kiosks, I know from having an ATM in the past—that whole setup is a pain in the neck and it's expensive unless you have somebody sponsoring it and blah, blah—and you're always looking for ways to cut. They already exist and I used one the other day and went, "Whoa, this thing's cool"—so taking advantage of the traffic that has to be there, because they don't want to stand in line DMV. MR. LEOPOLDINO: Right. MS. DE SOTO: Canoh, do you want tosorry, go ahead. CHR. CABANAS: No, go ahead, Kate. MS. DE SOTO: I was just going to say the discussion that's happening right now, I think it's a good opportunity to circle back to what Gabe was saying about how, if you put on the agenda, the different functional areas—especially because as you're going through all of this innovation and brainstorming. The Board is a huge resource because we come from such varied backgrounds that if the items are on the agenda, we can chime in and contribute, I think, more easily, and this is an example of that—this discussion. CHR. CABANAS: Thank you, Kate. And then, we don't want to just single out one division, right, because all eight divisions are equally important. But it's just because the recruitment is such an issue now in our community where you see a lot of the employers with large ads—or even ask the newspapers to do a feature article the way police and fire have done. You could approach them and see if they could feature a number of articles for different departments—and that might help you there. I like the idea of the community involvement because, you know what, the personal touch with individuals when they're out and about shopping or going to some other function, that's how you grab them because they don't understand what the County does, they really don't. For those that got that, way back then, they got it. But now you have other people—we have new residents in the community, you have individuals who have now grown up and are now young adults. They have no clue and that engagement with them is where your worth is while. It would make it effective and that's how you encourage them to apply for County recruitments. Even when we had the town halls around the island and police took us to all those town halls pau hana. I tell you. That worked. We went into the communities. We went to Honoka`a, we went to Kona, we went to Ka`u, we went to Kea`au, we went to—did I say KohalaWaimea, we went to all of those. And police went—they took us, they drove us out there and we worked from, like, 5 to 78 at night. And the residents of each of those communities, they turned out. They had no idea what the County does. They had no idea what HR did, until we got there and gave our little presentation—about an hour or so—answered questions. And we had employees from Water Page 21