2023-08-04 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission August 4, 2023 that have been provided to -date. Think for themselves what kind of proposal they'd like to set forth to, kind of, kick-off the conversation, and then at least at future meetings, there's a starting—an anchor point, if you will. MS. NAMAHOE: Mr. Patel, I have a question. Is it possible for you to speak to your counterparts in the other—for the other employers, the other counties, and the State—or maybe this information is available online or you don't have to reach out to say that you know what they're looking at for the next two years—if that's already been in their budget talks. And the reason why I'm saying that is because as we're discussing, I don't know if you can see it over thereI just decided to look at Hawaii County and to the—so Hawaii County's in the middle, and then Maui and Kauai are to its right—and everywhere that I marked orange, it's below Maui—at least Maui or, in some cases, Maui and Kauai. And, again, as somebody this is so near and dear to my heart, that I'm ready to spit out COLA numbers on all of us, the difference between us and those two counties. And it's not to knock anybody down, but what I would like to do is think about the trigonometry of what's the percentage, to pull it up to parity, and then what it would look like, at least, for the next two years—so that when we come up with numbers—if we decide to come up with increases, that we can look at realistic increases besides just saying 18 percent for what barb. is doing the bargaining units. MS. GREENBAUM: Right. MS. NAMAHOE: Because that's actually where Honolulu County has been pretty interesting to look at. And, granted, it's true, it's—what did you say -38 percent? But we might end up doing something like that because that's what it's going to take in the real world. And, yes, we do know examples of leadership on this island moving to different counties because the money was there. So, since we are woefully behind the times, and they don't have the benefits like we do of lava flows and big earthquakes and so on and so forth—and the things that are required of us to do public safety, access public access on the fly, 24/7 those are the things that are still fresh in my mind that are worth looking at. So, I would like to say that that compliments your Point 1 of where our starting point is. I'd like to ask us to, kind of, go through that and do the math on that—and that'd be where we really start to go forward. And I'm willing to be wrong there. MS. GREENBAUM: I like that. ACTING CHR FARAHL It doesn't matter what starting point you get. In other words, if you want to use the comparative index as the beginning, and then incorporate some of the other points—again, in one county you may have a much larger public works department because of the size of it—and another one, much smaller. Page 13