2023-08-04 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission August 4, 2023 MS. NAMAHOE: I'm sure a lot of us are used to P&L's. So, that might be—what are we looking at in terms of percentages? Where are we mapped— MS. GREENBAUM: Correct. MS. NAMAHOE: across all of the various employers, right? State, counties—State and counties. And then, I'm looking forward to the sham battle of how important and nebulous and fragile Hawaii County is without even thinking about when Pele go "boom." So, yeah. MS. GREENBAUM: Okay. So, if the Commission is open to that, I'm not going to make it complex. I'm going to make it very simple so that it's palatable—everyone can understand and at least start moving forward. `Cause I would like to see an increase, personally, `cause I don't think that the executives are compensated adequately. MR. NELSON: So, could I this is Nelson. Can I make a suggestion here? I just want to—I think we got to the idea of a spreadsheet and this information with the different counties—it's all very good information. But if I could just make a suggestion. I think, Step 1, is because salaries haven't been adjusted for 2018—Step 1 is, basically, we look at what should be the increase? The other guys have all gotten increases of 18 percent or something like that. Look at a baseline—what do we need to do to bring people just as an average, what do we think is a reasonable inflationary factor? Okay? That's Step 1. So, I'll say, "Okay, these are the current salaries, what do we think it should be?" Then or just based on that inflation factor. Then, we've got all this information that the departments have sent with all their other"Oh, this is why we think this guy deserves this. This is why" whatever. That needs to be, then, taken a look at and then we've got the other county information to maybe do some individual adjustments. So, I think Step 1, it's like an automatic inflationary adjustment, and we should try to agree on what—if we agree on that, what that general percentage would be. Then, there's kind of looking at each individual job for the—what do we think that's worth—`cause there are market rates for different things. I mean, I guess, like we heard, like the police chief—okay, he could get a job at San Franciso at double the salary. I mean, some people have different competing things like that. So, we could factor that in based on the information that we have. So, I don't know if we can—] do think—and when I looked at what happenedI did—we had our last meeting and Commissioner Pavao suggested, "Hey, go look at the Honolulu Salary Commission. What did they do?" And they got a lot of bad press, I think, for adjusting the councils salaries to full-time. Page 20