2023-08-04 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission August 4, 2023 So, a very large number of employees with lot of seniority were given all the overtime and all the double time and Saturdays and Sundays to make their salary a behemoth, which almost brought the pension system down at the tune of three -and -a -half billion a year. That, we need to make a decision—how do you want to make that decision? The simple rule is for managerial employees you can create a structure of satisfactory average—for those (inaudible)whatever human resources come and give them the increment based upon some kind of a criteria. In New Jersey, we did that to take the union increments the smallest one and the largest one. Between those two the supervising authority whether it was the mayor or the water commission, chose what percentage or number they wanted to give to that position. Let's say police commissioner got 3,500 out of the increment annually, until the next round of decision. The third component of that was the cost of living. The cost of living there are different calculations that could be done. And, moneywise, a resolution could be brought before the council—and they're the final authority that the cost of living would be this in contrast to the collective bargaining agreements that has already gotten that. And if you don't pay attention to that, you could have an all-American nightmare in 200 union members will come in and all the money's gone to management and none is going to us. And, last, the fourth component to that would be whether other costs that have changed or potentially can change that would make the position salary less than the nominal number that we would recommend. For instance, healthcare and some of the other out-of-pocket things that you would want to give them. MS. NAMAHOE: Chair Farahi, may I ACTING CHR FARAHL Sure. MS. NAMAHOE: Points 1, 2, and 3 I think are really important and so that we can walk the fence line of the duties that are ahead of us. I would like to suggest that the starting point be found on the final two pages of Communication—wait, yeah-06-08-23—aka the last two pages in the blue binder. And what that is, is it's the executive salary jurisdiction comparisons. I think that it's going to be, otherwise, it's difficult to anchor those factors without this being, I think, the initial vortex. Because it allows us to at least see—and, again, I'm coming from the EUTF point of viewI'm looking at all the employers in comparison to each other. And so, where I freely admit I have some baggage about this because I had to fight or advocate for Hawaii County over the—against and with, alongside the other neighbor island counties when we were dealing with healthcare concerns. So, spitting out numbers like we have 200,000 population on the Big Island and there's over 4,000 square miles and looking at some of the concerns—and then how we anchor into that. Whereas Maui County is there156,000 population; Molokai out of that is 10,000 population; Page 7