2023-11-21 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board November 21, 2023 CHR. CABANAS: Wonderful. Nice seeing all of you. Take care. Thanks for coming. SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: I found him outside. I think he might have been part of the peace protest? And, of course, Danny Patel, the Deputy, whom I'm very grateful to have to assist. Danny, I thought, did an excellent job while Waylen was the director. I was very grateful that Danny stayed on and took on the challenge of acting director after Waylen left. And he's been very instrumental in the transition to my role as the new director—and then, just the ongoing support of helping me to learn what all these different roles, responsibilities, resources, and things of that nature. So, very pleased to have Danny continuing in his deputy role. CHR. CABANAS: Thank you, Danny, for staying on. MR. PATEL: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, there you go. It's a win-win. So, at this time thank you, Sommer, for thinking of bringing the staff over because I think it's really important for the staff to know the Board, and the Board to know the employees—and being that we meet here regularly for our meetings, that's really important. So, I liked that you started off your directorship by doing that. I think we all appreciate that. We used to meet—not we, but the Board previous Boards—used to meet in the conference room of your department. But with COVID and the necessity for ZOOM meetings during that time, we ended up meeting in the Council Chambers. But we the Boards always met there. So, the staff would interact with the various Board members, so we don't have that anymore. So, this was really good today. MS. TOKIHIRO: I would like to try and find other opportunities for the staff to engage with the Board more regularly. I'm not exactly sure at this point what form that takes, but that's definitely something that I want to be mindful of going forward. And because I want them to understand how this works, and you are my appointing authority, and I want them to do things like read the meeting minutes, understand how I'm representing all of them and all of their work to all of you—and that's accountability for me. I want them to be able to ask questions"Well, what happened? Why did you answer that question this way?" Or if it provides an opportunity for us to continuously improve in a certain area, I want that to be a little bit more—I wouldn't say more transparent—the process the system has always been there. But until I was interviewing for my position as the director, I wasn't regularly going in and reading the minutes from your meetings. And when I started reading, initially, I started reading what had happened just in the recent past so I could make sure that I was familiar. But then I kept reading and reading and reading—and it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting for process, procedure but then, also, the outcomes and the things that you discussed the feedback that you provided, things that you would recommend. Page 8