2024-07-31 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission July 31, 2024 Ways that we are coordinating—coordinating is a little bit more of an action verb here. Connecting is about building those relationships and meeting with folks, but coordinating really means that we're getting our hands dirty and really thinking about how can we make progress together. It is about breaking down those silos, frankly, within our departments as well. And so, ways that we're doing that—we partnered with our Department of Public Works, and our Parks and Recreation Department to build a project that looks at facilities condition assessments and energy management plan for our County facilities. And that's really to understand where are our assets and our the opportunities there for other—either efficiency or installing some renewable energy at those facilities. So, it's been a great project, again, to sort of work across departments and build that capacity for our County. We're coordinating with departments to apply for various grants, which I'll go over in a minute here. We're partnering with community organizations to also support their grant applications that are in line with our sustainability goals. We're coordinating with community organizations to support data collection. We recognize there's a lot of need for understanding our baseline information. And one of those examples is, we're working with the NASA Develop Team that's here in Hilo for the summer and they're helping us collect observational data for our Hilo Baywater Shed, which is really important work that's happening. We're coordinating across various statewide groups—like I mentioned, the Department of Health, but we're also looking at how do we coordinate—we have the upcoming legislative session happening. And so, how do we coordinate and make sure that we're in alignment across the State as we look at laws that might be passed in these areas. We're coordinating the implementation of our Climate Action Plan. That Plan was created with all the departments working collectively to understand where they are and where they can make strategic efforts in these spaces. But we—someone has to carry that torch—and so our office is really carrying that and continuing to have conversations about where are we, where can we get, where are some opportunities to make progress. We're also coordinating to provide a Zero Waste Pilot Program. This will be a program that we use to make sure that our County meetings really are zero waste. So, helping to reduce use of plastic water bottles for our Commissioners and those type of efforts there. And then, finally, just looking at future efforts for coordination. We are working in the cesspool conversion space along with our Department of Environmental Management, just thinking about those communities that won't, realistically, be connected to a County sewer system and then how do we help to push forward and prioritize their conversion of their cesspools and, more importantly, bring in funds to help them to do that. And then, also, we are looking at convening working groups. There was some effort around this during the sustainability summits that Mayor Roth's Administration has been convening. And Page 12