2024-07-31 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission July 31, 2024 these are really subject -matter experts out in our community that are making progress in these areas and we want to bring them to the table to help us solve some of our issues and priorities. So we look forward to bringing them together on regular convenings. And then, finally, building capacity. This is a really important one for our office because we know we lack a lot of expertise, technical capacity but also we fully recognize that our County departments, in order to help us make progress in this area, they are already overwhelmed and understaffed, just like many agencies across the country. And so, recognizing that, we don't want to add things to their plate. We want to build capacity. We want to bring something to the table so that they don't have more work but we're actually making progress together. So, again, this is a really important one for our mission of our office. And the ways that we are doing that I mentioned applying for grants. Our most recent one that we applied for is a heavy duty vehicle conversion grant and that really was, again, thinking about how can we look at our heavy duty vehicles and think about clean energy for those vehicles. But building capacity—even to have the conversations, thinking about what does that look like to have electric vehicles for the County and starting to have those discussions to that grant opportunity. We applied for that grant that's going to help us improve our energy efficiency at County facilities. We are implementing our Climate Action Plan, again with have an AmeriCorps Vista, Liam, who's done a great job at really diving into that and providing an implementation matrix, prioritization tool—again, so that we can meet with the departments and have really clear understanding about where we are and opportunities for moving forward on that Plan. We're gathering data to update our greenhouse gas inventory. We have applied for a SolSmart Designation. We'll be the first County in the State of Hawaii to get that designation. And that really just promotes and removes barriers for renewable energy for our communities—so we're pretty excited about getting that. And then, finally, future efforts in the space to build capacity, really, around training. And one of those trainings is really looking at a model Trauma -Informed, Resilience -Oriented Equity- focused—so looking forward to bringing that training to our County. And just further details into our grant opportunities—again, remember our budget was 886,000 and so, if successful, which I'mfingers crossed, we will be—how you can see that that leveraging for only six months of work is really about paying off the investment to create the office. So the first one was really, again, that Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant—this is coming from the Infrastructure Reduction Act, I think—it's either that or the other one, I can't remember, actually to do the Facilities Conditions Assessment and Energy Management Plan. Page 13