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Salary Commission <br />Call to Order (Item 1) <br />July 31, 2024 <br />CHR. PAVAO: Call the meeting to order of the Hawaii County Salary Commission. <br />Statements from the Public (Item 2) <br />CHR. PAVAO: "Statements from the Public" on agenda items. Oral testimony may be <br />presented to the Commission either at the onset of this meeting or immediately prior to the <br />applicable agenda items. Is—any public testimony—anybody wants to speak now at the onset of <br />the meeting? Thank you. <br />MS. FRENZ: Good morning, everyone, this is DCC Cody, we're going to start with public <br />testimony, here, in Hilo Chambers and then we'll check-in with everyone on Zoom. Thank you. <br />Go ahead, Chair. <br />(At this time, Ms. Heather Kimball, Council Chair, Hawaii County Council, came <br />forward.) <br />MS. KIMBALL: Good morning. I'm Heather Kimball, Council Chair, for the Hawaii County <br />Council—good morning, Chair, and members of the Salary Commission. It's nice to be on this <br />side of the dais. <br />I'm here today to provide testimony on the salary considerations with respect to the OSCER <br />Administrator. I am one of the co-authors of the legislation that created this Office of <br />Sustainability, Climate, Equity, and Resilience. <br />And in the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that the current Administrator, behind me <br />here, ran against me for Council. But, since that four years, we haveI would say become <br />friends and share mutual respect. <br />But I am testifying today with regard to the positions and the requirement of the position <br />regardless of who holds that administrative position. To be clear, I'll just briefly share the <br />intention of the OSCER Office, which is to provide a, sort of, over -reaching, coordinating <br />authority with respect to climate change, resilience, equity, and sustainability in our County. <br />We—before we created the office, did a deep dive into a diagnosis of why do we have all of <br />these great plans around climate change, sustainability, resilience, in our community and yet a lot <br />of things were not being actively enacted. <br />And the answer to that question turned out to be—one, folks were kind of working in silos <br />independently and they lacked overall coordination. There was also a great interest in the <br />various departments within the County to do this work but they lacked technical capacity and <br />they lacked resources. <br />Page 2 <br />