2025-05-23 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board May 23, 2025 So, I know the Board has had a lot of business recently, but we will definitely get that on the schedule, so that you can meet them —ask questions of all of the Managers individually. CHR. CABANAS: And maybe a good time with —would be when we have our Board fully staffed. As everyone, you can see, there's only three Board members present and we're still waiting for the Administration to nominate two more individuals who would have to be confirmed by the County Council. Because the Merit Appeals Board consist of five Board membersa quorum is a minimum of three, so we do have quorum to conduct our official business. So, maybe once we are fully staffed, then you can bring the Managers on board and give a little update on each function. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, absolutely. CHR. CABANAS: Thanks. I do have a couple of questions to wrap it up for you, Sommer. I made a note of that —okay, so you met with the Chancellor of HCC on employee training and expanding the internship opportunities. Did the Cooperative Vocational Education Program known as "CVE"—did it include that? `Cause I know the numbers have been historically low, in the last maybe 10 years or so —with referrals of students from the CVE Program at HCC. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we've been briefly discussed that and then, more recently, Michelle Simmons, the HR Manager for Recruitment and Examination —had a meeting with UH and they're talking about expanding that CVE Program to include accounting and also information technology programs. So, that would be great if we could see that expanded to include those disciplines and —because those are areas we're always looking to fill positions within the County —and that would be a good way to utilize more of those positions and get more involvement in that program. CHR. CABANAS: Mm-hmm. And just for everyone's benefit —the CVE Program is budgeted by the Department of Human Resources. So, it's County funds where students work part-time, like 19 hours a week while they're in school. They get paid hourly for the work that they perform. It benefits the department, it provides the students with valued work experience, and many of the CVE students, historically —once they've finished their education at the University or HCC—it's been, primarily, with HCC—but they have applied for our recruitments and many, many have been employed —hired by the County through the formal recruitment process, and worked their way up the rank in the merit system. So, that's an important program. The last question is, what's happening with the Hiring Campaign and the Task Force on Hiring? The Hiring Campaign was brought up, I think, in November and again in February. This is mid -May —any progress on those two? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. If you're specifically asking about the radio ads —we haven't pursued the radio ads but we are working on different types of advertisement. The HR Task Force has met regularly and we're seeing progress in restoring the number of eligible candidates, the referred lists to departments, we're also seeing an increase in the number of qualified applicants Page 8