2025-11-17 Salary Commission Public Hearing Minutes

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Salary Commission November 17, 2025 CHR. PAVAO: Okay. Anybody else on Zoom that wants to testify? I see somebody with their hand raised on iPhone III. Okay, no other testimony—nobody else on Zoom—then we’ll adjourn the public hearing portion of this meeting and then we’ll move on to our regular agenda. So, next on our regular agenda is— (At this time, someone on Zoom spoke.) SPEAKER: Hello? Aloha. CHR. PAVAO: Okay, hello? MS. ISAAC: Hello, my name is Megan Isaac, and I did request to participate. Thank you. CHR. PAVAO: Okay. MS. ISAAC: Thank you. I would like to contribute, and I am genuinely a member of the public. I’ve really appreciated the very respectful—and I would imagine helpful manaʻo from some people who have a background in HR. I, myself, am an operator of a small business that contributes to actual revenue base in our economy. So, I have some concerns—I just have to look around me and I can see, particularly, in East Hawaiʻi, that there are—there’s a slowdown of tourism—and that concerns me because I know how important that is to a lot, a lot of livelihoods. I could give a lot more testimony than that, but I’ll just point out that even in today’s paper, there’s a story about industry—travel industry people that are starting to make the big noise and ask the State of Hawaiʻi introduce an interventionary marketing because they perceive the tourism levels are down and they perceive it to be a great concern. So, I’m just—I could, again, speak for quite some time about this, but I’m just going to say it’s been alluded to already—there’s—there’re actually very hard times going on in our community now and we can anticipate should that many continue. And as the last speaker wrapped up and said—it seems insensitive to even be entertaining raises right now. It is understood that, historically, significant raise came to the executive in 2024. It was the largest ever. It was at— over 27% I believe. So, this is an additional. And as somebody else said it hasn’t been tied to performance. We actually have seen some concerning levels of debt and I’m just going to do my best to quickly run through my understanding of what that debt level is. There—as I understand it, there are several warning indicators that show that Hawaiʻi County is actually in some financial risk and I’m going to draw on the 2024 financial review and show that there are something like $400,000,000.00 in bonds—and we’re looking at a billion-dollar budget. When I start to break that down as to what it means for each individual in the County, we’re looking at a significant number that’s—that reflects what each and every resident is carrying in the way of debt. Of course, I would like to pull those numbers up right now, but what I want to Page 11