2025-11-17 Salary Commission Public Hearing Minutes

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Salary Commission November 17, 2025 say about that is, it’s—as somebody else has pointed out—these kind of renumeration for our executives, which is not reflected with general worker wages and it’s, certainly, not reflected in the general community—is grossly insensitive and I think will bring—I realize that there are a lot of people that aren’t aware of this proposal to make a raise, certainly, people I’ve spoken to. I think you’re at risk of, again, making history but not in a positive way. And I just would urge you to please, please be sensitive to our community and sensitive to the optics of this because when we do the math, it’s coming out close to under 50%, but we’re talking about a number that’s close enough to 50% raise in a material matter of four years—the raise, itself, being ordered in the space of two years—it’s extremely insensitive when I can tell you for myself, my own business has seen a reduction in capacity, and that’s because I’m in the tourism sector—that much less spending apparently—and, as I said, those should be red flags. If we were basing these salary increases on performance, it would be one thing. But I actually didn’t see our county council do the work I would have liked them to do on just even the budget—they didn’t, to me, work hard enough to make cuts in certain departments. We saw part of the surplus go to a $70 million payout to unions—and all of this is just—not only is it creating wealth gaps in our community that aren’t healthy for us, but I feel also that it’s—we’re certainly sending a wrong message and creating a dangerous level of insolation for our leadership whether—there’s a risk that you create in an area of government that’s not in touch with the day- to-day struggles that people are going through. So, I think I’ll close there and just say mahalo—mahalo for all the excellent testimony that we were hearing from people who have an HR background. I really appreciate hearing that and, again, we have a County full of very, very good people and I constantly hear very respectful testimony and very—people that want to help make sure good decisions are made. And I don’t notice a lot of the public here today, so I’m representing many, many more people by speaking today. I took time out of my workday to do this—and it’s just to urge you to have the utmost (inaudible). I think we can take these—I think we can take the fact that the tourism industry itself is now making an urgent call for help to be a sign that we could be headed for a war—and it’s very, very concerning because, again, if we were going to base things on performance—we saw our county council last year go after quite—they pursued quite hard, the idea of eliminating short-term rentals—a lot of areas on our island. It was very fortunate they stopped that particular pursuit, but they had to be warned of just how much of our economy is dependent on tourism. So, again, from a performance point of view, we haven’t seen stewardship of our economy. And so, when I look around and I see people hurting, I see families struggling—you would want to base any raise for our leadership on some kind of performance metric that was tied to our economic performance. And so, I really—I urge that not only would you not pursue a raise at this time, but that the Salary Commission start to work on a structure where you could be establishing performance metrics. I believe that idea was (inaudible) today by somebody else who testified. It should Page 12