2026-05-12 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board May 12, 2026 So, it’s very much a collaborative effort between Classification and Pay, Recruitment and Examination, our departments—and then, other counties throughout the State. MR. THOMAS: Do you have to wrestle with situations where your Classification and Pay people, for instance, are not really convinced based on the (inaudible) that presented to them by the department or the requesting agency? Do they—how do they become convinced that a reasonable pool of applicants can be found? I guess, in the back of my head is—are there instances where the supposed new position is really being created for a particular individual in mind? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, to that end, I would just say that when Human Resources works with our departments to talk about operational needs, it’s always focused on operational need and not based on individuals. There are instances where a department’s request for something very specific is not something that we feel aligns with whether it’s the way that the department structure is set up or that the particular class of work is not equivalent to what would be happening in Hawaiʻi County. And—kind of a common example is if a department finds a class specification for a position that exist in the City and County of Honolulu and especially when it’s like an upper-level management type position, because the scale of the City and County of Honolulu versus the County of Hawaiʻi is very different. So, when we are looking at equivalent jurisdictions, we usually consider Maui to be the most comparable to Hawaiʻi County. Kauaʻi County has—they’re smaller—they have about half of the number of employees that we do, but we usually scale based on what Maui is using. So, City and County of Honolulu class specifications sometimes can cause us some challenges—and that has come up recently. And so, what we try and do is sit down with the departments and help them to understand why it wouldn’t be comparable—and then propose alternatives and provide the feedback as to why we’re recommending it. And then, also provide information about that internal alignment with other departments and how that department structure would be impacted. So, sometimes people or departments will go, “Well, I want to do this. And so, I’m going to take this task from this division and add it to this. And I’m going take this task from this division and add it here”—not recognizing that once you start moving those tasks, a few different things have to happen. You need to consult with the Union because there may be change of supervision, but then you’re also affecting the classification of the position, potentially, that you’re taking tasks from because all of the pricing and the classification is based on the job duties. So, once you start removing or moving job duties to a different area of responsibility, there could be other—we’ll call them “unintended consequences.” Page 6