2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MR. HOFFMANN: A three level budget submission, Bill. What I’m saying is the DOD type thing. A status quo budget in which you have no more resources. MR. TAKABA: Oh, submission. MR. HOFFMANN: The DOD type thing, a status quo budget in which you had no more resources. Whatever percentage the mayor wants. If you had five percent more or 10% more, where would that go? If you had to take a cut of 10% where would that go? Much like the Department of Defense does with their budget. MR. TAKABA: So there would be three types of budgets? MR. HOFFMANN: Three levels of budget. Same budget for the department, but if I had an extra five percent, where would I put that? If you were going to mandate a 10% cut, these are instructions from the mayor to the individual departments, what would you have to cut? That type of thing. Where would you recommend the cut? MS. NICHOLSON: Another question I had was about collective bargaining. We had Ron Takahashi and Ian Takashiba, we were talking about some of the suggestions that have come forward that would involve union changes. And so we learned, at least I learned, perhaps other people already knew it, that all of the collective bargaining contracts are statewide. MR. HOFFMANN: That’s why I didn’t mention it because I know we can’t. The administration’s hands to a certain degree are tied. Mr. Kenoi can’t go and say, okay, we’re going to take a 10% cut in contracts. He can’t do that. Even if he wanted to, he can’t do that. MS. NICHOLSON: So, it sounds like the only negotiating room is some supplemental agreements that can be made under the very specific circumstances. But Mr.Takahashi, I asked him if this was sort of common that there would be collective bargaining agreements that would span counties. And he said actually probably it’s quite unusual on the mainland, that most counties do it separately. And he had some good reasons why we do it that way here. But I was just wondering what your take is on that. MR. HOFFMANN: The reason that I didn’t mention it as far as contract negotiations are concerned is because of the situation I mentioned and you mentioned it, that it’s done at the state with the governor by the way. The situation with the furlough days is a clear example of that. Again this is the result of the union, I think, being in a very strong position in this state and we’ve always done it this way. I’m sorry, but that’s it. We’ve always done it this way. Until that attitude changes also with the union and with the state, we’ll probably have difficulty with that. I would love to see the changes made so that there would be collective bargaining maybe key to individual counties rather than just the collective bargaining at the state level. The mayor can hopefully and he might want to look at that as one of those tough nuts to crack. I’m not certain of the success of that. For a much long-range program and savings, this would certainly be an area in which we would save considerable money. The idea of some of the retirement benefits and adding overtime and so forth to some of the contracts that we have are things that 13