2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS.NICHOLSON: Any other questions? Dare I ask any more comments, Mr.Hoffmann? MR. HOFFMANN: Hey. Normally I don’t have that type of an opportunity. We only have three minutes, five minutes in council. Madam Chairman, I obviously appreciate the opportunity to come before you in person. You can understand why I feel I couldn’t have done this adequately by e-mail or a short piece of paper. I feel very strongly on many of these issues obviously. I hope, in any case that the issues that I’m trying to strongly advocate for and continue to push reflect that sensitivity that we have. I continue to stress and hope and always expect and anticipate that we’re going to have better cooperation from the administration to the council on many of these things. We are, I would hope, sharing the need and the necessity to view it in that manner. We don’t have the luxury of budget that we had when economic times were good. And unless I missed my assessments, I don’t see too much of an improvement. Working with the Food Basket as I do, I can tell you that when one out of every six of residents of this island use the services of the Food Basket each and every year for the past two or three years, folks, we’ve got a problem. The responsibility of government remains public health and safety. Food and housing are critical to meeting those responsibilities. We’ve got to do a better job. And we’ve go to stop trying to look upon this only from a political perspective. And I think we’ve gotten wrapped around that axle too much. So anything you can do to help us in that regard, I certainly salute your efforts and I salute the initiative that this commission is taking in this regard. I would only hope you had done that five years ago, but I’m happy you’re doing it today. Thank you. MS. NICHOLSON: Thank you. We’ll take a five minute break. BREAK: 11:45-11:50 MS. NICHOLSON: We have a quorum now so we can reconvene. We have a lot to go through. I think we want to go ahead and continue discussion among ourselves that any points that Mr. Hoffmann brought up that we might want to include, pick them up right now, things that we might want to put forward in our draft. I noted down nine specific suggestions that he had, some of which may already be on our list or they are things that we’re already going to discuss later. So, would you like me to just name them off? MS. PROVALENKO: Yes. Please. MS. NICHOLSON: The first one, and you may have some more that you captured. These are just the ones I noted down. 1.Eliminate vacant funded positions. Is that something you would like to continue to keep on our list, on our draft? 2.Introduce a hiring freeze for six months and then review that hiring freeze to see if it should be lifted. 3.The four day work week. Which is actually in another format on something else we’re going to discuss already. So, should we just carry that forward? But we’ll 24