2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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this. So I’m not against increases in government. I’m not necessarily opposed to seeing some departments have an increase in personnel if we can see some results coming from that in a fairly short period of time. Let’s go back to a few things as far as suggestions are concerned. There are time-honored ways of saying, ladies and gentlemen, this county has got to eliminate all vacant funded positions. Bill had heard my mantra on this almost ever since I joined the council. It’s as valid today as it was five years ago. And I absolutely accept the fact that when we had 480 vacant funded positions under Harry Kim’s administration, I think that term is right at one time. And we’re only down to, I think the numbers, don’t hold me, Bill can tell me if I’m right or wrong, 50 or so at the moment in the current budget. That’s 50 too much as far as I’m concerned. I’m sorry. We are in a tough situation. You want to address some type of a way to look at how we can do our job better, and to make the cost savings that we must have, I suggest to you that eliminating vacant funded positions is necessary. Now please, I’m not going to get into why we didn’t do that before. I’m not going to try to, as some people have mentioned, well that was the county slush fund. I have not made that statement publicly ever. And I’m not doing that here. What I’m saying is, we don’t have the latitude for the advantage or the opportunity to see any funded vacant position at the moment. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was at the way the mayor and the administration handled the budget for the previous two years. I’m sure you well know the number of things that Mr. Yagong and I working, not together, but obviously in tandem, looked at the different budget aspects of the county. And again we center on personnel. We’ve always done it that way is a mantra that continue to plague us as we went through the number of opportunities we looked at in the previous budget cycle. In May before the mayor submitted his final budget, he and I were on a platform over in Kona, and I presented a number of different proposals to the people there. We had about 120 people there. Most of the cabinet, by the way, showed up. And there were a number of suggestions. All of them were thrown in the waste paper basket and considered foul, not good at this time. In a way, I’m happy to see that maybe the mayor, if I read his comments correctly, coming back to several of those. I think he’s coming back he’s coming back a year late. But let me proposal that a hiring freeze is not out of the question right now. Folks we have a difficulty. The choice is either find another source of revenue. And that means, unless I missed the boat, raising the property taxes which as you well know probably would drag some of us under the wheels of the nearest truck being driven by most of our constituents because they’re hurting out there. Or in some way, trying to make sure that we do our job properly. Here is a suggestion for you. I don’t mean to go back and say I can use experiences that I’ve had in other jobs or in other venues and try to apply them in whole or even in part in the County of Hawai‘i. But I did spend a couple of years in the federal government in the Pentagon in Washington with the Department of Defense. And yes, I guess you could consider me a budget cruncher. And yes, I appeared every year for two years before four congressional subcommittees. Two in the House and two in the Senate. And our thing was to try to advocate and explain the Department of Defense Intelligence budget. It’s not an oxymoron. I know the jokes about that. But what we did, and one of the basic perimeters of trying to do our budget homework at the time and we were on a very, very strenuous scrutiny by an oversight by the Congress. This was just after the intelligence problems and difficulties we had in the ‘70s, so Congress was really beating us out. 5