2010-12-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MR. TAKAHASHI: Yeah. We could see what mistakes or whatever happened and we were able to proceed accordingly. MS. O’HARA: I have another question. You mentioned that Maui County only furloughed one day? MR. TAKAHASHI: Yes. One day a month. MS. O’HARA: Is that due to better economic conditions with the county, or they dealt with it a different way? MR. TAKAHASHI: Yes. I guess the way they looked at things with their budget that they only needed to have one day to balance their budget. MS. NICHOLSON: On a slightly different topic, and this is going back to the thing from Council member Yagong that Gloria referred to –I’m just going to quote a comment that we got here, because we got several comments when we asked for input from county employees. So this actually just reflects some of those other comments that we got. And this was from the county employee and it says –“I love my job and I know everyone needs a job, but you need to check out how overstaff we are at Solid Waste. There is so much wasted time because there is not enough to do with the amount of people that we have on staff. They practically have to invent things to keep everyone looking busy. Come see and you will be surprised.” So when you get comments like this, I have no idea if this is true or if it was resolved or what it is. But when you get these kinds of comments, what is the procedure in dealing with these kindsof complaints of this person is not being very productive. Something like this. What happens? MR. TAKAHASHI: I for one didn’t receive that. But anyway, if one were to be brought to my attention, I would immediately go discuss the matter with the department head and bring it to their attention too, and recommend to them that they take a real good look at it, if they don’t already know what the picture is. I mean, that would be the start and it would depend upon what the department head would want to do. MS. NICHOLSON: So there are complaints. How do they get to you or to the department head? I can understand how an employee might not want to complain to their department head about something like that. How do you solicit input from employees to help you identify problem areas? MR. TAKAHASHI: In general I don’t, I’m not closed to having employees come directly to our office or to me. I would prefer they go through their department. Again if they are in a situation where they are not wanting to complain about their department, what the tendencies have been is they go to the union and have the union represent them to present a complaint or a grievance against the situation. Or have the union at least call the department to say, hey, we got this situation. Can you look into it? We’re not actually out there soliciting these comments, but again, I don’t turn anybody away if they do want to come. I believe the employees know that they have their unions to go to. And that’s the way the system I guess is set up to be. Not to say that we want the 11