2010-12-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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unions to file complaints but we believe in amicable relationship with the union where we can talk to them to resolve issues. MS. O’HARA: More a comment and for your benefit –what we’re referring to is a e-mail that Council member Yagong sent out to all county employees asking for their suggestions on cost savings. And so he got back many, many responses. And we asked for a copy of it. And I can understand this was never directed to your attention so, this is what we’re referring to, these suggestions. MS. WONG: It’s 15 pages. MS. O’HARA: With many, many suggestions. Some were very interesting. MS. NICHOLSON: Which is in addition to the suggestions that we solicited as the Cost of Government Commission because we also got quite a few comments from employees. And some of them expressed the same sort of feeling of there are some people in my department that really aren’t doing much. There’re definitely some people that the county could let go. So we solicited that kind of input and we want to know how to make best use of that kind of input. And so what do you suggest? MR. TAKAHASHI: Work with the department heads. We can assist them in providing an evaluation of their operations. I consider ourselves a service agency. We don’t want to go there and tell you go to do this, you got to do that. That’s not our style. But if they want our help to come in to look at their operations, to look at the structural set up is, we’ll be glad to help. That’s just what it takes is to go in there and evaluate what you’re doing and see if you can do it better and what it will take. I have very good people in my department that’s able to help people in these areas, to include Ian. We just don’t want to force ourselves onto other departments to tell them how to run their show. We’re just here to assist them to do what they want or what they need. I would recommend you go through the departments to ask if you want to MS. NICHOLSON: Well a fair number of the suggestions we got would apply to the union contracts. Like people saying we should reduce the number of holidays. If someone wants that holiday off, they could take it as a vacation day off or something. So, those kinds of things are really sort of more broad and general. And I don’t know if you’ve heard those kinds of comments from people. MR. TAKAHASHI: Those types, yes we’ve heard. But again like I said, we can’t just go in and tell the union we want to take this out there. MS. NICHOLSON: I understand. MR. TAKAHASHI: Yes. Too much vacation. Too much sick leave. Too many holidays. Yes, those types we’ve heard. MS. NICHOLSON: But when push comes to shove, when you try to negotiate with the unions, they’re saying no. MR. TAKAHASHI: Obviously yes. There hasn’t been any changes over the years. 12