2010-12-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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received. Our employees have sort of adjusted. You have to deal with the decrease in pay, but they’ve made adjustments. MR. TAKAHASHI: If I can comment. To my surprise actually, we have had minimum if not zero grievances from the employees which is surprising given the economic, the furloughs and all of that, to having to do more with less, having less time to do your work. I think it’s a credit to the departments, the department heads, the mayor and his administration and how they went about doing the furloughs. I expected a whole lot of more complaints per se, which we aren’t getting. MS. WONG: And I remember that coming up when we met with you separately, and I reported that to the group, cause that was, I was surprised about that. One last question, we had received a document from Council member Yagong dated May 12, 2009, just a copy. He had asked the employees for input. One of the first things, bullets in it says the County Council should consider declaring the Big Island insolvent which would then allow you to cancel all union contracts and start fresh to demand accountability from county employees and supervisors. That was item one, and I thought wow, that’s a big thing. Is that even possible? MR. TAKAHASHI: To me, not without a change in the law that says Hawai‘i County is excluded from collective bargaining. But right now all counties are included under the law in this collective bargaining process. It would take a law change, in my opinion, to exclude us from these union contracts. MS. WONG: I just wanted to confirm that. I didn’t think it was possible so I thought I’d just ask. Thank you. MS. NICHOLSON: I have another question, has there been a change over the years in reducing benefits for new hires? In other words, if you’re being hired today versus you were hired five years ago, you accrue vacation time at a lesser rate? Or have there been any of those kinds of reductions in benefits that would apply not retroactively to people that were already part of the county, but for newer hires? MR. TAKAHASHI: The employer group has attempted to make those changes. We were able to, a few years ago to get some reduction in a graduated scale for vacation and sick leave benefits. That only was temporary. It lasted probably two years and it got replaced back into the contract the following negotiations. The law has changed as far as retirement benefits, although that’s at the backend, but it has been reduced somewhat where you have to work 25 years now to get free medical. And if you started after 2001, you cannot include your spouse as part of that medical package. Whereas, if you were hired prior to ’96 you get free medical with 10 years of service when you retire to include your spouse. Those benefits on the backend have changed, but that, as a result of law changes. But as far as the benefits right now, we haven’t seen a take back. Well, I take that back –comp time, over time, CTO. We were able to get a cap for employees. As the contractual provision before, there was no cap. The employees could accumulate 1,000 hours of comp time off. We were able now to go back and use the FLSA caps on that for most of the employees. There are still a group out there that has no cap on it. If you want to consider that a benefit, we were able to negotiate that kind of reduction. 9