2010-09-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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are the recommendations that I saw and copied and tried to be concise. The one on the bottom of page 2 and top of 3, that’s from Wikipedia. It looked at the different departments. I think I put in core departments, county departments, or counties. And I thought it was curious that Hawai‘i is noted, on the top of page 3, is the only U.S. state that has no incorporated municipalities. Instead it has four counties. And I realized that but I didn’t realize that we were the only ones. We have the liberty to be even more different or creative or whatever. This was sort of my backup to these two concerns that I have for our county. I’ll just mention it now and bring it up at another time, but I really would like to see, and it’s not the county ‘s responsibility but I see in our minutes that it was discussed last meeting – health care and education. I have a concern for health care and education. And it’s not the county’s duty. But just as ag is in R&D in special focus, eventually I’d like for us to look at health care and education be something that the county can, not necessarily build a department on but have an assignment too that would mean budget assignment. But this is a background to help us decide on, and Bill Takaba said we need to determine what our core services are, our core responsibilities. This is what other states and educators are saying. MS. NICHOLSON: Do you have any comments on Gloria’s report? W. TAKABA: I think with what Gloria is referring to, I’ll just pass out this copy, just to tie in with what the county does is what’s stated here. I’ll pass out what the county does.I think the first section of the report that I passed out, it’s pretty much in mind with what the county does except there may be some functions that we don’t do, like community colleges. I passed out what we do have. This is based on how we establish our budget. So, just say as an example we have General Government, and below General Government we have the County Council, executive branch auditing directions. So if you relate that to General Government in the hand out that Gloria gave us, we also have the grouping so what we have to look at is the underlying heading. And that’s the heading that’s that relates to Gloria’s paper. And below that would be the subcategories. For example we have General Government, public safety, highways, sanitation and waste removal, health, education and health welfare and education, culture and recreation, death service, and miscellaneous. The categories are there but we just don’t fund it. We haven’t been funding them. The county has not been funding too much in these areas. We have some like health. I notice that even in our health side, it talks about the physicians, the county physicians. They only do employee physicals. It’s not like to serve the public. So it’s more, that should be more of a general list that was health, welfare and education. Again, that’s what the county is. If you want to relate it to what you have maybe that’s a good way to start. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, we were all sort of agreed that our last meeting that we would spend time going through the County Charter and using that as sort of a base to follow up. I’m thinking about those quorums. MR. TAKABA: I think if you just follow these. It’s basically what you have to do. MS. NICHOLSON: What the core MR. TAKABA: Yes. These will be like what you would consider as. And you can see by funding where we get our money. It has a budget attached. That’s what currently 12