2010-09-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

us. And thank you for coordinating those two things. I can see under our General Fund which is primarily funded by tax revenues, that we are providing most of these services. The services that are being provided by the states are not the county’s responsibility as organized here in Hawai‘i. But one thing down below where you’re talking about service functions, there’s a very broad category called community service. And I’m kind of curious what all we’re offering in the way of, and what is community services? It’s a very broad topic as written down. What do you really mean by that? What are we really providing as community services? Just kind of curious. I think that helps us to focus on what the core actions this county should be providing when we really look at it in those terms. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay. Before we go into discussion on community services, did you have something you wanted to add? Gloria, did you want to address what, because you’re referring to the document. Do you come up with any that is included under that category of community services? Anything specific? MS. WONG: I don’t recall. All of this is cut and paste so I didn’t add anything to it. I can look back at my notes but I don’t easily recall. MS. O’HARA: We do have the health, education, welfare department. Health, welfare and education. MR. TAKABA: It’s not really the county’s function because Office of Aging inaudible. We have Office of Housing functions. MS. WONG: Is Karen Tashima part of that? MR. TAKABA: Karen, well she works out of the mayor’s office on a special project. MS. WONG: But her focus is health? MR. TAKABA: Yes, because we never had any kind of health initiative before. And what we wanted to do was at least have somebody covering health care issues because it is such a big subject, big issue. And we wanted to make sure that at least somebody can represent the county on health care issues. We don’t have an educational person, when you’re talking educational policies. So there’s a conference going on today, we send someone from the mayor’s office. He’s out of Kona. He works out of Kona. And the question came up as to who is going to be our contact on educational issues. Because we didn’t have one, we sent the Deputy Managing Director. In those areas, I think because we don’t do direct services in health care, we’re doing more recognition and planning. That’s the extent of what the county has done. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, we have a sort of a suggestion on the table that we divide ourselves into groups to talk about specific issues. And we have some tentative issues on the table. Actually I’d like to ask, in terms of the Sunshine Law, if we have two of say talking to a department, that’s not a problem? 16