2010-07-30 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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it be more flexible? Could there be an interagency structured that would allow you to maintain programs for which there are funding, such as federal funds and state funds that are coming down without eliminating the office entirely, since it’s been established by Code? MR. TAKABA: The reason why it got into the Code was it started of as the Committee on Aging. It was just a committee, like the Committee on Disabled Persons. It started out as a committee and then when the funds came available, then this committee was endowed with these huge grants and they had to start this program, so it came not by choice, but that’s the way we were set up. If you’re going to continue in that direction, you should be put in the Charter, and that could be a recommendation for the commission to make if you’re going to commit to something like that. As far as the interagency, where you’re talking about state versus county, within MS. O’HARA: No, I’m talking about within the county. MR. TAKABA: Because right now, Parks and Recreation has Elderly Activities Program. They do all the services. Office of Aging, which is a non-Charter organization provides funds to run these programs. So, in a sense there is an interagency thing going on where one agency is funding another with all this federal funds that they’re getting. But the law that allows them to get this money says the guys who fund programs should not run the programs because if not, then there’s going to be a conflict to have just build, build, build the programs, and not look outside at what kind of existing agencies there are providing similar services. If you look at the grants from the Office of Aging, we give grants to the Elderly Activities as well as other organizations like Department of Health, Legal Aid Society and all these other nonprofits – HCEOC, all these nonprofit organizations. That’s because they don’t want to have the duplication that some places have when they receive the grants. They just build county programs up and pretty soon we have this big program that would be better served by another organization like Legal Aid Society. It makes sense for us to give legal services to the Legal Aid Society rather than do it in-house because we don’t have the resources to do all our own programs. But the tendency will be let’s build our own. Let’s hire our own attorney and do a legal program within the county. But that’s not the way we should be doing it. We should look at the agencies throughout the county and putting it out to bid. Somebody can do a better job and more efficient job, then give it to the one who can do it most efficiently. But we did keep certain services within the county that we thought was core county responsibilities, like transportation. We give a lot of funding by, Office of Aging provided a lot of funds to the Elderly Activities Division to run the transportation program. We give funds for recreation programs. The kind of services that made sense to contract with the counting, another agency within the county, and we did that. But services that didn’t make sense if it was an educational program or something like that, we give the money to University of Hawai‘i, Office of Continuing Education. So, there is that interdepartmental relationships going on with granting the funding. But, I think it goes back to what kind of services or programs will the county maintain. If it’s within that core, I think it makes sense for us to do it and give ourselves the money or run it ourselves. If it’s not we should give it to another organization. MS. O’HARA: So, how large is our Office of Aging? 17