2010-07-30 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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shouldn’t be a core responsibility of the county, and that might be political science people that would know. And organizationally it would be better if you put this under this. Like the Parks and Recreation, some of the programs should go under Office of Aging and shuffle those around. MR. MATSUDA : Gloria, you’re not suggesting that we have another commission member, setup that person to assist? MS. WONG: Right. Assist us, yes. MS. NICHOLSON: Is there anyone in the university who does study county government? Not necessarily just to critic county government. MS. WONG: And in today’s newspaper, there was an article about how I think it was some students from College of Business and they teamed up with some students from Kam School and did a study in strategic plan for Hawai‘i Island gourmet products. And that was all for free, and they did that as an internship. And I was looking, thinking more along the line of some professor level, legal rather than some student level, as a community service. MS. GARSON: You can communicate. The commission can send a communication to the political science department head, I don’t know who that is, and make a request, be on a volunteer basis. And maybe put it out there, and it could be a supervised project. There’s nothing wrong with you sending communication making a request. MS. O’HARA: I think it would be nice to get input from the departments at the university, the relevant departments being political science and geography. They do a lot of urban planning with geography. And also the College of Business and Economics and send them up to the Deans of those departments and see if they can incorporate into this next semester as you get some feedback, and then I think we can strategize on a letter that we could send out to those two departments. MS. NICHOLSON: But the university is not in session yet. But it will be the end of August. Let’s focus on our letter that we want to send to the department heads. And who else might we want to send this letter to? Because our, who else, the boards and commissions. MS. GARSON: It’s all branches of government. So you’re also dealing with County Council and Clerk’s Office. MS. NICHOLSON: So, how inclusive do we want to be with this draft letter? MR. ARMOUR: I’d like to add some – coming from a business point of view, if I were to task this as a business owner, I’d look at, where’s my biggest income, and where’s my biggest expenditures, and focus on those items. Cause in the budget it had, I use an example, the cemetery, we get $7,000 of income and no expenditures, so that one you wouldn’t even want to bother with. The Department of Transportation or something that has $50 million, and that’s 10% or 20% of the budget, that’s probably a good one to focus on. So maybe the top departments gets the most focus and the top income gets 29