2006-04-06 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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that if an employee has years of seniority but transfers to work at another station, he starts at zero in seniority. This means the senior employees get first dibs on getting weekends and other days off. The employees are not in it together. Mr. Ho said that when an employee has worked 15 years, a lot of sick leave is accumulated, which makes it easy to call in sick. He stated that they are prohibited from singling out employees to look at their sick leave patterns —they would have to do all employees in the division. So it may not be worth the time it would take to catch the two to three employees who abuse their sick leave, because they would have to document the pattern for 80 employees. This allows the bad ones to slip through —they are allowed to abuse their sick leave without any systemic ability to counteract that. Ms. Bell said that her department is in the loop in the planning process, as well. When people apply for building pen-nits, it needs to be determined whether they need to hook up to a sewer system. If the project is big, they may need a solid waste plan. There are also rezoning and subdivision issues. The Chair asked if there were any questions. Ms. Nicholson asked about the vacant positions in the department, whether they were vacant because of Civil Service issues or lack of funding, or because they have recruited but cannot fill them. Mr. Ho said a lot of the difficulty is in finding the right person to fill the vacancy. He said the biggest gap is in finding civil engineers. They have a lot of job opportunity and working for the County is not the first place they would choose. Ms. Bauman said some of the vacancies are in the recruitment process, which takes time. Ms. Nicholson asked if filling those vacant positions would help the department. She said she was trying to prioritize the department's issues. What are their priorities, given that they have an incredible number of challenges? Mr. Ho stated that even if they filled all the positions, they would still be very overworked. It is hard to address the full problem, as it is out of their control. They don't control their budget. They get what they get and work with that. They can only address part of the problem. Ms. Bell said it makes sense to put their Wastewater billing with the Water billing, as they are not separate, though there may be problems with the semi- autonomous nature of the Water Supply Department. They would like to have the ability to have water turned off for non - payment of bills, which happens on Maui and Oahu, because the property owner was ultimately responsible for the bills. On Kauai the property owners are responsible, but they have no way to turn off the water. Ms. Bell said they went to the Water Board to see if they could work with them on turning off the water when a sewer bill is not paid, but the Board was not receptive. However, the issue of making property owners responsible has gone through the Council, so the owners are now ultimately responsible. Implementation of this started in October, 2005. C,