2014-04-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Mr. Kurohara: That's a good question. I'm not sure 1 have the answer for that right now but 1 do know that certain overtime is budgeted in certain departments and probably not so in others. I'm sorry, 1 think it is budgeted in all. Ms. Garson said all departments have overtime budgets. She said there is an annual external audit that is required by the Charter. Ms. Maddox said Mr. Kurohara offered to comment on the recommendation for the centralized grant writing efforts; this was the page missing from the original letter from the Managing Director. Mr. Kurohara: Basically, the response to that is that within the Department of Research & Development, there is a grant specialist that resides there. What I've seen, because 1 was in that position before, 1 used to work there before, is that the grant specialist is basically a facilitator, someone that helps other agencies or other departments with questions about how to write grants, how to look for grants and so forth. Grant writing in itself is a very difficult, and Susan you know, process that requires many people to write many grants, so to have, every departments has, most departments that are writing grants, have their own grant writers there, so they have staff that's assigned to writing grants, so the grant specialist role is to really facilitate finding the matching of these grants with the needs of the department. So in addition to that there's also a grant search engine that we work with that helps not only all of our departments but outside agencies can become a member as well and they can log in and they can do these searches for grants that would match what their looking for. Ms. Maddox commented that as a non - profit organization, her organization participates in the grant service Mr. Kurohara talked about and it's a very powerful internet based search engine. She said you can add criteria for what you're looking for and it will search public foundations, private foundations, federal and state funding sources. She said that to have a single grant writer who would have the expertise to write across all the department needs is not realistic but to have someone who is sophisticated in understanding on how to search and match funding sources to department needs is a strong function. Mr. Matsuda asked how many departments have a grant specialist. Mr. Kurohara: Most of, Police, Fire, Mass Transit, 1 mean you know, some of the agencies that are often writing for grants, Civil Defense, they may not have a so called grant writer as a position but their staff, they have trained staff that's what they do, that's part of what they do. There were no more questions for Mr. Kurohara. Ms. Maddox thanked him for taking the time to come. Mr. Kurohara left at 2:13 p.m. Ms. Maddox said that in the Police Chief's letter, he asked if he could see a draft of the recommendations before it was finalized. She asked Ms. Garson if that was within the protocol. Ms. Garson replied the group's discussion are all public, the group 141,11