2000-02-09 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 02-09-00Page 25 of 41 RAY: No. Well, all of them, but that short list of the different Department Heads. HERKES: Oh, that’s right. You’re right. I’ve got it. BEN: What I wanted to do was caution the Commission about the establishment of qualifications. The concern that I had, and I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, but I did take a look, and the problem I’m thinking of did appear in one of the qualifications - But, not to define the qualifications so much that you get into a situation where you don’t have qualified candidates. I had thought about the Managing Director because all of the talk about responsibility, of managing a City or a County, and you’re not going to find many people in Hawaii that has that kind of experience, if you were to specify it like that. But I did notice in the proposals, they talk about experience, both private and public sector, so that would take care of it. But, there was one that I had some concern about, and that was with respect to the Fire Chief. There’s a proposed requirement of three years administrative experience, administrative capacity. And I’m not quite sure what the definition of administrative capacity is, but I think you need to look at what you think it is because normally, your pool for the Fire Chief will come from Fire. Do the Fire Captains or Battalion Chiefs have what you folks are calling administrative capacity? MARTIN: The way I interpret it is exactly that. The Captains, as you say Battalion Chiefs, would automatically have it because they’re in that position up to, and possibly, more than three years. BEN: Well, what I’m cautioning against is don’t automatically assume that a Captain has administrative duties, or a Battalion Chief has administrative duties. I think of administrative as a broader department-wide type responsibility, so I’m just cautioning to make sure you folks are clear and we don’t eliminate, or we don’t over qualify the position. RAY: I did lift this out of Maui so this is language out of Maui County Charter. BEN: We did have one problem way back, I think in ‘92, on that very question because it was taken from Captain and there was a concern expressed to the Mayor about whether that person was, in fact, qualified to be Fire Chief, and I don’t know where the qualification language came from that they were referring to. RAY: Marni. HERKES: I appreciate your comments. You’re the Personnel Director. You’re the man that deals with this a lot. I think our overall broad goal was to insert some language in every position that began people thinking about the fact, what kind of qualifications there should be in that position, and we had no intention to limit anybody to that position, but what we found, and this is one of the reasons we took the engineer out, is that the administrative role is more important in the Department Heads than the actual engineering role, or firefighting role. That they be able, like you, to work with people, that they be human resource people, that they be people that have some experience dealing with departments and things. So I appreciate your comments. Thank you. RAY: Steve. BESS: I was just looking at the proposed language that we’ve already voted on, and to address Ben’s concerns, it would just take a little bit of tweaking here, and it would seem to me that - the Fire Chief shall have had a minimum of five years training and experience in fire control, and it now reads including at least three years experience in a responsible administrative capacity, but to just indicate that the guy demonstrates administrative capacity and strike any reference to experience, so that we don’t run into that problem with the Captain that hasn’t had the experience, but he demonstrates the capacity. RAY: Other comments? YOSHIYAMA: I don’t know which Fire Commissioner told me, because both of them that I talked to, from City and County of Honolulu, sat in on the selection process for their present Fire Chief, under their amended Charter, and one of them did tell me that they had to disqualify, I think, some Fire Captains - They’re similar language to us, at least three years experience in a responsible administrative capacity. That’s the same language as City and County, the one we have now in our Charter. RAY: And did they say that was a negative in their mind? YOSHIYAMA: The person that was telling me told me that it was a positive, him or her, I don’t know which one told me, but some of them qualified because they had temporary assignments to Battalion Chiefs, but pretty much the same, Battalion file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 02-09-00.html7/1/2011