MIN CHC 1989-05-17 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

I bring up for thought to the Charter. And that is that within the Department of Parks and Recreation, we do have the EAD section or the elderly activities division. And I again apologize for not having all the background. However, I know that Maui county has a different setup in which elderly activities comes under human services or human resources department. And this (inaudible) the extent of where I . . . CUSHNIE: Mr. Tanimoto, I notice in the Charter the Section 6-3 .4 , County bands , takes up about half of your job description. Is that updated? Would you like. . . TANIMOTO: I 'm stammering here because, when you say the County band takes up half of the job description, you mean the band in itself is outdated? CUSHNIE: Well , I mean that you have so many other responsibilities that are not even mentioned in the Charter. Do you feel mandated to provide a County band? Do you feel that you would rather have the option of discontinuing it sometimes rather than having to be forced to maintain one? TANIMOTO: I 'm hesitating because it has , in my mind, some political ramifications for discontinuing it. However, and I need to give you an honest opinion on that I guess. Yes , when I first took office, that was one of the questions that I asked. Is it absolutely necessary that 1) we have a paid man that ' s (inaudible) ; 2) is it absolutely necessary that we have two bands with 40 members in one and 20 members in another? Further investigation into that situation tells me that one of the bands has difficulty in fulfilling its manpower needs. So again, I am in agreement that at some point if we are relieved of that duty, it would make some sense if we had an alternative situation; and I can be honest in my request. And I ' ll tell you the answer that I was given, not in particularly by one person. But the question is if we' re spending X dollars for two bands for a total of 60 people, and I know they do have a lot of performances to justify to some degree, because they do over 60 performances. However , it ' s a $90 , 000 proposition. If we invited 60 to 90. . .and say, well , it ' s a $1 , 000 plus dollars per performance, my private sector mind says , what if we contracted it out to particular bands that exist in the community anyway? On and on. So that question again asked, if we should have the two bands . That ' s correct. But the answer that I was given was that it ' s a very political situation and who would want to be the person to wipe out the bands? 376