CHC 1979-04-10 - Laserfiche WebLink

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It is not normal practice for us as union officials to speak highly of management personnel . However, in this situation we have a lot of respect for the present civil service director. He is a man of integrity. Although the civil service commission members are appointed by the mayor and they, in turn, appoint the director, we are quite certain that the commissioners will not knuckle under any political pressure and appoint someone the administration favors. Mr. Edward Silva in his report to you stated that in order to keep the merit system as free as possible from political pressure, the director should be fully controlled by the commission. He also stated that in order to strengthen the merit system by making it less dependent on political sources, the director' s salary should be set by the commission and not by elected officials whom the director will have to deny requests from time to time. If you will recall , the last time that the administration granted pay raises for department heads, the mayor was very selective in that certain department heads did not receive any increase at all. We are wondering why the mayor was so selective. The civil service director was among the few that was not granted a pay raise. Is it because Mr. Silva, being a man of principle, will not knuckle under any political pressure? We concur with his recommendation that being under the control of the commission, they should set his rate of pay. We do not believe that there is anyone among you that would like to remove the merit system but would rather maintain the system and keep it as far away from politicians as possible. For these reasons, ladies and gentlemen , we do not want to see changes that would make the civil service director obligated to the administration. The director ' s pro- posal to this honorable body has a lot of merit and we ask you to seriously consider it and revise the charter accordingly. We would like to suggest that the Charter Com- mission take a serious look into creating an office of collective bargaining. Presently, the deputy director of personnel services represents Hawaii County in all of the negotiations. As some of you may be aware, contract negotiations is very time.cconsuming. To have a deputy director of personnel involved in negotiations means that the level of services being performed by the office results in a backlog of paperwork. The state government presently has an office of collective bargaining and we see a great need for this county to also create such an office. The county' s negotiator would be under the direct supervision and control of the mayor and would report directly to him. By continually having a top management person from the office of personnel directly involved in negotiations, you are hurting the internal workload of all of its employees. We strongly recommend this body to take positive action towards creating an office of collective bargaining. There is one section that we do not have in our printed material , Mr. Chairman, and that is a comment that we would like to make to you regarding the statement made by the - 4 -