CHC 1979-06-19 - Laserfiche WebLink

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MR. TRULSON : Mr. Mayor. I think perhaps it is the unencumbered balances in agencies, not money that has already been spoken for. In other words, say there is an excess or a surplus of money in this one agency. At the present time, your office is the only one that can transfer this money over to this agency that maybe needs it. MAYOR MATAYOSHI : Another agency within the department, yes. Not outside agencies. That goes through the county council for transfer but the initiation of it comes out of my office and I think this is correct. If maybe it is not now encumbered but it is going to be used for something it should be handled. . .On top of that if you look at the budget quite often you have some, balances as a source of income. And too sometimes the council , in their efforts to balance, have a tendency of increasing their fund balance. . .then for me to balance it at the end of the year, I ' ll have to meet that project, right. I may have to hold it. Then these are appropriated but unexpended funds. It is just virtually savings. It is not a surplus, as everyone is led to believe. It is savings in operation. And this is important for operations. And the management should be accountable for savings. And the manager who should be accountable for it is the Mayor. For efficiency of operations and also for achievement of goals is also the Mayor ' s responsibilities. But you cannot frustrate it. You have an operation like yours , an office, you appropriate x number of dollars for this , this, and this and okay that is your program. So you are moving along and you say okay, prioritywise in manpower and service you say project (a) is priority. So you are putting all the moneys in there, what- ever, and you are spending it. Project (b) , project (c ) you have money but you are letting it slide for a little while because you will come to it later on. If the board of directors were to say well, Trulson, you haven ' t done anything with this so take it and put it onto another department. You are going to say, wait a minute. Right? Then the tendency for you, as a department or a division chief is to spend everything right along the line so that nothing would happen and there would be no withdrawal. But that would not be good management of programs, nor good management of funds. You have begun to develop people who will spend for the sake of spending so that the thing will not move out of the department, right? That is wrong. You must do it as efficiently as possible. Be account- able for the money and see what happens. That same thing, this is the money you have, that is what you run it for. You 've got one year to run it. MR. CADINHA: Mr. Mayor. I have a question with regards to this. Under the present language, the transferal of funds within a given department, let ' s say that in the budgeting that comes down for council approval , there are x number of dollars to hire 50 more patrolmen in the police department and the logic behind the passing and acceptance of this budget is that 25 of those are going to be needed in Kona and 25 are going to be needed in Hilo, or 10 in Ka' u, or whatever it is. -15-