MIN CHARTER 2018-08-10 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -2 August 10, 2018 CHIEF ROSARIO: Good question. So the terminology they use is "grant," because they give us their money for it. But it's a budget that we operate on, and the State operates on a biennial budget, so that comes to our fiscal staff and Deputy Chief Uchida prior to this position here was the leader of our EMS Bureau side and handled all that for many years. So with that, many years ago we used to receive the money and it would just go into our total budget. Then when the County started doing budget cuts where we had furloughs and so forth, what we did was former Chief Oliveira in the transition between, we actually separated the budget between County and State so that if we were given an order from the County to cut the budget 10 percent we would cut the County side; and if the State gave us an order, we just cut the State side. So it's roughly about $17 million per year and we've been working very closely with the State Department of Emergency Medical Services and Injury Prevention for our needs as well. MS. SAQUING: Okay, thank you. CHR. ADAMS: Commissioner Todd. MS. TODD: A couple of questions. On Lifeguards you mentioned County beaches. Are we still providing Lifeguards at State beaches? CHIEF ROSARIO: Oh, excellent question. Yeah, sorry about that neglect there. But we actually operate at the Hapuna Beach Park which is a State beach park, and we get about approximately $400,000 grant funding from the State to do that as well. MS. TODD: Okay, and as a part of that do you get insurance for liability for lifeguards? CHIEF ROSARIO: No, that's been our—our last several years has been the legislative packet that we've put forward on that. MS. TODD: Then you mentioned your new fire station. What's happening with Kawailani? Because I drove down there and I saw that with the road widening, obviously the reason you needed a new one is there wasn't any room for you to move your vehicles in and out. CHIEF ROSARIO: Yeah, so the Haihai Fire Station was a replacement station for the Kawailani Station. Once we moved out of that, the Kawailani facility, we transferred all responsibility back to the County and another agency is currently utilizing that building. Page 26