MIN CHARTER 2018-09-14 (2018-2020)

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Hawaii County Charter Commission -3 September 14, 2018 CHR. ADAMS: Thanks. Commissioner Todd. MS. TODD: Neil nice to see you. Appreciate the fact that you have a broad knowledge in the housing agency and just for the Commissioners' information, at one time the federal government used to give enough money that 1 think almost all the salaries and wages were covered with federal money and in fact you folks had excess funds once upon a time. They were also very generous with grants for computers and other office equipment. Over time the federal government kept cutting back on the amount of money that flowed to the County. And then the County had to make a decision. In order to have the staff to secure that 30 million dollars in federal money, then the County had to start paying the salaries and wages out of the general fund. And so, basically you know do you get rid of this department, this agency that is bringing 30 million in to the County because you don't want to spend the money, or do you start allocating other monies, and that's basically why they are still here. It's because the resource, just the CDBG Program which is a couple million dollars, if you look at what they have been able to do in terms of County infrastructure, helping things like the fire equipment for Pahala... very, very critical. And, it's one of the 1 am hoping that the federal government doesn't dry up those funds and am I correct that Hawai`i is a little bit different in the way those funds get allocated? Within the State that they actually rather than having to go and beg for funding on the State level, that they actually get allocated directly to the Counties? MR. GYOTOKU: It's broken down in to two different municipal and outside Counties, so like ah, Kauai, Maui and Hawai`i County, we kind of compete and they allocate the monies to regional office here and Honolulu does the allocations. Going back to your statement that a lot of times the, our employees although they are exempt, they are tied to the union contract raises and over time the salary has substantially increased because of union bargaining unit raises like that yeah. MS. TODD: Mm-hmm MR. GYOTOKU: And in order to get more monies when we apply for it, you had to get more positions to handle, especially like existing housing, so we had to have more and then we got so we're so involved with a lot of these housing developments because now the big push is to develop affordable housing. And, in order to get affordable housing, you have to have some type of federal funding to tie it in to. It's not the—the numbers don't work. MS. TODD: Well historically did the department also work with private developers to do like Ouli, and I think there's something in Waikaloa and in Kona there are affordable housing units that were instrumental that the department did it and the old plantation camp out past... Page 24