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

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -3 September 14, 2018 And then on the agricultural side, I see there are a lot of Commissioners with agricultural linkages, you know, we continue to strive for supporting a diverse sector that supports a diverse range of businesses. For the energy sector, we really strive to focus on innovation to drive forward a dependable energy supply, one that is also resilient, efficient, renewable and low cost for consumers and that includes the County of Hawaii as the largest consumer of energy. Then on the sustainable development side, the focus is on balancing the natural environment, obviously the culture, and the economy, and a large degree of our efforts moving forward are focused on how do we mitigate and adapt to climate change. It is coming to our neighborhoods and so we need to be ready and progressive with that. I am feeling like maybe Ron should—you want to talk to some of these slides as we move forward? I don't want it to just be my voice. MR. WHITMORE: Sure, so we think both in terms of the programmatic areas we focus on, but also on kind of the approach we take to our work and generally talk about it in terms of three main areas. The first is that research side of Research and Development, you know, the advancing and sharing knowledge and so, you may have seen that historically in the data book that we published. We have now turned to digital version of that where people can not only find all of the data they'd like whether it's a state or federal source, but also easily see it in a graphical format or exported as a table, all with the intent of providing residents, businesses, other government agencies, with the information they need to, as Diane mentioned earlier, make informed decision making, whether it is at the policy level or programmatic level. Everything we do is collaborative in nature. We are a very small department so we collaborate significantly across County departments, cause as you saw in our programmatic focus, nearly everything we do can't be done or achieved by a single agency. So we work with both public and private partners to grow a range of initiatives that help make the island a better place to live, work, and visit. And then in the same note, we also collaborate on the funding side. We try to leverage a small budget of some grant dollars from the County with a variety of other public and private sources to support those same initiatives. And that's just a nice graphical snapshot of kind of the diversity of initiatives that our work ends up touching everything from agriculture to information, to energy. We haven't mentioned it yet, but we also have the, we house the immigration office for the County, and try to support sectors through a variety of mechanisms and funding. Do you want to speak to staff? MS. LEY: Sure. So, as Ron mentioned, we are a small department. We have a total of 15 staff members and probably the most visible for most folks are our Page 5