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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -3 September 14, 2018
<br />economic development specialists and technicians, focused on our primary
<br />subject areas, and there's a lot of overlap and a lot of blending that goes into
<br />meeting the needs of the community, about our community, but those primary
<br />areas are agriculture, tourism, business, industry development, film—and we've
<br />expanded to focus on the creative economy as well as the film sector. Energy,
<br />and then, our resource center which is primarily focused on collecting data,
<br />analyzing that, and doing specific research initiatives, and as Ron mentioned, we
<br />do have an immigration specialist who serves out of the Hilo office but gets out
<br />once a week out into our rural areas as well as Kona, and so, we try to assist the
<br />federal government in delivering information and assisting immigrants and
<br />immigrant families with filling out documentation. We don't do any of the
<br />enforcement side.
<br />And then on program development- some of our initiatives, we are, we have
<br />launched this year, bringing in a team of AmeriCorps volunteers and they are
<br />going to be supporting us in really some cross programmatic work and cross
<br />departmental and broad subjects, big broad subjects to advance initiatives that the
<br />County should and is involved with, and then we also have some other grant
<br />funded temporary folks, interns, so and then on the administrative side we have
<br />two administrative support staff, myself and Ron, and so, that's our huge staff.
<br />One of our primary initiatives throughout the year is our innovation grants.
<br />That's probably what most of the non-profit community know us for, and they are
<br />really targeted to strengthen our communities, grow industries, help. market,
<br />promote, educate, and build our workforce, and do some research. And, again,
<br />it's in our primary programmatic areas and we provide awards up to $25,000 and
<br />that comes with a— it's a one to one match, so it's, while the initiatives may seem
<br />small, they become broader by providing that match and we primarily work with
<br />non-profit organizations either recognized by the State or the federal government
<br />so...
<br />Our budget, again, it's small 2.6 million, our salaries are about 38% of that, and
<br />then about 50% is for grants. A couple of those are earmarks. We have pretty
<br />substantial long-term grants that we've made to the soil and water conservation
<br />districts to support clean streams and shoreline areas and keep the soil on the land,
<br />and then obviously our tourism promotion that's extremely important. And then
<br />we have flexibility in administrative grants of up to of about, and initiatives up to
<br />about $200,000.
<br />So our Charter, our Charter is pretty simple and focused on really again the
<br />missions we have talked about earlier, collecting and developing data that will
<br />support managerial and legislative decision making, programmatic and policy
<br />making, and then we talked to the fact that our program specialist provide
<br />leadership both in public and private development programs, enterprises, and
<br />plans, and that runs the gamut from social, economic, cultural, proposals and it's
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