MIN CHARTER 2018-10-12 (2018-2020)

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Hawai`i County Charter Commission -4 October 12, 2018 There's no good reason to change anything in this PONC or its maintenance fund. And so I'm asking you to please leave it alone so we don't have to go through the nightmare of having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to alert the public that you are once again trying to take the PONC fund and the maintenance fund, or strip it down to the point that it's not functional. We have 166 properties still left to go through. The commission cannot buy them all at once and we need all the PONC funds that we've got to continue forward in the future. Thank you. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you, Ms. Ford. At this time are there any other testifiers in Kona? MR. RUEDY: That completes our testifiers. CHR. ADAMS: Thank you. We have testifiers here in Hilo. I would ask our first two testifiers to please come to the table and microphones. The first would be Harold Dow and the second would be Dwight Vicente. Harold Dow: Comm. 7.2, in opposition. The Chair then called Harold Dow, who made the following statement: HAROLD DOW: MR. DOW: I'm here today representing myself but 1 need to disclose that I'm a member of the Salary Commission. There's a proposed change in the Charter that affects the operation of the Salary Commission and I'm opposed to that change. It adds time and expense to the business of the commission. I think that the billed proposal came about as a reaction to an extraordinary action that was taken under extraordinary circumstance. The Salary Commission is composed of nine members. One member from each Council district. I'm from district five. It takes five members to constitute a quorum. It takes five affirmative votes to enact any business. And for four years the Salary Commission did not meet a quorum and was unable to conduct business. Not until September this year did that commission reach a quorum. At that time we were four years behind in doing our business. I carne into the commission in September of last year. It was sort of a rapid and steep learning curve for me. But what I found out very quickly was that the compensation for County employees is driven from the bottom up. It starts with collective bargaining and they've been very effective in getting annual raises for their employees. Those raises have compounded to two and a half to seven percent per year. So if you take the upper range of that, the compounding in four years was 30 percent. The end result was that our elected County officials and appointed officials had not had a raise—some of them in four years and some of them in almost ten years. They had many departments who had subordinates that were making more than the department heads. So with that data in front us we Page 3