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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2026-06-24 Merit Appeals Board Minutes (Draft - Part 1 of 2) REGULAR SESSION Merit Appeals Board Hilo Council Chambers Hawaiʻi County Building 25 Aupuni Street, First Floor, Room 1401 Hilo, Hawai‘i June 24, 2026 (Wednesday) Call to Order (Item 1) The regular meeting of the Merit Appeals Board, County of Hawaiʻi, was called to order at 9:02 a.m., by Chair Gabriella M. Cabanas, at the Hilo Council Chambers, Hawaiʻi County Building, 25 Aupuni Street, First Floor, Room 1401, Hilo, Hawaiʻi, on Wednesday, June 24, 2026. Roll Call – Present Ms. Gabriella M. Cabanas, Chair Ms. Suzi Bond, Vice-Chair Mr. Gilbert J. Aguinaldo, Member Mr. Daniel “Niel” Thomas, Member Also Present Mr. J Yoshimoto, Assistant Corporation Counsel, Office of the Corporation Counsel Ms. Sommer J. Tokihiro, Director, Human Resources Department Ms. Glynis Yamada, Secretary-Reporter, Human Resources Department Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 2 Call to Order (Item 1) CHR. CABANAS: Good morning, everyone. It’s June 24th, 2026. It is 9:02 a.m. The Merit Appeals Board meeting is called to order, and we are in the Hilo Council Chambers, at the Hawaiʻi County Building, at 25 Aupuni Street, First Floor, Room 1401, in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. We have quorum today. We have four Board members. I’m Gabriella Cabanas, Chair for the Merit Appeals Board; and seated with me are the following—Suzi Bond, Vice-Chair. MS. BOND: Good morning. CHR. CABANAS: Gilbert Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aloha—good morning. CHR. CABANAS: And Daniel “Niel” Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Good morning. CHR. CABANAS: And we also have our Assistant Corporation Counsel, J Yoshimoto. MR. YOSHIMOTO: Good morning, everyone. CHR. CABANAS: And our Secretary-Reporter, Glynis Yamada. MS. YAMADA: Good morning. CHR. CABANAS: And our Director of Human Resources, Sommer Tokihiro. MS. TOKIHIRO: Good morning. CHR. CABANAS: Good morning, everyone. Addendum to Agenda (Item 2) CHR. CABANAS: We do not have any addendum to the agenda. Statements from the Public (Item 3) CHR. CABANAS: No “Statements from the Public.” Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 3 Approval of Minutes (Item 4) April 23, 2026 (Regular Session); April 23, 2026 (Closed Session); And May 12, 2026 (Regular Session) CHR. CABANAS: We are on Number 4 of the agenda—“Approval of Minutes.” So, let’s take each one separately. April 23, 2026 (Regular Session) CHR. CABANAS: Has everyone read those minutes? And have—oh, so they have— they’re nodding their head. So, may I have a motion to accept and file—approve and file, the— MS. BOND: I have a small correction on the— CHR. CABANAS: Oh, you do—wonderful. MS. BOND: Yes, I know—look, I was actually paying attention. My name is spelled wrong. My name is spelled wrong twice—and differently both times. CHR. CABANAS: What page is that? MS. BOND: On page 26, towards the top—“MR. THOMAS”—it says—it’s “S-u-z-i”— CHR. CABANAS: Oh, yeah, I see it. MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible.) MS. BOND: Although you’d be surprised how many “Vaughns” and “Barnes”— CHR. CABANAS: And where was the other correction? MS. BOND: No, that’s the only one there. The other one is in a different— CHR. CABANAS: Oh, different meeting minutes? MS. BOND: In a different one—yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. YAMADA: Excuse me, Suzi, what page is that? MS. BOND: Twenty-six, right at—towards the top—“MR. THOMAS.” Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 4 MR. AGUINALDO: And all the way down, yeah? (Inaudible)—also, on the bottom—“I mean” (inaudible)— MS. BOND: Yeah—no. But no—the only place it’s spelled wrong is at the top. MR. AGUINALDO: On the top? MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. It says, “So, Susie”— MS. BOND: “So, Susie”— CHR. CABANAS: “Susie” is mis-spelled. MR. AGUINALDO: Oh. MR. THOMAS: I didn’t spell it right—when I spoke. MS. BOND: Yeah, right. You mis-spelled it when you spoke. MR. THOMAS: I sure did. MS. BOND: Okay. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So— MS. BOND: Besides that—I move we approve the minutes for the April 23rd regular session. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: No, shouldn’t it be “as amended?” MS. BOND: As amended. MR. THOMAS: As amended. MS. BOND: Or as corrected. CHR. CABANAS: Amend first. Yeah, amend first. MS. BOND: Oh. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 5 CHR. CABANAS: Amend it first. MS. BOND: I move we approve—no, I move we amend the minutes— CHR. CABANAS: Yes. MS. BOND: —for April 23rd. MR. THOMAS: Second to her accept. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried. Okay. And then, we need to go back for another motion to approve the minutes, as amended. MS. BOND: Okay, I move we approve the minutes of the April 23rd regular session. MR. THOMAS: Second. MS. BOND: As amended. MR. THOMAS: As amended—second to her accept. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 6 CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried. April 23, 2026 (Closed Session) CHR. CABANAS: We are now on April 23rd, 2026, the closed session. Have you had— all had the chance to review the meeting minutes? Okay. No amendments there? MS. BOND: No. CHR. CABANAS: May I have a motion to approve and file. MS. BOND: I move we approve the minutes for the closed session for April 23rd. MR. AGUINALDO: I second. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried. May 12, 2026 (Regular Session) CHR. CABANAS: We are now on May 12th, regular session meeting minutes—May 12, 2026. Have you all had the chance to review those meeting minutes? MS. BOND: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, no amendments? Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 7 MS. BOND: There’s, once again, mis-spelling of my name on page 10. This time there’s an added “e”— CHR. CABANAS: Page 10— MS. BOND: The only thing you can do is do the “Suzy” version and then—then we would have had the whole trifecta, so— CHR. CABANAS: Page 10— MS. BOND: “Chairman Cabanas”—“Anyway—okay, other questions for Sommer?” CHR. CABANAS: Oh, yeah. I see it. It’s the second line. MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Taking out the “e”—“Suzi”—"S-u-z-i”— MS. BOND: Yeah—just “S-u-z-i.” CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So may I have a motion. MS. BOND: I move we amend the minutes of May 12th, right? CHR. CABANAS: Right. Correct. As reflected— MS. BOND: As reflected. Yeah. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, and there’s a second by Niel Thomas. Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 8 Four ayes. Motion carried. We are now reviewing the— MS. BOND: No, we have to accept the minutes. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, yes, I’m sorry. MS. BOND: So, I move we accept the minutes for the May 12th— CHR. CABANAS: Regular session. MS. BOND: Regular session— CHR. CABANAS: As amended. MS. BOND: As amended. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, second with Niel Thomas. Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 9 Review of Executive Session Minutes April 23, 2026; And May 12, 2026 (Executive Session: The Merit Appeals Board Anticipates Convening One Or More Executive Meetings Regarding The Above Matters, Pursuant To HRS Sections 92-4 And 92-5(a)(4), For The Purpose Of Consulting With The Board’s Attorney On Questions And Issues Pertaining To The Board’s Powers, Duties, Privileges, Immunities, And Liabilities. A 2/3 Vote Pursuant To HRS Section 92-4 Is Necessary To Hold An Executive Meeting) April 23, 2026 CHR. CABANAS: Okay. We are now on reviewing the executive session meeting minutes for April 23rd, 2026. Have we all had the chance to review those meeting minutes? Okay. MS. BOND: I move we accept the minutes of the executive session for April 23rd. MR. THOMAS: Aye—I mean, second. CHR. CABANAS: Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Motion carried, to approve the executive session meeting minutes for April 23rd, 2026. May 12, 2026 CHR. CABANAS: And the last one is May 12, 2026, executive session meeting minutes. Have you had the chance to review those minutes? MS. BOND: I move we approve the minutes of the May 12th executive session. MR. THOMAS: Second. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 10 CHR. CABANAS: Okay, any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried to approve the executive session meeting minutes for May 12th, 2026. Director’s Report (Item 5) MAB Monthly Divisional Activity Report: June 2026 (Administrative Services Division, Classification & Pay Division, Equal Opportunity/ADA Division, Health & Safety Division, Labor Relations Division, Personnel & Organizational Development Division, Recruitment & Examination Division, Workers’ Compensation Division) CHR. CABANAS: Moving along. We are now on the “Director’s Report” for the “MAB Monthly Divisional Activity Report” for June 2026. Okay. (At this time, Ms. Sommer J. Tokihiro, Director, Department of Human Resources, came forward.) MS. BOND: I have a question—what is “Flexible Spending Plan.” What does that— MS. TOKIHIRO: So, one of the benefits that the County offers is we have a health flexible spending—but then, also, childcare reimbursement. So, under the Federal rules, we can allow our employees to set aside pre-tax earnings, up to a certain limit, for reimbursement for certain healthcare expenses. And, also, a similar program for, like, childcare expenses. And then, that also allows our health insurance premiums to be deducted on a pre-tax basis. So, I believe the current limit for deductions is somewhere around $3,000.00. So, it lets our employees set aside that money, on a pre-tax basis—and then they turn in receipts to the Administrator of the program—and then, get reimbursed. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 11 So, for example, you could get reimbursed for your co-pays for seeing the doctor or if you—like, dental appointments—even though we have dental insurance, a lot of times there’s, kind of, a significant portion that you need to pay in addition to that insurance coverage. So, if you participate in this program, then you can turn in receipts and get reimbursed your own pre-taxed earnings. So, a really great benefit for our employees. And I believe that the childcare deduction is, like, $5,000.00 a year. So, all of those expenses are significant, so it’s a nice way to be able to offer that opportunity for our employees to participate. MS. BOND: And that’s—so they can put that aside and that doesn’t get taxed? MS. TOKIHIRO: It doesn’t get taxed when they—so, it’s taken out of their check on a pre-tax basis and—no, it’s not taxed, and the IRS sets the limits for what is allowable each year. MS. BOND: Okay. Thank you. I had no idea. When I saw that, I was, like okay— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MR. THOMAS: A follow-up to that question, Suzi—what employee groups aside from, say, County government employee groups around the country—is that available to—is it available to employees in the private sector? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. It is. So, it’s available, I think, to any employer to provide—but there are some costs of administration. So, prior to coming to work for the County, my employer allowed us to do the same. So, my private employer was able to provide that benefit. MR. THOMAS: And what about Union employees? MS. TOKIHIRO: Like, actual employees of the Union itself? MR. THOMAS: No, people who are members of a Union—is there any restriction on them, if the Union provides those kinds of benefits? MS. TOKIHIRO: The Union, to my knowledge, wouldn’t provide those benefits—but we do provide that benefit to our entire workforce, including the unionized workers. MR. THOMAS: Thank you. I learned something. CHR. CABANAS: Any other questions? Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 12 MR. THOMAS: Yes, I have one. In Classification and Pay, the next to last bullet point is about these ancient class reviews, dating back to 1986. I sort of remember a discussion of that sometime in the last couple of meetings. Is this, now, a triumph of catching up on old news or how is this happening? MS. TOKIHIRO: It is—and it’s actually part of the outcome of my MAB goals that I’m going to present under the next item. So, I’ll be able to show you the spreadsheet that we’ve compiled and how we’re planning to address the updates of all those. MS. BOND: I actually wrote, “yay.” MS. TOKIHIRO: Oh, yay— MR. THOMAS: Yay. MS. BOND: In the margin here—it’s like, “Yay!” MS. TOKIHIRO: So, I will just note going back to the initial question regarding flexible spending. As we close out our fiscal year, we have open enrollment for a lot of these employee benefit programs that we have—so, our health insurance open enrollment, the flexible spending open enrollment—for our benefit year, which begins July 1. Our Admin. Services Division is also hard at work implementing the mass pay increases that came out of the collective bargaining contracts, which will take effect July 1 as well. So, a lot happens as we close out the fiscal year and then enter into a new fiscal year. MR. THOMAS: And a question, if I might—on Health and Safety, again, next to last bullet point—this temporary hazard pay. Is this part that was associated with the Kona Low storms? I remember that there was quite an issue of that hazard pay, in general, related to the pandemic. Is that now an issue that’s behind us and, therefore, this one went smoothly or what’s the back story here? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the HGEA contract—our Water Safety Officers—are in HGEA Unit 15. So the contract includes language that allows for them to make a claim for working in hazardous conditions that are temporary and not otherwise priced into the class of work. During COVID—COVID, sort of, changed the perception of hazard pay, and I won’t get into the debate of it because there are different sides to the story, right? I think what happened in COVID got a little bit away from the language in the contract itself. So, this is the Water Safety Officers exercising their right to make the request for hazard pay. A determination has not been made yet, as far as whether or not it will be granted Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 13 because we need to look at all of the data and the information—like, where the impacts of the Kona Lows were not equally felt, like, around the whole island, right. So, when we get a claim, for a period of time, we have to look at individual areas and look at who was affected and how—because those affects were different. So, they’re exercising their opportunity per the contract language, to submit their request—and we did meet with HGEA because hazard pay is supposed to be awarded in consultation with the Union. So, I did meet with HGEA—we’ve collected a lot of information from the Fire Department—are currently still evaluating that request. SPEAKER: Cool. MR. THOMAS: Well, that’s kind of interesting. How is the request for hazardous duty pay an issue—it has to be in compliance with a provision of the union contract I understand. MS. TOKIHIRO: It does. Yes. MR. THOMAS: And it’s the employees’ opportunity to initiate that or does the Union do it with management? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the request can come from either the Union or the department head. MR. THOMAS: All right. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MR. THOMAS: And then, is there a formula for determining the amount of hazardous duty pay, if that is approved? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. So, the contract calls for either hazard pay at 15% or 25% of their hourly wage based on the level of severity of the hazard. And the two—I don’t want to mis-quote it—but those two percentages are defined in the contract as far as what would constitute the severe versus most severe hazard. MR. THOMAS: And is this all in the Union contracts? MS. TOKIHIRO: It is not in all the contracts. It’s not in— SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 14 MS. TOKIHIRO: It is not. MR. THOMAS: Okay. Thank you. MS. BOND: That would be too easy. I have a question—and, actually, going back to the Classification and Pay—no—Equal Opportunity, ADA Division. What does “WCAG” mean? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we call it “WayCAG”—but it’s the “Web Compliance Accessibility”—it has to do with ensuring that everything that is publicly available on the internet is—meets the accessibility requirements for people with a disability, so that people have equal access to all of the information. So, we need to make sure that all of the information on our website is accessible—can be—it’s easily usable for someone who, say, may use a screen reader instead of—you know, if there’s a visual impairment, et cetera. And so, even the format of the reports that you folks are getting— MS. BOND: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: —we’ve changed this format to make sure that it’s accessible, easily readable by a device. There are certain requirements as far as using different contrast, so—and then, fonts—there are certain fonts that are very difficult for a screen reader to navigate. And so, this format for the Monthly Divisional Activities Report has been changed to ensure that it’s accessible. And then, when you folks get the Quarterly Report—I believe in July—we’re also changing that format to ensure that it’s accessible. So, the original deadline to—that the federal government had established for compliance was April 27th, 2026. They ended up extending that deadline to April 27, 2027—but we’ve already been working on this accessibility project for well over a year in anticipation of the 2026 deadline. So, we’ve been working with IT and also with our departments and the Pacific ADA Center—to do trainings for our employees and departments that do everything from social media, to posting information on websites—to provide them tools and information regarding what is required and how to ensure that their information is accessible. So, it’s an ongoing project but, definitely, one that we’re committed to making sure that everything is accessible. MS. BOND: Cool—okay, I had no idea. I love acronyms. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 15 Then I had another question under the Health and Safety—and I’m not sure why I started this, but I did. It said, “Completed Safety Specialist II interviews. Safety Specialist II to start 06/16/26. Safety Specialist I anticipated vacancy currently in RTF process.” MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the “RTF” is our “Request to Fill”— MS. BOND: Oh. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, that’s the mechanism by which every— MS. BOND: It’s something I should know. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. Every department comes in with a Request to Fill and that’s what initiates a recruitment process. As far as the Safety Specialist positions, those we are recruiting for and filling as part of my second MAB goal, so I’ll be able to provide you with an update on that as well. But we are happy to have that one position filled. The individual started on June 16th, and it was actually a promotion from within Health and Safety. The individual was a Safety Specialist I and was now promoted to the II level. MS. BOND: I think part of the other reason I had it started because of my Citizen Corp. side of my world—is that we’re trying to get someone from Health and Safety to start attending the meetings. MS. TOKIHIRO: Oh, sure. MS. BOND: So, I need to find out who in that department I should talk to. MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay. MS. BOND: I’ll talk to you about that later—sorry. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah—no worry. MS. BOND: I knew there was a reason why I started, though. That’s all my questions. Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: All right. Thank you, Ms. Bond. Mr. Aguinaldo, any questions? MR. AGUINALDO: No. MR. THOMAS: I’m pau. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 16 CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas, you’re done—okay, so now it’s me. Going to the Classification and Pay Division section—it says, “Reviewed and completed 65 intent to adopt a new class of work requests from the other Jurisdictions…”—those 65—have they, in any way, impacted action from your department? In other words, someone is creating a class—is it related or initiating action for the department? MS. TOKIHIRO: In some cases, yes. Like, we learn a lot from looking at intent to adopt classes of work from other jurisdictions. And then, an example of that would be Pool Lifeguard Trainee—I think that that is a class of work that actually started with the County of Kauaʻi—and we have, historically, had a difficult time filling our Pool Lifeguard positions. So, Pool Lifeguards fall under the Department of Parks and Recreation. Our Water Safety Officers fall under the Fire Department. So, a lot of times what will happen is we’ll fill our Pool Lifeguard vacancies and then when a Water Safety Officer position becomes open, then the Pool Lifeguards want to go and work for Water Safety. So, we’ve consistently encountered challenges of filling and retaining the Pool Lifeguards. And so, Kauaʻi County, having a similar issue, developed a class of work called “Pool Lifeguard Trainee” where the individual can qualify for the trainee level position with no required certification; and then they’re provided the necessary training to get certified during their probationary period—need to have the certification upon completion of probation. And then, once they’re certified and performing satisfactorily, the department can then reallocate that trainee position to the full Pool Lifeguard where they’re independently able to perform those duties. So, that’s an example of where—when we’re reviewing those class specifications for things that have been created in other jurisdictions. It may present opportunities for us to look at our own needs and go, “Oh, hey, this is an idea”—and then, we went back to the Department of Parks and Recreation, made them aware, and asked if they would be interested because, ultimately, we need to work with the department—but that’s how we’re able to provide them with ideas. Also, it’s good for us to be looking at the language because we are equal pay for equal work, and we all face the same sort of challenges. It’s good that we are looking at the language that other jurisdictions are using to describe certain things because that helps us to evaluate—“Hey, maybe we should reassess the way that we are naming our title” in something. So, an example of that would be “Office Assistant.” We were the only jurisdiction that still had “Clerk I, II, and II”—and all the other jurisdictions had retitled those classes of Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 17 work to “Office Assistant I, II, and III”—and so, we recently completed that retitling as part of that effort. So, yes, reviewing those intent to adopts is very helpful and, definitely, is something that we follow-up on, if we find something that could be utilized in our jurisdiction or something that we could change. CHR. CABANAS: So, was that Pool Lifeguard Trainee class established? MS. TOKIHIRO: It has been. Yes. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, okay. And advertised for? MS. TOKIHIRO: Not yet. They haven’t come in to recruit for it, but they will be coming in to recruit for it shortly. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: I’m not— MS. BOND: ‘Cause it’s so close, I mean— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, I’m not sure about the timing of it. I think it was looking at—the Department of Parks and Rec.—and part of that is because of the end of the fiscal year. New positions are created during the budget process, and then those positions need to be allocated before they can be filled. And so, Parks and Rec. have been working on some catch-up for positions that were approved in prior fiscal years that hadn’t been allocated. So, I think that they were— they’ve been, kind of, working on a prioritized list of things to do. And so, this—they’re working through those things and Pool Lifeguard Trainee will open shortly. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. And I had some other questions. So, I see under Admin. Services Division, “Processing negotiated pay increases for…”—three Unions—“UPW, HGEA, and SHOPO…”. What’s happening with Fire? I noticed under Labor Relations the EM—Fire EM employees, they have recommended adjustments and it’s in draft form. Are these going to be simultaneously processed? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So the—we completed arbitration with the Fire Fighter’s Union, and an award was issued by the Arbitrator. And then, the Fire Fighter’s Union filed a Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 18 Prohibitive Practice Complaint with the Hawaiʻi Labor Relations Board—and the Employer group has also filed a Prohibitive Practice Complaint. So, while we do have a arbitration award and we have—arbitration is final and binding. And so, we’ve pursued approval by all legislative bodies of the cost increases related to that award. It’s not noted here because we hadn’t distributed the salary schedule by the time that this Admin. Services report was due—but Admin. Services is also processing the increases that were outlined in the arbitration award. And so, that will be for—I don’t know that they’ll make it for July 1, but there were—there are increases being processed—and, yes, it will coincide with the excluded managerial employee increases. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: And then, we have completed arbitration with the Water Safety Officers, so that’s HGEA Unit 15—but we don’t have a final award, yet. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. And then, I noticed a major improvement in the social media advertisements—interviewing employees from the County, showing them shoveling asphalt for the Laborer positions, and other Registration recruitments. So, are you folks doing that? Someone told me you folks—I think the Administration— told me that you folks had hired a third party. Is that true? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we have a short-term contract for someone to help us because to do social media, you kind of got to know the tricks of it, right, to figure out how to edit all of those videos. And so, yes, we do have a contract hire to help train our staff on how to do that because this—we don’t have a Public Information Officer or someone who is just dedicated to social media. So, it’s really our Recruitment team, giving them the opportunity to learn the skills from someone who knows how to do it—but, then, also using this short-term, 89-days—and it’s only 10-hours a week—help us to develop our strategy because the important part or the part that I feel is important about social media, is coming up with a strategy that includes different formats—but is something that we can manage and regularly maintain and regularly post. So, we focused, initially, on the Registration recruitments because that’s a big push to establish lists that are used by multiple departments for these categories of work like Laborer, Park Caretaker, Custodian Groundskeeper, et cetera. So, we really focused this initial effort on creating a social media approach that helps the public to see what is the work that is actually being done—but then, also, really highlighting this opportunity to perform work for a variety of different departments. There’s a video that will post today or later this week that’s going to talk about actually completing the application. We want to do application tips. I’d like to see interview tips Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 19 on there—in addition to highlighting our regular new jobs that are opening each week— and then, kind of, addressing some of the continuous recruitments where people may not know what that position is. So, one of the next ones is, for example, “Radio Technician” at the Police Department. We’ve had that position on continuous recruitment—people may not understand what that is. So, we’re going to actually go out there with the Radio Technician and, hopefully, get some good video of them actually installing things in police vehicles. So, we’re in this beginning phase of, kind of, developing and fine-tuning what this strategy is going to be going forward. It’s gotten a great response—like, in the month of May, I think we had, like—I don’t know—3,000 views or something of that nature. But in the first 16 days of June because this contract—employee only started on June 1st—but in the first 16 days of June we had 65,000 views, and one of our recent videos got 10,000 views. So, it’s out there. It’s getting out there. We’re waiting to see what kind of an impact it has as far as the actual number of people that apply for these Registration recruitments—but I know one of the positions, they have less than 200 applications, right, and in the first day alone, we had over 100. So, I’m hoping that we’ll see an increase but just a different way to try and get the word out there. And it’s been really great. We worked with the human resources people in each department who work with the supervisors to help us to identify who would be comfortable speaking on camera—and then, we go out and interview them—and it’s really great to hear what our employees have to say. We’re not coaching them. I mean, we have, like, seven standard questions—“What do you like about your job?”—and including, “What do you do on a daily basis?”—those kinds of things. And it’s really great to hear the employees talking about how much their work means to them—and that’s the best advertisement, right? And the fact that it’s—they have people that they enjoy working with, they enjoy their co-workers, they enjoy being outside, they enjoy serving their community. So, it’s been a really great—it’s a lot of work—I’m not—I’m going to be honest. It is a lot of work trying to do this and still get the day-to-day work done, but it really has been super exciting for the team. I think it’s exciting for the department and really encourages everybody—“This is why we’re here.” So, yeah—I’m glad you’ve seen it. I hope you’ll continue to follow us. CHR. CABANAS: It’s very nice. So, is the contract hire—‘cause it wasn’t recorded, so I was kind of surprised—but the contract hire is doing the script or the editing or the filming? What is this person doing? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we come up with the ideas. So, it’s the Recruitment team and I going through and saying, “This is what we would like to accomplish”—and then, with Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 20 the contract hire, they’re there, and helping us to actually edit and put together the video—but it’s the Recruitment staff going out and taking the video. It’s the Recruitment staff developing the questions. So, really, the contract hire—I mean, can provide us with ideas but it’s us as far as the team that’s saying, “This is what we want to accomplish.” I’m not turning this over to a contractor and say, “Go out and do this.” These are things that we have been wanting to do for about the last 18 months, and I actually met with Tracey from the Mayor’s Office multiple times and talked to him about our ideas—and things that we wanted to do and things that we wanted to get training on. And Tracey is very busy. He’s tasked with doing all of the Mayor’s social media. And so, when we weren’t able to connect with him to get it done, I decided—“No, I still need to get this done.” And so, I need to get it done—and in an alternate way. And so, we identified someone to help us with that. But, really, the focus is on developing the social media strategy and then providing the staff with the training because once you, kind of, practice and get used to it—it gets much easier. And then, we should be able to handle it going forward, once we have the format set. So— MR. THOMAS: The contractor geeks who do this kind of work have an average age of 11. MR. AGUINALDO: Yeah. So, we could have my boy—for free. Yeah? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. I mean, really, that’s someone who has that skill and—I mean, just kind of that exposure and does it, right—because that’s where you learn the kind of—some of these tools. MR. AGUINALDO: (Inaudible) temporary until you guys get the habit and you guys doing it on your own. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. The idea is that we’ll be able to maintain it going forward. MR. AGUINALDO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Was that money budgeted for the contract hire? MS. TOKIHIRO: It wasn’t budgeted but we have excess salaries and wages from positions that weren’t filled. So— CHR. CABANAS: The only comment I want to make is having done all of that, as the Manager myself, I’m kind of surprised that the Manager wouldn’t be able to do it. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 21 MS. TOKIHIRO: I think the Manager will. It’s just they’re not as familiar with the social media part—that’s why it’s a very limited, short-term contract just to get training to get up to speed. CHR. CABANAS: So, it’s only one—only one 89-day contract? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. And it’s 10-hours a week. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. Because, really, that’s the purpose of the Manager. It’s not directed at the employee. My comment is not directed at the employee—it’s at the position. Because the Manager is responsible for all of the marketing and utilizing ideas—creative ideas—and that was the primary reason that I had described all of our marketing and recruitment efforts when I retired, so that whoever the successors were, could run with it. And I mean run with it—not hop, skip, and jump—but run. And it’s, like, I—the expectation I had was they would do that. And it’s been a real pickle for that to occur. So, hopefully, that will occur here on out because that was the only reason why I did that. I expected that position to be utilized at the level that it was utilized. And it hasn’t been. So, that was just my major disappointment. So, I was surprised to learn that there was a contract hire doing the social media. Don’t get me wrong—the social media on Instagram that I’ve seen are very well-done. It’s nice. It’s about time that occurs. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And there—the contractor is by no means doing that independently. It’s the Manager working with the contract hire because the Manager— that’s the whole intent of it—is that the Manager learns and be able to do that. So, it’s definitely a team effort. It is not something that is separate from the department. I mean, they are regularly—the contract hire wasn’t—was, like, in town yesterday—not even working—and wanted to show me something. So, nothing is getting posted without it first being reviewed. The Manager and the contract hire create it—it all comes to me for review. I’ve had follow-up discussions with Tracey. Tracey is reviewing it, as well, from the Mayor’s Office. So, this is definitely something where HR is directing this effort. It is not something that we have turned over to somebody else to do because the intent is that we learn and do it. Because I share your sentiment, I have—that is an area that I don’t feel has been well-represented to-date. And so, I’m very happy to see the change and see the response because it’s really something that I’ve felt has been very important for quite some time and I just needed to find a way to get it done—and this was the fastest way for me to accomplish that and move that forward because I needed to see the effort in this area. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 22 MR. THOMAS: Well, getting that job done probably involves technical things that a Manager wouldn’t necessarily be expected to know. CHR. CABANAS: I beg to disagree— MR. THOMAS: Really? CHR. CABANAS: —with you on that because you’re talking to the very person who has done it. Who has done videos—two major videos—created, wrote the scripts for radio ads, newspapers, television. So, no—the Manager needs to be creative—work with your team, work with resources out there—that’s why the person is—that position is an EM position—that’s why. It’s not a bargaining unit position; it’s an Excluded Managerial position. And so, the person isn’t doing technical stuff. It’s doing creative coordination—getting it done. And if Tracey couldn’t do it—well, then, they should have known that HR was going to go with a contract hire—and I’m assuming they did, ‘cause contract hire forms need to be processed or through electronically now, so— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, they have to sign all contracts. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, so I don’t know what’s happening there—that they didn’t know about it, but— MR. THOMAS: Well, the creative part I’m sure—I totally agree with you that the creative part rests with the Managers and it’s not to be given away. But what comes to mind is what I call the “parking meter analogy”—you need to know how to get a parking meter to work, and you put a coin in there, and you get a certain amount of time—but it takes the geek or whoever you might to have as a consultant to know what goes on inside the parking meter. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, but then there are—that’s where the resources and the collaboration comes in—it’s from the Manager. It’s from that position. Because that position is in the driver’s seat to work with the departments who have the vacancies, work with whatever media is out there. If you’re going to get a contract—okay, you’re going to get a contract—but you are the overseer. You are the Producer. You are the Director. It shouldn’t be the Director of HR doing it—it should be the Manager—because the Director has other major duties to oversee— MR. THOMAS: I agree with that, too. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 23 CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MR. THOMAS: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, anyway, that’s just my position. Having walked the talk. MR. AGUINALDO: Do your job. CHR. CABANAS: That’s my expectation as the former Manager that they would run with it. And Sommer is right—it didn’t take off the way she had wanted to for a whole number of reasons and even prior to her being the Director—that wasn’t occurring either. So, I can’t fault Sommer for all of that but it’s, like—“Okay, now—okay, so it’s a different chapter and let’s move it forward, but let’s have the Manager do it because…”— Sommer, you’re busy with other bigger stuff. It’s like, I don’t expect you to be writing scripts or working with the resources—that’s the Manager and her team to do—and that’s all I’m going to say. That’s just my expectation as the former Manager—having done that. My Director never got involved in any of that—never. MS. TOKIHIRO: I do want to support the team, but I also—I think part of me, too, because this is a whole new area. I mean, I enjoy working with the team on it. I give them my general ideas for where I would like it to go. The kinds of things—the kinds of information that I would like to get out to the public—not the script itself, but the kinds of things that I feel where there may be some disconnects. Part of it is on the application itself—the supplemental questions—the things that don’t need to be mysteries, so we can kind of share some of that information. I do enjoy—I always want to be as knowledgeable as I can about everything that’s happening in the different divisions, so that I can best support the staff. But I think, too, when we’re doing social media in this way, we’re representing the Department of Human Resources, but we’re representing the entire County. And so, I want to make sure that what is being put out there on social media, is a polished, professional-looking product. So, not necessarily that it’s all going to be super—I mean, there’s a lot of ways to have fun with social media, but it is important, to me, that it is professionally and tastefully done as well. And so, I have spent a lot of time looking at other examples of social media—maybe some that I like and some that I don’t like—and that’s part of what I share with the team as well. Like, when we’re developing our “brand” so to speak, which is kind of how they Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 24 describe it—I’m looking for it to have a certain substance—and so, I can show them examples of, “Not this. I definitely don’t want this.” But I think that there’s a lot of room for creativity and to have fun, to engage more of our employees—and, hopefully, we’ll see what impacts it has on our recruitments, the number of applications. We’re definitely tracking our stats. And so, you’ll get more updates from me on that. I didn’t want to put a whole bunch of things into my report to you folks until we were actually doing it, so that I can give more—so I could answer more questions and give more clarification, but you’ll definitely get reports on our efforts going forward. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, thank you. Anything else on the report? Okay, so may I have a motion to accept and file the Director’s Divisional Activity Report for June 2026. MS. BOND: So moved. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: Thank you. Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried to accept and file the Director’s Divisional Activity Report for the month of June 2026. Communication(s) Item 6 CHR. CABANAS: Okay, looking at the agenda. We do not have any “Communications.” New Business (Item 7) CHR. CABANAS: And no “New Business.” Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 25 Unfinished Business (Item 8) FY 2025-2026 Annual Performance Evaluation Of The Director Of Human Resources (HR): Presentation By The Director Of HR Regarding Department’s Goals And Objectives For FY 2025-2026; And SurveyMonkey Results For FY 2025-2026 (Line Department Survey And Internal Employee Survey) Executive Session: The Merit Appeals Board Anticipates Convening One Or More Executive Meetings Regarding The Above Matter, Pursuant To HRS Sections 92-4, 92-5(a)(2) And 92-5(a)(4), For The Purpose Evaluating An Officer Or Employee Of The County Of Hawai'i, Where The Consideration Of Matters Affecting Privacy Will Be Involved And Consulting With The Board’s Attorney On Questions And Issues Pertaining To The Board’s Powers, Duties, Privileges, Immunities, And Liabilities. A 2/3 Vote Pursuant To HRS Section 92-4 Is Necessary To Hold An Executive Meeting CHR. CABANAS: We are now on “Unfinished Business” for Fiscal Year 2025 to 2026 the Annual Performance Evaluation of the Director of Human Resources. This is going to include a presentation by the Director of HR regarding the departments’ goals and objectives for Fiscal Year 2025 to 2026. And, also, the SurveyMonkey results for Fiscal Year 2025 to 2026. This includes the Line Department survey results and the Internal Employee survey results. MS. TOKIHIRO: Can I request just a short recess before I get started? CHR. CABANAS: Sure. Let’s take a five-minute break. RECESS: The Chair called for a recess at 9:50 a.m. RECONVENE: The meeting reconvened at 9:59 a.m. in open session. CHR. CABANAS: We are now back in open session. Okay. So, Sommer, you may proceed with your presentation. MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay, everyone. So you received the binder from Glynis this morning. The coversheet is the pink, and then we’re going to go right into Goal number 1. They’re all tabbed for you. So, Goal number 1 was to, “Implement the Human Capital Management (HCM) module of CoHnect in January 2026. This will include extensive software testing prior to “go live” to identify and correct identified issues, providing training to departmental human resource representatives, and updating DHR processes and procedures accordingly. CoHnect will replace Eden (Fresh) which has been utilized by the County of Hawaiʻi for almost 20 years.” (SEE ATT. A.) Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 26 So, I have a presentation that will give you some information about how that goal was accomplished. So, the first is a “Project Timeline.” And so, part of this graphic with the graph displayed in this way, is that you can see that the different modules overlapped each other beginning from 2024 and continuing through present. And so, each phase—there’s—the Human Capital Management part was HR’s part, but we also have budgeting, financials, and payroll—which were all part of the Department of Finance portion of the project. But, in some instances, because our staff—say, we have to enter payroll information—we were part of the testing for the modules that were being developed by Finance. So, there was a period of time as you look at Phases 2 and 3—where there was significant overlap, which actually resulted in some members of our staff being in scheduled meetings to address different components of the software development, up to the full eight-hours a day. So, very challenging process for many months to complete this project. So, each phase included planning and discovery, which was the discussion with CherryRoad that—CherryRoad was the Implementor for our system. So, our software is an oracle cloud-based software, but our Implementor was CherryRoad and they’re the ones that helped us to perform the customizations to make this system work specific for the County. So, we would have discussions with CherryRoad on the County’s current processes and procedures, so that they could get an understanding of what our workflows were, what our business processes are—and then, from that, they would do design and configurations. So, working with CherryRoad, again, on the design and configuration of the system—and then, getting the conversion data from Fresh into the test environment. So, “Phase 0,” starting at the top was the “Enterprise Structures.” So, that was establishment of the legal entities, business units, departments, worksite locations for all positions. And so, you kind of imagine that we’re starting with, like, building the dome and then building the structure inside. “Phase I,” “Budgeting”—we provided input on employee data, position data, and salary schedules because that’s all maintained by Finance as part of the budget process. During “Phase 2” of the “Financials,” was the configuration of the employee data as employees needed to be set up in the system already—for Phase 2. Go live for Phase 2 was July 1st, 2025, to December 31st—and each pay period, HR worked on validation and conversion of new hires from Fresh. So, it became a system where we were working in Fresh, developing CoHnect, and then had to enter the information into both sides. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 27 For “Phase 3”—during the “Payroll” completion phase, we provided input from an HR perspective related to all of the provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreements that affect payroll. Okay, so “Testing.” Once CherryRoad developed, kind of, our system—then it was time to do testing. We developed over 350 different test scenarios, which we will call our “testing script.” And the testing script captures the various actions—the personnel actions that we would take. So, for example, the test scenario you can see the list—sorry, it’s kind of small—but requesting a new position or changing a position; permanently transferring a position to a different geographic location; changing like the full-time equivalency from, like, say, part-time to full-time. We had recruitment test scenarios where we’re entering end date, adding a pending a worker, converting a pending worker to an employee, changing assignments—so that could be promotion to another position. So, initially, we have 354 different scenarios—we tested all these different actions—but also helped us to test the security of who was entering the information; once the information was entered, who was being notified that it needed to be approved; once the approval was given, who was notified to take the next action. So, it was the business process itself, but it was also security and making sure that the workflows were working correctly. And so, we actually had login information for human resources staff at all different levels, so that we could take one personnel action and follow it through the complete workflow and check all of the notifications to make sure that everything was working correctly. So, the system integration testing from August 11th to September 10th of 2025, included those 300-plus test scenarios that I was just mentioning—and so, that was a period of intensive testing, which continued. So, that first initial part was about the system itself— then the user acceptance testing was really getting deeper into making sure that the security was correct. And then, because CoHnect—I call it this living, breathing thing because it’s an oracle cloud-based product which gets monthly patches and quarterly updates. It’s constantly changing. So, any time they’re going to release an update, they give this whole technical summary that says, “This update is going to include these changes”—and we need to go through and do testing to see how that practically affects our workflow and our processes. So, this oracle product that we’re using, we have been able to customize it to a certain extent to the County, but the ability to—it’s not fully customizable because it’s a cloud product that a lot of different agencies, organizations, or other government entities are Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 28 using. So, we have some ability to make some changes but it’s not as simple as one might think. So, there are definitely some limitations. So, when it comes to the “Quarterly Updates,” we do—we’ve consolidated down to 75 different test scenarios that would regularly test a variety of these actions that we would be taking, so that we can see if there’s anything that would be critical that we wouldn’t want to accept an update because it’s really going to cause a problem in the business process. Okay, next—so the “Training.” All County employees needed to be trained because we went to a system where everyone’s entering timesheets online, requesting leave online, et cetera. And a lot of those components are payroll, but we wanted to make sure that the information—that we were going through all the training that CherryRoad was going to do and make sure that it was applicable. So, HR played a big part in reviewing the training materials and providing feedback. “Core HR training for departmental HR reps.”—was scheduled on December 8th, 11th, and 12th; “Learning Training for Departmental Learning Specialist” was on December 8th. And, normally, those HR reps. and those learning specialists—those groups are going to overlap—and so, that’s why we were able to consolidate that training to just those few days. “Training for Departmental HR representatives on entering transactions in CoHnect”—that happened on December 19th—and we’re very fortunate to be able to do so by Teams, so we can all be on the computer at the same time entering things together. And then, “Post Go-Live-Training” continues to be offered to departmental HR representatives via Teams—every pay period—to assist them in entering transactions. MS. BOND: Is that because of the updates that are constantly being implemented? MS. TOKIHIRO: It’s more related to the different employee actions and where you would enter certain information. So, like, I was mentioning, like, the change assignment. So, maybe people don’t need as much assistance with entering, like a new pending worker about when an assignment is changing or something about the position is changing—they maybe need more assistance. Okay, so for—the major components of the HCM Module from an HR perspective are related to our positions, so all of the positions in the County. And so, this is just a screenshot of, kind of, the information that that you would see for my position. So, it shows like the number of hours per week—of course the title, the home department, et cetera. I’m not—my screen is extra small—but this is intended to capture the basics of what’s in the position (inaudible). Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 29 CHR. CABANAS: So, Sommer, who entered this? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the position information is entered by our Classification and Pay Division. CHR. CABANAS: For your department? MS. TOKIHIRO: For information about all positions is—for the County—is done by Classification and Pay—yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, they enter 2,000-something? MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So, they—so every position in the County has a Position number—and so, what Classification and Pay does is they put in all of this information for each position, and then when an employee is hired, it’s the departmental HR rep. that goes—selects the position number and all of this information about the position is auto-populated. So, the next time someone is hired to be the Director of Human Resources, if it—and maybe that’s not a good example—but, say, for example, like a Laborer—for every Position number 501, that—this information about Position 501 is entered in our—by our Classification and Pay Division. Say, someone leaves that position and there’s a new hire, the new hire—the hiring department just has to put Position 501—all this information comes out. So— MS. BOND: All they have to do is enter the name and then, basically— MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. So, the—our departments are not changing any information about the position, right. So, even the information about the salary—all of that information is already there. So, departments don’t have to—aren’t allowed to edit that information at all. We maintain that. MS. BOND: So, there are—could there be multiple 501’s or is there only one 501? MS. TOKIHIRO: There’s only one 501. MS. BOND: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, you could have a class of work that has multiple positions— MS. BOND: Yeah. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 30 MS. TOKIHIRO: —but we don’t have multiple positions of the same number. Each position is distinct. MS. BOND: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Does it track hires for the position? In other words, Hire “A” retires, Hire “B”—does it show, “Okay, this position so far has had ten people in it”—does it show that? MS. TOKIHIRO: We’re trying to work with CherryRoad or Oracle on the reporting piece. And so, that’s one of the things that one of the reports that I consider to be very critical. It wasn’t information that we could get through the Fresh system—and that was, basically, the history—like, position history of when that position was last filled, how many people have we had in the position, how long as the position been filled—like the dates of employment. So, that’s actually something that we’re working on, ‘cause I think that that’s really important information for the County to have about all of our positions, especially as we look at if a position has been vacant for a certain number of years—is it time to unfund that, abolish a position, et cetera. So, yes, all this position information, our Classification and Pay Division had to work really hard to get all of this information in. We were able to take information from the Fresh system and put it into CoHnect, but there were some challenges with that. And one of the new things in CoHnect is every position needs to have a physical address location, and that is not something that we had in Fresh. We didn’t necessarily have an address in our system for all of our remote worksites. And so, every position had to be assigned an actual work location. And so, that took us quite a while to compile. So, that’s one of the—an example of one of the things where we couldn’t just take the information from our old system and go put in the new. So, this is a picture of a Form 13. And so, Gabe can appreciate the magic of a Form 13, but for the rest of you that haven’t been part of the County, this is the official record of every personnel action. And so, when someone is hired, it would show the position that they’re hired into—this form also gives indication about eligibility for certain benefits, it contains information about what retirement system they’re eligible for, it captures all of the different types of personnel actions and documents the authority for the action that’s being taken. And so, the intent of our CoHnect system is to capture all of this information electronically and to no longer have a Form 13. At this point, we continue to have paper forms as a backup, while we continue to navigate and fine-tune CoHnect because there Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 31 are certain reporting requirements, especially related to the Employee Retirement System that we need to make sure that the Employee Retirement System is given this complete, official record of every transaction that that employee went through during their career—and we’re not getting the history from CoHnect right now, that we need in order to be confident that we can do away with the Form 13. MR. THOMAS: Can these online forms be—these forms be signed electronically? MS. TOKIHIRO: These are not signed electronically. The Form 13 itself is not but it’s—there is the potential for forms to be signed electronically, but I believe the County would have had to enter into a separate contract, so that the signature could be verified—and so, we didn’t do that. That’s why we have maintained—and for other reasons—we’ve maintained paper forms. So, for example, an EC-1 to enroll in medical benefits—because that form is another party’s form that the County is just completing—those forms are not something where we’re able to put them into the system, manipulate them, et cetera—so we’ve continued paper forms for that as well. But, yeah, the electronic signature—I mean, I guess I take it for granted. Every time I’ve sent—been sent a document that requires an electronic signature, but the contracts for those services or cost associated with that can be significant. So— CHR. CABANAS: For the workflow, a Form 13 is initiated by the department— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: —it comes to your office, to Transactions. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. I, actually, have the step-by-step—you want me to give you that or did you— CHR. CABANAS: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the departmental HR rep. enters the new employee information in CoHnect. So, they enter it in the CoHnect system, and then we receive a notification that a new employee has been entered. And then, the department HR rep. prepares the Form 13, so it’s at the department—and then it comes to Central HR. So, once we get the paper form and we approve what’s on the form, then we go into CoHnect and approve the information that’s in CoHnect or make any changes. So, we’re checking the CoHnect system against what’s on the form. And then, when we approve the new employee record in CoHnect, the department receives a notification that it’s been approved, and then they receive the copy of the approved Form 13 back. Did you have another question related— Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 32 CHR. CABANAS: I—well, I was—yeah, I was kind of going beyond that. So—okay, so they complete this, it comes to Central HR, your department, and then the—what are they now? HR Specialists? HR Techs.? What are they? MS. TOKIHIRO: It depends. It could be all of those. CHR. CABANAS : All of those. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, they may have an HR Assistant, HR Tech., HR Program Specialist. CHR. CABANAS: So, an HR person reviews it for accuracy. MS. TOKIHIRO: Mm-hmm. CHR. CABANAS: And then, does someone else review it in your office? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, Transactions audits it. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, that one person reviews and audits. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: And then what happens? MS. TOKIHIRO: And then, if it’s approved, then it gets—the department is notified, and the form is returned to the department. CHR. CABANAS: So, they approve it? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: And what if it’s still wrong? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, if it’s wrong, we can’t—if we reject an employee record, it actually basically removes the whole thing. So, there isn’t a good system where the HR rep. can go in—we can’t just reject it and say, “Change this and then send it back to us”—the system doesn’t allow them. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 33 So, what we’re doing is if a change is made, we’re able to get on a Teams call with the HR rep., show them what is incorrect, make the change in Central HR, and then approve it. And it’s—so that we’re not causing the frustration of, “Okay, you have an error in this one field, if we reject this, the whole thing gets deleted. You got to start over.” We don’t want that. What we want is, “Great job on all of this information you entered. This one field does need to be corrected. Let’s look at it together, so that you know exactly what I’m changing and why, but we can still continue the process.” So, if there’s changes that need to be made, we’re informing the department—working with them to provide that education and training. CHR. CABANAS: Is it tracked that the correction is made in this system? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. I’m—the reporting for that is a little bit different and we’re still figuring out how all that works. It’s not just an immediate report that you can go and get, but it does basically capture all keystrokes, so you can see—you can get into that and see where that’s occurring. So, Teams is, I think, another great thing that came out of COVID—Zoom and whatever—so that we’re able to do it together and address individual situations—and that’s what more of the training is now, is addressing those specific instances and questions specific to an employee and their particular situation. Okay, so I actually—I asked Dee to prepare, kind of, a video on this. It may be a little hard to see but it’s going to take you through the different screens that you—that our departmental HR reps. have to go through when they’re entering a new employee. And so—and it’s kind of surprising because you might expect that, “Oh, it’s this Oracle system, it’s so great, it’s so much more efficient”—but it’s, actually, I believe 18 different screens where we need to enter information. Yeah, so this is Dee actually going through and entering an employee. So, first we start with the “when” and the “why”—and so, this is where we’re putting in the hire date, the person’s coming to work for the County; we’re putting in the position number; and then the system is going to capture all the information about the position. CHR. CABANAS: So, this info. is inputted by your staff? MS. TOKIHIRO: This info. we’re mimicking what would be input by the department. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So, this is how they enter all of the information for a new employee. So, I believe, in this scenario—so this is personnel details. This is the—she’s entering the social security number now. And there isn’t a way to just skip to a screen. So, if you didn’t have information, like communication info. for whatever reason, Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 34 you couldn’t skip the screen. You still need to go into the screen and then save and move forward. And that’s where the issue is, too, with editing an employee record. If a departmental HR rep., for example, incorrectly entered the address, you can’t go just back to the address screen. You got to go back to the beginning. CHR. CABANAS: How’s the security for this system because there’s so many data breaches these days from large corporations. I mean, it’s pretty—it’s bad. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And that’s where the security for us, we have limits as far as what specific roles can see. But as far as the integrity of the information with Oracle itself—that’s beyond us—that’s—Oracle has to maintain that because it’s their cloud software. So, yes, any information out there on the internet, right. So, now family—an emergency contact. So, she didn’t enter anything there because our employees can actually log into the system and enter their own emergency contacts. And there’s all of this different information and, basically, (inaudible) is a collection of tables, right. And so, there are certain tables that we have enabled and certain tables that we don’t use. For all of these fields, these are fields that are—that Oracle makes available, but we had to enter certain DFF Codes, which is an additional field to track things like with—is the end of our probationary periods because we require that PARS or our Performance Review be done at three-months and at six-months—and that six-month timeframe is part of gaining civil service status. So, we actually had to enter—add additional fields so that we could track those things, so that our departments can be reminded. (At this time, Ms. Yamada placed a bottle of water on the table for her.) MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. She knows I’m going to talk all day. So, that our department—so that we can actually pull a report that’s going to show when a performance review is due because if, in some cases, we may have instances where probation needs to be extended, there are requirements for when we notify employees of that—and so, we had to enter additional fields to capture that data—but, again, there are limits to the amount of information that you can modify in the system. So, now she’s entering additional assignment info. which includes information about the Employee Retirement System, so that information is captured in the system as well. She got to be a—Dee got to be a pro from practicing to put together this video, so it actually is quite a bit faster, though, when she first started—but it’s, kind of like (inaudible) because these are all the different screens and areas where our HR reps. are having to provide information. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 35 So, she’s logged in as a HR rep., right now, and then I believe it shows you the bell notifications. So, we get these notifications in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that let us know that there’s a transaction to be approved. So, also, in this system, the position information—okay, so there she’s showing you the bell notification when she’s logged in as herself, she can see that there’s an employee record that has been entered by a department and now she is logging in as a Transaction staff member to approve that transaction. And then, now she’s logged in as the HR rep., again, so that you can see that the HR rep. receives a notification when the new employee record has been approved by HR. So, with the positions as well, we have—there’s different roles. So part of the roles having to do with security but also things having to do with, like, approval of timecards and approval of leave requests. There’s the line manager and then there’s the supervisor—and so all of that information is position-specific and is based on the org. chart. The challenge with that is that your org. chart may not necessarily reflect the operation. And so, talking about larger departments, say, like the Police Department—where you may have a line manager but that is not necessarily the person that on the day-to-day is approving your timecard—that maybe your line manager could be a person of a certain rank, but then it’s actually maybe a captain that’s approving your timecard, but we can only have one supervisor and one line manager. So, that’s been, kind of, a challenge for our departments, but they’ve been working with Finance on that as well because we want our position files to be consistent with the organizational structure of the department and follow the org. chart. We don’t want to be changing, “Oh, who’s the supervisor just because…”—it’s, like, the supervisor says, “We need to follow a structure”—so we’ve been navigating those things as well. So, “Employee Self Service”—so one of the features that we were—that everyone was excited about in the new system is being able to go in and see our own information. So, employees are able to go in and look at information about the position that they’re in, and then this is an example of when I log into the system—this is what I see. This is where I enter my timecard, this is where I enter my leave requests, this is where I can update my personal information. So, under “Pay” I can see—I can go in and see my paystubs, and then this is where I would go in and I could print different documents and then enter my timecard. You can also update direct deposit accounts, view and print W2’s, and also update federal and state withholding. So, “Time and Absences”—this is the timecard. So, employees enter absences and timesheets and are able to view leave balances. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 36 So, this is the form that we used to use to request leave. It’s our “LOA” form, but instead now we do it in CoHnect, so you just enter the dates and the duration of your leave. Because we report time on a weekly basis, generally, vacation is requested by the week that it corresponds with. So, if you were going to take—if I was going to take Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off—and then also all of next week, I would enter a leave request that covers Wednesday, Thursday, Friday; and then I would do a separate leave request for next week. And it’s because when the leave is approved, it automatically populates into the timecard. So you don’t—like, the current—the old system, we would have to request the leave and then we go enter it on our timecard. Now, when the leave is requested, an electronic system, then it will just populate into the timecard. So, this is a picture of what our old “Time and Attendance Report” was. Everybody had to print this report on that buff-colored paper, it was the rule. But now, we enter it electronically. So, in the example below, if this was my timecard, it shows that I worked my regular hours but then had one-day of vacation. So, in the electronic timecard we enter all time by the time code. So, my regular hours are entered under “11” and so I just enter the regular hours there. The vacation that I had requested, that was approved—it’s going to auto-populate into this timecard. I need not enter it. So, for “Personal Information” we can, as an employee, can update your personal details including your name, marital status, and ethnicity; contact information including your phone number, email, home and mailing address; emergency—family and emergency contacts. We’re able to view employment info.—employment information and salary and other compensation. MS. BOND: They can change their ethnicity? MS. TOKIHIRO: They can. Under “Contact Information” here we’re showing the updating your phone number, email address, your home and mailing address. If I were to log into my employment info. I would be able to see my assignment information, including job details, ERS enrollment, employment date, my manager, my direct reports, and then also historical changes. Employees are able to view their current and prior pay rates. So, for example, after these—the wage increases go into effect on July 1, employees will be able to see that we’ve made that change. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 37 And then, also, our—all of our training now is online through the system, through the “Learning Module.” So, through HR reps., employees are able to look at the training catalog and then they request to be enrolled in training—they request to enroll in training and then their department can approve that. But it’s nice to be able to have the employees see the full training catalog and be able to print transcripts of trainings that they’ve completed. So, the implementation of CoHnect continues, as I mentioned, we continue to provide regular training—but that’s Goal number 1. MR. THOMAS: How far along is this project? Is it 90% complete now? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we’re fully live but we continue to have ongoing fixes. And for HR, we aren’t so much fixing anything per se, but it’s more now making sure that we can get all the reports that we need—capture all the information. There are certain reports that we need to provide about our employees—say, membership in certain bargaining units that comes up as part of the collective bargaining process. So, those are Labor Relations reports, so Labor Relations is working on that. As I mentioned, our Classification and Pay Division is working on having reports developed that are specific to the positions and position history. This system is not one that is easily able to be queried. So, in our old system, you could basically do a search in any field where information was entered and come up with data. So, you could easily search a variety of things, just by hitting a couple of buttons. In this software, it’s all basically like scheduled processes. There’s not—and you’ll ask for a report and it gives you everything—and then, you’ve got to, kind of, narrow it down. So, we’ve been working with Oracle on things like—I think they’ve kind of, suggested to us maybe we could use some dashboards for certain things, so that the reporting isn’t as onerous of a task—but that’s one of the things that we’re working through because we’re used to being able to get the information from the system a lot easier than Oracle. So, from an HR perspective, that’s most of our focus right now, is just getting the reports that we need. MR. THOMAS: With what department is the cost of this program budgeted? MS. TOKIHIRO: That’s with the Department of Finance. MR. THOMAS: Finance. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. Because most of the program is actually a financial tool. So, it covers all of our budget, all of our financials, all of our payroll; and then, HR. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 38 MR. THOMAS: So, if HR, for instance, says that they want to be able to query the system in certain ways, is that an extra charge that’s part of the contract or— MS. TOKIHIRO: So, the County has two, what they call “Day 2 Support Agreements”—so, we have an ongoing support agreement with CherryRoad who was our Implementor—and then, we also have a support agreement with Oracle. And so, we work with Finance and IT. We have weekly meetings to discuss the different Help Tickets that we’re kind of working through. And then, where that Help Ticket is being directed, and if there’s going to be a charge associated with it. So, we collaborate with Finance and IT about all of the different issues that we’re working to address—just so we’re all on the same page because certain things are best addressed by Oracle, certain things are best addressed by CherryRoad, and then—yes, if there’s additional cost that may come up that are outside of what we’ve already paid for with the Day 2 Support, that has to be taken into consideration as well— MR. THOMAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: —for prioritizing. MR. THOMAS: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, and are there questions for Sommer? Okay, that was a very detailed, informative presentation—step-by-step but it only goes to show how much detail is involved in all of this—and the forethought. HR really has to think of what their needs are, how it’s going to be implemented in this new system, and being able to query the information is important. MS. TOKIHIRO: But, I think, it’s kind of—the whole process—and that’s why, I mean, it literally took years. But the initial process was us on Teams meetings—hours and hours and hours and hours a day—explaining to this software company, “Okay, this is what we need to do to get an employee from A to B to C to D.” And that would be fine if we were just talking about, like, “Oh, we need to hire someone into a position and then they’re going to be promoted to another position”—and the employee life cycle was, like, linear—but, in the middle of all that, you have Collective Bargaining Agreements, you have different benefits, you have different differentials that affect rates of pay, we have different work schedules—we’re 24-7 operation. So, we have all of these different needs, so it’s like it may seem like, “Oh, this is not so bad, we’re just doing HR software”—but, really, we’re preparing for all of these different, very specific requirements. And that was very difficult for the Implementor to understand—like, a lot of times they would design something, and they would go, “Well, you just do this”—and we’re like, “No, but what about somebody who has a work schedule that starts on Thursday”—not everybody follows the straight Monday through Friday, right. Our fire fighters, for example, 56-hour work weeks, et cetera. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 39 So, it was—it’s a very long process and very challenging just to help make sense of this because some of it, honestly, doesn’t make sense. And then, when you try and explain the Collective Bargaining Agreements and how to apply these things—and this company is looking at how to apply it as a formula, right, for everybody in the bargaining unit—when sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s so specific that it’s like, it really needs that manual calculation, right. So, it was a very labor-intensive project—not necessarily because all of it is HR—because, again, really, only these two components—the position and the employee record—are actually HR. But HR needed to provide a lot of guidance in the process to make sure that these other things are applied correctly. MR. THOMAS: Remembering that this part of the agenda is really talking about your own work and what you do. Can you walk us back to the beginning of this project and help us understand what did you personally do to impact and plan on how this project is going to be, how is it implemented, and how did you figure out what you had to do, personally, as opposed to what you believed other people could do. CHR. CABANAS: Can we—can I just interject—that’s a very good question, but can we do a pause because I have to leave. And then, allow Sommer time to answer your question when we resume. MR. THOMAS: Lunch is a priority. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so if it’s okay with everyone. MR. AGUINALDO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MR. AGUINALDO: Do your thing and then come back. CHR. CABANAS: And I’ll be back—yeah. Hopefully, I’ll be back real quick. Okay, thank you very much for your kind attention and support. Thank you, Sommer. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. I’ll be here when we come back. CHR. CABANAS: So, we will convene at—what is it now—10:45—11:45 I’ll be back. Is that okay? Yeah. RECESS: The Chair called for a recess at 10:45 a.m. RECONVENE: The meeting reconvened at 11:45 a.m. in open session. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 40 CHR. CABANAS: Okay, it is 11:45 a.m. and we are now back in open session. So, we’ll take off where we left off with Sommer answering Mr. Thomas’ questions. Do you want to repeat it, again? MR. THOMAS: Do I remember the question? CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, do you remember? MR. THOMAS: Generally, it was to speak to your experience in this job, which I understand is about three years now. When did the project to bring this new system come into view—is that before or after your ascendency, so to speak. And what do you feel the contributions were that you made to direct this conference as opposed to this implementation of this project, and what influence did you have on it, and what did you feel—what aspects of it did you feel could be handled by others. MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay. So, the—shall I continue? Okay. Yeah, so the County procurement process to identify who was going to assist the County with this software program began prior to me starting as the Director. So, I was appointed in November of 2023 and the procurement process for this had already begun. So, by the time, that selection process was already being made. But as far as my role in the project, as I mentioned earlier, my general management style is to be engaged with the various divisions and the work that they’re doing, so that I can support all of the employees in the division—and support the work being done. So, I attended a lot of the development meetings, I attended a lot of the testing meetings, I attended the meetings with the representatives from Oracle, with the representatives from CherryRoad; separate meetings that would—where Finance and HR would collaborate, really working with my staff so that they could show me or explain to me. Anytime that there was a challenge in the development process where maybe there was, for example, like we were talking about electronic signatures on forms, and we were talking about the different enrollment forms that our employees need to complete for outside agencies, et cetera. There is an onboarding component that we could have included in CoHnect, which would have had the potential for some of those forms, for some of those electronic signatures, for some of—to automate some of those things, so that when you had a pending worker, we could send them an email and say, “Sign all these forms before your first day of work”—and not do the typical onboarding process that we do. But it wasn’t working. It wasn’t—it didn’t seem like it was going to work for us because of our individual requirements and requirements of the agencies that we’re collecting this information from. So, my staff would come to me. They wouldn’t just make a decision. It was always this interactive process of us working together through, “This is the challenge. This is what Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 41 we’re facing. This is what the system can do”—but, ultimately, we have to decide if we’re going to use that functionality or not. And that was—when you’re talking about updating a system that is replacing something that we’ve had for 20 years, my initial orientation is we should be maximizing the functionality to the fullest extent that we can, otherwise, what we’re going to get out of this is the system that just duplicates what we already have. I mean, there has to be value added after 20 years of new software and updates and things like that. And so, I really wanted to be informed as far as what kind of a product we were producing. What the software manufacturer is saying is possible, what our operational need is, and how that all works together—so that I can come and talk to MAB—but talk to any employee that might have a question that I run into in passing or someone in the community that hears about it. I mean, I want to have an understanding. That being said, again, I can’t be everywhere all the time. And so, a lot of the development of this is delegated to the managers in those divisions that are most affected. So, it was our Personnel and Organizational Development Division, it was our Equal Opportunity and ADA Division, it was our Health and Safety Division, it was Classification and Pay, Labor Relations, and Admin. Services. And really the only division that wasn’t tasked with part of this was Recruitment—and that’s because that was another component where we decided to continue with the NeoGov platform. There is a recruitment element that could be offered through this Oracle software but really didn’t work for our needs, and so we elected to stay with NeoGov. So, there was a lot of interaction that I was involved in, and I kept myself educated throughout the process and I, certainly, participated in as many meetings as I could with all of the different stakeholders. But, really, the hard work and the day-to-day and the heavy lift—absolutely came from my staff—and I appreciate how much they kept me informed and gave me the opportunity to ask my questions because I don’t want to have something happening in HR where I’m going, “Oh, I don’t know”—I mean, the Director should know—as much as it’s hard to be everywhere that I need to be and understand all of the things, I feel that it’s the responsibility of the Director to be very well-informed about what’s happening in the department. MR. THOMAS: ‘Cause I’m hearing now a theme of cooperation and teamwork. How much turnover has there been among these division heads that report to you, and what do you look for either in evaluating the performance of existing staff or of looking at who you want to hire as a person to fill a vacant position—to make the strongest team that is along the lines of what you just described? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, this CoHnect project is a good example of the kind of collaboration that I encourage and reinforce in HR. Because it’s important, like, in the CoHnect Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 42 project, even though Admin. Services who—that division is responsible for entering the actual employee records personnel transactions—things like that. They need to have a very good understanding of the position side as well. And so, them—they—working with the Classification and Pay Division, even in the development. I mean, it was really interesting to be part of meetings where Dee, the Manager for Admin. Services, might mention to Jamie, “Oh, what about this?” Something that Jamie might not have thought of but because they work so closely together, they’re able to support each other in that way. So, there isn’t this kind of culture of, “Well, that’s not me. That’s for her to figure out, that’s her division, if her division then ask the question—then too bad.” That’s the exact opposite of what I’m looking for. I want everybody to be as informed as possible about the work of the different divisions and work together because, ultimately, we are one department and our responsibility is, as the Central Agency for the entire County—and so, we need to make sure that that collaboration is there. So, I haven’t had a lot of turnovers. I have filled two Manager positions. So, one was the EO/ADA Coordinator position. The other was that we had the vacancy in the Recruitment Division. I filled that Manager position. And I’m sorry, I neglected the third because the position—my permanent position as the Division Head for Workers’ Compensation, I filled that one as well. But, really, what I expect from the department and expect from the Team is that collaboration, is that communication, collaboration, working together to identify solutions because that’s when people come to us when there’s a challenge and we need to have a solution that’s consistent and fair, so that we can support our departments. MR. THOMAS: Good. Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay I think we’re ready for your Goal number 2. MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay. So, Goal number 2 was the “Re-organization of the Health and Safety Division to include centralizing all Safety and Driver Improvement Coordinator (SDIC) positions within the County, and develop a uniform, County-wide driver training program.” (SEE ATT. B.) So, the County had the Safety and Driver Improvement Coordinator positions. We had them in our Department of Environmental Management, we have one in the Department of Water Supply, we also had them in the Department of Public Works; and then, in the Health and Safety Division we had Safety Specialists. So, all of our Safety Specialists happen to be CDL license holders, and so they could help with Driver Coordinator roles, like, doing annual audits of our staff that do—that have CDL’s and drive for us, but that wasn’t their central role. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 43 And so, it was becoming more of an issue. Like, more departments were coming in saying, “Okay, now we’d like our own Driver Improvement Coordinator.” So, Department of Parks and Recreation actually wanted to put a position into their budget. And so, through discussion with the Mayor and the Managing Director—the Managing Director having formerly been the Director of Human Resources and very familiar with the Health and Safety operation—they’re like, “No, we would like to see this become more centralized, so it’s coming out of HR.” We also have the Department of Public Works—has a Driver Training Program that’s been approved by UPW—the United Public Workers—but DEM hadn’t been able to get approval for a Driver Training Program. So, there was inconsistency within the County of even functions like that. So, we were excited to have the opportunity to centralize that function within Health and Safety. So, when I present this goal, I’m presenting what happened but also wanted to use it as an opportunity to provide a little bit more background to the Board about—when I say, “Oh, the position was transferred from the Department of Environmental Management.” I included some samples of, like, even the paperwork that goes into that, just so that I can help the Board to understand a little bit more about what goes into allocating positions, re-allocating positions, transferring positions—so it’s just overall County operation but a good opportunity to provide you with a little bit of education because this is what we do in HR. So, Glynis was kind enough to tab all of my attachments for us. So, I do have a little “Table of Contents” for you, but we’ll just kind of go through it. So, Tab number 1—this document provides an outline to the Board of the various actions that were taken. So, there were many steps in this process. We needed to communicate with the departments that currently had the positions, let them know about the—that we were going to centralize the function, let them know how this would impact them as far as the transfer of positions. We did—the Department of Public Works, we actually have not transferred their Safety and Driver Improvement Coordinator position to HR yet. And the reason being is that in meeting with them, they already have an approved Driver Training Program, and they have a systematic approach for identifying those employees that are going to be trained, setting up their training schedule, et cetera. So, acknowledging that it was going to take us time to complete the re-org., transfer all the positions, get our training program approved—it was decided that we would leave the position in the Department of Public Works, for now, so they can continue operationally as they have been, so we won’t interrupt their operation. And then, once we finalize this, get fully staffed, and begin our training operation—we can re-evaluate incorporating their position into HR. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 44 But we did meet with Water. We don’t get to absorb any positions from Water because they’re semi-autonomous and approved by a Water Board and the financing is all different. We don’t absorb their position, but what we did was absorb their function. So, we let them know that going forward, they’ll become—be able to come to Health and Safety for their request for training and we’ll support their department in that way, so they really don’t need their position anymore. We did meet with the Department of Environmental Management as well. We had to complete an initial draft after discussion internally. It became clear that there wasn’t really a class of work that we already had in the County that would fit the role of this Driver Trainer Supervisor. So, we worked on developing a class of work specific to that role. And then, there’s been—when you develop a new class spec., you develop a new position description. So Health and Safety had to work on that. There was an actual transfer paperwork for all the positions that has to get approved by the Mayor and the Managing Director. There was a position that had been approved in a prior budget for DEM that had, actually, never been allocated. So, we actually had to allocate that in the Department of Environmental Management, and then transfer it to HR. So, a lot of details there which I can explain as we get into the actual—as we get into some of the additional tabs. But we have—and I have the new org. chart that we can go over as well. When we have positions in HR—all of our positions in HR—because they may have access to information that’s confidential as far as employer/employee relations, we exclude all of the positions from the Union. In this case, so we need concurrence from the Union in order to exclude the positions. Because of a grievance matter that’s still being addressed, when we requested to exclude these positions, the Union said, “No.” So, it’s a little unusual but we—these positions are the new positions that were added—are currently included in the bargaining unit. I think the other grievance matter is going to be resolved and we’ll re-address it with the Union—but that was a process. When we initially sent them the notifications regarding exclusion, we did it all on one letter because we already have the same position that are already excluded, so we kind of considered it a matter of—that it was, sort of, a given that they would agree to the exclusion. They didn’t. So, then we—through subsequent correspondence I asked that an individual letter be written for every position so that we could be clear that the Union—it maybe they were okay with excluding some but not one—but, no, they said, “Do not concur.” So, that process took some time as well. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 45 But as Suzi mentioned from the report from the Health and Safety Division, we have opened the recruitment. So all the recruitments open internally first, and then if we don’t—aren’t able to either get qualified applicants or make a selection—then we go to open-competitive. So, we were able to fill the Safety Specialist II position through an internal recruitment. Through internal recruitment, we have one applicant for a Safety Specialist I—that interview is going to happen on Friday—and then, the Program Specialist position is going to open on competitive recruitment—it may already have opened—so, all in the process. It’s taken us some time to establish the positions, but the recruitment process has started and has been completed for some. So, that first tab was the timeline, just so that you could see that we’ve been actively working on this project over the months, and the different components that have gone into it. Tab number 2 shows the organizational chart that shows for our Health and Safety Division prior to the re-organization. And then, Tab number 3 is the organizational chart following the re-org., that includes the new positions. So, you can see the Safety and Driver Program Specialist—that was the new class of work that was created; and then the two subordinates, Safety and Driver Improvement Coordinator positions; and then we did add a Safety Specialist II position as well. So, Tab number 4, this is where we kind of get into the detail little bit as far as what’s actually required to transfer a position. So, an existing position that you’re going to transfer whether you’re transferring it from one department to another, or you’re transferring it within a department—maybe you’re moving it from one division or one section to another. You have to do a “Transfer Notice” and actually after you get all requests for organizational change approved by the Mayor and Managing Director. So, it's a request that comes in from the department head, would be reviewed by the Mayor and Managing Director, and then final approval comes from the Department of Human Resources. So, once that request is approved, then that initiates the notice. So, in this case, we had several positions to be transferred. But then Tab number 5 is the “Allocation Notice”—so this is when a department request a position in the budget. It gets approved in the budget, but what Council is actually approving is just the money to fund the position. So, they’re just funding—they’re just providing approval for the money portion. But what the position actually is, what the class of work is, the pricing for the position—that’s all determined by the Department of Human Resources. And so, a department Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 46 needs to come in with the request to allocate the position. They provide us with a proposed position description, and we look at that—see if we have an existing class of work—and then, if not, work with them, et cetera—and then, actually, create the position after we work with them on the position description. So, all of these notices, right, if you have an “Allocation Notice”—and then, in this case, because we were—there was a Safety—a Driver Improvement Supervisor position that had been approved in a prior budget for the Department of Environmental Management, this was the one I mentioned—we had to allocate it in the Department of Environmental Management first. And then, there is the “Transfer Notice” that then transfers the position from the Department of Environmental Management to HR. And then, because when a position is allocated—we allocated it based on a class that we had, but once the position was transferred to HR, after we were considering the whole org. chart and the operational need of the division—we re-allocated the position from a Safety Driver Improvement Supervisor to this Safety and Driver Program Specialist—and that’s because, from an operational perspective, that Program Specialist level was going to provide us with the ability to manage that Driver Training Program, but then also evaluate other safety components. So, Tab number 6, again, is just the “Allocation Notice” for the—one of the new positions. And then, the same for Tab number 7. So, these were the transactions that occurred on all of the new positions that were added to the Health and Safety Division. So, Tab number 8, I just wanted to provide a little bit of a summary because I know, in particular, Niel likes the Classification and Pay stuff, but I thought it was a good opportunity for everyone to, kind of, have an outline to understand the process that we go through, when we’re developing new classes of work. And so, I think that this is something that came up, maybe in the last meeting. So, the background discussion that we had within HR was what was the role of the position. What did we see talking about, again, the organizational chart, talking about kind of the reporting structure—what the supervisor position was going to be responsible for. So, we had that discussion and then we looked at existing classes of work and didn’t see anything that really, kind of, encompassed everything that we need. And so, we came up with what we thought the proposed class might be. And so, really, just documenting what the role is going to be, what the oversight is. And then, we start with a jurisdiction review. And so, we go and do kind of a deeper dive and look at classes of work that exist in other jurisdictions to see is—would there be something that somebody else has that we don’t currently have, but that we could adopt. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 47 So, in the jurisdiction review, we looked at positions in the City and County of Honolulu, County of Maui, and County of Kauaʻi—and we didn’t really find anything that captured exactly what we needed because none of these other roles in the jurisdictions were tasked with the same thing that our new supervisor was going to be tasked with. So, that helped us to identify—“Yes, this actually is a new class of work”—but also when we’re establishing a new class we have—we look at internal alignment because we also have to make a determination regarding the pricing for the position, which is—the pricing is how the salary gets assigned. So, there is a class of work, we do have a Safety Specialist II—so we already had that. So, the supervisor role doesn’t really fall in line with that. And then we have a Human Resources Program Specialist—but that Human Resources Program Specialist is—it’s a pretty broad category. I mean, a broad description, but we felt that—or Classification and Pay felt that the pricing of the Program Specialist was probably most consistent with this new class that we were proposing based on duties and responsibilities. And then, when the new class is adopted, we send it out for jurisdictional review. So Gabe was mentioning all those different classes that Classification and Pay has already reviewed this year. So, we send our classes out for other jurisdictions to review. They have the opportunity to provide comments or share concerns, and we take that feedback and then we go through a process of notifying the jurisdictions of our “Intent to Adopt” a class. So, Tab number 9, reflects the correspondence that would be sent to the other jurisdictions that helps them to understand this is our Intent to Adopt and it gives the background of why we are creating this, what is the job to be performed, and all the details about the class—we’ve let them know what the other classes of work that we evaluated, what they were—so that they can see our research process and see if the comparisons are appropriate. And then, we ask for them to provide their comments. In this case, we didn’t get any comments or concerns from any of the other jurisdictions, and so we notify all of the jurisdictions of the final action taken, that we’re adopting the class as initially proposed; and then, also attached is a copy of the class spec. itself that was developed. Part of the review process is also that the Classification and Pay Division shares the proposed class spec. with our Recruitment and Examination Division because Recruitment is the ones—they're actually going to be screening the minimum qualifications to see if someone meets those requirements. And so, our Classification and Pay Division asks the Recruitment Division if they have any concerns or questions as well, before the class even gets reviewed by other jurisdictions prior to adoption. So, the class spec. is there for you to review. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 48 Tab number 10 shows the correspondence—the individual letters that were sent to HGEA for each of the positions. So, every time we have an exclusion request, this letter would go to the Union and then they’re provided with a area where they can “Concur” or “Not Concur.” And if there’s questions—like we send a letter, and then our Classification and Pay Division will reach out to the Union and just follow-up, see if there’s any questions or if we haven’t gotten a response, we follow-up with them verbally—but we do require a written response to these types of requests. And then, finally, Tab number 11 is the Commercial Driver License Training Program that we developed. We are still—it’s in draft because we are still in consultation with the Union. So, we initially sent it to UPW, I believe in March—oh, my apologies. We initially—well, so I did—we forwarded it to UPW in March, so the letter that I sent with a copy of the program was dated March 17th. In April, the Union sent an email—and I provided the emails just so you folks can see the exchange between ourselves and the Union, but—so UPW reached out in April and requested an extension of the timeframe to review the program because what they do, too, is they send the program out to their membership and ask the members if they have any questions or concerns. So, they requested the initial extension and then—to May 15th for review; and then they submitted an additional extension request to June 30th to review, but we also met with them—so we met with the UPW representatives last week and consulted on the program, and there were a couple of revisions that are going to come out of our discussion. One, being the—we’re going to propose a template for how the employee is notified of their opportunity to participate in the training program; and we’re going to request clear documentation of either their acceptance or refusal to participate because there are limitations in the program about the number of opportunities that an employee would have to participate in the training. So, in our discussion with UPW, they had questions about different aspects of it, and we were able to provide some good clarifications that helped them to understand, and then they requested a couple of revisions. So, we’re in the process of drafting the revisions and we’ll get that back to them. So, once we have final approval from UPW, we’ll be able to proceed. So, we’re still in process as far as filling the positions and final agreement on the training program, but I’m very pleased to see it all coming together and hope to be able to fill the vacancies quickly and get the training program going. CHR. CABANAS: Any questions for Sommer? MR. THOMAS: Oh, I usually can manufacture one. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 49 CHR. CABANAS: Okay, Mr. Thomas, your light is on. You may proceed. MR. THOMAS: I’m impressed with the administrative responsibilities and all the intricacies of making all this happen. What I don’t see in here—and maybe this is just reflective of my own ignorance—is any internal asking of ourselves—why do we have this program in the first place? I mean, sure it sounds like County workers who drive vehicles ought to be safe drivers, but do we need this many positions? What do we need these positions to be doing? What are they supposed to teach? How many of them do we have to have to get the job done? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, this training program is specific to CDL license holders. And so, we have a number of different positions that require our employees to hold a CDL license. And so, part of it is the training. So it’s training so that we are able to provide promotional opportunities for our current employees. So, for example, on the Department of Environmental Management, people will come in as they—a Solid Waste Facility Attendant—so, if someone who’s at the transfer station—but then, through a driver training program, if the County is able to help train them so they can get their CDL license, then they become eligible for promotional opportunities into positions such as Equipment Operator—and things like that, as an example. And so, this training program is to standardize that training so that we can provide those promotional opportunities for our employees. So, currently, I believe the contract allows for—if an employee were to get their license, then there’re some—we could reimburse the employee for their license, if they get a job or they have a job that requires it. But there’s no standardization to that training. I mean, if they go out, there’s a number of different driver training schools. The training is all going to be different and it’s very expensive. So, back in the day when I was doing vocational counseling, maybe the CDL training was less than $3,000.00; now, it’s six, seven—$8,000.00. And so, that’s very difficult for our employees to afford. And so—and then, there’s the component of the audits which are required by the DOT. So, we need to audit our drivers not less than once every two years, go out on the road with them, make sure that they’re following safe driving habits. So, there really is a need for the positions. I think the fact that we’re centralizing it into HR allows for more coverage for departments. So, for example, in the Department of Environmental Management, their driver—Safety Driver Improvement Coordinator position has been vacant for more than a year now—and so, with the prior structure there was no support for DEM. They were just without somebody in that position—and so, things weren’t happening. So, it actually resulted in the County having to enter into Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 50 a contract in order to have the DOT audits completed, and there wasn’t any driver training being provided. And so, now this centralized function will be—will enable us to be able to support departments with a variety of personnel rather than, “Oh, just this person, in this department only works for this department.” MR. THOMAS: So, how do the standards get written and by whom for what the education component or the curriculum or whatever you call it, has to be done? And in what context does all of this written? Is there a study somewhere that shows that back in time—10 or 15 years ago or whenever this particular set of instructions was created—somebody did a study and says, “Whoa, we really need an education program, and it needs to cover these topics, and it needs to be written and approved by such and such an agency or function.” MS. TOKIHIRO: So, it is the Department of Transportation, and they’ve changed it over time, like what is required for the license. Previously, I don’t believe you had to have classroom instruction. You could just get a permit or—I’m not well-versed in all of those details, but I know that now they’ve standardized it where you have to go to a driver education school—you have to attend the training program. That would be a part—that classroom instruction part, would be a component of our program, but it’s actually something that’s required—it’s a DOT required program. So, we would have our employees participate in an approved classroom training program. And then, in order to get the license, you have to have a learners permit and be able to perform these certain tasks in a road test and be familiar with all of the different mechanical components of the truck—and that’s all outlined by—in the State—like CDL license manual. So, what we’d be doing is we’re implementing for our employees a program to meet the requirements of the DOT and the State. MR. THOMAS: So, is it DOT then, that increases the educational requirements to the point that the cost of it all doubles? MS. TOKIHIRO: I think it could be—well, like that classroom training that I’m aware of, I believe that there’s a classroom training that you can do online that cost $25.00. So, I don’t know that it’s always all of the DOT requirements that are increasing the cost but, certainly, like everything else on our island, it’s supply and demand, right? So, the requirements, I think, even for the insurance and the fact that in order to be able to provide this training, you need to have a semi-truck, right—for someone to get a CDL Type A, it’s a certain type of vehicle. And so, I think the cost become—they increase because the cost of the equipment alone increases; and then, the trainer itself, it’s their time, right—and it’s not just like you go, and you drive the truck twice. These training programs take weeks, if not months. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 51 Our training program is going to match a trainer with an employee on a one-on-one—I would prefer them to be specifically just training one at a time—one-on-one. We could handle probably more than that. You could probably train a couple people at a time, but what you’re doing is just limiting the amount of time each individual gets to practice on a truck itself. MR. THOMAS: So, bottom line then—and then I’m done—is that we’re sort of stuck with what DOT puts on us to do, and nobody is really compelled to ask how necessary is this, at this level of activity. It’s like—it just is— MS. TOKIHIRO: Well—yeah. And we’re required to have positions that have these requirements based on the equipment that we’re operating, right. So, we’re just following the state and federal rules regarding that—and then, trying to make sure that we’re providing training opportunities to our employees so that they can take promotions. MR. AGUINALDO: It’s—so, when you guys talk about the CDL—I do have. So, there’s different classes, like, what Sommer indicated—Type 4, Type B, Type A, GVW-Rating, Tandem Axle, Tractor/Trailer, Airbrakes—to answer that question, you are required—bottom line you are—like, after I think 911, it’s even harder. I mean, you have to provide valid—I mean, from birth certificate to passport—they do comprehensive background. You got to do PUC—it’s a comprehensive physical. So, like what—I feel, like, what the County is doing is an equal opportunity employer. They’re doing things in-house. I had to go outside—I mean, it’s not easy. So, the reason why it’s so very hard now, you’re driving a vehicle that you can kill somebody. You can use that as a tool of mass destruction, I guess, you can call it, ‘cause it’s so big. There’s variables of tiers of education when comes to CDL. I—every so often I have a reminder from DOT, like, “Hey, you’ve got to do it, if not you’re going to lose your license.” So, I have held that for quite a long time—and that is really good, like, doing it in-house. Outside, right now, it’s so expensive. And internal training because different departments, waste—solid waste, highways—they all have different types of vehicles. So, when we look at that kind of stuff, it’s—you cannot walk away from it. Majority of our roads—you look at it—you’re driving on a state road—and County road, you still have to have it—and there’s a certain thing on your license that shows. I did have before, like heavy equipment/CDL kind of vehicles—even having trailers, you have to have a certain type of license because of GVW. We cannot walk away from it. So, it’s something that—I hope that clarifies your question. MR. THOMAS: Yeah, it does. And, obviously, the big truck can do more damage than something small but then, some nut job in a Tesla can have it engaged to drive itself—and it drives itself up a lady’s driveway into her house and kills her. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 52 MR. AGUINALDO: Yeah, that’s different. MS. BOND: But that, actually, brings me to another point on this whole thing. There are a lot of people running around in cars that are labeled “County of Hawaiʻi” cars—in little trucks—I mean, not ones you need a special license for. Is there any kind of a program that they have to go through before they do that? MS. TOKIHIRO: There isn’t necessarily a program that they have to go through before they’re driving any County vehicle, but we do have a driver training—a training program, if there is a concern about somebody’s performance in a vehicle. I think that the vehicles when they’re out, like for—say, some of our vans where we may have elderly activities or something where there’re passengers, those—they have an assessment before they’re picking up passengers. But, for myself, I have a County vehicle issued to me, but I didn’t have to go through any sort of performance test before I was approved. MS. BOND: Well, there is one particular person that drives a lot on Highway 130 that’s got an interesting road rage thing going. And I—it’s, sort of, like—is there a program that—I guess, if enough complaints come in, then they have to go through a thing—and how do I get people to complain about this guy, other than me. MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. And so, it would be—if there were concerns, raising the concerns to the department. If it’s unclear which department, those contacts could be made through the Mayor’s Office. It’s actually the Department of Finance that maintains the kind of special use permits that we all have in order to—for those of us that are issued a County vehicle. But, certainly, if there’s a concern—that concern should be brought to our attention, so that we can address it. MS. BOND: Yeah. ‘Cause that kind of thing—I got a license plate once and I called and everybody—I got this giant run-around—“Well, that’s not our department. We don’t take care of that. We’re not in charge of it” da, da, da, da, da—and I’m, like, “You know, when he kills somebody, then you’ll pay attention”—and it’s, like, it doesn’t need to have to get to that. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And, certainly, I think that it may be difficult to determine the correct department, but I would definitely say that the Mayor’s Office would want to know—and they will, definitely, be able to find the department. MS. BOND: Maybe, yeah, I started at the bottom. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 53 MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MS. BOND: That’s my mistake. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. Which, I mean, I appreciate the effort to try and do that, but I think that— MS. BOND: And this was years ago—it’s not current. But the other question I have, too, is there—people that are assigned cars that have the seal on it—they’re allowed to take them home every night and use them as—you pick up their kids from school and that kind of stuff? MS. TOKIHIRO: So— MS .BOND: Or is there a— MS. TOKIHIRO: I believe that the correct legal term is “deminimus use”—is that what it is—like, it’s supposed to be official use getting to and from work. MS. BOND: Right. MS. TOKIHIRO: And so—no, it’s not the same as operating your personal vehicle. It is not your personal vehicle. It’s assigned for official County business—that being said, I think that there are instances of on your way to and from—there may be small deviations out—I’ll defer to Corp. Counsel on the exact definition of deminimus— MS. BOND: Look he’s looking (inaudible)—I made him work. Oh, no. MR. YOSHIMOTO: Well, what I’m looking at is a Memorandum 23-06 and it’s from Finance Director Deanna Sako, dated December 27th, 2023. And it’s—the subject is “Personal Use of County Vehicles”—and it goes through all of the proper use. And so, generally speaking, if it’s—like what Sommer said, if it’s “deminimus”—usually deemed to be okay. I don’t know about what you mentioned, Suzi, about— MS. TOKIHIRO: Passengers, they don’t— MR. YOSHIMOTO: Yeah. I mean, I can address that later, but I can’t give you— MS. BOND: It’s just a curious—not really on subject—let’s keep moving. Poor Sommer today had to talk enough. CHR. CABANAS: (Inaudible), okay. Any other questions for Sommer? Okay. Okay, thank you, Sommer— Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 54 MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay. CHR. CABANAS: —on Goal 2. So, we are now on Goal 3. MS. TOKIHIRO: Goal 3—okay. So, Goal 3 was to “Develop a searchable database to summarize minimum qualification requirements for all County of Hawaiʻi classes of work and track the date the class was last amended or reviewed. After the database is completed, a DHR internal review will be initiated for class specifications that have not recently been amended, prioritized as follows: (1) those that have not been amended prior to the year 2000, (2) those that have not been amended from 2000-2010, and (3) those that have not been amended from 2010-2020. This will help ensure class specifications are current and accurately reflect the scope of class coverage.” So, again, thank you to Glynis for tabbing all of my exhibits here—there’s only three. But the first one is the spreadsheet itself, which is going to be almost impossible for you to read, but I wanted to—this tab is provided more as—so that you have a visual of the volume as far as the amount of information that was compiled and captured in the spreadsheet. So, I can go ahead and pull up the spreadsheet, and I can give you a sample of some of the different categories that were captured—but then, also, how having all of this information on one spreadsheet makes it a very usable tool for the department. So, this database just having been developed during this last year, is the first time that the County has ever had a single place where information was tracked on all of our different classes of work. So, in the past, if you wanted to try and identify all positions that required a certain type of degree or certification, it would be—do you want me to continue? You want a recess? (At this time, Mr. Thomas left his seat at the dais and proceeded to sit near the screen for a better view of the power point presentation.) MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible) where I can see it. MS. TOKIHIRO: Oh, okay. So, it would be kind of hit or miss—like us—like our Classification and Pay Division—can you see it better there? MR. THOMAS: Perfectly, I actually (inaudible). MS. TOKIHIRO: Okay. So, it would be kind of hit or miss. Our Classification and Pay Division, sort of, having to guess or try and figure out—and things may be missed. So, I’m just going to go through the spreadsheet and just, kind of, give an overview of the different categories. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 55 So, each class is assigned a “Code Number”—and so, that’s Column number 1; Column number 2 is the “Class Title”; then we have information about the assigned “Pay Grade” and the “Bargaining Unit” that the position belongs to; we have information about education requirement; the discipline summarizes if a specific degree is required in a certain area. So, for example, Engineers are required to have a certain—like a degree in engineering, right—but not all of our positions require a degree in a certain discipline. “Selective Certification”—our classes of work, in some instances, are very broad. Selective certification allows departments to provide some clarifications of specific requirements if the class of work is broad and there is a specific need that they identify for one of their positions—but that is rare. We only have a very small number of positions that allow for selective certification. So, we capture information about whether or not “Supervisory Aptitude” is required; we have information about “Special Licenses and Certificates”; then we get into actual “Driver’s Licenses.” So, like, as Gilbert was mentioning, so we have “Class 3” driver’s license requirement; whether or not the position requires “Class 4” or a “CDL”; the different types of “CDL Endorsements” that may be required; if a “Traffic Abstract” is required as one of the requirements for the position; or that ”DOT Medical Certificate”—I believe that’s for anyone driving a truck with a gross volume weight over 10,000 pounds. We summarized the category of work, if it’s—like the level of work, if it’s light, sedentary, or a heavy class of work. “Act 64” is eligibility for benefits that are considered—benefits for performance of work in positions that are considered to be exposed to unusually hazardous conditions. There are certain additional benefits that may be available for employees, if they’re injured in classes of work that are eligible for Act 64. We also have the “FLSA” information—“Lautenberg” is a specific area where if someone is required to carry a firearm, there’re certain things that could make them ineligible to carry a firearm. We also summarized “Special Working Conditions”; and then, finally, getting into the dates as far as “Last Amended”; and then we have a “Comment” section because as we’re working through this document and compiling it—even in the process of compiling it, there were different, kind of, “notes to self” that our Classification and Pay Division wanted to make as far as language that we may need to address—and just different things. There were also a bunch of classes—I’m going to go ahead and each one of these headers has a pull down menu, which allows you to sort within that heading. And this is the part where we get to see the functionality of having all of this in one place. So, when I first open the spreadsheet, the spreadsheet was sorted by alpha. order according to class title. But when I just re-did the sort, I sorted by last amended—so you can see that we have amended some of these classes in 2026. And then, there Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 56 were a whole bunch of classes that we amended in 2025, but we amended those to remove the specific disciplines for the bachelor’s degree requirements for a bunch of our positions, but we don’t consider that to be a true amendment of the class—we just amended the MQ. So, for a lot of the positions that were amended in 2025, we’ve added additional comments to include—I don’t want to scroll too fast, I don’t want to make anyone ill—but it’s just that the spreadsheet covers almost 800 positions, right. But there were additional notes—so, like, for example, right here, when we amended the Planner Series—we amended it in 2025 specific to the minimum qualification—a degree requirement—but in the comment, we noted “2016” because that’s the time—that’s the last time the class spec. was actually amended. So, we don’t want to just focus on “last amended”—we also want to make sure that, “Hey, we’ve really gone back and fully looked at the whole class.” So, even though these positions were amended in 2025, we’re considering their last amended as 2016— and so, that will be part of the prioritized list. (At this time, Mr. Thomas was speaking; however, he was not speaking into the microphone.) MR. THOMAS: So, I was asking—because I’m interested in the ancient history—the ones that haven’t been reviewed or done over since 1842 or something. What do they look like and, I guess, you can sort this based on any column, right, so you can sort it on “last amended”— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So, this is—yeah. And so, something is wrong with my filter—okay, so if you go “last amended”—this one was 1961. So, District Road Overseer—and we’re already in the process of working with the department on this one. And then, the next, like, Field Lubrication Worker—even in the process of completing this spreadsheet, we recognized that that’s not a class of work that—where we have a filled position. We’re not using that, so that is one that we’ll be moving to abolish. MR. THOMAS: We don’t lubricate fields anymore, huh? MS. TOKIHIRO: No—or we do it differently under a different title, yeah. So, Pipefitter Helper—that one hadn’t been last amended since 1964, so we’re in the process of working on that as well. MR. THOMAS: Does anything on this spreadsheet say when the last person occupied this particu—at any particular position? MS. TOKIHIRO: No, because that’s separate—that’s going to be separate data. So, this is getting the information as far as when someone last held the position—is a little Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 57 different, but I can tell you that we have—for anyone coming in with a Request to Fill a position, they have to document that they have reviewed the Position Description and that that’s up-to-date. So, that’s anytime we’re recruiting for a position. But, say, for some of these positions, I don’t know if you’ve had the same Sewer Maintenance Helper in the position, all of that time—you may not have reviewed it. And just reviewing the Position Description doesn’t mean that they’re going back and looking at the—amending the class spec. So, this is that effort to take it beyond just what’s happening at the recruitment level when someone’s coming in to fill a position—as far as the Position Description—and getting back to the whole foundational base for the position itself. CHR. CABANAS: I think it prompts the discussion between the department and HR as to whether some of those positions are actually needed because when they fill, I’ve never seen Pipefitter Helper—they usually recruit Pipefitter. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: So, it kind of—it’s a good tool for discussion between the departments (inaudible) need it. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And so—and that’s the thing is that we—HR, up to this point, has always just responded to a departments’ request. So, if a department wanted to amend a class spec. they would come in and request that of HR. There wasn’t a proactive approach from an HR perspective to go to a department and go, “This language may be out of date”—or “This language that you’re summarizing this task, is not consistent with language that is used for the position below it or the position above it”—there wasn’t this overview where we’re looking at the big picture. It would be a department—Number 1—would have to come in with the request to change it, and then HR would look at it. And I very much disagree with that approach, and I think the positions are the responsibility of HR. We maintain the classification system. And so, we should be regularly looking at these class specs., working with the departments to help them make sure that the information is up-to-date and accurate—but then we also need to make sure that the language is consistent across classes of work throughout the County. And so, this tool will enable us to do that. So, in Tabs 2 and 3, I provide examples of what this review process actually looks like with the department. So, our initial—from this spreadsheet, our Classification and Pay Division is identifying positions that—or class specs., that they’re going to look at. So, they’ll do the first review and make their recommendations for things that need to change. So, could be standard language regarding licenses, it could be formatting, it could be whatever. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 58 And then, we’re going to send our proposed revision to the department. So, what I’ve provided—one ex—the Tab number 2 is an example of a Buyer III position. So, I’m showing you the redline version so that you can see that we started with a document that was just Buyer III. And then, these red underlines show the changes that were—that we’re recommending. But then, you can also see in some of our proposed language, there’s strikethroughs because that would be after we’ve done our proposed revision, we send that to the department, and then we’re getting the department’s feedback. So, it’s really a collaborative effort between ourselves and the department. So, I provide Buyer III as an example and then also District Road Overseer—just so that you folks can see the back and forth, kind of, engagement and the different areas that we’re looking at when we’re making the revision. MR. THOMAS: So, there’s somebody who has to—in your department—has to look up Power Mower Operator—they look at that, and Tractor Mower Operator—and I see these vehicles being operated by people and they go past my house all the time. So, they—your people look at this and say, “Wait a minute this a duplication of the people who are doing that kind of work already.” CHR. CABANAS: It’s two different types of equipment, right, Sommer? MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. MR. THOMAS: Okay. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: The Power Mower Operator is smaller than the tractor-mower operator. MR. THOMAS: Okay. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, this—we’re actually really excited about this tool that the County now has to be more proactive in the way that we look at our class specifications. But the Classification and Pay Division, specifically, is very excited about finding errors because they didn’t have the mechanism, right, to do the deep dive themselves. And so, I just had a meeting with Jamie yesterday where she brought me a sample of the way that something is described in, say, nine similarly situated positions where the Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 59 words are all different. And I’m like—no—I mean, so even standardizing language for certain things, we need to—if something requires a certain type of driver’s license, the language that represent that in the class spec. needs to be the same. And so, I think the team and the department is really excited to have access to all this information, so that it’s readily available—and so that we can make an impact on updating these really old ones, but then to keep them updated going forward. So, ideally, once we’re able to continue working through this, I’d like to see class specs. amended not less than every three years. It’s going to take us awhile to get there. We have some catchup to do, but at least we’ll be better tracking the last time things were amended and we can be proactive in reviewing these. CHR. CABANAS: So, every time there’s a change, there’s someone dedicated to updating this? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. And there’s a way to—I want to say, cross-reference that it’s done so that there’s no missing entry? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, Classification and Pay—so in addition to this master spreadsheet, which is—I believe they have it saved in Laserfiche, so anybody that’s working on it in the division has access to it. They also have other logs where they’re tracking where they’re at with their projects. So, it’ll be a combination of—it will be not necessarily documented on this spreadsheet but documented in one of their other logs. CHR. CABANAS: Now, for those classes of work—I can read this, but I can’t read what’s in the redline—for those that have, like—I just saw one—12 semester hours in accounting or auditing. What if it’s something related? MS. TOKIHIRO: I don’t think that that requirement has a substitution. I think— CHR. CABANAS: It has to be that? MS. TOKIHIRO: It has to be that. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And that’s very specific to those Accounting or Account Clerk classes that they want people to have some—not a degree, not even a certificate, but some course work in accounting concepts CHR. CABANAS: But when it’s like—I’m just thinking ‘cause there’s so many possible possibilities that come up with an applicant. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 60 MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, what if there were like 12 semester hours in business. It would require them to still look at the transcript— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes—and look at the courses. CHR. CABANAS: —and look at the courses. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And then, if our Recruitment team, after looking at the transcript and looking at the courses, if there was a question, we usually would reach out to the community college or the university for a clarification. MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible.) MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: It’s a lot of detail in HR—a lot of detail in all of the various functions. I read something that HCC received—is it millions of dollars to help the students. I don’t know if it’s Workforce Development or—did you see that? It was recent. MS. TOKIHIRO: I—so I don’t think I saw that specifically, but we have been continuing our discussions with HCC about trying to establish internship opportunities, and I’m regularly talking with both their credit side and the non-credit side; ‘cause we’re looking at—are there additional training opportunities on the non-credit side that they could develop for certain areas of need that the County might have. So, yeah, we’re always—enjoy opportunities to collaborate with HCC and also UH. So, we were also recently revisiting the CVE Program because it’s really up to HCC to have more degree programs that include that CVE Course because I’d like to see more people come to us through that, but that’s been kind of—they’re in charge of that. CHR. CABANAS: It’s been years. Even I—I’m almost retired eight years and while I was there in the department, even that was our discussion. So, it’s like—we even offered to help them advertising the CVE Program, but they were short with students. And it doesn’t seem to get—I don’t know— MS. TOKIHIRO: It doesn’t seem like it’s gotten better (inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, but I do see your folk’s budget and you folks did do pretty well with the CVE budget in the utilization of students—so, that’s good. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, so there has been, I believe, more interest lately. And then if we have the funds available then we allow more—the student is allowed more time to Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 61 work because we have the funds available to pay them. So, I mean, we definitely want to provide as many opportunities as possible, but we’re kind of limited in our ability to control that, ‘cause they have to be enrolled in a specific course in order to be able to participate, so. MR. THOMAS: So, to be a Clerk Reporter, you have to have courses in stenography? Do you have to even know what stenography is? MS. TOKIHIRO: See, and that’s where— CHR. CABANAS: I don’t know if they even offer that. Do they? MS. TOKIHIRO: I don’t think that that’s still offered any more and I think— CHR. CABANAS: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. Even like typing certifications and things of that nature—and that’s where we get back to the language, as I mentioned—and these requirements—that all of this will allow us to reassess those things and make sure that we’re requiring things that are actually available and applicable to the position anymore. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, because times change, and when I first started with the department, we administered typing tests—actual typing on a typewriter, and then the computers came, and then they started—we started typing proficiencies on computers—that has changed. They don’t—shorthand courses are no longer offered, so that’s changed. And now it’s incumbent on the departments to assess the person’s typing skill or skill on a computer. So— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. Assessments are really important for our departments to—just to make sure that the person—just demonstrates the performance to be the best fit for the position. MS. BOND: I have never passed a typing test. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, other questions for Sommer? Okay, Sommer— MS. TOKIHIRO: That was it. CHR. CABANAS: —thank you so much. Your presentation was very detailed, very thought out, very impressive—it shows the hard work of you and your staff. So, thank you so much, and please relay our thank you to them as well. MS. TOKIHIRO: I, absolutely, will. They worked really hard. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, for Classification and Pay, this is the first—the first ever. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 62 MS. TOKIHIRO: And what’s great was that it was so much work for them and I would have—I would ask for monthly updates—not to be whatever, but just to, like, help keep them on track, right? And then to see if there was anything that they needed from me, like—because I know that this was a daunting project for them and so—and they have their other day-to-day work, right. And so, I would get the updates from them but what was really great—and for all the divisions and all their work—is how much it’s meaningful for them. And then, them doing this and then finding their own ways where they want to improve and do something more or do something better. And I really saw in the completion of these goals and my work with the entire department, a real switch to this proactive approach—and it’s not, “No, we’re going to sit back and wait”—it’s like, “No, this is our area of responsibility and so we need to be going out and initiating this”—and so, I’m really happy to see the team take that on and be so proud of their own work, ‘cause it is—it’s been a huge task for all of the divisions this year. And then, of course, they know that I’m going to be coming back and going, “Okay, well, we got next year.” CHR. CABANAS: And is it dated—date as of what date? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, this—I just got this updated. She—as of June 15th. CHR. CABANAS: June 15th. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So, June 15th was my deadline to everybody. So, there are—there may be additional updates, and I know they still are in-progress for a variety of these. CHR. CABANAS: So, as they update it, they’ll update the date—so they can keep track of when someone last went to this excel spreadsheet? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. Yeah. And it’ll track it through excel as well. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, okay. Okay, so—we need a motion to accept and file the Director’s presentation on the three goals for Fiscal Year ’25-’26. MS. BOND: So moved. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 63 MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion carried to accept and file the Director’s presentation on the department’s goals and objectives for Fiscal Year 2025 to 2026. Shall we take a little break, or do you want to proceed, ‘cause we still have—or you want to get a little snack—we’ll take a little pause. RECESS: The Chair called for a recess at 1:04 p.m. RECONVENE: The meeting reconvened at 1:13 p.m. in open session. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, we are now on our “Unfinished Business” the SurveyMonkey results for Fiscal Year 2025 – 2026, specifically, these are the line department surveys and the internal employee surveys. So, that information is where, Glynis? Oh, the back, okay. So, Sommer, have you had a chance to look at it? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes, I (inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, so the first survey is the—this is the external surveys—the green sheet is the internal surveys; the goldenrod is our rating sheet of Sommer, yeah—okay, where she has the three goals; and then the other areas that we look at. Okay. So, that’s our rating sheet. So, let’s go to the first survey, the external survey—28 responses (SEE ATT. D). “Human Resources efficiently assists me in doing my job.”— MR. THOMAS: This is the first blue sheet? MS. BOND: No, this is the—you’re in the white. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 64 CHR. CABANAS: The white sheet. MS. BOND: The white version of this. CHR. CABANAS: No, no, it’s over there. It’s in that tab. MS. BOND: After the goldenrod page. MR. THOMAS: Here’s the goldenrod page. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: Okay, the next page after that. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MR. THOMAS: Okay. MS. BOND: There you go. CHR. CABANAS: There you go—okay. MR. THOMAS: Okay, good. Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so we have the majority actually satisfied. The next one, Question 2—“The Human Resources Director works effectively with me and other members of departmental staff.” Same thing. MS. BOND: This is the one that went to all the department heads and all of the other HR people. CHR. CABANAS: And their staff—right. MS. BOND: Okay, just making sure. MR. THOMAS: Somewhere here it says how many people responded to each of these two surveys. Where was that? (SEE ATT. E.) MS. YAMADA: In the blue sheet, the last sheet behind that— MS. BOND: All the way at the back. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 65 CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, it shows that—it doesn’t show out of how many—oh, it does. The external— MR. THOMAS: External department’s 81. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. Out of 81, we received 28 responses. MS. BOND: So, how—what’s that for Sommer— MR. THOMAS: Oh, I see—line department—28. So, a quarter. CHR. CABANAS: It’s not even half. MS. BOND: It’s not even half. MR. THOMAS: About a third of them. MS. BOND: But it’s better than it was last time. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, yeah. Well, we did ask the Mayor’s Office to reach out to the department heads and their staff— MS. BOND: I saw that, so—yeah. CHR. CABANAS: —to complete the survey. So, it looks—it’s a little better—not fantastically better, but it’s a little better. MS. BOND: Well, it seems like last year’s, it’s only like 17—so I think we’ve jumped considerably. MS. TOKIHIRO: It’s actually—yeah, the blue sheet shows the historical data from 2018—and actually there was only, this is the higher—highest number of responses, except for the year 2020 to 2021 when 39 people responded. So, I guess, historically it seems like somewhere around 20%—25% is about— CHR. CABANAS: Twenty—21. MR. THOMAS: Twenty-eight would be about average. MS. BOND: Eighty-one people, right—out of 81? CHR. CABANAS: Seventeen out of 81. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 66 MS. BOND: So half would be (inaudible). So, you’re better than a quarter—you’re probably more like 30% CHR. CABANAS: Thirty percent. MS. BOND: So, that’s—oh, look, she’s doing it with a calculator—I was doing it with pen and paper. MS. TOKIHIRO: I’m not smart enough (inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: Twenty-seven—11 out of 27—that’s the internal. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, 28 out of 81 would be 34.5%. MS. BOND: So, that’s not actually getting—that’s not (inaudible)—at least a third, that’s—okay. CHR. CABANAS: And the internal? MS. TOKIHIRO: The internal survey—11 responses out of 27 would be 40.7%. MR. THOMAS: It’s a little better. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. That’s not even half, though. MS. BOND: Yeah, well, it’s still better than last year, so an improvement. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, anyhow. Okay, well, let’s go through this. So, okay, we read Number 1, Number 2—there’s always someone that’s scoring Number 1—they’re not satisfied, but it’s only one—is it one or two? Same thing with Question 2. Question 3—the majority—“The Human Resources staff addresses my questions in a timely manner.” MS. BOND: That was interesting. CHR. CABANAS: Question 4—“Human Resources provides my department with thoroughly detailed recommendations that appropriately addresses my issues/concerns.” Okay. Number 5, there’s some dissatisfaction—“Human Resources seeks out and incorporates knowledge of my department goals and priorities through meetings, audits, training, et cetera.” I mean, the majority are still satisfactory but— Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 67 MS. BOND: But I wonder how much that has to do with the upgrading and the reclassifying that you’re doing. CHR. CABANAS: Yes, but this is up until June—well, yeah, could be—to May—end of May. MS. TOKIHIRO: I think some of the possible dissatisfaction reflected is that it depends on how we are working with the department regarding their goals and is it an overall goal or is it a specific goal—and maybe HR disagreed with maybe the method of getting there, right. So, sometimes—so the questions are pretty broad but from an interpretation standpoint, we don’t spend a lot of time in HR talking about overall goals for a department. We do audits, but our audits are—say, interview packet audits or we’re doing audits of personnel files. We’re not doing other audits. The training—we have training that the County offers—if the department comes to us and seeks training, certainly, we can develop something for them. But it—and we’re kind of looking in the context of department goals—I think some of the dissatisfaction could come—specifically, related to positions—and because there are times where we may disagree or have another recommendation for how to accomplish something. CHR. CABANAS: To me it seemed—and this is not new—this is, kind of, old. When I say “old” it—even when I was working at the department—it sounds like they want attention in a general way—like, “Oh, getting to know you. How are you guys are doing”—and then they start talking about their general goals or any concerns that they have that HR could help. This is what it sounds like. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, I do actually have, like, a department that has requested just a standing appointment—every third Wednesday from 2 to 2:30—I have set aside in my schedule to be available to a certain department head and their deputy. And it was because, initially, the department had a lot of challenges, but the ongoing discussion is more of those—kind of, those learning opportunities—so that attention. So, sometimes the meetings get cancelled, if there isn’t a specific issue. But in the course of that discussion, they look at it as learning opportunities to bring certain scenarios to us and ask, like, “What could we have done differently” or “This is what’s coming up after we’ve had a few instances where things kind of didn’t go well.” And so, I appreciate those opportunities to sit with departments and talk about things in advance of them happening, so that we can, kind of, lay out the roadmap to it. And not every department takes me up on my availability to do that. I have no problem doing Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 68 that. I think that those conversations can be very productive and helpful in kind of managing expectations, too, so that, like, when we’re talking about a department wanting attention—and then, “Oh, this is my goal and this is…”—we can actually have a more concrete discussion of, “Okay, what does this actually look like for you? Are you intending to ask for additional positions? How long does that take? What are the…”—so that we can have some of that planning discussion and have realistic expectations instead of, maybe, someone thinking, “I want to do this”—and so it’s going to go this way without even involving HR—and then becoming frustrated. If it doesn’t follow, maybe, the path that they were anticipating. MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: You might be—you’ve already offered your time but, I guess, when you have a Cabinet meeting you could always say— SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. Or just say—“I’m planning to just share whatever your plan is, to have a number of sessions with departments”—and you can rotate it so that you—you’re able to meet with each department in a certain period of time. It doesn’t have to be all one month—could be in the next six months or whatever—but “I’ll be reaching out to your secretary…”—or whatever—or “…to you directly.” Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And Cabinet is a good opportunity for me to provide those reminders, and I always try and give examples and thank the departments for the collaboration efforts. So, specifically, call it out during a Cabinet meeting to, kind of, encourage other people—“Come and talk to us first because we were able to solve this problem by including these different divisions of HR and the discussion to get on the same page”—so CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: —and I’ll continue to do that. CHR. CABANAS: And without identifying that one department, you can just say, “This is what we’re doing, and it seems to be a win-win situation”— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: —“and I encourage you to call, and we can meet.” Yeah, anyway— okay. So, that’s that. Question 6—“Human Resources adjusts quickly to changing priorities.” Oh, boy, do priorities change all the time. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 69 MS. TOKIHIRO: I think the hardest part about that question was “quickly.” MS. BOND: Again, for that word. MS. TOKIHIRO: Like, in a government entity, “quickly” has to be relative, right? MS. BOND: Like turning an ocean liner. MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. CHR. CABANAS: And what’s a priority to one department is not necessarily a priority to you or anoth—you know what I mean? MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. CHR. CABANAS: They’re in a rush. I mean, we had this one person, he would just walk in—walk in and wanted to—us to solve the problem right there. And so—yeah. Priorities change. We could be working on a special project and if the Mayor wanted us to do something, we drop everything and we do that priority. MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Question 7—“Overall, I am satisfied with the service Human Resources provides.” Okay. MS. BOND: Probably 70% they’re doing fine. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, they’re doing okay. Okay, then we come to the comments—Question 8—“What does the Director of Human Resources need to do to improve her performance?” So, we are in an open session, but we could go into a closed session—but then, we’re not being transparent. And if we stay in the open session, as we are now, then it’s part of the record—either way, it’s part of the record. MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, I know it’s up to me but—as the Chair—but do you have—do you feel—if we’re going to read this and discuss it, we are in an open session. I could not read it and just categorically say these are some of the concerns— MS. TOKIHIRO: I think my only concern is we want departments and the staff of HR to participate, so I am somewhat concerned about being too specific in providing, like, Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 70 reading the actual comments. I’m happy to address the comments in a general sense, but I wouldn’t want anyone to feel like they’re potentially revealing who they are by what the comment is—and since it was just stated that the comments were only going to come to me—I—yeah, I don’t know. MS. BOND: Well, it seems to me, too, that the negative comments—generally, you can tell where the not happy people are versus the happy people. So, I mean, yes, it should be all taken with the—with some severity—it’s not the word I wanted—seriousness, but I don’t think that all of it—all the nitpicking needs to be addressed, personally. I just, there—nowhere are you going to get 100% of the people that are going to agree with you and be happy with what you’re doing—doesn’t matter what you do. I mean, it really doesn’t matter. So, yeah, there are people that have negative comments here and some of them are—you can tell, it’s like, you were having a bad Thursday, that must not a good thing. But then, there’s some really great, really good comments here—and I think that the—in my opinion, when you take the positive with more—I mean, I just—the negative thing, don’t go there. CHR. CABANAS: Well, I think we have to consider all the comments. MS. BOND: Well, yeah, but I mean— CHR. CABANAS: Whether it’s positive or negative—in all fairness to the evaluation process. MS. BOND: Well, I’m not saying ignore them. I’m just saying that don’t go down that rabbit hole. CHR. CABANAS: Well, let’s— MS. BOND: Understand them, but don’t— CHR. CABANAS: I want to— MR. THOMAS: J’s microphone is on, and I think the legal advice could be helpful to us. CHR. CABANAS: Yes. So, that’s what I wanted to have J do—please, give us your advice— MR. YOSHIMOTO: Yeah, so— CHR. CABANAS: —and guidance. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 71 MR. YOSHIMOTO: Okay. So, as a starting point, the meeting is in open session. Recent court decisions have established that evaluations of directors, such as what we have now, need to be happening in open session, unless there’s a significant privacy interest that’s established. As an example, I think everyone’s aware that the Police Commission hirings and Fire Commission—those things are held in open session, right. And the basic rationale is that directors who are appointed to these public positions do not have a significant privacy interest just by virtue—the fact that they’re either appointed, nominated, or evaluated. Now, if there is a significant private interest such as some type of either health condition or financial information—that might be different. So, absent those circumstances, the baseline is we’re going to be in open session, which is as transparent as you can be. And so, in terms of documents—whatever documents that the Board considers or uses in its evaluation would be a public record, because it’s something that’s being done in an open meeting. So, I don’t see how we could—or the Board could evaluate the Director without relying upon the survey responses because that’s, basically, one of your tools that we use. So, unless there’s some significant privacy interest that can be established. MR. THOMAS: Well, all that speaks to the privacy interest of the person being evaluated but the other question that came up was—are the people who filled out the survey and offer comments aware of the possibility that they inadvertently, for instance, disclosing who they are and do they have an expectation to privacy. MR. YOSHIMOTO: Well, it would. Okay, so as far as that is concerned—the respondents were informed that they were—the survey is done anonymously, right, so there’s that context. So, interesting issue, right, because if there is an expectation of confidentiality, then that would possibly tip the scale. In this particular instance, the respondents were told that their responses would be provided, right, to the Director—which it has been. And given that evaluation of the Director is being held in open session, therefore, it follows that whatever that the Board uses for the evaluation, also becomes public record—absence some of expectation of privacy, so. I hear what you’re saying, though, but— MR. THOMAS: Does that add up— MR. YOSHIMOTO: So what that add ups to is whatever the Board uses in its evaluation of the Director, becomes part of the public record—absence some significant privacy interests, right. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 72 So, right now, as it stands, the respondents were instructed or told—informed—that they were going to do it anonymously. So, I don’t see anything identifying in the survey results— MS. BOND: No, I don’t either. MR. YOSHIMOTO: The comments can be attributed to, but that’s nothing definitive—but that’s the nature of comments, right, I mean—and they’re done—they’re not saying, “John Doe and Jane Doe did this and that”—but they’re pointing to departments—but that’s what survey comments do. MR. THOMAS: Well, for instance, one respondent says how long she has been employed by the County. Well? MR. YOSHIMOTO: Right—that might be an inadvertent—right. So, now if the Board were to decide to hold it in closed session, then we would need to establish the basis for that. And so, we could have a discussion, but I’d rather have that discussion in executive session, ‘cause then you’d be consulting me for legal advice. So, anyway. MS. BOND: I—it doesn’t say—I mean, it doesn’t seem to me that we can actually identify who any of these people, and so— CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, I agree. You can’t tell who, is who, here. MS. BOND: You can tell that there are people that are unhappy, and you can tell—and that’s not necessarily really a reflection on you. So— MS. TOKIHIRO: And the fact that I do the work every day, I have an idea—I mean, certainly, based on experience—where the perspective is coming from. And so, I don’t see any rationale for a closed session or executive session. That being said, I am going to do my best to try and maintain the anonymity of the respondents. So, I will respond in general terms. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: Right. And I don’t—if you (inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: And that’s what we would expect— MS. BOND: Right. CHR. CABANAS: —from all of us. We’re not going to pinpoint— MS. BOND: No. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 73 CHR. CABANAS: —anyone or group of individuals. We’re just sharing this information and is it helpful to you, so that you can move things forward, and just kind of take it from there. MR. THOMAS: Well, how does—how do you, Board members, feel about the larger public interest, at least in my opinion, of maximizing the number of people who willingly participate in the survey. It occurs to me that it’s possible that a lot of people—because it’s only a minority of people who are responding to these surveys—like a third or less—are those people not—who aren’t responding concerned that they’ll inadvertently or somehow or other say more than they meant to, and their comment will become controversial and wish they hadn’t said it. MS. TOKIHIRO: I think because the rules have changed or the guidance has changed regarding executive session—and this is the first time that my evaluation is being held in an open session, we—the Board may want to consider possibly changing the language and the instructions regarding the survey, next year, just to kind of clarify that it’s part of the evaluation, which is—I don’t know how much detail you might want to go into—but, so that they understand that this might occur because we don’t want to discourage people from responding by any means. CHR. CABANAS: No—(inaudible). MS. BOND: And I think that these responses are literally water under the bridge for how we go forward. This is what people thought this past year—this is not—so, this is how we evaluate what you—how we see you, what you’re doing. MS. TOKIHIRO: But I’m happy to have all of the feedback and we can definitely address it. CHR. CABANAS: I have a question—because I believe that our Board always goes the extra mile in being transparent in doing whatever we need to do, to document—and when I listen to the news media and watch what goes on with other commissions and boards—I, kind of wonder, because it doesn’t seem as transparent as it could be. MR. YOSHIMOTO: You mean other boards and commissions? CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, other boards and commissions. MR. YOSHIMOTO: Well, there are— CHR. CABANAS: I mean, they start referring about constituents and what the constituents want and—I’m thinking, “Well, what about the interview questions and the Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 74 interview scoring”—doesn’t that—isn’t that what it’s supposed to be focused on rather than worrying about constituents. I mean, we’re not here on our Board with constituents in mind—we are here as individuals, where we work as a group to evaluate and vote—and we vote in rollcall basis. So, I don’t know, it’s just—makes me wonder what— MR. YOSHIMOTO: We can go into executive session, if you want to talk in more detail. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. BOND: I—okay, so going back to this. Going back to this—there are some very interesting things that people say in it, when they made their comments. And there’re some of it that I think you would say, “Oh, okay”—like “instructors have to work together to assist departments”—okay, maybe I should get a little better at that. That’s a good comment. Or—I honestly would not hang my hat on—I would look at this as, “Oh, okay, I could maybe improve that”—or “Oh, yes”—or “I don’t think that….” You don’t have to agree with it, but maybe some of it could be—overall, I think that the comments, they are not—there’s a couple in here that are not happy campers—and I don’t think that there’s anything you could do to make them happy. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, I— CHR. CABANAS: I don’t know if we can say that—that they’re happy—that they’re not happy campers. I mean, what if their concerns are valid? I’d like to (inaudible)—I’m in a position where I’m going to read this and share it with the Director of HR, and then she is going to do her assessment because she knows who she works with, she knows what challenges she’s faced— MS. BOND: Well, that’s basically what I’m saying. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, but it’s like you’re putting a weight on it—and you shouldn’t be putting a weight on it until we go through this whole thing. MS. TOKIHIRO: I think when I reviewed all of the comments, there are a couple of themes that emerged and were apparent. And the part about having divisions work together and provide consistent information—definitely, appreciate it and, definitely, something that we are working on and strive toward. I think HR—kind of the difficulty is we have eight different divisions with very distinct areas of responsibility. And in some of our transactions, you’re going to have more than one division interacting with a department and, possibly, answering questions. So, for example, when we’re looking at recruitment—and so, when someone is filling a position, a department is working with our Recruitment Division to complete certain requirements—but then, as part of hiring an individual into a specific position, whether Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 75 it’s a temporary position, or a permanent position, or maybe it’s a civil service limitation date—then it becomes, once the individual is in—going to be placed in a certain position—then there become a lot more detailed questions related to that person’s employment, that person’s benefits—eligibility for different things that is actually best answered by our Admin. Services Division. But sometimes what occurs is in the process of hiring—departments may have an expectation that the Recruitment Division knows the answers to all of my questions, and if I just give them that they’re going to get all of the correct answers—that is our goal—but that is also not always the case and it’s because once we’re talking about a specific employee going into a specific position, there’s all kinds of information that’s unique to both the employee and to the position that they’re going into, which could affect the responses to those questions. MS. BOND: So, one of things is that people need to know in all of your divisions is to say, “I don’t know, let me ask somebody, and then get back to you on it.” I just recently had an experience with the state department—or the Department of the State of Hawaiʻi where I went in and asked a question. And I asked it three different times, and I said, specifically, :’Cause I don’t believe your answer”—and then I asked for the person’s name. I went back a week later, said what this person had said—the paperwork that I had been told to take in—and was told all of it was wrong. That everything that she had told me—that I asked her three specific times, “Are you sure this is what it is”—and they said, “No, she’s wrong.” And I said, “You guys have a huge problem here. You guys have a problem because she couldn’t say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘let me ask somebody’”—she said, “No, this is the way it is”—and she was wrong. And so, now I’m paying the consequences for her being wrong and the supervisor was saying, “Oh, well, that’s not good”—and I said, “No, you should be saying—we will retrain everybody”—we’re going to get—or you need to tell people, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer and if somebody is talking about something in Recruitment, but they really need to be talking to somebody in another department, then they need to say, “I don’t know. Let me ask somebody in that department and I’ll get back to you.” MS. TOKIHIRO: And, actually, beyond us getting back to them—I always appreciate when one of our staff will say, “I don’t know”—and then direct them to the person that can best answer because sometimes relaying an answer from another division, can also become a little bit of the telephone game, right, if it’s not relayed accurately. But we also have taken more opportunities amongst the different divisions to share instances where something, kind of, got lost in the mix, or may have—an error may Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 76 have occurred, or someone may have misunderstood, or we need to make sure that we’re double-checking and reiterating. So, maybe it’s not necessarily a specific recruitment issue but it’s something that Admin. Services has identified. And so, we incorporated into part of the discussion between Recruitment and the department, so that it doesn’t become an issue. So, every time there is an instance of something that maybe didn’t go as expected across divisions, and we identify these things because they require some kind of remedy or fix. Those are opportunities that we take within the department to talk about it—and so that we’re all educated as far as where it went wrong and why—and so that going forward, how will this be addressed. So, I think that communication amongst the divisions was something that came up in numerous comments. And so, that’s definitely something that we will continue to be working on. MS. BOND: And that’s all you can ask. MS. TOKIHIRO: We need to make positive progress. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so here we are in open session. MS. BOND: Do you really feel that we really need to read each and every one of these? I mean, the whole thing was it was supposed to go— CHR. CABANAS: No, we don’t have to read each and every one. I think—have we all read all of the comments? I think we could look at general themes, but just remember that as J has indicated, that if the public wanted to view this, they could because it’s public record. MS. BOND: Right. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: So, (inaudible) thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so let’s go with the first theme that sticks out to you—and anyone can start by looking at page 8 and 9—for Question 8. SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: No, no—10 is separate. MS. BOND: No, no, 10 is a different question. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 77 CHR. CABANAS: Eight is, “What does the Director of Human Resources need to do to improve her performance?” So, that’s pages 8 and 9—yeah, 8 and 9. Okay, so the first one was the divisions—they’re not being consistent— MS. BOND: Yeah, and that’s— CHR. CABANAS: —in, I guess, their responses. And I don’t know—maybe some customer service reminders might need to be applied because I guess it’s the approach that some of them are using by some of the comments here. MS. TOKIHIRO: I think—yes, the approach and then also the comment regarding timeframes—open-ended timeframes. MS. BOND: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: I think that we need to make sure that the divisions are providing, kind of, a realistic estimate for when something will be completed. And, again, like I was talking about some of—the meeting that I have—the standing meeting with a particular department where we can talk about the planning so that we can help the department to understand all the different components of what needs to occur, as far as what they’re planning, so that they can understand what those approximate timeframes may be. So, if you are looking to create an entirely new class of work, it’s not going to happen in a week, right. And so, I think it’s communicating. And that’s also part of customer service and the approach is that if they have a reasonable timeframe for when we’re going to get back to them, then at least they understand that. And it’s not just this—left, like, “I don’t know, is anyone still paying attention to my request…”, et cetera. So, I think that communication and providing an anticipated timeframe is all part of, also, that customer service theme. I also interpreted one of the comments—one of the references Question—Respondent number 10, was talking about, like, a “no can approach” as opposed a more open-minded approach and providing alternatives. And that’s, definitely, what I want to see from the department. I don’t want our divisions to provide a response that’s a “No” unless they’re making clear the reason “Why not” and if there’s an alternative providing that. So, maybe it’s not exactly what the department is asking, but “This is why”—and as an alternative we could do this. CHR. CABANAS: Right. Give them their options. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 78 MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MS. BOND: If can—can. If no can—(inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: The comments compliment you—they say that you’re very supportive, you work well with everyone, you communicate well—those are all positives about you. The parts that need work are with the staff. MS. TOKIHIRO: Mm-hmm. CHR. CABANAS: So, what you said is good. So, you’re the good example for the department, really. MS. TOKIHIRO: And I do need to—I mean, I have seen improvement—just—we had a Manager’s meeting recently—and I told them that I see improvement and I look forward to that continuing and continuing to improve. And, I mean, these are—we’re in open session, this is a public document. I mean, I could take this back to the whole staff and show them all the comments. I won’t, but I will excerpt parts of this because some of the recurring themes—it’s important that they hear the feedback in words that aren’t mine—that are words from our departments so that they’re understanding that as well. So, this is definitely something that I will be reviewing with the divisions. MS. BOND: Yeah. I mean, some of the things that they complain about are things that you, personally, couldn’t change even if your life depended on it—like, raising the salaries to be what they are in the outside world. That’s not something that you have control over, so complaining about that is, like, “Okay, fine.” MS .TOKIHIRO: Right. But, I mean, even that—I think sometimes when the feedback is something that I—isn’t something that we’re immediately able to control, I think that there is an element of that—that’s important for us to be mindful of, so that we can provide that general education. So, like, for example, our Labor Relations Division is doing this LR Notes, which is like reminders about labor relations matters because we found that there were some, kind of, recurring instances where maybe people needed little reminders and some additional education on how to handle some things. And so, some of those kinds of things about how collective bargaining works and whatever—we can provide overviews of that when we do things like our HR Quarterly’s, and we meet with our HR reps., and use alternative sources to provide some of those tidbits. I’m not saying that I have to address that specific question, but things around that to help the HR reps. and department heads understand how this works. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 79 Because a lot of our—we’ve had a lot of new HR reps. and they’re not necessarily all promotions from internally within the County. So, I think that there are a lot of people that are still learning how the County works and all these different components of what we do. CHR. CABANAS: I wouldn’t dismiss that comment so lightly though, because even if it’s just one person saying it—and we have to, kind of, remember that the Director represents the County at the negotiating table. The Director talks to the Administration, finds out the Administration’s position on negotiations—our salaries. And what happens is, I think, among the different bargaining units, they start comparing, and I’ll give you an example—even when I was working, it was—oh, back then, they were called “Clerks.” So, the Clerks are making less than the Laborers and Park Caretakers. Yet, the Clerks had an educational and experience requirement, whereas the Laborers and Park Caretakers don’t. However, on the other side of the coin, the Clerks can get step movements, et cetera—whereas the Laborers and Park Caretakers can’t because there’s only one step—I don’t know if it’s changed—but it’s one step in their salary schedule. So, those are the things that they look at—and the thing with this is, now, because workers are hard to find, applicants are hard to get—the salaries may be a little outdated. Maybe it’s something that the Director, in her authority, can advise the Administration. Maybe this needs to be looked at a little bit better. So, although it’s just a one-liner, it’s something in the overall picture that can help the County because—look at the recruit—look at the number of recruitments that are still open on a continuous basis. How are the departments faring, how are the employees feeling with more work and less staff? How are the services being provided? How happy are the departments? Well, they seem to be still pretty happy. But just, kind of, taking that whole picture—and then the retention of employees—are they happy getting the salary where now they find out that someone in the private sector is making more? So, yeah, it’s the big picture kind of thing—and, yeah, she cannot change it overnight, but she can strive to promote—is what the word, I guess, I’m going to say—promote and discuss with the Administration if they’re saying, “Oh, no, no, don’t…”—I don’t know what their position is, but if they were ever to say that, then she can offer her expertise in that situation. So, that’s the only comment I want to make about that. MS. BOND: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: And collective bargaining is a challenge, too, because it’s all the jurisdictions— MS. BOND: Right. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 80 MS. TOKIHIRO: —right, and we’re all negotiating for salaries with the Unions collectively as a unit, right—and so, and there’s big variability. I mean, imagine that we have cost of living differences on each island and, yet, the wage increases that our employees are receiving are the same ones that employees are receiving in the City and County of Honolulu or County of Maui. And then, also, just to complicate it—the Unions decide—they have all of these different arrangements. So, as Gabe mentioned, there are certain units that have step movements, there’re certain units that are single rate where there’s no steps. And so, what has occurred over time, because they’re all different, is a bigger disparity in ways that you might not have anticipated or imagined. If you’re getting—1% or 2% increase and it happens, like, this year—okay, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but then as you go over a contract period and then, say, into a second four-year contract—a single—for those employees that are on a single rate schedule, the increases are applied to their base salary, as the full percentage, every time. For ones that have steps, it’s that increase is reduced by the value of the step movement. So, instead of getting a 3% adjustment to your base salary, it may be a 2% adjustment to your base salary because there’s a step movement, the value of that is 1%. So, it becomes this complicated math, but what has happened is, over time those units that still have the step movements, where those across-the-boards are adjusted to accommodate the step—those salaries have not grown as quickly as the salaries for people in those singe-rate units. And so, now, you have—even within, say, HGEA—they have Unit 3, and they have Unit 13. Unit 3 does not—did not have step movements. The current contract does call for a couple of movements, but they had suspended step movements. We’ve actually found that their salaries for certain positions are now greater than positions in Unit 13, which is supposed to be a promotion—to go from Unit 3 to Unit 13—and, technically, it’s a promotion, except that now the wages are—so we need to work with the Union. And that’s where I have had discussions at different times while dealing with other grievance matters and saying that we really need to work as a team because I think some of the things that have happened have been these unintended consequences, and we have to get some things realigned because this disparity will just continue if everything is handled differently. So, it really is, I think, it’s got to be a team approach. We have all the jurisdictions and then all of the different units, but that is something that we recognize as becoming more and more of an issue because of the different ways that the Unions negotiate with the Employer and the different terms that they come up with for each of the contracts. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 81 MS. BOND: I think that conference I was at last—couple weekends ago, there was one of the speakers who is—had started off in a government job, and then had gone to a job in the private sector, and then now works as the head of a non-profit. And he said, “Boy, you really understand how the differences in the different worlds.” He thought he was making a good salary as a government worker until he got this private contractor—private company job. And then he says, “And now, working non-profit, I’m making half of what I made as a government employee.” And I still think it—knowing what the budget is—and this is part of it, is what the budget is for the non-profit—they can’t pay me any more than this. So, either you want to do the job, or you don’t. And someone like me, I’ve always worked in non-profit, so I know that I’ll never get paid even as well as a County worker gets paid. But it’s a choice one makes. And so, if you want to work in service to your community and to the County and stuff and then—you know—and then there’s the whole union thing. It’s like, if they could just—every time I go—I see them, “Oh, we’re going in the bargaining again”—it’s like, “Oh, God”—and then that changes the whole budget for the County because now that the—like that whole fire fighter/workman’s comp.—that—from the pandemic where they got the hazardous pay or whatever it was. And all of a sudden here’s these big junks of money that, all of a sudden, the County is supposed to be paying out this money that’s—where is it coming from? We can’t raise property taxes, we can’t raise the—so, it’s—there’s—people forget that— how the game is played and it’s interesting to watch from the outside, mostly, it’s (inaudible), it’s like—there’s no equity. No matter what you do, there’s no equity. MS. TOKIHIRO: There’s a lot of different components to it. MS. BOND: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. It’s not just one thing, but—yeah. MS. BOND: So—and you can’t take it all on yourself like it’s “you” can fix it. That’s part of the problem is it as much as you’d like to. MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. MS. BOND: It’s not part of the game. Okay, moving on to— CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, moving on—but, so, going back to you, Sommer, as the Director—I mean, some of the comments are very positive—"you work well with the staff”—again, “you communicate well, you’re very helpful, willing to help, approachable and supportive, provides accurate information and guidance, always willing to help when needed”—so, the other areas I’m sure you’ll be able to work on with your staff. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 82 Okay, moving along to Question number 9 and this pertains to “welcoming suggestions to improve services provided by the Director of Human Resources.” MR. THOMAS: I had a question that was inspired by some of the comments here. There are three comments—one, I think, is about the fifth paragraph down, that starts with “Ensure DHR staff…”—and it concludes with “…how long it takes to get recruitments done…”; another paragraph is third from the end, a longish paragraph that starts with “…Positing a position…”—posting a position—“…can take several months”; and, again, it’s the same theme of how long it takes to get these activities done; and the third one is the last one on the next page, Number 11 “…turnaround time is typically 4+ weeks.” Do those comments seem to have merit and describe the need to create a path forward to reduce the time that it takes to get things done—with the one comment in here that I think is of concern is that if it takes longer than it should, applicants that we might want to consider have actually moved on and gotten different job. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And so, absolutely. All of the comments have merit. I—and it is definitely something that I am actively monitoring with our Recruitment Division. We have had some challenges in our Recruitment Division over the last several months. I mean, I think that things are in a much better place right now then, say, they were about maybe eight to ten months ago. But there has been some transition—the Manager vacancy, when Michelle decided to accept a position at the Department at Parks and Rec.—that kind of created some transition, so we had an internal TA before we recruited for the position. And then, that position was filled in March. But then, we still have another position that we haven’t filled yet, as a result of that internal promotion. And then, we also had an individual in the office or in that team that was off on extended leave. So, that division has been short-staffed and so the turnaround time has been a little longer. We’re also working through some workflow challenges because anytime a department wants to recruit for a position, the Request to Fill comes to our department and then it goes to the Managing Director or the Mayor for approval before we can move forward with the recruitment. So, depending on the turnaround time, it may take additional time before we can post it because we also make sure that it gets advertised in the newspaper. We only open recruitments on Sundays and closed them on Tuesdays. So, depending on workflow, sometimes even when we get all the approvals back, we’re not able to open all the recruitments on that one Sunday, and sometimes due to staffing—and making sure that once the recruitments close, we can screen the applications in a reasonable time. We do stagger some of those recruitment dates—but we still have one vacancy to fill in the Recruitment Division. I think their timeframes are getting better as far as Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 83 turnaround, but those comments always have merit to me and absolutely because if we have interested applicants, we don’t want to see them moving on to other jobs because it’s taking us too much time to get back to them. We have done—made some changes to the notifications that we’re sending to applicants, so that they’re aware of where they are at in the process, because their—the screening of the applications happens in HR once we refer a list of names to a department—all future communication with that applicant is going to be from the department directly. So, changed the language in some of the notices to kind of make that process clear, so that they have a reasonable expectation as far as what happens next and what the process will be going forward. MR. THOMAS: So, it’s a staffing issue that ought to fix itself as opposed to a systemic problem? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. I don’t consider it to be a systemic problem. I—for the last several months we have had staffing issues, which have contributed to longer turnaround times. That being said, I think that there’s always room for improvement and I would like to see our turnaround even with full staffing—I’d like the turnaround to be faster. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, anyone else? Ms. Bond, do you have anything? MS. BOND: No. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, I don’t. It’s just—I just noticed that, again, the recruitment processes are taking way too long. And the fact that there are so many continuous recruitments—wow. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And we’re actually changing our strategy with that a little bit. We’re closing continuous recruitments and then working with departments. We find that we leave something on a continuous recruitment, and we don’t continue to get applications. It seems like people, generally, apply when a position is new and somewhat “hot” so to speak. And, even for myself, like, I’ve talked to the staff—if I go on the County Jobs website and I’m seeing that something has been open for more than 12 months—I’m like, we don’t even look like we’re serious about filling that, right. And so, what we’re doing is working with departments. We’re going to close the continuous recruitments—and if it’s something that really needs to be re-opened—say, like, Engineer, et cetera—we can work with the department to get that re-opened pretty quickly. But what it does is it’s going to—anybody who’s filled in a Job Interest Card saying that they’re interested in that position—once we re-open it, it’s going to send all Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 84 of those notifications again. And it’s going to just generate interest for being a new advertisement as opposed to just this stale thing on the list. Those interactions with the departments to talk about closing those continuous recruitments is also the opportunity to say, “Hey, this has been open for this period of time, do you want to consider possibly a different class of work. Is there something else that we could do to help you so that if you’re not finding qualified applicants at this level, is it the class spec.? Is there something that needs to change or do we need to look at different classes of work or something that would function as, kind of, a trainee where we could get qualified applicants in and then help them to get the training and experience needed to qualify for the hire levels.” So, we will see closure of continuous recruitments as we, kind of, re-work those. Some of them, as I mentioned, will just re-open but others of them—hopefully, we’ll come up with different strategies to address them. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So, that concludes the external survey. We are now on the results from within the Department of HR. (SEE ATT. F.) So, Question 1—“The Director understands her leadership role and works with DHR employees to develop a clear vision for the department, with measurable goals and objectives, consistent with the department’s mission.” So, the responses—the 11 responses are good. Yeah. Question 2—“The Director demonstrates substantive knowledge regarding the department’s programs and services.” All favorable results. “C” the same thing—“The Director’s annual budget allows the department to effectively conduct is goals and objectives.” Question 4, there’s some variation—“The Director implements professional employee development and training that enhances the knowledge and skills of DHR employees.” MS. BOND: Do they want more training? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, and the answer to that is “yes”—and finding the training, I’m actually working on training for Classification and Pay, and Recruitment through, like, a national consulting firm that does, like, an HR overview. And, apparently, that some of the staff have attended these courses in the past and thought that they were valuable, and now they have new staff in their divisions, more staff—and so we’re re-visiting that. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 85 But, yeah, training is sort of a challenge for HR. We don’t really have a training budget—that being said, we need to be creative and look at other alternative ways to accomplish that. We’ve had more opportunities recently for more collaboration with personnel of the respective divisions in other jurisdictions, and I think that that’s great for the sharing of information. And then, me wanting—we did a kind of a team building collaboration training—specifically, related—it was supposed to be focused on how we communicate amongst each other within the department better. But, yes, training is a challenge but we’re looking at alternatives and ways in which we can provide more training opportunities. MR. THOMAS: If I might jump ahead, unless you want to take things in order—but if you go to page 3 of the budget report— CHR. CABANAS: Oh, can we finish this? MR. THOMAS: Well, I think it’s pertinent to what we’ve just said because on page 3 of the budget report, there’s a million dollars’ worth of budget—under “Employee Scholarships” and “Skills Development”—so, the employee scholarships is $515,000.00, the skills development is $416,000.00—so that’s close to a million— anyway—$930,000.00. And of the $515,000.00, it shows only about 16% of that was spent; and under the $416,000.00 it shows none of it was spent. Am I mis-reading this or what’s the story here? MS. TOKIHIRO: Those—that’s—those are funds specific to our County Tuition Reimbursement Program. So, that’s the—if employees—County employees of all departments, if they are in a degree program and complete courses at the end of each semester, they can submit a request for reimbursement. So, participation in the County Tuition Reimbursement Program would be available to our employees, but that is not money that’s specifically for Human Resources staff training. MR. THOMAS: So, if it’s not getting used for that program, can it be shifted or reallocated over to employee training? MS. TOKIHIRO: The Department of Finance has other, like, a training provision that they have that can be used by all departments for employee training. What they like to do is use that money for, like, say, to bring in a trainer in a certain area, and then we provide the opportunity to a variety of departments. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 86 So, for example, County training—the County training provision was used for, say, a course related to grant writing or how to identify grants and things like that. So, we would bring in someone who would provide this training to 50 or more employees at a time, so— MR. THOMAS: And it’s charged to which department then—not— MS. TOKIHIRO: It’s not charged to HR, it’s the Department of Finance has a training provision, so it’s charged to them. MR. THOMAS: So, would say over in that department that they have an inadequate budget or a budget that’s barely enough that partly explains the—whichever it is— Question 4, which has—seems to be saying that there’s not enough professional development. MS. TOKIHIRO: I—so, I don’t know if this will answer your question, but the Finance maintains this training provision, which is a fund that can be used by all departments, but the requirements for it, there are specific requirements, and it has to be approved by Finance. So, as much as those funds are available, it’s not something where we can just readily say, “We’re going to use the money for this.” We need to go through a process to get approval for that. MR. THOMAS: So, is the answer to Question 4—just sort of mis-directed by the people who say the Director’s professional development enhances blah, blah? MS. TOKIHIRO: Not necessarily, I mean, I think that as the Director, it’s my responsibility to make sure that we’re exploring training opportunities for employees, but— MR. THOMAS: It’s not your rodeo, though. MS. TOKIHIRO: Well, yes and no, right. So, as far as, like—as far as implementing professional employee development, I mean, I can help identity and try and coordinate those training opportunities. As far as me—I don’t know, I feel like implementing is more of, again, active—like, I would actually be doing it, right. So, (inaudible) interpretation, but I am happy to have the feedback and these are discussions that are ongoing with all of the divisions and I’m encouraging all of the Managers to work with their staff, identify areas that are of interest to them, and if they’re aware of certain training resources in a certain area—I’m asking them to bring that to me, because I won’t necessarily know all the (inaudible) training resources for, say, our Admin. Services Division. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 87 Sometimes because we’re a public sector employer—training specific to public sector employers can be challenging to find as well. So—but all of that being said, there’s always room for improvement and I, definitely, want to see the staff have professional development opportunities in whatever form. CHR. CABANAS: Mm-hmm. I think for Recruitment and Examination, there’s really two major areas that anyone who works in that division should enhance their knowledge of—one is the various occupations because there’s thousands and thousands of occupations—and I know your staff has utilized—it used to be called “Dictionary of Occupational Titles” but it’s now “ONET”—online from Department of Labor. And the other one is utilization—knowing the various courses offered—and the starting point is right here at UH Hilo and HCC—where they know about the different courses in all the various disciplines, even if they have to go and spend some time over there; have them talk to a career counselor couple sessions and get them started with that because that will be the starting point in screening the applications. The other thing is being resourceful with veterans’ counselors here—with the VA Office. And, of course, you folks already started it, the auditing—going out to the various worksites and learn about the jobs. I think that really helps. The prerequisite for them when they start working on a job posting is they should know about that job—the ins and outs, how to screen for the minimum qualifications. If they don’t have a good handle on that, they should go out and talk to the department, the supervisor—if the incumbent employee is still there, talk to them, find out about the job—so, when they come back, they can screen the applications adequately, appropriately, and efficiently. They won’t be stuck on whether they should accept or not—and I think that’s the basis for them. Going to the other jurisdictions is very helpful. When I first started, my director sent me to the State. I stayed there for, like, three days and then came back. And then, started working on the other divisions itself—but that really helps, yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, those collaborations with the other jurisdictions because we all see the same things— CHR. CABANAS: Yes. MS .TOKIHIRO: —we all face the same challenges, and we’re all dealing with the same classes of work and the same similar requirements. The requirements don’t have to be exactly the same, but—yeah, really collaboration. Any time we can collaborate and learn from and work with another jurisdiction, is helpful. CHR. CABANAS: But that ONET is really, really helpful. And I used to tell the staff when they were on the fence about it, accepting an application or not—and we didn’t Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 88 quite understand—I said, “Think of all the different jobs that you see when you’re out and about. It could be a clerk a cashier—think about those positions. Those are clerical; whether it’s a storekeeper—that’s clerical—or whether it’s a forestry worker. Think about all of that.” That, kind of, helps them—some of them are very visual learning individuals and that, kind of, helps them connect the dots. Yeah, so. MS. TOKIHIRIO: Yeah, and I agree, too, that going out and learning about completion of the jobs from the people that are doing it—I mean, even in the course of, say, prepping for the social media things. They’ll ask the employee, “Okay, show me what you do on a typical day”—because we may have an idea of what we think it is, but every single time when they go out, they come back and say that they didn’t know this about the job. So, yeah, all great opportunities. CHR. CABANAS: I mean, I thought—I found that a real win-win situation. You know why? Because when the staff goes out to talk to the employees to find out about the job, they were very happy. They felt valued that other— MS. BOND: Somebody cares. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah—came to see me about what I do and I’m explaining my job to the people from HR—and they were very willing to share. And then, when you leave, they just felt—wow! They felt so validated. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. So, I think it’s really a good thing. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: It’s win-win. SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Well, you could, but then she got to take it from someplace else— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: —if the budget is status quo. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: No, and that’s what makes it hard for the—not only HR, all the other departments, because you know how many years it’s been status quo. MS. BOND: Yeah. Exactly. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 89 CHR. CABANAS: Over ten. MS. BOND: No—yeah, I totally— CHR. CABANAS: If not more. MS. TOKIHIRO: And we’re just grateful we didn’t get a reduction, right? So—yeah. MS. BOND: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: But, yeah, it is—that is kind of a challenge. MS. BOND: (Inaudible) turning an ocean liner. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MS. BOND: It’s not going to happen fast. CHR. CABANAS: Anyway—okay. So, that was Number 4. Question 5—“The Director instills effective professional behavior and skills.” The majority are favorable. Question 6—“The Director builds morale among staff and volunteers and sustains a healthy and safe work environment.” Again, the majority all favorable. Number 7—“The Director delegates tasks and responsibilities effectively, establishing measurable performance standards for DHR employees.” Again, majority favorable. Question 8—“The Director ensures that timely annual performance reviews are conducted of DHR employees.” Again, favorable. Question 9—“The Director encourages staff critical thinking and problem-solving solutions to issues faced in the HR program.” You must be doing a wonderful job here because look at that line—it’s right across the page. So, you’re encouraging them to think critically—very good—and problem-solve—very good. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 90 We had one director, he used to tell us—and they’ll know who it is, but he used to tell us, “Don’t come to me with your problems. Come to me with your solutions.” MS. TOKIHIRO: That, and that the big picture perspective, right? CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: And it’s not just resolving this problem, it’s like, “Okay, how do we help the department in total.”—right? CHR. CABANAS: Right. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, “The Director encourages horizontal and vertical organizational communication within the department and with other departments and agencies.” Okay, mostly favorable. And I think this is the last one or close to it. Question 11—yeah, it is the last—“Overall, I am satisfied as an employee of DHR.” Mostly favorable. There’s one person who’s not too happy. MS. TOKIHIRO: But I think that the person was still here from last year, too. So, I don’t know if that’s (inaudible). CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. All feedback is appreciated. CHR. CABANAS: I hope the person gets happier. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes, as do I. Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, Question 12, this is with all the responses—“What does the Director of Human Resources need to do to improve her performance?” Okay, let’s look for the themes. MS. BOND: My favorite is “favoritism”—it’s like, you want more of it or less of it? You have to, kind of, qualify that statement. She wrote it down—it’s like, you want more or less. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 91 CHR. CABANAS: But it’s not a theme. MS. BOND: No, it’s not a theme but it just cracks me up. It’s like, okay— CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so let’s look for the themes. MS. BOND: I think, overall, the themes are she’s doing a good job. I think that there’s always room for improvement—yeah, there’s always is room for improvement CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, no matter what we do— MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: —there’s always room for improvement. Why? Because you do it—whatever it is—then you critique it; and when you critique it, you find, “Oh, yeah, I could have done that better.” Yeah. MS. BOND: I never have that problem— CHR. CABANAS: But the comments really are about you, Sommer—you’re sincere in your efforts, you address questions positively, you have certain areas you need to work with, with your employees—but it’s always a given. You strive to be proficient, collaborating with the staff, utilizing available resources, maintaining the integrity of the program and the department—“The Director should be allowed to build and lead the department based on her vision.” Does someone feel that you’re not leading based on your vision? MS. TOKIHIRO: Well, I couldn’t answer specifically, but I think that HR is—oh, there’s a lot of things, right? I mean, there’s history amongst the departments, there’s history amongst the co-workers and the different divisions—there’s a lot of history amongst the divisions themselves, there’s relationships with other departments, changing priorities every Administration, and then working with the Administration, specifically. So, I don’t think that I am conveying to anyone that I’m not leading the department based on my own vision. I think we’ve made a lot of changes. I think it’s clear to my staff the direction I would like to see the department go, but I guess I would interpret that comment more along the lines of understanding that there’s a lot of different components to it, right—maintaining the balance and there are times that I’m going to disagree with another department head or—a particular perspective. But, ultimately, whether we agree, or agree to disagree—we’re all moving forward together and we’re going to keep marching on and doing everything we can to make HR better—and the integrity is what matters to me. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 92 CHR. CABANAS: Mm-hmm, and that’s very important, and that’s a good perspective to have. I think the main idea—the main thing is to navigate because there’re so many challenges out there, and it changes from day-to-day—and sometimes others have priorities that we have to deal with. So, navigating is key and you’re doing—I think you’re doing well. And look at this last comment, “Sommer is doing a great job as the director. She’s the best Director of HR…” she’s the best Director of HR this person has ever worked for. Wow! MS. TOKIHIRO: I’m probably the only Director of HR that they worked— CHR. CABANAS: I (inaudible) this person is a long-term employee. MS. TOKIHIRO: —we need to know what the comparison is. Naw, I’m just kidding. MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible.) MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. True. True statement. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, and there’s also a next—or Question 3—13 rather, Question 13. This is the last one—“We welcome suggestions to improve services provided by the Director of Human Resources.” MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, I agree. It’s hard when you’re—the budget is limited. You have creative ideas, and you don’t have the money—and you just have to make do with what you have. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah, do our best. CHR. CABANAS: It’s hard. Yeah, it’s hard. And then, you have another positive comment, “Overall, I think she is doing an amazing job, and it’s so much easier to work with her versus previous Directors.”—wow, that’s a really high compliment. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) MS. TOKIHIRO: That’s a longer-term member of the department. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 93 CHR. CABANAS: (Inaudible) employee is—that’s even better. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Well, that’s a very high compliment. Yeah. Good job. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so those were the responses and now it’s our turn to do the evaluation. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Oh, I’m sorry, the budget, yeah. Yeah, budget—budget. (SEE ATT. G.) MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we tried to align the budget report as closely as we could, with two—compared to last year. It is just a challenge that the current fiscal year budget report is from the CoHnect system. And then, there were also some challenges that we were aware of. So, for example, we were talking about that County Tuition Reimbursement pot of money. We found out that the funds—so when we are going to be reimbursing employees for the funds that they’ve spent for tuition, we notify the department—and it’s actually the department that enters the information into the payroll system. And then, when the department enters that, it’s supposed to charge the General Ledger number that’s specific to HR. We became aware that that General Ledger number charging back to HR—there was an issue with it. And so, it may not be that any of those tuition reimbursement funds were actually coming from the HR budget or coming from the department’s budget. So, we have provided authorization for employees to be reimbursed. I believe we were up at around $70,000.00 but how that’s being reflected on this budget report, it’s a little different. There’s a few things that are a little haywire, as of right now, as we continue to work through challenges in CoHnect on the financials. MR. THOMAS: It would be nice to figure that out because, right now, on paper it looks like there’s $900,030.00 budget of which only $30,000.00 or so has been spent. MS. TOKIHIRO: Right. Yeah, so we have the documentation, like, in the Personnel and Organizational Development Division as far as what has been authorized. And so, we’ll be working with Finance to get that corrected. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 94 MS. BOND: So, there are two different accounting systems, right—between the ’24-’25 and the ’25-’26? MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: That doesn’t help. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, Suzi, your mic. MS. BOND: So, there are two different accounting systems compare—from ‘24-‘25 and ‘25 to-‘26, so— MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct, yeah. MS. BOND: So, it makes it a little— CHR. CABANAS: Well, it’s two different fiscal years. MS. BOND: Yeah, but it—the accounting systems are different, so because the reports are different—the format of this one versus the format for the next one. CHR. CABANAS: So, I have a question. So that Flexible Spending unused money—it’s not $416,000.00? MS. TOKIHIRO: The Flexible Spending unused money—no. CHR. CABANAS: It’s for training. MS. TOKIHIRO: No. The 416,000.00, I believe, is for our Professional Trainee and Professional Development Trainee positions. CHR. CABANAS: Right, but that’s the unused money, right, that the employees haven’t— MS. TOKIHIRO: The forfeiture? CHR. CABANAS: Yes. MS. TOKIHIRO: No, it’s not the forfeiture. CHR. CABANAS: Oh, okay. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 95 MS. TOKIHIRO: So, yeah, the forfeiture is—there—any monies that are not used through the Flexible Spending Program, according to the Federal law, they cannot be reimbursed to the employees. They’re forfeited to the County. CHR. CABANAS: Right. MS. TOKIHIRO: The County can use those funds for specific things, but what we’ve been using the money for is to pay the administrative fee for the Flexible Spending Program. So, I know in the past that the Tuition Reimbursement was coming just from those forfeiture funds. CHR. CABANAS: Right. MS. TOKIHIRO: But the County wanted to take it beyond that. And so, when those—when we increased the budget up to that $500,000.00—that’s all County money that’s being set aside for that. And those forfeiture funds are being used in other—that forfeiture account is used for other things. CHR. CABANAS: What are they using it for? MS. TOKIHIRO: They’re using it for the administrative cost for the flexible spending— CHR. CABANAS: For flexible spending— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: And how much is that? MS. TOKIHIRO: That’s a good question. I know it’s a fee based on a fee per participant in the program. I could get back to you with the exact number. I wouldn’t want to mis-state it. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So, this $416,000.00 is for? MS. TOKIHIRO: Is for the positions for our Professional Trainee and Professional Development Trainee Programs. So, those are positions in HR that if a department wanted to make a training opportunity available, we have 33 different career path positions and, basically, they tell us, “We want to be able to provide training in this specific career path.” So, say, for example, the Fire Department has a position related to IT. So, they want to provide this opportunity. They ask our permission to use one of our positions for that and then we do an internal recruitment, see if there’s any internal interest. And in the case of the Fire Department, we did have an existing Parks and Rec. employee that was really interested in IT-related jobs. And so, went to the Fire Department as a Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 96 Professional Trainee in one of these IT positions. And during the course of the program, they received a professional level experience to help them to qualify for the position at the permanent class of work. So, it’s a whole program that we’ve developed. I think you’re seeing the $416,000.00 then, again, as related to some accounting issues related to the GL’s and having that salary charged to the right account number. I think that those adjustments happen at the end of the fiscal year. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. MS. TOKIHIRO: But all of—we have ten positions like that to provide those training opportunities and all of those positions, right now, I believe, are currently utilized. CHR. CABANAS: And then, for advertising—so the department has 5,000.00 for—this is for the recruitment ads, right, 5,000? MS. TOKIHIRO: Correct. CHR. CABANAS: What’s the advertising under “Human Resources OCE”—54,000.00? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, that was an increase specifically, related to Recruitment to try and do dif—to provide monies to do different recruitment things. So, we were using it for a variety of things, but that fund—so the $5,000.00 will pay for newspaper ads for our regular recurrent job listings. CHR. CABANAS: Right. MS. TOKIHIRO: But then, part of that $50,000.00 is how we’re paying for their ads that you hear on the radio— CHR. CABANAS: Special— MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. If we’re doing advertisements in professional publications, if there’s some type of fee for that, if a department—say, wanted to advertise something in a journal, we could help pay for that as well. CHR. CABANAS: You could even do it on television, the banners—‘cause that’s not that costly—it wasn’t. But that’s a lot of money—54,000.00? MS. TOKIHIRO: It is, yes. CHR. CABANAS: Wow, you guys can do a whole bunch of things. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. Yeah. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 97 MS. BOND: That was two years ago—that’s not this past year—that’s the ’24-’25. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah (inaudible). MS. TOKIHIRO: But the amounts, it has continued to be the same as far as the amount. CHR. CABANAS: The amount. MS. TOKIHIRO: They haven’t deduct—I mean, reduced the budget, which we’re grateful for. We also have promotional items that we’ve had created for when we go to, like, different career fairs and different hiring events. So, the—we call them the “swag” items, the kind of give-a-ways—things. CHR. CABANAS: So, what’s the plan, ‘cause we’re going to start a new fiscal year. What’s the plan to utilize this large sum of money. Is there a plan? MS. TOKIHIRO: So, continued and enhanced strategies of the things that we feel have been working. So the radio advertisements are actually, they can be pretty costly. CHR. CABANAS : Oh, yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: But I think that the radio stations have all done a great job of—because we advertise on all of them. So, we’ll reach out to the radio stations and say, “We want to advertise these positions”—and we’ll give them certain bullet points—and they put together different scripts—unique scripts that then they send to us for review. MS. BOND: Do they give you the two to one—two for one deal? MS. TOKIHIRO: We get all kinds of deals but then we get the invoices where they show every single time that they play the ads, itemize it—yeah. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: But you can choose what time you want it. They give you that, right? MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes. They—and they make proposals— MS. BOND: (Inaudible) depending on what time. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And they make recommendations. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 98 MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yes. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. And different radio stations charge more—and so, as we’ve kind of have done more of these radio ads over the last year, we’re collecting more information. We actually made sure that on the application, we’ve listed all the different radio stations where we’re advertising things, so we can see through the survey that we do on NeoGov where people are hearing about it. So, radio ads, we have been working on the TV. It’s incredibly difficult for anybody to get back to us, which is kind of crazy—like doing it on the morning news and things like that. MS. BOND: Yeah, I’ve actually seen (inaudible) weird times, though. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. So, it’s weird times but it’s really difficult for us to get them to get back to us and, at one point, it’s a Honolulu news station, and it was someone on the mainland that was contacting us, which was contributing to, like, time zone problems. CHR. CABANAS: (Inaudible) local people. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. MS. BOND: But they actually are required to give you the tear—quote/unquote “tear sheets”—that is something that they’re supposed to do—just like the radio does—tells you what time and when and exactly. So, if they’re stalling you, it’s probably the stall is coming from the mainland because all of them are owned by mainland companies. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: So, we are actively—I would like to see it get on TV. I had also been checking into, like, the message boards that we have at the Queens Court in Waikoloa, where there’s a lot of foot traffic and a lot of local people that’s where they’re going for their stay-cation. So, there’s different advertising opportunities there as well. So, I think each year, we’ve been trying to step it up, and we will continue to do so, and try and utilize the resources available. MS. BOND: Do you do anything with, like, Civil Beat or Big Island News, or any of those? MS. TOKIHIRO: No. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 99 CHR. CABANAS: You can try Na Leo because Ashley needs 24/7 programs to air. And she has—I forget the name of it—but you can ask her. She has a room that you can go in and they’ll film you and your staff for 10-minutes, free airtime. And you could do something about interview—job interview training or applicant tra—application training, or just about jobs in itself. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, you should check with her because she needs continuous programs to air. MS. TOKIHIRO: Yes, will do. MS. BOND: And, actually, some of that stuff that you’re videoing, that you’re doing, like, for Instagram and stuff—those would be great little, short things you could put on there, too. CHR. CABANAS : Yeah. MS. BOND: As well as—I would check into, like, Big island News, which I—it’s something that is beginning to actually become more relevant. So— MS. TOKIHIRO: Will do. Thank you for the feedback. Yeah, Ashley was kind in giving Michelle and I a tour of their facility when I was trying to figure out what they had to offer. So, definitely, great resource there. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, so we are now on the evaluation (SEE ATT. H). Do we need to go into executive session, J? No. Okay. MR. YOSHIMOTO: No—sorry. No. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So, as far as Goal number 1—meets or does not meet? Do I need to put all the numbers and — MS. YAMADA: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Oh, so this my copy? MS. YAMADA: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Okay. I’ll do that. MS. BOND: It’s just like “x” in one or “x” in the other? Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 100 CHR. CABANAS: Yes. And then, what I’ll do is, I’ll go match up the numbers to fit it in the “Meets” or “Does Not Meet.” MS. BOND: There’s 1, 2 and 3—(inaudible) internal/external. SPEAKER: And the numbers are— CHR. CABANAS: Wait now. SPEAKER: The numbers are— CHR. CABANAS: I got to take this out. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) SPEAKER: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Yeah, but I have to put the number and the alpha. to justify the meets or does not meet. MR. YOSHIMOTO: Oh, that’s—okay. CHR. CABANAS: You know what I mean? MR. YOSHIMOTO: I do. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. So, Goal number 1—well, Goal number 1, doesn’t have numbers or—Goal number 1, she “Meets” it, right—everybody, Goal number 1, she “Meets” it for 1, 2, and 3. MS. BOND: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Correct? MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Okay. And 4—it’s the following one. Okay, I can plug in the alpha. and the numbers or actually I really don’t because I think she “Meets” it for all. MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Okay. So, “Planning, Prioritizing, Organizing”—“Meets.” MS. BOND: Yeah. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 101 CHR. CABANAS: Oh, I’m supposed to put “Meets”—for external/internal—“Meets.” MS. BOND: (Inaudible.) CHR. CABANAS: Just checking. (Note: At 2:51 p.m. through 2:52 p.m., no audio was recorded due to an issue with the recording system. During this timeframe, the following was discussed: In the category of “Problem Solving/decision Making”—Director Tokihiro “Meets” expectations; and in the category of “Leadership” – Director Tokihiro “Meets” expectations.) CHR. CABANAS: Congratulations, Sommer— MS. BOND: Yes. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: For a very nice evaluation. “Meets” expectations. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. MR. THOMAS: What I think I noticed was that for all the previous evaluations, at least during my term on the Board, have been favorable. This one is more favorable. CHR. CABANAS: This one is the easiest because she’s professional, you articulate/you communicate well, you show others that you’re supportive, you’re willing to help them. There’s some things you need to work on but—hey, life isn’t perfect—and you have really a good staff, yeah. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. I appreciate the feedback. I appreciate your time to volunteer on the Board, and review all this information, and provide my evaluation. So—and I appreciate all the questions. I will take the feedback back to the staff and we will continue to move forward and address all the issues. CHR. CABANAS: So, we need a motion to accept—to approve our evaluation—yeah, that she meets the— MS. BOND: I move that we find that Sommer “Meets” our— CHR. CABANAS: Our categories— Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 102 MS. BOND: —requirements for evaluation and that we are very happy to have you as our Director of Human Resources. MR. THOMAS: Happily seconding. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. Any discussion? MR. AGUINALDO: No. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Four ayes. Motion is carried. Congratulations, Sommer. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, anything else, J? MR. YOSHIMOTO: No. CHR. CABANAS: Okay. Again, congratulations. MS. TOKIHIRO: Thank you. CHR. CABANAS: You can now go and celebrate. Go out to dinner. MS. TOKIHIRO: (Inaudible.) Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 103 MR. THOMAS: Thank you, too. (At this time, Ms. Tokihiro shook hands with all of the Board members and Legal Counsel J Yoshimoto.) MS. BOND: I have to say when I went to that meeting for the boards and commissions that they had—and I said something about the reports that you did every month. And, probably, at least two-thirds of them went, “Every month you get a report? What do you mean, every month?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they’re like, “We don’t even see reports.” So, you really do keep us very well informed— MR. AGUINALDO: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MS. BOND: —and we’re very grateful for that. MR. THOMAS: What meeting was that, Suzi? MS. BOND: There was a meeting of people who sit on boards and commissions and they— CHR. CABANAS: It was an orientation that the Mayor had. MS. BOND: Yeah, it was about a few months ago. Anyway— MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible.) MS. BOND: —it was for the chairs and vice chairs only. CHR. CABANAS: Yeah. MR. THOMAS: (Inaudible.) MS. BOND: And, anyway, so—but it was interesting because so many of the people went, “What do you mean she gives you regular reports?” I was like—so most of them don’t get what we get. So, we’re very lucky to have you. CHR. CABANAS: Okay, any— MS. TOKIHIRO: No, I—thank you. I mean, I’m glad that the Board is happy with the reports and we’re happy to provide the updates. So—I’m glad you are a well-informed Board. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 104 CHR. CABANAS: Yes. We strive for it. Announcements (Item 9) CHR. CABANAS: Okay, any “Announcements?” Schedule Next Meeting Date (Item 10) The Merit Appeals Board Will Convene Its Next Meeting On Thursday, July 23, 2026, At 9:00 A.M., At The Department Of Human Resources Conference Room, 101 Pauahi Street, Suite 2, Hilo, HI 96720 CHR. CABANAS: If not, we’ll—the Merit Appeals Board will convene its next meeting on Thursday, July 23rd, 2026, at 9 a.m. at the Department of Human Resources Conference Room, at 101 Pauahi Street, Suite 2, in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. So, we’ll be at the HR Office. Adjournment (Item 11) CHR. CABANAS: And, today—may I have a motion to adjourn today’s meeting? MS. BOND: So moved. MR. THOMAS: Second. CHR. CABANAS: Thank you. Any discussion? If not, I’ll start a rollcall vote with Ms. Bond. MS. BOND: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Aguinaldo. MR. AGUINALDO: Aye. CHR. CABANAS: Mr. Thomas. MR. THOMAS: Aye. Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2026 Page 105 CHR. CABANAS: Ms. Cabanas—aye. Motion carried. Today’s meeting is adjourned at 2:57 p.m. Respectfully submitted, Glynis Yamada, Secretary-Reporter APPROVED: Gabriella M. Cabanas, Chair Merit Appeals Board