Agriculture and Public Trust Committee - Regular Meeting

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Aloha a wina lā kākou. I waka alua kuma lua minuke i hala o ka hōla e kahi. Ma kanakolu o Yulai i ka makahiki e lua kaukani i waka alua kuma ono. E olu-olu mai hoʻomalu ke kumike aloha ʻāina. O wau o Keani Rollins Fernandes ka luna hoʻomalu o ke ia komike. It was 122, now 123 on July 30th, 2026. Will the Komike Aloha ʻĀina please come to order? I'm your chair, Kiani Rollins Fernandez, and there are currently no testifiers at the Molokai District Office. And I'll remind everyone to please silence their cell phones. Members, in accordance with Sunshine Law, if you're not joining the meeting from the conference room, please identify by name if anyone is in the room, vehicle, or workspace with you. Minors do not need to be identified. And that's just for the council members, not the resource personnel. Please see the last page of the agenda for information on meeting connectivity. Our committee vice chair, Tamara Paulton, will be joining us after the playground blessing that she's providing closing remarks for. And then online, we have committee member Tom Aloha.

Aloha, good afternoon, Chair. I'm in my Kihi office alone. My staff is in the lobby. Thank you.

Mahalo. In person, Committee Member Kawanoe Batangan.

Aloha kākou.

Aloha. Also joining us in person, Council Chair Alice Lee. Aloha kākou. Aloha. Joining us online, Committee Member Shane Senancy.

Here at my home office, I'm here by myself, and there are no testifiers in honor.

Mahalo. And joining us online, Committee Member Yukile Sugimura.

Aloha, everybody. I'm in my private office, and I'm looking forward to a very productive meeting. Thank you for bringing this up, Chair Pauline Hernandez. Absolutely.

Mahalo. And we have joining us a non-voting committee member, Gabe Johnson.

Aloha, chair, council members, committee members. There's no testifiers at the Lanai District Office, and I'm here and ready to work. Thanks for having me.

Mahalo for joining us. And non-voting committee member Nohelani Uuhajens is always welcome to join us. From the administration, from the Department of Management, we have Managing Director Josiah Nishita, aloha. From the Department of Personnel Services, we have on her second to last day with the county, Director Cynthia Rasopater, aloha. Also from Department of Personnel Services, Oh, okay, Kainéa is not here. Deputy Director, oh, Deputy Director Kainéa Aiwohi-Alo and from Department of Management, EEO ADA Manager Diana Marantes, Maranteza.

Sorry, I messed that up.

Marantza, Marantza. And then we'll also have representatives from GuideHouse that I will include by name after we bring that item up. Committee staff, we have with us Committee Secretary Laurie-Ann Tengon, Senior Legislative Analyst James Krueger, Legislative Analyst Kristen Szabo, Legislative Attorney Megan Moniz, and Council Services Assistant Clerk We have one item on today's agenda. And I don't think that's Leah's. I think that's Jean's. and I think Council Services Assistant Clerk, Jean Pokipala. Mahalo Ms. Pokipala for holding it down out there. We have one item on today's agenda, County Human Services Review and Strategic Planning. Since this item is a 7B presentation with no legislative action, we will jump straight into opening remarks and presentation before receiving public testimony and then followed by discussion. As I mentioned, joining us today is Manasheek Director Nishita, Director Rosal Porter, Deputy Director Aiwohe Alo, EEO ADA Manager Marantza, and from GuideHouse, Inc., Matt Petroski. Amber Seagroves, Callie Seymour, Miranda Vetter, and Melissa Pavlicek. If there are no objections, I would like to designate the individuals as resource persons under Rule 18A of the Rules of the Council based on their knowledge of the County's Human Resources Review and Strategic Planning Project. Are there any objections? Mahalo members. At this time, I would like to invite Managing Director Nishita to provide opening remarks, followed by a presentation from Ms. Diana Maranza.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I'm going to have our Personnel Services Director give some opening statements. We'll go into a presentation from our team, and then I'll give some closing remarks to the presentation. Thank you. Go ahead, Cynthia.

Director Raza-Pardee. Good afternoon, Chair and committee members. Thank you for having us today on my second to the last day of my county career here. So jumping right in, as you know, the county has launched into the AlignHR project. You graciously provide us with funding in the past fiscal year, I believe. And so just kind of to recap how we got here today, the county has changed significantly in the past year. few years, at least in the last decade. And we've added five new departments, Department of Housing, Department of Agriculture, OEV Resources, East Maui Water Authority, and the Office of Recovery. From 2010, the county's budget was $736 million. In 2020, it was $800 and $70 million, or close to. Today, it's 1.6 billion. So I would say that that nearly doubled. The county is operating in a very different environment than we did even a few years ago. In addition, we have the 2023 catastrophic wildfires that has changed the way the community expects us to respond, that we need to respond, and just so many more demands placed on county resources. The existing HR framework was designed many years ago and As the organization has grown, we too have to grow and change with it. We have had many challenges just with onboarding new staff, growing our county, and retaining employees. A few examples is the hiring process can be lengthy and difficult to navigate. Recruitment is highly competitive. with all the growth on the island in addition to just the different market conditions, the labor conditions with the impacts of the fire and just the cost of housing and everything. The rules and policies are not simple and easy to understand for most that haven't been working in civil service, I would say. And this is not isolated to just a single department. It covers all departments, and we're looking forward to looking at the process that we have and having experts to help us, guide us through this process. Yeah, so the AlignHR project was launched to help the county take a comprehensive look at how HR services are organized, delivered, and supported. The desired outcomes are to have more faster and more transparent hiring, more consistent HR service delivery across departments, and to modernize rules, policies, and procedures that are easier to understand and apply. a stronger foundation for recruiting, retaining, and developing the county workforce. And we don't want to change just for the sake of change. We want this to be meaningful and grow with the county in the future. And so we turn it over to our friends at GuideHouse that are helping us to focus on this project, and they will guide us through the process. Aloha.

Mahalo director and then representatives from a guide house. You may turn your camera on and begin your presentation. OK, we can see it.

Great.

I apologize, everyone. I'm getting an error message with my camera saying I was disabled by the host.

OK, we'll try to fix that. I see you.

Here we go. Perfect, perfect. Well, aloha and I would like to thank the Council for its time today and allowing us to present on this very important topic. My name is Matt Trousky. I'm a director with Guidehouse and I lead our state and local HR and workforce consulting services. Our role is to partner with the county on the AlignHR project, and we are here today to provide a project overview, an update on progress to date, and a look ahead on what is to come. Before we dive in, let's introduce the rest of the team, starting with Amber Seagroves.

Thanks, Matt. Hello, everyone. My name is Amber Seagroves. I'm an associate director at GuideHouse, and I'm serving as the HR and workforce subject matter expert on this project. And I'm thankful to have some time to chat with you all today.

Callie? Hello, everyone. My name is Callie Seymour. I'm also an associate director with the GuideHouse team on the state and local government West team. serving as the co-project manager on this project with Miranda Vedder. So I'll pass it to Miranda next.

Thank you. Hello, aloha, everyone. My name is Miranda Lum Vedder. I am a manager with GuideHouses State and Local Government Practice. I'm located on O'ahu, and I'm really grateful to be a part of this initiative and thankful for your time today. And with that, I will hand it over to Mal.

I'm based in Honolulu. I'm an attorney and have a consulting company called Hawaii Public Policy Advocates, and I'm very happy to be part of the GuideHouse team in the role of assisting with reviewing rules, policies, and procedures. Back to you, Matt.

Great, thank you. Next slide, please. Thank you. Let's set the stage a little bit. Across the country, organizations, especially public sector, are facing increased workforce challenges, including recruitment difficulties, increased retirements and knowledge loss, changing employee expectations, and personal practices built around the 30-year employee. Current workforce trends seen across our public sector projects, outdated, ambiguous rules and policies hinder HR practices. Changing needs require re or upskilled employees as roles continue to shift over time. Increased prioritization of flexibility from job seekers, remote hybrid work, different schedules, et cetera. and those institutional knowledge gaps as tenured staff retire and employees change jobs. We understand that Maui County may experience many of these challenges, but through the lens of local conditions, which add another layer of complexity, we all understand Maui as high cost of living, housing, childcare, and healthcare, a geographically constrained labor pool combined with below average unemployment compared to the rest of the nation. And the 2023 wildfires exacerbated workforce shortages, created employee displacement and other personnel related challenges. The AlignHR project provides an opportunity to address these challenges holistically by modernizing rules and policies, evaluating current HR structures and processes, and creating a strategic roadmap for implementation, all following known best practices. Next slide, please. AlignHR strives to streamline hiring, strengthen retention, develop a more consistent HR service delivery model, both for individuals in the community receiving county services as well as county employees, and clarify workforce planning across the county. This project is designed to produce practical outcomes, not a report that'll end up on the shelf collecting dust. We've helped several public sector organizations improve

Thank you.

and address these challenging workforce issues. For example, with Los Angeles County of Education, also known as LACO in California, GuideHouse partnered with LACO to develop new HR methodologies, processes, and training programs that promote greater equity and consistency across the organization's classified and certificated workforce. The project focused on improving alignment between job families, classification process, compensation structures, and workforce frameworks. In the great state of Texas with Harrison, I'm sorry, with Harris County, we supported Harris County's Public Health Organization Transformation Initiative. It was designed to establish a centralized operating model for the organization. We developed staffing and organization models, consolidated service responsibilities, established performance management frameworks, and prepared personnel for adoption of new processes, enabling a sustainable and scalable service delivery organization. In my last example with Mariposa County, we partnered with the county on their first ever holistic organizational and operational assessment. As part of this effort, a core focus was on improving the hiring process for the county as well as modernizing the structure of the HR team. As a small rural county in California, Mariposa struggled to attract qualified candidates, a task made more difficult by inconsistent and cumbersome existing processes. We supported Mariposa in consolidating its HR functions into one team and ensuring a group in HR would be focused on recruiting. The team also worked with the county to completely overhaul their hiring process to ensure qualified candidates that did apply would not be lost due to an overly difficult, complex and long process. These project examples and several others are closely aligned to the outcomes listed on this slide that are our target goals for the AlignHR initiative. Next slide, please. AlignHR includes two interconnected workstreams. Workstream one focuses on rules, policies, and procedures. This effort reviews personnel-related administrative rules, policies, procedures, and related guidance to develop updated, practical, legally compliant, and easy to understand and use documents. Workstream 2 reviews current human resource practices, roles, processes, structure, and how HR services are supported by DPS and department personnel roles. Based on the review findings, we will develop a strategic plan and phased implementation designed to address the county's most pressing workforce challenges soonest. Together, these work streams review and strengthen how human resource services are organized, delivered, and supported across the county. Next slide, please. And I'd like to pass to Amber for the rest of the presentation. Thank you.

Thanks, Matt. I will walk us through the overall structure of our work along with the key activities and our approach and how we move from learning about the current environment to building practical, actionable solutions for implementation. So building on what you've heard so far from Cynthia earlier and then also from Matt leading us to this point, this is the details of the project. During the discover phase, which is where we currently are, so to the far left, We're conducting interviews, workshops, benchmarking, and document reviews to assess the current HR services, identify challenges, and uncover opportunities for improvement. As we move into the later phases of the project, ID8 model scale, our focus shifts from understanding the current state to developing those recommendations for the future state. This also includes revised rules, policies, and procedures, recommendations for an updated HR framework, and the development of the HR strategic plan that Matt just mentioned. And at the end of the day, the goal is to deliver practical implementation ready recommendations that will help the county strengthen HR service delivery and better support the community. Next slide, please. Organizational change management. I know that's a big word. This is one of the most important aspects of this project, and it's really understanding how change is implemented and how effective it is. It's really understanding that in order to have sustainable improvement, that does require effective change management. And it's only as successful as the leaders, managers, and employees are able to understand what is changing, why it matters, and how they'll be supported through the change. So you'll see here as we go through and look at our timeline in just a moment, our change management activities are integrated throughout the life cycle of the project. And this is to ensure that stakeholders are engaged, that we have consistent communication, any training needs are addressed, and that change is successfully adopted. The second year of the project is specifically dedicated to this, to helping the county implement those approved recommendations and ensure that adoption is successful of changes that are implemented through training and additional communication support. And as we close on the OCM, all things change management topic, before we start talking about timeline and where we're at today, the goal here is to help the county implement change with minimal disruption. We know that everyone has a heavy load, that everyone has a day job, and our goal here is to make the transition any change that possible. occurs as simple as possible. Also making sure that we prepare leaders, managers, and employees for long-term success. Next slide. Taking us into the project timeline. So you'll see here we have the months across the top. We have our work streams that Matt gave a description for on the left side of the screen there. This provides a high level overview of how the project is sequenced. The first 11 months of the project, I focus on stakeholder engagement, the assessment, developing recommendations and planning. That does include updates to the HR rules, policies and procedures and the county's HR framework and strategic plan. The two work streams do operate in parallel. The first one focused on improving those rules and policies and the other one on building the stronger framework. And then as I shared on the previous slide, the change management is embedded across the project and you see that down at the bottom, starting with the first month going all the way through year two. And the second year is where implementation training and change management support become our primary focus. And this is when the county starts moving from the approved recommendations into action. Next slide. Progress to date. While the project is still in its early stages, there has been meaningful progress that has already been made. The team has established a strong project framework and began the assessment of activities needed to support our future recommendations. We've submitted the stakeholder engagement and communication plan and key communication materials have also been drafted. The team has identified stakeholders that we should engage with. We've begun scheduling and conducting interviews and working sessions. And so that point, the team has completed 10 interviews and eight working sessions so far with approximately 70 plus additional interviews planned over the course of the next two months. We are also reviewing DPS rules, policies, bargaining agreements and key organizational documents that will inform our assessment. The next focus that we have is to continue scheduling those interviews and workshops and begin analyzing our findings for our assessment. I will note that the priority processes that have been identified for future mapping include recruitment and hiring, classification and reorganizations. Working together, how can you be involved? How can you help? This project depends on engagement from a variety of county leaders, managers, employees, labor partners, and elected officials. The more input that we receive from stakeholders across the county, the better position that our project team will be to understand what's working well, where challenges exist, and what type of solutions will be most practical for the county. For council members, there are two key ways to be involved. The first is we look forward to gathering your perspective through stakeholder interviews, which are expected to be scheduled in the coming weeks. And then second, the council can support the project by reinforcing aligned HR communications as they are distributed. This helps employees and stakeholders understand the purpose of the project, how they can be engaged, and what to expect as the work progresses. And we want this to be inclusive and informed, and stakeholder input is essential to developing recommendations that reflect what the county needs and support long-term workforce needs. And with that, I will say thank you for your time. We appreciate the council's support as AlignHR helps to strengthen Maui County's HR Foundation and better supports the workforce serving the community. And I'll turn it back over to the county team. Cynthia, I'm not sure if that's going to close or...

Thank you, Amber. Yeah, this is Josiah. Yeah, I'll close it off for us. Just a couple notes before closing. One is we are aware and have been in communication with the auditor's office regarding the item on their audit plan, and so we don't anticipate any conflicts or anything like that, and we'll continue working with the auditor. to make sure that we get them the information and what not necessary for that. So I wanted to make sure the council was aware of that and we'll continue to work collaboratively with them. The other thing I wanted to highlight, I know it's been kind of referenced, but we want to extend our sincere appreciation to Cynthia Rozell-Porter for everything that she's done. And this is her second to the last day, of course, but she's been very instrumental in helping to establish this project. And although it's been launched fairly recently, we've been working on this and discussing this for some time now. And of course, it takes a while to get a lot of pieces together, but we really appreciate all the work that she's put in and as well as her team has put into this. um i think just in closing there's kind of two elements for this i just wanted to highlight one professional one uh personal and i think from the personal side um all of us can reflect back to a time some uh a lot longer periods of time than others but um uh like when i was in high school i remember um everybody wanted to work for the county You couldn't get in. It was always the thing like you have to know somebody who knew somebody or whatever the case is. It was the place to be and people wanted to have a county job, wanted to be with the county through their entire career. may have had movement throughout the county during their career, but I think a great example of this is Cindy Sasada in my office, and I'll give a shout out to her, because she's on her second to the last day for retirement as well. um but she has been with the county for decades as well and uh you know that was uh the traditional county employee you know and i think reflecting on that um in relation to kind of why this project is so important is really helping to meet the needs and uh changing environment of our workforce um you know we need a comprehensive and holistic approach to this The structures and processes that were in place many years ago haven't changed with the times quickly enough to where we are today and what our workforce demands. I mean, things like telework, things like 410 schedules and all these kinds of things were never really discussed or a possibility back then. But now there's a lot of changes in the workforce demands. People don't stay with a job as long as they used to. There's generally more turnover, people looking for new things. And so we really need to kind of catch up to times and make sure that our structures in place meet the needs of our community of where we're at and building structures and processes and whatnot that will lead us into the future seamlessly as well. And then professionally, I think I would just note that nothing can really happen without all of our people. So that means bringing in new people to make sure that we're filling vacancies and supporting our existing processes in place. That means supporting our residents through all of the services and whatnot that the county provides that can only be done when we have a strong workforce in place. And they really are like what the county's best asset in and why we do so well in what we do. And so continuing to invest in that and setting up processes and whatnot, not just for the incoming applicant in terms of recruitment and whatnot, but making sure that we're supporting a stronger HR framework that supports our employees in place and provides really the opportunities for them and the support for them to be these long-term employees that can retain institutional knowledge and then continue to pass on and train kind of our next workforce. So we really wanna equip our teams. We wanna ensure that we're equipping our Department of Personnel Services and their teams so that they can also have the tools and structure needed to be able to meet the changing demands of our community and the growing workforce. And ultimately, a lot of the systems we have in place, Cynthia mentioned it earlier, we need to reflect that we're now a $1.6 billion organization. So things that may have worked or were okay in a smaller organization are not gonna be as efficient or work as well in a larger organization. And so we need to make sure that we're putting the tools and pieces in place to meet really where the county is and where the county's going. So I'll kind of close it on that. Chair, we're happy to address any questions and respond to the committee as needed, but we really appreciate the opportunity to be here today with you folks. And just wanted to also shout out Christy, working at Corporation Council. She's been a tremendous team member on this project to make everything happen. And then Diana, who's here today, and then Priya is also online from my office, have been really instrumental in getting this project going. So appreciate all of your folks' support and looking forward to the discussion today. Thank you.

Mahalo, Managing Director. And mahalo and congratulations, Ms. Sassata, on your second to last day too. Wow. And before I begin public testimony, I saw Committee Vice Chair Poulton, Tamara Poulton, join us at the beginning of the presentation, but I didn't want to interrupt. So aloha.

Aloha streaming live and direct from the Lahaina Residency Area Office here at 60 Kanui Street. This came from the playground blessing at the Rec Center Park. And I also am a lifelong county employee, started for the County of Hawaii in 2000. This is my 26th year. I started at an SR 13 and worked my way up to this year.

Well, thankfully it's not your second to the last day also. Members, please save your, not so fast. Members, please save your questions until public testimony is completed. Okay, and testifiers wanting to provide testimony should sign up At the meeting location, joining the online meeting via tiny URL link to connect to the Zoom meeting or call in to the phone number and enter the meeting code noted on today's agenda. Written testimony can be submitted via e-comment link at mawacounty.us front slash agendas. For individuals wishing to testify via Zoom, please use the raise hand function by clicking on the raise your hand button at the bottom of the bar. Staff will ask you to enable your microphone and video prior to your turn to testify. You can unmute yourself when you are called upon by clicking the microphone and camera buttons in the lower left portion of the screen. For those calling in, Please follow the prompts via phone. Press star nine to raise your hand, and when it's your turn to testify, press star six to unmute. Staff will add names to the testifier list in the order testifiers sign up or raise their hands. For those on Zoom, staff will lower your hand once your name is added. I will then call the name you're logged in under or the last four digits of your phone number when it's your turn to testify. Please ensure your name appears in Zoom as the name you prefer to be referred to or as anonymous if you wish to testify anonymously. If you're in person, please notify staff that you would like to testify anonymously. Otherwise, please state your name for the record at the beginning of your testimony. Oral testimony is limited to three minutes. Staff has been monitoring individuals joining today's meeting by phone and by video and we will do our best to take each person up in an orderly fashion. I will now call the first testifier. Testifier by phone, via phone, last four digits, 4945, followed by Johann Law. Okay, you'll press star six to unmute. You may proceed.

Okay, the computer lady said I'm unmuted. Can you hear me now?

We can hear you. Please proceed.

Hi, everybody. This is Jesse Law calling from an undisclosed location because I don't want the thought police to come and arrest me for thinking bad thoughts. I'll try to be respectful and polite at your meetings, Kaylee, as you set a good example. And so that's my segue right into The county employees, in my opinion, should be pono, because if you're going to be leaders, then you should lead honestly, and that comes into mind from . Talking about her, I read in the Hawaiian Constitution that it said the same thing, that employees should be pono. So without saying any names, I think you guys know who you are. I got lucky and found a quiet place where the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining so that I could hear the meeting. And I appreciate everybody working there. Oh, so I'll just make it quick. So I'm trying not to use my whole three minutes because I know you got a lot of work to do, Keoni. Very happy to hear your voice. I wish I could be there to see you, but I'm under duress from certain members of the court counsel office and lawyers and police officers that will try to arrest me and put me in jail for participating in a meeting. So I think I'm safe to say at least one name because he is not part of the county yet, but he's a part of the I just had a very unpleasant experience at the Kahului Airport. I went in to see Marvin Moniz, and he acted like he was busy. He had to go do something. And then when I told him I'd come back, I was trying to be polite. And then when I came back, you know, sheriffs were waiting for me. And now I'm also banned from the Kahului Airport by dirtbag Moniz. So don't vote for him. Aloha. That's it.

Okay. Any questions for our testifier? And then I'll just, mahalo for your testimony, and I'll just remind our testifiers to exercise decorum during our meetings. Mahalo. Our next testifier is Johan Lal.

Good afternoon. I've gone through the county hiring process I think five or six times. I've been offered a job three times and I accepted a job twice at the county. I'm pretty familiar with the whole thing. And so I have some common sense suggestions. One of them, so everyone I think recognizes the issue with pay. I think every council member has mentioned in meetings like the salaries are an obstacle. I remember a while back you guys had a presentation from the lifeguards and they said the same thing. You're trying to hire people who can make twice as much money working construction and stuff like that. One thing is I realized when I left the county and went to work for University of Hawaii is the rules are pretty similar between the counties, the state, and UH. One thing is you often hear that there's no flexibility in the pay that can be offered or the grade of the job or the step. From my understanding and looking at the rules, the starting pay or the pay that a job is posted at can be anywhere within that range of steps. And so like you can start a job higher than the bare minimum or like a few steps above the minimum and you can get a lot more applicants. The issue I think that HR has with that is that it creates an equity issue where people who have been around for a while they can be at a lower pay than a brand new person. So that's another thing that should be looked at is how do you keep people by paying them more? And there is also in that realm a lot of flexibility in raising people through the grades. You don't just have to go up through your step increases. You can increase pay if someone has good performance and stuff like that. And I believe Jordan Molina has discussed that at a meeting. I can't remember what the topic was exactly, but I think the departments and The people who are actually trying to do the hiring want more flexibility, and per the rules, they actually do have a lot of flexibility. So as much as possible, that should be allowed, is paying people more. Also, the qualifications, I think, should be looked at, because I know a lot of people who work for Zayad at the planning department who don't have degrees, and so that limits the degree to which they can work. uh move up and so if if a job doesn't actually require a degree uh you know you should allow substituting experience Stuff along those lines that just makes sense. Also, the drug testing and things like that can be an obstacle. I know someone who came to work for, he was hired by the planning department and he had a medical marijuana approval and that became an issue when he got drug tested because even though it was allowed, the drug tests, the rules required that he not be given the job. He went through appeals and he ended up having a job created for him i believe so there's like stuff like that where it's like you know do we need to drive test people like if they're not in a job that's not you know operating every machinery and stuff like that uh do the physicals have to be like super strict um and then of course like the pay and flexibility and and being able to offer more um And another obstacle that I've heard from... Johan, can you please conclude? Give one minute to conclude.

We're not hearing the bell.

There should be more flexibility with the people doing the hiring to get the list of applicants rather than having them be filtered heavily by the HR folks. And that's it. Thank you.

Questions for our testifiers? Member Bolton.

Was it the engineering supplement that you were talking about for Director Molina?

I don't remember. That doesn't ring a bell, but I just remember he wanted to pay people more and he kind of wasn't allowed to.

Okay, thank you.

Any other questions, members? Seeing none, we'll thank you for your testimony. Okay, that brings us to the end of the testifier list. If anyone wishes to testify, you may please unmute at this time and proceed with your testimony. Okay, hearing no one speaking up or unmuting their video, we'll close public testimony and continue to accept written testimony into the record. Any objections? Okay, mahalo members. Okay, public testimony is now closed. Okay, let's see, where we at?

Okay, mahalo. Hear the bell, I don't know if, It went off on your side, but online we couldn't hear it.

Yeah, I tried to put it into the mic. It didn't work. I'm not going to put a timer on you folks.

Unless you get carried away, then we'll do a timer.

I'm just going to let you use the honor system and see how well you do there. OK. Mahalo to our resource persons for the presentation. Members, I will now open the floor for questions and discussion, and we'll try it out first round without a timer. Sounds like Member Matangan might abuse his first round. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, members, by show of hands. Committee Vice Chair Poulton, followed by Member Matangan.

Thank you. I'm super stoked that we're getting help with this. It's been a long time coming. My first question is, in previous talks with the personnel department, they were looking also into state legislation that guided the way that they do things. I was wondering if this guide house or Align HR is going to be, I saw in the presentation that you're looking for choke points or things like that. Is that included in their state obstacles or blocks or things like that?

I am Council Member Potts and so I think I can respond to your question as yes if there's anything that we identify in or if they identify through this deeper discussion with stakeholders that is the plan to have that type of legislation enacted but you know that's a longer road in respect to that. So hopefully we can just look at our rules and if there's anything obviously that we can improve in the legislative rules and HRS, statutorily we can look at doing that too.

Okay, I just wanted to bring it up that like, you know, when we speak about it at the Hawaii State Association of Colonies, it seems to be like, you know, civil service reform is needed, but nobody knows where to start. And so I guess a question for GuideHouse or for you folks, is there any, have you guys been doing work with other jurisdictions in Hawaii or even the state, or it's basically... whoever contracts you, which is only us in the state or has anyone else contracted you folks?

Thank you, Council Member, for the question. Yes, the answer is yes, GuideHouse is doing work with other parts of the state. I'll have Miranda give a couple quick examples. But our practice is international in scope. And we do a significant amount of HR and workforce type projects similar to this across state, states, counties, the federal government, as well as private organizations. But Miranda, if you just want to give a couple examples of some current projects, I know we've got ongoing outside of this one, please.

Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. So as far as other projects that we have going on here in the state of Hawaii, in addition to another project we have with the county of Maui, we're also working with the city and county of Honolulu, the Department of Transportation Services. And then at the state level, we have contracts with the Department of Transportation, as well as work that we're doing with Department of Industrial Relations, so DLIR with their unemployment insurance.

Okay. And I guess, I mean, maybe it's jumping ahead in your phases, but like in past work that we've done for other clients, how have you reduced the hiring interval, like from, say, 90 days to align with private sector? Like sometimes you get hired on the spot.

Sure. Thank you again. I can speak to that a little bit. Most of our projects with HR and or workforce related do focus on, I'll just call it the hiring cycle in some way, shape or form, right? The goal of that work and frankly this work is to reduce the hire time, provide more transparency, for the applicant, i.e., them understanding what step they are in the process, etc., and also focus on the pool of applicants to really promote that the best and most qualified folks are the folks that are that are applying. You know, public sector organizations pretty much universally frankly have more rules, regulations, and constraints tied to their HR processes. So I know it's challenging to get public sector hiring time down to some of those, you know, real short private sector examples. But we've worked projects, I've led projects where we've cut the hiring time by 30%. a couple of examples, maybe even 50%, with an understanding of the fact that there are multiple parties involved in the hiring process, multiple stakeholders, there are HR entities, there are hiring managers, et cetera. So getting alignment across all the folks that are involved and a mutual understanding around what the goal timeframe should be for each step, as well as the overall process itself is really important.

Okay, my last question for this round, so I don't turn into a hog. Is there any possible way that even though this is civil service, like through state laws and county rules and whatnot, that somehow we can tie the wages to the cost of living, like what it actually costs to live here? Because if we're not paying a living wage, then I'm not sure what we're doing right. And sometimes we are told like, oh, they're doing the same thing in Kauai or someplace else, but they're getting paid more. So I'm not sure how that occurs as well.

Managing director.

Thank you, Chair. I would just add the scope of that is maybe a little bit more on like a classification and compensation kind of analysis. I think in feedback that I would anticipate we're going to be receiving as a part of this project, that that item will be flagged as one area that will need additional follow-up. But the council has, you know, worked, of course, we have our collective bargaining agreements. I think all of them now are all essentially in effect. And so, you know, there'll be a future phase for that kind of next round of collective bargaining, but that will be kind of more on a compensation classification analysis.

Thank you. I have a follow-up, but I'll write it down so I don't hog the time.

Dan, that is how we share. Mahalo, Committee Vice Chair Fulton, Member Batonga, and followed by Member Johnson.

Thank you, Chair. So, MD, I think I heard you say that you guys are collaborating with the auditor on this project. Can I confirm that the recommendations from the Fraud Risk Assessment are being incorporated into the hiring process?

Thank you, Chair. Just to, you know, I guess explain what collaborate or whatever. It's just like we're not working in conjunction. It's two separate projects, but we're working collaboratively to make sure that there's nothing, like we're not overstepping them or whatever the case is, and then that any information that they need or whatnot that we'll provide. So I just want to clarify that, that they're not like a project manager in relation to this. And then I think offhand, I can think of like one thing from the fraud risk assessment in terms of where it brought forward identification for maybe more structure or policy or whatever around like background checks or that kinds of things. And that's items I think that we've already been, already hearing and or anticipating from stakeholders as a part of how we can shore up kind of the hiring process and management of employees following hiring.

Thank you. Then I had a question similar to what Member Paulton asked regarding what the county can do independently versus what needs to be done in coordination with the state and the other counties. From the presentation, I was not clear on what we're allowed to go alone on. Can you provide more detail on what you guys are focusing on? Because some of the biggest concerns that departments have always had were those pay scales, the job classifications, even creating new positions. And I anticipate those are gonna need to be done in coordination with the state and the other counties. But the reorgs, for example, those are things that are internal to the county. So can you give us a better sense of what is encompassed in this project versus what is something that will have to be done

I'll try to answer your question. Thank you for the question. So this project is looking at our admin rules, our policies and procedures, and how they align with our office, with all the different departments. Because the county has grown so much, we've had, you know, just turnover. It's kind of looking at what we do, what every department does when it comes to hiring. In addition to that, it's kind of creating that landscape where everyone is doing and operating the same way.

Okay, can you give me a better sense of what's encompassed within the administrative rules and the policies and procedures that you guys are taking a look at?

So it's the admin rules of the Department of Personnel Services. So it covers pay administration, classification, recruitment, performance evaluations, training, I don't have a list, but there's like 14 chapters. It's like 102 pages of rules. Okay, thank you.

And then I guess since it wasn't included in there, is departmental reorgs part of this? Because that is part of the hiring process.

So departmental reorgs are part of this process. We're looking at it. However, and that's part of the HR process, but it doesn't belong to personnel services. So we're looking at everything that touches HR and classification. So yes, that would be included.

Understood. Thank you, Chair.

I don't need a timer. You're all doing great. Member Johnson, followed by Charney.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you everybody for joining us today. Very important discussion. I am really happy that we're working on this because it seems to be such a log jam in how we get the county to get its work done. Some of the things that you, I mean, seeing the presentations, I heard a lot about admin rules and policies and procedures and how do they align. We're a growing county, I understand all that. And then there's a little comment on research benefits slash hiring incentives. I think that's a bit of a focus that I'd like to maybe emphasize a little bit more. It didn't seem that, maybe you guys can tell me differently, but it seemed like, what are we doing wrong as a county, our bureaucracy? I also want to say, let's look at what the workers want. One thing I'm always pushing for is daycare for our workers, but maybe some folks don't need daycare. They need adult daycare for their grandma and grandpa, and then they can go to work, that kind of thing. It might be a little bit nuanced. Somebody doesn't have children. Maybe they are not interested in that. They're more interested in maybe a gym membership. Those are small details that I think we wouldn't know unless we actually go out and interview our workforce. So my question is, are you guys going to kind of get into what they want?

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Johnson, for the question. I feel like you might have been listening into my stakeholder engagement interview because that is a lot of the same things I shared with the group in terms of, you know, there are, of course, processes, procedures, rules, whatever, then there's compensation and whatnot. And then there's kind of this other element of just how do we care for the employee and help meet their personal needs so that we can make sure that they can help meet our professional needs. And so, yeah, that was a big part of my discussion with the engagement team, just making sure that, you know, we understand kind of that this is a really a holistic approach to employee management and, you know, engagement, and that it really goes beyond just like words on a page.

You know, I think that's great that you guys are doing that. I love that. A story that reminds me of that needs to be worked on this is that I know a person, he has a business degree, 10 years management experience. He applied to be a county worker entry level 16 times. And on 17 times, they hired him. But still, I mean, man, that's... I don't know how to have an open sign, you know, like welcoming sign when you've got to go through our process 16 times. You're not going to get the, it shouldn't be that way. That's all I'm going to say. So hopefully we can work on that. Hopefully it's not like state law or county code. It should be something internally that I think we can fix. And if that's the case, I'd love to hear that. And then I'll leave me another question if you guys want to address anything like that.

No, I mean, I guess all I'll say to that is, I mean, every situation is so unique. So, I mean, can't address that situation specifically, but obviously a whole part of this project is to make sure that we can get in the workforce and help streamline the process for them, make departmental jobs easier, make things clearer for, you know, our human resources staff and others who have to do things so that I mean, the name, I can't claim credit for the name because I actually don't know who on our team came up with it, but it truly is like aligning HR across the board so that everyone is in alignment on what needs to happen and what needs to be done so that we can make sure we take care of people appropriately.

But my final question is in regards to admin rules, policy procedures, all internal things, I understand that. Our strength as a body is changing county code. And I'm willing to work with the administration if the county code is in your way because we look at our budgets every year and we've got priority this and priority that. And if it comes back that we don't have capacity, that positions are not there to do the things that we're trying to prioritize as a body, Oh, I can't tell you how frustrating that is. Because most of my priorities come community-led, right? The folks wanted this. And when I come back and say, we don't have engineers to do this thing, that's not how. I don't want to do it like that. So if there's any legislation that you guys think could help streamline this process, sign me up. Let's talk. I'm sure members would also want to have that discussion. That's kind of our big thing. But that's my final thing if you want to add to that.

Yeah, and thank you, Chair. Really appreciate that offer. I think in addition to that, at some point along the way here, you know, there may be requests for additional resources to help meet different needs. And then the other element, I would say, not just the county code, but what we'll really lean on you folks to assist with is This upcoming legislative session is probably gonna be too early, but in future legislative sessions, I think we'll really ask for your folks' assistance as we get information and everything and identify bottlenecks and whatnot on ways that maybe we can work with HSAC and our state legislative partners on maybe helping clear some of the stuff up that can assist all the counties and the state collectively. All right, thank you so much, Managing Director. Thank you, Chair.

Mahalo, Member Johnson. Member Lee. Thank you. And then followed by Member Sagimura.

Okay, thank you, Chair, and thank you for taking this up. As you know, it's been a high priority for the council, this revamping the civil service system and management of grants. So in this case, when I was on the Civil Service Commission, one of the things we did was ask staff to do a survey of all the departments, because that's where the answers lie. And it doesn't lie necessarily with the directors. It lies with the people who actually do the qualifying and hiring and the recommendations for hiring. The directors don't go through that necessarily. So if we could get a good handle on what are the roadblocks for these people, it's not so much the rules and regulations, You know, that can be fixed any time. But the human part of it, the relational part of it, is of the utmost importance. And so by getting the information from the people who actually do the work, you will know exactly where the bottlenecks are and what can be done And I was gonna ask the vendor, sorry, what is that, guide something? Guide house, okay. So you've done this before. What are typical problems and typical solutions? Anybody?

Thank you, Council Member. Could you be a little bit more specific? You're talking specifically about, for example, the hiring process and those, sorry, go ahead.

And speaking to the workforce, people who do the hiring within the department divisions and offices, what are those, some of the typical problems and how have you helped them solve them?

Sure. I'll give you a few examples. With some of our clients and customers, there isn't either a piece of complex technology or I've even used simple Excel trackers. There isn't an entity or a group that is tracking the separate steps in the hiring process. For example, how long a particular STEP has been waiting, let's say for engineers, they're in the scoring phase. How long has those folks been in the scoring phase for that particular vacancy?

Thank you. We have the limited time to ask questions. Let me switch over.

Sure.

Well, I'm not hearing the answers I was hoping for. You know, this is kind of going down a long and winding road. I take the short road. Yeah, right to the point. Now, Cynthia. The people who actually do the hiring, those are the people I think we need to really focus on and get, because you have day-to-day answers, not academic, it's just this is how it works and this is how it doesn't work. But the bottom line, which everybody avoids, is the issues with the union and collective bargaining. Isn't that true?

Thank you for the question. So talking about the hiring process, so the union's not really involved in the hiring process. We collectively bargain for salaries and benefits and rights, but they're not involved in the hiring process.

Okay, not the hiring process necessarily. However, let's say engineers, are they EMs?

No.

And they're all union as well?

Yes, bargaining unit 13.

Would that be something that we would want to reconsider in the future? The areas that we have the hardest time filling?

So in collective or in the HRS, I mean there's rules and classification like what's a bargaining unit, one employee, they're a blue collar. What's a BU2? So an engineer wouldn't be excluded managerial because they're not excluded managerial. They would be covered by BU30.

And the laws can change is what I'm saying. If we can't hire people enough in that particular area, we have to make changes.

Correct. So we did a few years ago, probably like three years ago, we did a supplemental agreement. You're all familiar with supplemental agreements where we increased the pay, the salary structure for the engineers.

Is it possible to revisit that to increase it even further?

Sure, if the county's got the money. But in this case, we did collectively with all the other jurisdictions. Okay, we have money.

Yeah. Okay. In your department, you shouldn't worry about that. That's our department, worrying about the money. Yeah, really. You figure out the solutions, and we figure out how to pay for it. Yep. Okay, thank you.

Mahalo, Charlie. Members, Sugi Mura. And then again, members online, just raise your hand when you're ready. Okay, Member Cook. Followed by Member Cook. Kalamai.

Great discussions. I love this. I want to say finally, finally, finally. So thank you, member, well, Josiah Nishita, managing director, for guiding us through this process. As through budget, all the members have heard that whenever the department comes forward, they always blame personnel. for this for that and why things don't happen. So I hope then, in future budget sessions, and by working through this, we will then find solutions so that we can get things done, and not have this these roadblocks that we've been hearing about. And I I do remember the discussion with Jordan Molina when he was talking about, it was about engineers that Johann Law was remembering. I think it was regarding engineers and the frustrations and all the departments that have engineers. DWS has somehow figured out how to make it happen. So that was an accomplishment. And I don't know if personnel got involved so that you can replicate that with the other departments. Like managing director, when I was growing up, my uncle, Jimmy Izumi, Uncle Jimmy, he was part of personnel services. And when we had our family gatherings, our Kashiwa family gatherings, he would talk about working for the county in the same way that Josiah heard about it growing up. So I always thought, oh, yeah, we want to work for the county of Maui because of the benefits. And everybody was always talking about retirement. And when you're young, you don't know what retirement means, but Uncle Jimmy said, so it must be good, you know? So we were brought up with that mindset. But what I would like to know is, in your presentation, you talked about how other municipalities, and you have state transportation. Why is it in the whole state system, you only have transportation and not transportation? other departments? Or how do we? Do you have an answer?

Yes, I can take this one. In addition, so I think you mentioned like out of all of our all of the various places within the state, you know, the White Department of Transportation. I think that was one that aligned really well with some of our other service offerings. So what we're doing for them at Department of Transportation is really more related to Act 100 compliance with the state. In addition to... What is that? What is Act 100? Oh, yeah, of course. So Act 100 was established, I believe, don't quote me on this, in the 90s. for each department to, each department is mandated at the state level to provide a report on, I'm sorry?

Act 100, Session Law of 1999 requires all state departments and agencies to submit annual reports detailing their long-term goals, quantifiable objectives, policies, and performance measurements.

So I guess then what you're saying is that GuideHouse, what you did was help them comply with the law, with your process. So you would think more departments. I'm just thinking why more departments are not using you is my thought because I would think that that would align us with them. The challenges that I have experienced for I think maybe three years, I've been trying to get 911 dispatchers to be recognized as first responders. And they were part of a clerical category within the union. And if you know what first responders do, which is what 911 does, I never thought that they, you know, so I've been on this mission to try to get them to get more pay is what it is and to recognize their skills as they really are. It is very difficult. And I wonder if you would be able to assist me as I try to move this forward because I'm not going to give up. I've had several meetings with my staff and with personnel and with HGEA, that's their union, but just trying to get this, it's very interesting because there's layers and layers of approval that has to happen even statewide because there are other 911 dispatchers. But would your services be able to help me with this?

Managing Director.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah, so each situation is so unique. The specific situation being brought up right now, I guess, my understanding is that those discussions have taken place previously. with HGA and in relation to, so obviously there would need to be alignment and agreement in terms of releasing, I guess a class or whatever from, And then the legislature would also have to create a new bargaining unit. So there's things that would kind of have to happen outside of us to, you know, facilitate something specific to that. But, you know, I think what we're trying to do is really like control what we can control, fix what we can fix, identify those other barriers and whatever, and then we can continue to follow up as the years go on.

Okay, so this is not the process that I would look towards. But managing director, I did try to change legislative, do something and put them in another category. But the legislature said, I think they were trying to get them to be a separate bargaining unit, but the legislature said no, so my bill did not even move forward. So we're going through this other process, which is... through many meetings. So thank you for knowing about it. And I really would like to help them still. I like the idea about telework and the 10 hour workday as it would help people. And I love the idea of providing childcare and you're right, as we may need to take care of our parents and it is our right that we should do that for all that they did for us. So I like all of that. And if we can incorporate that into this discussion, I think we would be a stronger county and get to the place that both managing director and myself heard years ago about Maui County being the place to work. and we can increase our skill worker. Thank you.

Mahalo, Member Sugimura. Member Cook, and we'll go next to Member Sinensi. Okay.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, managing director, administration, and all of you for this program that you're working on. Welcome. You are very, very welcome and encouraged. This is something that is my fourth year on the council and the Department of Personnel Services, the challenges in general to basically be able to hire, reward, retain has been an impediment. So I have three things that I'm that have been an issue and you can comment on them or just hopefully things that'll be addressed. One was the direct interview aspect. So I work with Public Works, Environmental Management and Department of Water Supply. So the engineering and the technical staff that's necessary for them to be able to bring forth people, propose people, interview, and then have them go through the qualifications with Department of Personnel Services. Currently, people apply and there seems to be a filtration that is keeping the potential employees at arm's length from the people who are actually going to be managing them. Minimizing that, I think, would be a great asset to enable the departments to actually be able to clarify what they want. And part of that is the MQ, the minimum requirements, minimum qualifications. That definition, I think, from what I've heard, because I don't do hiring, has been somewhat of an impediment. Because someone might have... great engineering skills, communication skills, experience, but not basically be able to check every single one of the boxes on the MQ. And then therefore they're not even referred because quote, they don't qualify. And the third thing, and this is, I recall, but I think it was public works and the directors request to be able to give merit pay to highly productive engineers because they have a whole lot of work and to be able to encourage and reward the people who are really getting the work done. So that was that issue that's been going around, but it was merit pay for high performance and director, I mean, Department of Personnel Services apparently couldn't comply with that because of certain roles. So anyway, that's my, the three things that from my perspective as a retired contractor and business owner are the kind of great factors that are inhibiting. Well, we all want to hire people, people want jobs, we need things done. So I'm really excited about your being able to assist us and making it more efficient. Any comments?

Thank you, Councilmember, for the examples and the comments. I will say and understand acutely that the hiring process is a significant challenge today. I think everybody is and we will be focusing a significant amount of time at the front end of this project on that process. We've got time blocked next month where we're going to lay out the current process, build a revised process, start to socialize that with the departments, interest holders like yourself, and understand that there are, again, multiple parties that own different steps in that process, right? DPS owns some, the departments own some. You know, I think it's going to be really critical to get everybody on the same proverbial sheet of music and what they're responsibilities are with those processes. Otherwise, I've seen it far too many times where it ends up being a little bit of a figure-pointing activity, and we don't want that to get in the way of progress. and confident that we can make some really significant short-term improvements around getting those applicants, those highly qualified applicants through the process.

Great. Thank you for that. I want to acknowledge through this discovery and research, we're gonna basically find things that are bureaucratic structural impediments that anybody currently in the positions don't necessarily have control over and that legislatively both county and state, we have the opportunity and potential responsibility to assist changing those roles that might be working against us instead of for us. So I agree. It's not appropriate to point fingers at anybody because everybody's doing their best. This is where we are. And I'm really excited. And thank you. That's all I have, Chair.

Mahalo, Member Cook. Member Sinensi.

Mahalo chair and Mahalo to the guide house crew for that presentation. I did hear Matt at the beginning in his opening remarks, speak to the local challenges of high costs of living here in Maui County. And so I just kind of wanted to see How does the group intend to maybe address some of those issues? I know that housing is a big issue. We can't house a workforce if they're not able to afford any housing in the county. I know Chair Rollins-Fernandez has always spoken to HUD guidelines and how even the HUD guidelines have not kept up with Maui County prices. How do we try to adjust our salaries with these types of higher cost of living, particular housing? For now, that would be my first question.

Thank you for the question. I do want to start, and I know we've mentioned in our briefing that we're kind of at the front end of this project. We have conducted a few interviews so far. Salaries compensation has been a subject that comes up often, right? I do think it is important and a few council members have touched on this to a certain degree so far that. Whenever possible, we take a step back and talk and look more broadly around the whole concept of total rewards, right? Compensation, regular compensation, salary, hourly pay is important, but how are we also rewarding and recognizing our employees for How are we motivating our employees overall through other means that we have direct control over? Josiah did talk about I will say that a formal comp study is currently outside of the purview of this current work. I will say, however, though, we do want to look at how Other types of incentives, recruiting bonuses, for example, et cetera, are applied across the county. I'm betting we're probably going to see some significant departmental differences there. But I do believe that compensation should be a focus at some point. But I think we can all agree that that will be a medium and longer term initiative to change that.

Yeah, and I know Director Rosso-Porter spoke to expanding some of the newer departments and creating those EP positions normally takes six months to a year just to create these positions. a lot of our vacant positions are entry level positions. So even at the entry level, we can employees can't make a living at these entry level positions that pay $36,000 a year, $40,000 a year. I mean, you would need the income to survive here would be upwards of 90 to 100,000 a year. How do we Do we change somebody's entry level positions? Do we do in-house training that they can step quicker? Mr. Law in his testimony mentioned about having, we can hire at any of the steps. um i mean if that's true or not but how do we move people along or help them to to get that training to get up to those steps where they can afford to to live them out sure um you know we are we are at the beginning of this project we are still gathering information um so honestly it would be

Reckless for me to get too specific around guaranteed solutions at this point. But I will say this. I know legislative changes have been mentioned so far. Understand those are complex and take more time. um it will probably take working on some legislative changes and then also looking at policies which are much easier faster to to change and control within the county we have maximum flexibility we can change

some policies i believe pretty quickly right that's a great idea oftentimes will the council will put in funds to to hire outside groups to give us to give us some recommendations to give us uh an action plan and oftentimes we don't get any or or any recommendations for us to follow if you guys can come up with a list of potential policies that we could do at HR, then we could, as policymakers, we can act on those. So I appreciate your time today. Thank you, Chair.

Mahalo, Member Sinensi. Okay, and then I'll go. Okay, so I'm Mahalo Director, Rosal Porter, Managing Director, team, and guide house. But I know like in your opening remarks, I think you hit the nail on the head and in getting us to this point, we have to acknowledge that we need to grow. And so thank you for getting us to this point. I think my first question is, with director leaving, who's planning to shepherd this contract through?

Thank you, Chair. So this project is a joint project between, well, department management's leading it, but Department of Personnel Services is a major component of this, as well as Department Corporation Council. From my team, Diana, who's here today, is helping to shepherd this along. And Kainéa and others, Christy and others, and Priya, who's online as well, will be here still to make sure that we're continuing to drive things forward. And, you know, for my purposes, I think there's a lot of focus, I think, discussion here today on kind of the hiring process or whatnot. But I just want to make sure that, you know... we're keeping focus on it's like the totality of the employee experience here, right? It's like we wanna make sure we're retaining them, we wanna make sure that we have the right processes in place. Some of the reasons why undergoing this to begin with is we really started down a process of trying to update certain policies and seeing that there's need for really kind of that process to occur across the board. And, you know, this will help us establish accountability. You know, I think there's obviously a lot of things that need to be changed or could be reevaluated, but To be fair to DPS, there's accountability across the board. It's not just with the Department of Personnel Services, it's with our individual departments. We talk about this all the time when we have contractors come in and they say, hey, my permit took 500 days, and we go look at their permit and we're like, okay, but you had it for 350 of those days. So similarly, we have situations that we deal with where we need that accountability to make sure that if positions are desperately needed and departments are requesting for them, that not only are we revamping kind of how DPS operates and the rules and policies and procedures that they're under, but also departments are held accountable to make sure that they're not a bottleneck or um gap in that process as well and not sitting on lists not contacting applicants not following through uh with hiring letters or anything like that and then on the back end that they're providing the kind of support and whatnot uh that's needed for employees throughout the uh the entire life cycle of employees so thank you chair mahalo managing director uh so many questions to now dovetail off of um

Okay, so for each department, they kind of have like an HR person each department. And will GuideHouse be also looking at that structure and providing recommendations on how internally we have like a centralized DPS, but also decentralized by having an HR specialist in each department?

Thank you, Chair. Yes, departments do have in various forms, some form of DPO and of course, bigger departments have kind of more support services and smaller departments have smaller support services. They all work collaboratively with the Department of Personal Services. I think one of the things, again, you guys must be listening into my conversations with GuideHouse. But one of the things, you know, identified that, you know, I would like to see evaluated and, you know, whatnot is how that could look like. And it could be a variety of forms. But, you know, we've grown as an organization. And so an opportunity now, as you folks are aware, that we'll be working on kind of the new facilities. facility for DPS and maybe what additional space can bring to the ability to kind of provide additional services, training, tools to not just DPS, but also how can that facilitate kind of assistance countywide. So I think there's a lot of different mechanisms at play and possibilities, and I think we'll get further refined as time goes on.

Mahalo, and hopefully a facility with better air conditioning. Yeah? Okay. Okay, and in the timeline, so the Workstream 1 and Workstream 2 will be completed or is projected to be completed within the fiscal year in April. And then there's like a year two for implementation. The contract itself is a one-year contract, potentially a two-year contract, or just a one?

Well, I don't know if Christy wants to...

It's a two-year contract with the option to extend for three additional one-year terms.

Okay.

Mahalo for that.

Okay. All right. And then this is for GuideHouse. Have you folks met with Civil Service Commission yet?

We have not yet. They are on our list.

Okay, I would have thought that would have been maybe like one of the first folks that you would have met with. Okay.

I'm looking at our interview schedule. Apologies. It's going to be happening in the next couple of weeks.

Okay, because they're the oversight body of DPS.

Correct.

So I imagine a lot of the recommendations would also have to go through them for approval and adoption?

uh thank you chair um i mean that that could be different depending on kind of what's being updated or things like that i mean uh i think just one thing i just want to know about the schedule is um we do have individuals like uh cynthia who are going to be leaving shortly and we want to make sure we're collecting all of that institutional knowledge and everything before uh people leave so you know some of the schedule kind of reflects that to make sure that there's there's certain time constraints and others um you know given that okay mahalo for the insights okay and then um i think in in your response to my first question

or second question about how to improve is the intention to also receive recommendations on software and technology. When we go to NACO conferences, there's so many different vendors and in just the past three years, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of software that are offering AI and just different It's really grown a lot also.

Thank you, Council Member, for the question. I will say technology is going to be an area we're going to be reviewing also with processes, laws, rules, statutes, policies, etc.

Okay, I have more questions but I'll end on this one and then it's, how long have we been going? 1.30, so about an hour and a half. I'll take our 15-minute recess and then we'll return and I see Committee Vice Chair Paulton with her hand up and we'll just go by a raise of hands. Okay, so if someone would like to meet with GuideHouse to provide perspectives, how would that happen? Or do you folks choose only?

Thank you, Chair. So, you know, as part of the initial process, we identified a number of stakeholders. I think, you know, over 100 that they had identified previously, which includes like HR personnel within departments. It includes like, you know, council members, Civil Service Commission, you know, many others. We do have a... that was released publicly, alignhr.co.maui.hr.us. And we can provide that again after if needed, but that would be a mechanism that people could also email in and provide, you know, recommendations questions things for clarification things like that and the project team will receive that directly as well so obviously we're not going to be able to like interview everybody who's ever had a worked for the county or had a problem applying for the county or whatever the case is but that is a kind of more broader mechanism to ensure that you know people can submit things to even if they don't get identified as a traditional stakeholder

Mahalo, Managing Director. Okay, I know I said we're going to take a break, but by show of hands, how many more council members would like more questions in a round two? Just raise hands. Because if it's just Member Bolton and I, then maybe we'll just ask our questions and adjourn. Okay. All right. We're not going to take our recess. I'll just call on Committee Vice Chair Poulton, and then any last questions, including myself, and then we'll adjourn. Okay. Committee Vice Chair Poulton.

Thank you. Just following up on my last round, when the managing director mentioned about the collective bargaining agreements, I know part of the process is each county gets to send their representative and then sometimes the state has four votes and each county has one vote and they plead their case. I just was wondering, as we, County of Maui, plead our case, does it have to be like, don't give these guys raises? Can it be, this is how much housing costs in Maui, this is how much it costs in West Maui, and maybe you should give these guys a bump? Can it be like that when we send our person to the collective bargaining? And is it, or how do we prep our side to send collective bargaining?

Thank you, Chair, thank you for the question. So when we go to negotiations, we're negotiating, I mean, internally with the other jurisdictions. So we take our priorities, we share it with the other jurisdictions, and we all vote, like what the proposals are gonna be, and oftentimes, it's the state that carries the four votes or the six votes depending on the bargaining unit. And so I think the legislature, so statutorily there are, supplemental agreements that we can enter into with the bargaining unit once we have a contract, once we have a master agreement. And so we did that for the supplemental agreements for the engineering pay, the salary schedule. We did that for the 100% medical for the HMSA and Kaiser that you guys were a part of. And so there is that opportunity. to do something like that, so it wouldn't necessarily be us negotiating by ourselves with the union. It would be after the contract is settled and we're in a master agreement that we could enter into specific agreements. We did one for the BU3 and BU4 recently, so we moved them up a step. you know, maybe it, you know, it was a 4% increase July 1st, they got another 4% increase. So that kind of moved the needle on for them a little bit. And, you know, maybe that's not significant enough. They're not in the 90, you know, thousand percent, you know,

i mean it's hard to call it significant when we also raise wastewater nine percent water fees five percent all these other like rent hud even raised their rents like for light tech projects 200 i mean when you're talking about a four percent increase when we see what like gas costs and all of that it's It's barely keeping pace, just seeing. The other question, I mean, I guess, you know, I would like us to just send a representative, even though we're like one vote out of maybe eight, just to see the realities of the situation and like, you know, Somebody can go into the tourism industry or some other industry like waiting tables and make so much more. And especially like some of the secretaries and clerk jobs, they're essential. Like, you know, they deal with voting and things like that, which is kind of a big deal. But yeah. I guess, you know, and being part of H-SAC, these types of positions are hard to fill throughout all the municipalities. And I would hope like we see the correlation of, you know, a lot of people would want to take a job that would better the community that they themselves live in but not at the expense of their own household being able to like afford school fees like bus fees or school lunch or whatever it is you know like people want to make the place they live a better place to live but you gotta you gotta eat Dogs gotta eat. The other question I had was in regards to performance evaluations. Maybe I did hear the presenter mention that and how When I used to have performance evaluations or to give performance evaluations, a lot of the problems sometimes in doing them timely was people would be chronically absent or schedules didn't mix up. I was in a Monday through Friday kind of work, but how has GuideHouse been able to improve performance evaluation and things like that in other jurisdictions?

Thank you, Councilmember. Appreciate the question. I think we can all agree for focused on employee growth, it is really important for individuals to get the feedback that they need to continue to either grow in their current job and or prepare for their next job. I do think there's opportunities at the county to push for a higher completion rate. In a perfect world, I'd love every county employee to get an annual performance review and understand that that is important. a mathematical challenge, especially with some of the issues that you just described, as well as some supervisors having a significant number of employees under them, which you know, can create a significant amount of work. I think there's opportunities with the process, the form itself. Again, I don't want to get too far into solutioning, but we will talk. We will be looking closely at this process. We'll be looking at the current documentation required and looking to streamline that as much as possible. and make the process really much easier for both the supervisor and the employee.

Thank you. Oh, and before I follow up on that, I'm so sorry, I forgot to disclose that Christian was in the office with me at the beginning. the whole time, sorry about that. On the follow up of that, is there any opportunity that we can identify like a good performance evaluation or a performance evaluation pathway that could lead to either monetary incentive or moving up a position. A lot of times, people will have to wait for there to be a position open. And then you look at the performance evaluations like, oh, they did great or whatever. But maybe there would be opportunities in other areas based on fantastic performance evaluations where they could apply for a job, maybe not just in where they're at, but across the colony that would increase their wages.

I do think going back to the concept of total rewards that I mentioned earlier, we do need to think about and frankly be creative, at least in the short term, understand that changing the pay scales is again, a longer process, right? I do think there could be some creative shorter-term opportunities on the award space and continue to, I would say, balance those rewards between longevity or service rewards, which obviously are important, and also high performance.

And then, you know, in terms of, like, I guess, does HR also cover worker safety, not necessarily from a standpoint of worker on worker violence, but public to worker harassment or violence?

I apologize, Council Member, I'm not following that particular question. I'm not sure, maybe Cynthia or Josiah, if you are, apologies.

Somebody put a gun on planning, and so, like, you know, Member Seymour and Chair Lee put in $50,000 for, like, a campus-wide security plan, because it seemed a little bit like there wasn't a plan for, like, somebody pulling a gun at the county building. Some people wanted to call folks. Some people said, don't call folks. And that's obviously not good for morale. I think one of the things people said was feeling safe. And I think the county has been very supportive in pursuing TROs when people feel harassed, not just at work, but when that harassment that started at work goes out into the public or whatever. But is that part of your HR task here? Because obviously feeling safe at work helps you to do your job better.

Sure. As part of... We talked about rules, policies, et cetera. We'll be going through and poor Cynthia would put her through the proverbial rigor of the last three weeks with hours and hours and hours of working sessions. But we are doing a review of all of that documentation related to HR. Couldn't agree more. If an employee doesn't feel safe at their job, how are they supposed to focus on being an engaged employee, long-term employee, et cetera? It's something we can talk more about at the next session.

Is it something that you could also coordinate? tasks like Blake Takayama with campus security. So if it's part of like HR to make people feel safe, like it might help to like talk with the guy. I think that's, kind of doing it, but you know, there was a little focus at first on like elected officials, but I'm more concerned with the everyday guys, like they don't get paid enough to deal with harassment or threats and stuff like that. I mean, I don't think anybody does get paid enough to deal with that, but surely not like the bottom folks that don't make barely a living wage.

I mean, obviously harassment, verbal or physical of any type, is unsatisfactory and should not be part of the workplace. Apologies.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then in terms of the rules and stuff, as they exist, where could somebody find those right now? I guess administrative rules, are they posted? And then is part of your thing to only look at administrative rules for personnel or administrative rules for each department?

Cynthia, do you want to maybe answer where they're available? Because I know we've been working from an internal repository.

Right. So thank you for the question. Yes, the rules are posted on the county website under Department of Personnel Services, and their engagement with personnel and AlignHR is limited to the Department of Personnel Services rules, policies, and procedures.

Okay, okay. Thank you, thank you. That concludes my questions.

I guess it also, hi, this is Corp Council. I think the engagement also incorporates any policies that relate to HR. So those might be housed, for example, like the violence in the workplace policies with the Department of Management or, you know, but that would still impact employees and that's something we would look at. Does that make sense?

Yeah, is that Ms. Chen home? Yes, hi. Oh, thank you. Okay, so any kind of managing direct or violence in the workplace policies.

Any HR-related policy where an employee could be subject to an adverse employment action if they violated that policy, I think is part of the scope of this engagement.

Oh, that's more if a county worker is violent in the workplace rather than somebody from the outside being violent to a county worker.

Yeah, I think the policy encompasses both, but because it would impact the county worker potentially being disciplined for violating that policy, it would be encompassed in the scope of this project.

Yeah, we used to have a real good guy. I think his name was like Ralph Thomas or something. He was real good at like explaining all that stuff. Like, you know, you might not think it's harassment, but it's not your perception. It's what their perception is. But then they got to tell you that they're feeling harassed and all of that. Too bad he retired. I think he was on the board of Water Supply for a little while too. But I think he's still active though with BFW and stuff like that. But he was one of the good ones.

Mahalo, Committee Vice Chair Poulton. Okay, and then Mahalo for that question, because then I did go onto the website and I don't see it. I love the aesthetics of the new website of all the departments. But I did Google it and found it. Is that admin rules title MC-11, Department of Personnel Services, Rules of Civil Service Commission, Rules of the Director of Personnel Services, December 2002? 2002. So it hasn't been updated since then. Oh, wow. And what is the process for updating this?

Well, the AlignHR project. So, I mean, this will be a part of it. And then, I mean, ultimately, we would have to take admin rules to like a public hearing and whatnot and receive feedback and then we could get them implemented. But a piece of this is to be more holistic than just what's kind of isolated in there, right? Because there's so many different pieces and different departments, even on maybe a similar type of, like I think somebody mentioned earlier, like on recruitment and retention incentives, there are different policies within the departments about different amounts and payback schedules and whatnot for recruitment and retention incentives. So it's like we really do need to align HR across the board, and that could be in the form of centralization, standardization, updates, things like that.

Are the other departments rules this old too? I just graduated high school in two. That was a long time ago.

Yeah, Chair, I think, you know, one of the, like I said, part of getting into this was forming some working groups and whatnot around updating discipline policy, violence in the workplace, different things like that. And I think what's, you know, being identified, especially in other areas as well, is we need projects like this, I think, to keep going in various aspects of county operations because sometimes, you know, things may be good enough for what's happening to get things through or get things done. But there may be like end business impacts or outside impacts to residents or other things that really we just need like a holistic view on it and tie everything together to make it work as efficiently as possible.

Okay, Mahalo. Okay, are there any other questions, members? Okay, I'm not seeing any hand. Oh, Committee Vice Chair Palten.

What is the frequency of progress update that is it like at the end of each phase or like this is great at the onset, but how do we know like, Things are moving along. We're making good progress. We identified some issues and we're busting through.

Managing Director.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Committee Vice Chair Poulton, for the question. I'll preface it by saying this, that we will come back to you folks as many times as you desire or want or the frequency of that or if you need written updates or anything like that. We'll work to provide whatever the committee needs. I think my anticipation was that we would come back to the committee sometime at the beginning of next year. and then update the committee as to the progress of the stakeholder engagement and other things that have been found through the kind of the initial process and kind of what's the next steps from there. But like I said, if the committee desires additional engagement in between that or whatever, you just let us know and we'll provide whatever information is necessary. Thank you.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, I mean, that sounds great. I would like to know, like, you know, once there's been significant movement, but you tell me when that is, or tell the chair when that is.

whoever that chair may be. So it looks like at the end of January, they plan to have finalized work stream one review and update HR rules, policies, and procedures. And I think that's when managing director is proposing that we could discuss this again. And then, yeah, it'll be right before budget starts and mass nominations of boards and commissions and all that fun stuff in the beginning of the year. Okay, any other questions? Member Johnson.

I'll try to keep this one quick. I don't want to hold anybody. Real quick in regards to the supplemental income. The clerks in planning were supposed to get it, but we didn't issue the supplemental income. Why was that? Do you guys want to? Oh, why did that not happen? Why did the mayor not sign up?

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're referencing. We did execute the supplemental for BU3 and 4, which I think the clerks would fall under. So I'm not sure. Yeah, unless you're talking about, I mean, there was an effort, I don't know, back in Arakawa's time, I think it was.

If you're talking about different than... With like the carryover savings from council services to... pay the election clerk folks that funds? Is that what you mean? Member Johnson?

Oh, okay. I thought you said Department of Planning. I believe a letter was provided to Council Chair regarding that, identifying the reasons why and then the next steps to take to be able to accomplish what was being requested. And to my knowledge, I'm not aware that Council has done any of those steps. But we're willing and ready to work with you folks, whatever is needed. Well, I mean, Chair, I'm not saying it's anybody's fault. It's just that there's items that would have to be done by the employer, such as like, I think one of the things identified in the letter was you know like reclassifying or um like reallocating positions things like that um those you know would have to be initiated by the employer um i i can't remember the the full scope of everything offhand since that was a quite a while ago but um to my knowledge and i don't defer to dps if they've heard anything differently but i haven't heard of any other steps but The BU3, BU4 supplemental would apply. There's only one BU13 employee in the clerk's office. So it would apply to everybody else in there. So they would have gotten those two step movements, the one in May and then the one in July. And so, yeah, like I said, reach out to us. We're happy to.

I meant more the ball was in our court.

Yeah. Okay, there you go. But is it a thing if the department asks for supplemental income? Is it just, how does that work? Do they ask?

Well, thank you, Chair. Thank you, Council Member Johnson, for the question. I think one of the things that gets evaluated is making sure that there's, like, fairness across the board, right? So, I mean, like, you know, one of the things that has to be evaluated is, you know, I'll just use a, since we have a lot of planners in various different departments, is if you have like a planner one, like why would a planner one in Department of Planning, why should they get additional bonuses or different things than a planner one in DEM or a planner one in DPW or whatever? Like there should be some level of like fairness and consistency across the board. And hopefully it's not because one department's worse to work at than another one or anything like that. But I think there's like that fairness and consistency aspect. And then there's also other mechanisms um that are available and in the control of departments rather than just kind of like bonuses or things that can tie to other elements i think one thing that um i think dps has presented before to you folks is um Like there was opportunities provided to like different levels of employees in the EM scale for like if you have certifications or you have performance evaluations, you know, good performance evaluations and things like that. that there can be opportunities for additional kind of enhancement and whatnot. So, you know, there's opportunities like that. We're totally willing to work with you folks or identify what is needed in that agency. But to my knowledge, we hadn't heard anything back since then.

Okay.

Thanks for that clarity. Thank you, Chair.

Mahalo, Member Johnson. Okay. I think I just had one last question. Okay, and it's kind of a salary question, but it's also part of like DPS. The positions in DPS, I forget what they're like HR specialists or whatever their title is. Are they also BU 313 positions?

Thank you, Chair, for the question. So yes, our HR specialists are BU 13.

Yeah.

And we have clerks and techs that are BU3.

Okay, okay. I know like 3 and 13 are always the ones that don't get as competitive pay increases as the other bargaining units. And so I hear, you know, like honing in on policies and procedures and that the bureaucracy will be the, you know, we're going to remove the impediments to bureaucracy, but also As many of my colleagues echoed, we need people to do the work and if the people aren't being compensated enough to stay, particularly our HR people, then that's also a problem. We got to fix the system there too. I think that's outside of the scope of work for GuideHouse. But it is part of the overall system for the staff that implements the policies and procedures. So I hope we can address that. And I think that's good. I think I'm done. Okay. All right. I see no more questions. I will invite our resource folks to provide any closing remarks. Mr. Petrowski?

Yes, thank you chair and council members. Again, really appreciate your valuable time today and understand that several of the topics that we talked about are really front and center for the county employees, their families, the communities, overall workforce. I can't stress how committed and excited we are to be your partner on this journey, on this project. are really looking to make some improvements and enhancements that hopefully address some of these pain points mentioned.

Mahalo. Director Roswell-Porter, mahalo for spending a portion of your second to last day of your career here at the county with us.

Thank you for taking the time, for your interest, and your continued support on this important project.

Thank you so much for your 30 years of dedication to the county. Congratulations on your very much earned retirement. Managing Director, any closing remarks?

Thank you, Chair. Just really appreciate you and your staff helping us to get this together for the committee. It's so important. Obviously, there's so many different elements to this, and it impacts so many different areas of our county, including the services that we can provide and caring for our employees and providing good jobs and whatnot for our local workforce, too. So we're really looking forward to this overall project. It's going to be really important to help meet all of the needs of our departments and the community. And so we just really appreciate everybody's help and assistance and collaboration in this. Looking forward to the continued work ahead. And please feel free, any other council members, let us know if anything is needed along the way. Thank you.

mahalo managing director and mahalo again everyone for being with us for presenting answering all of our questions and we look forward to uh future updates okay let's see members if there are no objections i will now defer this item any objections Seeing no objections, that concludes today's Komiki Aloha Aina meeting. Mahalo. The time is now 3.30 p.m. on July 30th, and we are adjourned.