• Understanding Article 29 • Is increasing tourism good for Kaua‘i? Understanding Article 29 Thanks to Council Chair Jay Furfaro and other current and former councilmembers for weighing in on the county’s executive salary process and to The Garden Island
• Understanding Article 29 • Is
increasing tourism good for Kaua‘i?
Understanding Article 29
Thanks to Council Chair Jay Furfaro and other current and former councilmembers for weighing in on the county’s executive salary process and to The Garden Island for serving as a forum for airing the issues (“Clerk’s salary still stirring controversy,” Dec. 16).
I served on the 2004 Salary Commission that initiated the charter amendment adopted by the voters in 2006 regarding the county’s executive salary process, and I followed that proposed amendment through the Charter Commission during 2005-2006. The amendment added several rational elements to that process that people in government are still trying to catch up with.
After sending a testimony to the Salary Commission that convened in February, 2007 I was engaged elsewhere and did not pay much attention to the salary process until the tempest in a tea cup surrounding the county clerk’s 2009 seven per cent raise began to roil recently.
In the past few weeks I have reviewed the salary process that has unfolded since the 2006 charter amendment was adopted. I do not have space to spell out in detail what I have learned, but I would like to offer a few comments that I hope will advance the dialogue.
Here is a bare outline of the process that has occurred since 2007:
An all-new seven-member Salary Commission was convened in February, 2007 and in April produced a salary resolution establishing across-the-board pay raises for elected and appointed officials that cumulatively amounted to just over fifty per cent. The package of raises consisted of an initial raise of 25 per cent effective July 1, 2007, followed by three seven per cent raises over the next two and a half years.
The council, which has the authority to reject the commission’s salary figures in whole or in part, but cannot amend them, allowed the package of raises to stand and all the raises automatically became established sixty days later.
In the spring of 2009, after the first three raises had been effected, the mayor, based on the county’s fiscal position, asked the commission to defer the final seven per cent raises for administrative personnel from December 2009 to December 2011. The commission at first balked but eventually issued a resolution in September 2009 that deferred administrative raises to December 2010 but allowed raises for the county clerk, deputy clerk, auditor and members of the prosecutor’s office to occur on schedule in December 2009. The council again allowed the salary resolution to stand.
On Nov. 24, 2010, the council again allowed to stand a Salary Commission resolution that deferred the administrative raises until July 1, 2011.
The Salary Commission’s 2010 resolution also contained a provision that clearly violates Charter Section 29.03 by allowing the mayor and council to lower the salaries of non-elected officials through the budget process. The provision is unconstitutional in two respects. First, it claims that the commission can delegate its authority to establish salaries to the mayor and council. Second, it usurps the authority of department heads to set the salaries of their deputies at a figure lower than the established figure. The council did not challenge or question this provision.
This provision highlights an area of universal confusion about what relationship the non-salary provisions in Salary Commission resolutions bear to County Code Section 3-2.1, the county’s salary ordinance, but that is a subject for another time.
I urge everyone to gain a clear understanding of Charter Article 29, the salary process it envisions and the process that has occurred since the charter was amended before wandering off into a corner of the process to talk about minor points like the county clerk’s 7 per cent raise in 2009.
Horace Stoessel, Kapa‘a
Is increasing tourism good for Kaua‘i?
Sunday’s Garden Island featured an article entitled “KVB’s $1 million tourism campaign ‘starting to pay off’” on the front page of the Business Week section.
Certainly there are other needs on our island that $1 million could address. Clearly the hotels and hotel industry itself will be working to increase their use without the help of our dollars. The message that Hawai‘i is a wonderful place to visit has already been widespread. It is not the lack of desire to come here that keeps would-be visitors away; it is the economy and when the economy recovers we will be inundated with tourists again.
From the point of view of the island and our people here there are other reasons that increased tourism is not the best solution to our economic problems. Certainly our roads are crowded enough without additional tourists and our roadsides gather enough refuse without more people traveling them. If the maximum to which people aspire is to clean rooms and make beds, our aspiration levels are set far too low. We need qualified, well-educated people to run our government; we need people who read and write, who record and disseminate our culture; we need people to keep track of our finances and advance our economy so that our salaries will meet our high cost of living; we need a higher level of education than that required by a tourist-based economy.
The argument that I hear in favor of tourism is that it provides jobs. It may do that but the jobs it is providing do not enable our people to buy their own homes, to do what we want for our families, to pay for increased education, or to enjoy as good a life as our ancestors. A higher standard of living for all people of Kauai means that we bite the bullet now, while we have to anyway, and that we get more education so that we can fill professional positions at our college, in our classrooms, in our government, in our hospitals, and in other professions with people who already live here and want to stay here.
Marjorie Fitting Gifford, Princeville
