LIHU‘E — As July 1 rolled in, the county’s Fiscal Year 2013 officially started, and with it, the possibility for Kaua‘i’s top police and fire officials to receive almost $7,000 more in annual salaries. Their pay, however, will still be
LIHU‘E — As July 1 rolled in, the county’s Fiscal Year 2013 officially started, and with it, the possibility for Kaua‘i’s top police and fire officials to receive almost $7,000 more in annual salaries.
Their pay, however, will still be lower than some of their subordinates two steps bellow them, after a mayor’s executive order gave some “excluded management” at Kaua‘i Police and Fire departments a raise twice as high as their bosses.
After last year’s fuss about a Salary Resolution sent by the Salary Commission for approval by the Kaua‘i County Council five months past its deadline, this year the commission was sharp on meeting the March 15 deadline set by the Kaua‘i County Charter.
But it didn’t matter; this year’s resolution was later amended by a second resolution which raised the cap of the pay scale of KPD and KFD chiefs and their deputies.
In an April 18 letter sent to Commission Chair Robert Crowell, Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. said he agrees with the council that all positions covered in the resolution deserve a salary cap increase, but “due to the economic climate” and since the administration would be asking line level employees to go an additional year without a raise, it just wasn’t time to raise salaries for KPD and KFD chiefs and their deputies.
Part of Carvalho’s reasoning was that providing raises for some county department heads and not others poses “morale and perceived fairness issues” which are unproductive for the administration, he said. He asked the commission to stick to the original resolution and said he had included in his budget for Fiscal Year 2013 funds to hire a consultant to examine pay for all positions included in the resolution.
The commission had a different opinion, and on April 23 sent a new resolution to the council, which in turn approved it at a special meeting June 20, the day before it would become effective without council action. The new resolution amends the previous one by setting a $114,490 salary cap for KPD and KFD chiefs and a $105,660 salary cap for KPD and KFD deputy chiefs.
Crowell said the commission wanted, as much as possible, to close the gap caused by an inversion problem, specially at KPD, where 21 rank-and-file officers made more than KPD Chief Darryl Perry in 2011. One of those officers made as much as $153,000, while Perry’s salary was $107,335.
The inversion, caused by overtime, will not be eliminated by the new resolution, but Crowell said that the new salary cap is also about “retention of a good chief or good deputy.”
The commission also respected Carvalho’s salary by not setting caps that exceeded his salary.
“We didn’t want to give the chief, at this time, more than what the mayor is getting,” Crowell told council members at the June 20 meeting.
Executive order
In the meantime, while the council was still waiting to include the new resolution in its agenda, Carvalho signed an executive order sometime in the end of May, substantially raising the pay scale for “excluded management” at KPD and KFD.
Those positions include KPD assistant chiefs, who now will get paid $120,612 and $119,472, depending on certain criteria; and KPD captains and KFD battalion chiefs, who will get paid $103,884 and $95,856, depending on certain criteria.
According to the operational budget approved by the council for Fiscal Year 2013, if there were no executive order, KPD assistant chiefs would be making $104,148, $105,696 and $96,024; KPD captains would be making $92,460 and $91,812 (one captain position is vacant, according to county officials); and KFD battalion chiefs would be making $96,384, $95,688 and $90,384.
Unlike chiefs and deputy chiefs, excluded management is able to accumulate overtime. Therefore, if there was an inversion problem caused by overtime pay for rank-and-file officers, now the problem will be enhanced by base pay for excluded management — who will still be able to add another $18,000 to $20,000 in overtime, according to a schedule Council Chair Jay Furfaro said he had.
Crowell said commissioners had no idea of Carvalho’s executive order when they convened to craft a second resolution to amend the first one.
Despite some lashes at the commission from some council members, regarding the commission once again sending a recommendation past the March 15 deadline, Councilman KipuKai Kuali‘i stepped in to defend Crowell.
Kuali‘i said the council was “grilling” the chair of the Salary Commission, but the commission only reacted to the council when they crafted the second resolution.
The council had a couple of meetings with extensive discussion and testimony about how wrong it was that Perry’s salary was lower than his subordinates, he said.
“The commission did the right thing (by crafting a new resolution), now we have to do the right thing (by approving it),” said Kuali‘i.
Kuali‘i, along with Councilman Mel Rapozo, had filed a civil complaint last year against their colleagues and the county, seeking a declaratory judgment on the word “shall” in the charter, related to the March 15 deadline for a Salary Resolution. The judge dismissed the case, ruling the plaintiffs had no standing.
Why freeze, then
raise salaries?
If Carvalho went to the extent of sending a letter to the commission asking to keep frozen the salaries of top KPD and KFD officials, why would he sign an executive order to raise salaries of their “excluded management” staff?
Rapozo had the answer: potential lawsuits.
“In the mayor’s defense, he had no choice,” he said at the June 20 meeting. “What this county failed was we didn’t honor the state law regarding excluded management compensation back in 2009 and in 2010, which generated grievances and lawsuits that were successful in Honolulu.”
State law says that whenever a collective bargaining employee in a bargaining unit gets a raise, their counterpart on the excluded management side gets the same raise, according to Rapozo.
“We didn’t do that in 2009, we didn’t do that in 2010 with police and fire because those were the only two bargaining units that got raises,” he said.
County spokeswoman Beth Tokioka gave a similar, more complete answer a week after the resolution was approved by the council.
“In 2009, 2010 and 2011, when the rank and file in the police and fire departments were receiving raises via the previously negotiated Hawai‘i Fire Fighters Association and State of Hawai‘i Police Officers Union agreements, excluded management personnel and other non-HFFA and SHOPO members employed by the county were not afforded raises,” she said. “This was a budgetary decision made due to the financial condition of the county in response to the economic downturn. This combination of raises for union personnel and no increases for non-union personnel created an inversion for excluded positions in KFD and KPD.”
Tokioka said that “obviously,” it is not the ideal situation to have lower-ranked officers getting paid more than their bosses, but based upon collective bargaining contracts this may or may not occur regardless of what level an employee is at due to years of service.
“A long-term remedy to avoid these types of situations to the greatest extent possible should be sought through the collective bargaining process, and through continued research and due diligence of the Salary Commission, taking these and other factors into account when setting the salaries of personnel covered by the Salary Ordinance,” she said.
There is an additional detail tagged to Carvalho’s executive order: The pay is retroactive to July 1, 2009. This means that three KFD battalion chiefs will receive a combined $64,378 payment, and three KPD captains and three KPD assistant chiefs will receive a combined $135,077 payment. And the retroactive pay will be disbursed in one payment, according to Tokioka.
• Léo Azambuja, staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) or lazambuja@ thegardenisland.com.
