House Standing Committee on Finance

Aloha and Happy New Year, Chair Todd, Vice Chair Takenouchi, and Members of the Committee on Finance. My name is Rana Hashimoto and I'm the Director of the Department of Human Resources Development. Before I proceed with our budget requests, I wanted to introduce the team members that are here with me today.

If you guys could just raise your hands when I call you out. Well, first of all, let me introduce our Deputy, Brian Furuto. And I also have here Travis Palmyra, who is our newly appointed Labor Relations Division Administrator. Also have Jennifer Mori-Kilbey from our Employee Claims Division. Reynelle Yee, who heads up our Employee Relations Division.

Patty Taketa, who's our Lead Recruiter. Marc Togashi, our Administrative Services Officer. Joy Inouye, who heads our Compensation Branch. Doreen Kuroda, who oversees our Benefits team. Patty McDonnell, who's our Training Manager. Malia Deleon, who's our Classification Branch Manager and Erin Connor-Jerome, Executive Specialist and the author of our annual Vacancy Report.

Before I talk about our budget request, I just wanted to take a few moments to talk about some of our accomplishments and—over the past year. First of all, I know you folks are always interested in the Vacancy Report. We submitted that to the Legislature at the end of December, and it's posted on our website.

So, please take a look at that if you have time. The good news is that we added 300 more civil servants over the last fiscal year, so not only were we able to replace the 1,169 employees who retired or resigned from state service, but we added an additional nearly 300.

But unfortunately, because we also added 485 new positions to our overall count, our vacancy rate, the percentage, actually remained flat at 24%. Had we not added those 485, it would have gone down to 22%. So, we're making progress.

Not as quickly or as much as we would like, but I think what you'll see is that the efforts that our recruitment team is putting into place are having an effect—a positive effect on the vacancies. And it's really attributed to the fact that we are doing a lot more marketing. We have a dedicated team to doing recruitment and outreach and connecting with the. community and talking about the benefits of state employment.

In FY '25, we saw more interest in state jobs than we've ever seen in recent memory. In fact, the number of applications soared to over 41,000. So, our team, our staffing team, reviewed 41 plus thousand applications for civil service jobs over the last year.

That's a tremendous increase over last year. I think we were closer to 35,000. And about 7,700 of those were directly in response to the Operation Hire Hawaii Initiative that Governor Green signed the emergency proclamation in February of 2025 to address the issues happening at the federal level and loss of funds and those impacted by job loss.

This past year, we also made some changes policy wise to incentivize recruitment.

One of which was to allow soon to be college graduates to apply for civil service jobs three months prior to their graduation so that we could start working with them, having them interview before they actually graduate. And so, that's been a positive effect as well.

I think most importantly, our staffing team has made tremendous progress ensuring that recruitments are posted timely. We've tried to, at every point that DHRD is involved, we've tried to make our processes faster and more responsive to the Department so that we can hopefully increase our recruitment efforts. We are also making tremendous progress and screening more quickly.

I think, you know, that's been a real hang up for DHRD over the last, last many years and, and most of that was due to a lack of staffing and just the increase in overall applications that were responsible for screening. We see more applications and not as much staff and so the—it just compounded the issue.

But just most recently, I think we're, right now as of today, we're finishing up our November applications and most of the applications we're reviewing are in December and we, we got a whole bunch in January.

We posted recruitments for our conservation and resource officers in Department of Land and Natural Resources and got over 700 applications in the matter of hours. So, it's, it, you know, it's, it's a lot of ebb and flow in recruitment but we're, our team is, is doing their best to stay on top of it and to be responsive.

And really, I think the message I wanted to convey is, is the resources that you provided to DHRD over the last couple of years, not only in terms of positions, we got some positions to help with the recruitment screening last year. We also got funds to help with the marketing and all of that is, I believe, money well spent.

We've been able to contract with LinkedIn with—we use NeoGov as our onboarding platform, so that's the software that applicants use to submit an application and one of the features that we've contracted just recently, this last fall, is to subscribe to their feature called Attract.

And it's very similar to LinkedIn where we can communicate directly with applicants who have a profile in NeoGov. So, if they—NeoGov is software that's used by many government jurisdictions, so it's specific to municipal, state, county government jobs.

And so, we know that those are individuals who are focused and interested in working for government and we can reach out and communicate with them and tell them about jobs in the state of Hawaii. And that's been, we—our team is just, is undergoing training right now this week.

We have somebody from NeoGov here on island helping them get up to speed on that software, and it's really exciting. I think it'll have really good results. Couple of other points I just wanted to mention. In terms of our own vacancy rate, three years ago, when I sat before this Committee, took over as DHRD Director, we had 90 positions, but 30 of those were vacant.

So, we were a team of 60. And that was scary, I'll tell you for sure. And, but today, actually I checked yesterday, and we are a team of 94 as of yesterday.

And we have—our vacancy rate is 12. We have 12 vacancies. So, tremendous progress and that's counting all the additional positions that we've received over the last few years. So, I'm incredibly proud of that. I'm incredibly proud of the team behind me who's made recruiting and filling our position positions a priority. I think it's—it shows in the numbers.

We still have a few recruitment challenges, but we're going to, we're going to work through those. All of our positions are under recruitment. We don't have any position that we're not planning to fill or, you know, not intending to service.

Finally, last year, the Legislature appropriated $1.75 million for DHRD to hire a consultant to work on reviewing our entire, the entire structure of our civil service system, including classification, compensation, the minimum qualification requirements, job titles, even providing us recommendations for tech solutions. So, I'm happy to report that we have gone almost entirely through the procurement process.

We've selected a vendor and we're just now working on the contract. So, we're making good progress and we appreciate your support in that regard as well.

So, let me get on to our—we have two budget requests for this year and two, these are repeats from last year. We had requested these two items last year, but they're a little bit different. We've scaled them back. We understand that resources are tight.

And so, we've come back again with two requests, the first of which is in HRD 102 and we're asking for three FTE and $306,144 per year to fund three positions in our employee staffing division. And these positions are specific for doing the recruitment outreach that I've been talking about.

So, we have one team that does our, basically our screening of applications, but we have another small but mighty team of individuals who, to date, have been—it's been an ARPA project. So, we got a little bit of ARPA monies back in 2023 to stand up a project to help with the marketing and outreach for recruitment purpose.

So, it's basically to institutionalize that project team. Right now, it's a project team of five positions. We're asking for three. We understand that the finances are tight coming into this next year, but I think that's kind of the bare minimum that we would need to be successful.

These are all the folks who put on the job fairs and attend the job fairs and coordinate with the departments. I think if any one department were charged with doing what this team does, it wouldn't happen. They just simply don't have the bandwidth and the capacity to put on these big events like DHRD is able to do and then leverage our kind of knowledge and be able to provide that resource.

We just invite them, they show up. Sometimes there's a small fee, sometimes not. But the power is in leveraging our ability to put on those kinds of events.

And not only that, a large part of this team's work is doing that outreach to say, UH Manoa and to Chaminade to the community colleges and working directly with DOE. So, we take that sort of work off the department's plate and help coordinate it from a statewide perspective. So, I think this project team is incredibly important and I would hate to see us lose momentum by not being able to continue it in the next year.

The ARPA project, the funds sunset this year, so the funds will be no more come September. So, we have just a very short window even if these are authorized. That's why we put it in last year.

We were hoping that we could have a smooth transition. We're cutting it really, really close this year. If the positions end in September and we're not able to continue them, that would be a huge problem for us. Secondly is—our second request is also for HRD 102. We're asking for two FTE and $217,370 to again operationalize and institutionalize two positions which are also ARPA funded.

So, our initial ARPA project was three separate kind of projects under one umbrella. One was the recruitment team. One was a small temporary team to help with our workers comp. That team will Sunset and that will not be a problem.

But the third component was these two positions in our Personnel Transactions Office and this office, essentially, they manage all of our human resources information system. So, basically, I think you folks might be familiar with the term PeopleSoft.

It's basically our software that keeps track of the electronic personnel records for every state employee and it interfaces very closely with finance, with budget, with every electronic system that touches on people and positions. And so, its success is exceedingly important to the state.

And so, we asked for these two positions so that first of all we could make sure that we're leveraging the use of our technology. So, PeopleSoft has been around for a really long time. The state has been using it, I think since around maybe 1996 or thereabouts. We have a lot of history. We have a lot of data.

A lot of data points, but we don't necessarily use all the functionality well. And so, this project team is really to—with their knowledge, we have an exceptional manager of that team who used to be a PeopleSoft consultant, knows the software in and out, and is really helping us kind of bridge the gap in terms of the technology and the functionality and to leverage that use.

So, we really want to be able to keep these two positions, especially thinking long term, thinking the next five and ten years where we know we're going to be coming up on EFS, the Enterprise Financial System. Obviously, it's exceedingly important that our data talks with the financial system.

I think obviously, personnel is one of the most expensive, expensive parts of state government and to not have that ability for the two systems to talk seamlessly would be a huge detriment to us. And just in terms of not only after the EFS but then we'll probably be looking at some kind of HR system, whether it's PeopleSoft or something else.

Usually, software has a cycle, and we have to go back out and see if we're using the best software and then just ERP. If we do some kind of enterprise resource platform, these positions would be critical in making sure that we're successful, that the HR component is successful.

So, that's essentially what we're asking for. And I'm here and my team's here and available to answer any questions you might have about our budget or anything else, to your right.

Before we get to members, we have a few kind of boilerplate questions. We just want to ask departments how they're dealing with existing restrictions and then I think you've already touched in your testimony on there's not much federal, federal fund impact that you're anticipating, correct?

We do not have any federal funds outside of those ARPA funds, but those are already basically in our bank.

And then, to your knowledge, any emergency appropriations for your Department that you can?

We don't anticipate any. We haven't had any for the last couple of years. We've been able to use ARPA funds. Prior to my coming to DHRD, occasionally, we would have to seek for workers comp, but we've, so far, we've, we've been able to manage workers comp within our appropriation.

Okay. So, so the existing restrictions that are in place, you guys have been able to navigate okay?

We think we're going to be okay.

Okay. Members, questions for the Department?

I have a question. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I was looking at your statement here that says moreover, the state's total benefits package once is significant draw is not as competitive as it once was because other employers have improved their own offerings. Can you expand on that?

Well, I think I've been in the state government for a long, long time, since the early 90s. And you know, back then, we, people were, you know, a state job was, was coveted. Right? Because of the benefits, the leave, the retirement benefits, the health benefits.

And I think other employers learned that in order for them to be competitive, they need to be more like the state. So, I think in private sector, you see more, maybe not as many holidays, but certainly you see that there are comparable benefits when it comes to leaves and some of the other things.

They may not have pension plans, but they have 401ks, which in some cases, you know, employees, prospective employees, like that because they don't have to worry about vesting after five or 10 years and they can take it with them. So, there are drawbacks. I'm not saying that our benefits aren't desirable or you know, meet our employees' needs.

It's just that other employers have learned from our benefits package and are now more competitive.

Do you think that the medical insurance premium might be a barrier? Like what is the premium now for an employee? Is it 60-40 or?

So, there are actually very affordable depending upon which plan you select. So, actually, that part doesn't fall under DHRD, but I can just speak from my own experience that we actually have three different options. The 75-25 plan, where employees pay about 75% is covered, 25% is not, that one, if you're a single employee, it costs about $50 a month. So, pretty affordable in my opinion.

I'm just wondering, when I left government, I was paying like close to $1,000 for a family plan. And if that's the case, that's that much money out of your payroll. So, I could see that as being a big barrier for taking a government job.

When Governor Green first came into office, he actually increased the amount for the 75-25 plan. So, he authorized the state to actually pay an additional amount. So, I think we're paying about 95% of that premium. So, I believe it's very affordable for if you're single.

Obviously, if you have a family, it is more expensive, but I still believe it's around 175...plan.

So, if you have a spouse that has a private industry job that pays maybe 100% percent of the medical, you, as the government employee, will not pay any medical. Right? So, you get the benefit of your whole paycheck, whereas the person that doesn't have the medical gets that cut. Right?

So, that's where I can see that there's a problem that we need to start thinking about. Thank you.

Director and team, thank you for being here today. My question is about, like, remote work. In general, what is the state's outlook on remote, hybrid, and in person? Do you guys have, like, the percentage and the pros and cons to that? And how are you guys moving forward with that?

So, back in, I want to say—well, okay, sorry, let me back up. In 2022, before I came to DHRD, the former DHRD Director, along with our team, negotiated new guidelines and a new agreement related to remote work. And it went into effect early in 2023, so, just right after I became Director.

And since that time, we've had good success. I don't think we are hearing the same concerns that we did maybe three, even three years ago, or four years ago, in terms of the challenges around remote work. Right now, we've been living with the current agreement in place, and I think our departments like it.

It basically allows them to do either hybrid or completely remote. The only time we don't allow remote work is when somebody and a new employee is on probation. So, once they've passed probation, they've been accustomed to the job, and probation is usually six months. After that time, it's really up to the Department.

They have the flexibility to decide when remote work makes sense for the operations and the type of work that the employee is asked to do. Because obviously, for some jobs, remote work is not an option. Those that need to be in the office or they're servicing clients or providing direct services.

I think you'll find from...probably not appropriate for them in most cases. But a lot of our departments who do spend a lot of time on the computer and the office have found that remote work is a, is a good tool to incentivize employees to come work for the state. If they can offer that, even if it's not right away, you know, after you pass probation, we can make that available.

My own team, we have about a dozen employees who remote work, on a hybrid basis. So, they, they're in the office three days a week and they can remote work up to two days a week.

Are you able to give like a general percentage of the state workers that are in person and hybrid and remote?

We probably—I believe that's one of the tables that WAM asked for so we could dive into each of departments. I don't think we—we don't necessarily have a way of tracking that in any of our systems right now, but I believe each department was asked to report on their remote workers as part of one of the WAM tables.

Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you.

Rep. Kusch.

Thank you. I actually have two questions that—if the chair will allow. First, if these three or five positions in the program ID, HRD 102, if funds are not available for those positions, and especially the three sound pretty critical, you know, because of—thank you for your gains.

It sounds like you've been making in hiring process like 700 people for DOE care officers is impressive. That wasn't the case in the past. Would those funds from those 12 vacant positions—do you anticipate filling those imminently or might those have some flex built in to an upcoming resignation—not resignations, retirements?

Do you see any play there, in that money, that 300k?

I do not. And the reason being is DHRD is—we're a total of 102 positions. So, each branch is maybe only three or four or five people. Obviously, we have some bigger programs, but we have some—like our benefits team is a team of five. Our compensation branch is a team of three.

So, I can't just take one of those and not feel the consequences of not filling those positions. We just had four people retire just recently and we do anticipate filling all of our vacancies where they're currently allocated, for that reason. There really isn't any fat in DHRD.

Okay, thank you. And then the second, and maybe you covered it because there was a lot of impressive gains, but one of the things that we've heard in the past was the metric of how long it takes to hire someone. And I know that probably bears the individual department that's also hiring.

So, the metrics could be different across different job fields. Have you seen any increase in that or do you have any comments or, you know, is there a length of time? Because I know if it takes six months or 12 months to hire someone, they may find another job in between. I understand that's been a problem in the past.

Right. So, the important thing to know is when a position becomes vacant or newly established, when there's a vacancy that needs to be filled, it's in the department first. So, they typically do an internal recruitment, and they offer the job to their own current civil service employees first.

That's the first kind of step. And if they're not able to fill it internally, then they come to DHRD and they submit a requisition for us to either provide them an existing list of names. Because you're probably familiar, a lot of departments have common job titles. For example, like an Accountant 3. Right?

Pretty much every Department, except for DHRD, has an Accountant 3. And so, so, we oftentimes have an existing list of names that we refer to departments if they ask for it. And so, that list would go out within, say, 48 hours of them asking for it. So, there really is no delay.

But if we need to go out and recruit, then our goal is to get every job that we've been asked to recruit for often posted on our website within two weeks. So, there's a little bit of back and forth with the Department. There's an awful lot of information that needs to go into the computer system to get it posted.

But ideally, we would have that job up and posted within two weeks of getting the requisition. And then, there's a duration, right, that we are accepting applications, whether that's DOE Care officers and it closes in within hours, or whether we leave it open for two weeks, sometimes longer.

If we have a lot of vacancies and we know it's going to be difficult to fill, we may do a continuous recurrence and we just leave it open until they tell us stop, we filled it. So, there's different avenues there. And then we have a period of time where we screen the applications, and we've made a lot of progress.

That used to be sort of the...right, is how long it took DHRD to screen and get the list back to the Department. And right now, we've put a tremendous amount of focus on and speeding that part up and getting the list back.

But then once it leaves DHRD's hands and we send the Department a list of qualified applicants, the ball is back in their court to then schedule interviews, do reference checks, make a selection, and onboard. So, it's very difficult for me to put a timestamp on it because we're only one portion of the entire hiring process.

And many times, I think 60% of the time, it never comes to DHRD. It's part of the Act 57 Report—sorry, we're trying to not call it Act 57 Report. We're trying to call it the Vacancy Report.

The Vacancy Report has basically the number of requisitions that have come to DHRD and the ones that still are in the departments. So, that number is less than, less than 40% come to DHRD, which, so that means that 60% of the vacancies are still in the Department. So, I can't speak to why there's delays at the Department, but I can tell you that less than 40% they've submitted requisitions for and we're working on helping them recruit and fill.

Okay, and just follow up to that, just that screen time. What would be your guesstimate?

It used to be months and now we're hoping to—we're, we're closer to weeks now. I think—we're in December and then the, the applicants that we—applications, we got probably a thousand just in January so far.

So, that 41,000 that we get every year is, you know, you can kind of do the math. It's about 800 or so per week that we're trying to churn through regularly. And sometimes, we have these blips where, like, oh, have we got 7700 that we didn't really anticipate having to screen.

So, there are times where we're slowed down just because of volume and holidays and that sort of thing. But our goal is eventually to get to the, the point where it, we can get those lists out within about three weeks.

Okay, well, fantastic. Thank you.

All right. Members, any additional questions? Rep. Takenouchi. Vice Chair.

Director, Deputy Director, thank you. Can I ask a follow up to that last question Rep. Kusch brought up? So, I think, you know, the last three years I've been on the Committee, we have heard a lot of the frustration from some of the departments about a lot of these things.

Thank you for your work on that.

Do you get the sense that—you know, you guys are kind of early this year in the info briefings. I guess, with your work within the, within the administration with the other departments, do you think they're seeing a lot of these things helping them and helping their frustrations that they've kind of voiced in the past?

Or are you—are we going to get the same kind of, like, pushback when we try to push them on, like, their vacancies and why programs aren't able to maybe work as well as we want them to see? Is that kind of work within the Administration?

I guess there's probably still going to be some frustration. And not that it's necessarily DHRD's fault, but I think, you know, we'd all be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the challenging labor market that we have in Hawaii. We have, what, 2.7% unemployment. That's really low.

Basically, everybody who wants a job is working. So, we have to, we have to provide something that's more attractive. We have to be faster. We have to strike when the iron's hot.

So, I'm not sure what they're going to say, but I can tell you we're doing our damnedest to try to meet their needs and to be responsive to their needs, and we'll continue to do that and be receptive to what kind of suggestions they have.

But, like...pointed out, 60% of those vacancies are still at the departmental level. So, I'm not, you know, we can't, we can't be blamed for all of the issues around vacancies. And I think if you looked at the Act 57 Report as well, there's about over 400 positions which have been vacant for four years or more.

And so, that tells me there's probably something else going on there. Typically, when a vacancy sits for that long or, you know, four years is kind of extreme. Even if it's two years, my recommendation to anybody that asks me is try something different. Right?

If you're, if you're not able to fill a vacancy after, you know, a year or two years of trying to hire a particular person, change it up, you know, or bring it down to a lower level and train somebody up. You got to try something different.

So, some of it, okay, you know, might be fair, but I think they also need to be more creative in how they approach filling their vacancies.

Is there kind of support or I guess, work being done to kind of help them kind of pinpoint, like, why, you know, like that 60% is getting kind of stuck with them, or is that just, that's just in their ball court to kind of churn through until you guys are ready to get into the process?

Well, each Department has a departmental human resources officer, basically a managerial point of contact who runs their HR operation. Because DHRD, we do two things basically centrally. We manage work comp claims for all state employees and we do that centralized recruiting to the outside. Right. The open, competitive to the public.

But basically, other than that, most of the HR operations happen at the departmental level under the supervision of their departmental human resources officer. So, that individual is basically the individuals that we, that group are the ones that we interface with most. We go to their monthly meeting and talk about issues and talk about these things.

So, there are a lot of touch points between DHRD and the department's HR operations. But in terms of going, drilling down into their departments, typically not unless asked, we try to work through the HR staff in order to help them vacancies. And whatever else they might have.

Whether it's a classification issue or maybe the MQs, sorry, the minimum qualification requirements, are misaligned and they're not getting the right applicant pool for what they need, then that's where we would want to help fix that.

Can you give us a brief update on the status of the classification and compensation study and maybe any additional funding that may be required?

So, as I mentioned earlier, we've just—we're in the contracting phase right now. So, we made a selection of a vendor and we're just working through the contract procurement requirements and then we, we hope to get rolling very soon. In terms of whether we would need additional funding, not sure right now.

You know, our classification plan has over 1,450 unique job titles that this vendor is going to have to sift through and all of the qualification requirements pretty quickly. So, you know, it may end up taking a little longer than I think we would all hope.

But I think right now, we're supposed to come back to you in October with a plan and with a report in anticipation of it coming to the Legislature in 2027. Very ambitious though.

Sure, sure. And tied into that, you know, we, something that's going to come up and does come up is we do have a number of positions, a great number of positions within the state, that largely pay what most would consider a sub living wage.

And it makes scaling up really difficult, you know, as there have been changes in requirements put on the state for, from the Federal Government for eligibility verification. And one of the challenges that those jobs don't pay and they're very difficult to find, in some cases less than you'd make working at a fast food restaurant.

So, is that something that is really like a focus of that study and we can expect some real tangible recommendations.

Yes. So, compensation is another big component to this study. So, we anticipate it's not only the classification, classification and the qualifications and the minimum, sorry, the minimum qualifications and the job titles, it's basically the whole ball of wax.

There's nothing that's off the table in terms of what we want to look at, the structure, how we're organized, the leveling. You know, I, I think you folks have heard me say before, we have like seven different levels of accountants. Do we really need seven? Is that effective? Efficient?

Do we, you know, can we somehow make this more streamlined to make it more competitive? Maybe we don't need those lowest levels. Maybe we can start at a higher rate. But all of that obviously would come at a cost if we make big fundamental changes to how we price jobs. And so, that's a concern. Right.

And making sure that we have, we can prioritize and then we can come to you with a plan on how we get there, that.

Thank you. Members, additional questions? Rep. Morikawa.

Because I was looking at some compensation. An office assistant makes way less than the janitor. Is that something you guys are looking into? I mean, way back when, it used to be either equal or a white collar would be a little higher than a blue collar.

Yes, again, that is part of the study. There's some historical significance to some of the collective bargaining that's happened over the last couple of decades. BU One which is our blue collar workers went to basically a single rate. So, they pay one rate. All janitors all earn the same dollar amount.

And so, when they negotiate and when there are collective bargaining increases, basically, typically, we keep the same percentage, for most of the, the bargaining. There are some exceptions, but, by and large, between white collar, blue collar jobs, they get generally the same overall percentage increase in salaries across the board of increases.

But when you're talking about just one rate, all of that money goes to that one single rate. So, if, for example, this past year, it was about three and a half percent, so that for unit one employees, their base rate of pay goes up 3.5%.

Whereas for bargaining units that have a step movement plan, I don't know if you're familiar with that, where they have, they started an entry rate and then every couple of years or so or when it's negotiated, they would move across, horizontally across the salary schedule, and we have about 10 different steps.

So, at the entry rates, we are less competitive. At the midpoint, we're pretty competitive with the market. And probably at the end, we're probably overpaying the market a bit. But what happens when you have a step movement plan of, say, 10 steps, the funds for those step movements come out of that annual increase.

So, rather than getting a 3.5% across the board increase, those employees may get 1.5 % across the board. So, the salary schedule is only going to increase by 1.5% because that additional, say, 2% percent is used to fund those step movements. Make sense? So, in other words, Unit 3 has been losing ground in comparison to Unit 1.

All of the across the board goes into that single rate. When you spread it across between step movements and across the board increases, the salary schedule increases much slower. And then, you find that there's this inversion of salaries.

It's just sad that you would have an office worker making so much less when they could be a janitor making $20,000 more.

One of the nice things about, sorry, if I could just add, one of the nice things about this, doing this study, is we hope to put some data behind those points and then if we're able to fix some of these issues or address some of these issues, that we can do it.

And I would like to see this happen maybe every, you know, 15 or 20 years. We've been doing collective bargaining for 50 years in the state. It's kind of time that we sort of step back and take an overall perspective.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

Rep. Templo, then Rep. Kusch.

My question is on like modernizing the workforce. Is there any talks on like having gig workers, like having a pool where you can source like specialized labor?

Like I guess if you need somebody to fix a computer without the whole procurement process and all that, like a simplified way on creating some type of structure like that. Has there been talks or like yeah?

Not really. The departments can hire individuals through as an 80-90 hire to, for short term kind of emergency needs that they have the flexibility to do that. But it's different than what you're talking about where you kind of just have a specialized.

That's really, to me, more of a procurement issue and how we hire individuals versus employees. We're primarily focused on trying to build service, civil service, long term our workforce, rather than, you know, temporary kind of flexible needs.

So, there has not been any talks on creating systems where people just kind of want to do side projects and be kind of like a gig worker on a state level?

I think it would be like through a procurement. So, there are lists of, for example, professionals. You can have a list of individuals who are pre vetted, say for engineers and architects and attorneys who do work for the state and they're kind of on a pre-vetted list.

But I don't want to get too far into that because procurement is not my area of expertise at all.

Okay, thank you.

Rep. Kusch.

Just quickly, thank you for all your time. Workman's comp, if—has there been any progress on shortening evaluation periods and getting people back to work and the, you know, processing on your end?

Just generally, if you have specific questions, our administrator's here. But over the last few years, we've made a tremendous progress in reducing the number of open workers comp claims that we have. And just this past year, we were able to fill one of our long-term vacancies which was for a vocational rehabilitation specialist in our workers comp division.

So, that individual's primary, her entire job, is to get individuals back to work. And so, she works closely with the employee's physician and with our programs in order to either provide light duty to. get them back and then ultimately to get them back to their regular job.

Or to do a job search for them if they're unable to return to their usual and customary work. So, we're super excited that she's joined our team and she hit the ground running and so, yes, we are making progress in that area.

You don't have any metrics to share?

Not specifically. We can...

Percentages or?

I don't have any off the top of my head, but we could get back to you with some information on that.

Thank you. Thanks, Chair.

Couple of timeline questions actually. First is about Operation Hire Hawaii. I saw the numbers that you guys have reported for the year. Glad to see we're getting some of those federal guys in. I guess, two-part question.

Has that been, you know, continuous throughout the year or there has been a slowdown, you know, now that things have calmed down a little bit after we launched it. And then has there been talk about how long we're going to run the program since it was created by Executive Order?

Yes, initially when we launched Operation Hire Hawaii, it was—we planned to do it for at least a year to pilot it. And then, the idea was let's take assess it, see what's working. What we could perhaps either operationalize as part of our process or not, but we're coming up on the year.

I think next month will make a year. I anticipate that we'll probably keep it up for a little bit longer. There is still interest in continuing. I think typically, we have about 50 jobs that are posted on our website at any given time under the Operation Hire Hawaii banner.

So, I think it's still an important tool that's available to departments if they have a particular vacancy that they want to fast track and they feel like that's the best approach. So, I don't have any burning desire to shut it down anytime soon.

I'd actually like to see more departments use it, but we understand that there, oftentimes, there are staffing challenges on their side, so understandable. They pick and choose when it meets their needs.

And then, is there any, I guess this would probably just be like a general timeline update question. The other study about the reducing the vesting time. Is that like on track as far as you guys are concerned?

We're going to get the recommendations to hopefully maybe look at possibly doing something if it seems positive in '27.

So, we have not started on that. Our focus was really on the classification and compensation study since that is a bigger project with a very short deadline. But we have reached out, and we've met with ERS to get their feedback.

I think you folks are aware that ERS has a new Executive Director and so we have also spoken to Calvert, and we'll go make another appointment with him very shortly to see how to move forward. We haven't really decided who's going to be lead on it. Obviously, that's not an area that we're tremendously versed in.

So, we would, in any case, we'll be working closely with ERS to make sure that we ask the right questions and get a good work product out of that study. But we definitely intend to proceed with it. It's just a matter of how we manage it moving forward.

Okay. It's a little too early for any kind of guess about when we could get that.

What we've learned is that there are a lot of vendors or consultants in this space. So, it doesn't—we don't anticipate it being a challenge to find somebody to do this study. So, it's just a matter of working through the procurement process and making sure that our scope of work is appropriate for everything that you folks are expecting out of that report.

Thank you.

Okay, anything additional? All right, thank you very much. We're going to recess very briefly, let everyone get settled, and then we'll reopen with Department of Law Enforcement.

We're reconvening the Committee on Finance for the purpose of budget briefings, and we're going to open up with the Department of Law Enforcement. Director.

Good afternoon, Chair, Vice Chair, Members of the Committee. My name is Mike Lambert. I'm the Director of the Department of Law Enforcement. With me today, I have Deputy Director Jared Redulla, Fire Marshal Dorothy Booth, Executive Officer Brandon Asuka, Finance Manager Russell Fong, Human Resources Officer Jennifer Egami, Budget Analyst David Tran, Legislative Analyst Kathy Shiro, and Litigation Coordinator Laura Maeshiro.

So for this briefing, we just want to bring you guys up to speed on kind of what we're doing and the direction that we're trying to take. Just for some background, we have the most basic functions of port, airports, harbors, to include state narcotics investigations as well as general criminal investigations.

Majority of our criminal investigations have to do with state facilities. A lot of that resources go into jails. So for example, when people are raped, assaulted, or unfortunately even murdered, that falls on the responsibility of the Department of Law Enforcement.

We do have our new add ons, which is the agricultural crimes as well as the fireworks task force. And we are moving in the right direction in those areas. In the package that we sent you, starting on page two and three, we outlined 15 priority areas. I'll go ahead and leave that for questions further out.

The biggest things that we're really trying to work on as we grow our agency to be competitive is pay parity. Right now, bargaining 14, which the sheriffs fall into, they are anywhere between $20,000-24,000 less than our county counterparts. We are doing our repricing. We're hopeful, but we don't think that it will even come close.

That does impact us in regards to hiring. We have a 27% vacancy. Our counties are experiencing 20%. So some people will say money is not the answer, but I would rather be at 20% than 27%.

So in other words, having a fair wage and at least be comparable would help me to fill those vacancies. If we move to the priority list... And again, I'm willing to answer any questions into the breakdowns that we provided.

But for priority one, two, and three, they have to do with our state narcotics lab and utilizing funds that are revolving and to increase the ceiling. Because as the cost for analyzation, training, and what not increases, the ceiling needs to be lifted where it's too low.

But we do have money in the fund, so there should be no impact. For priorities four through seven, all that has to do is a reshifting of our organization. So it's a net zero change. All it would do is you move the positions into the appropriate program code based on the move.

The reason why we did the move is a lot of, there are some inefficiencies that were occurring. In other words, too many people here, not enough people there. And we had to move them against into different programs.

For priority eight and nine, that has to do with the Department of Law Enforcement having the ability to support the Fire Marshal as an attached agency. Those two pots, 8 and 9, are still going to Department of Labor, and they're supposed to be attached to the Fire Marshal. So we're just asking for those to be moved over to us.

For the most part, we don't have too many asks this year. Our instructions are to be an execution year, so it's relatively a flat request. I know the big topic is going to be fireworks. I'll go over some of the highlights for this year. The fireworks task force seized 121,000 pounds of illegal fireworks coming to the state.

We're happy with that. And that does not include three more containers that still need to be weighed. So we had a really great year. We made five felony arrests. We executed 23 search warrants. We opened up eight investigations against homes utilizing nuisance abatement.

So again, I know we still had some this year, but I think that it was definitely an improvement over last. I know that's not true for every neighborhood, so I don't want to celebrate. For those neighborhoods that we were not able to get to or they did not see a notable response, please just give us time. It was year one. So with that, we just open it up to questions.

Great. And yeah, again, just some standard. How are you folks dealing with the current restrictions? Do you see the need for an emergency appropriation or anything incoming?

Not at this time. Not for the supplementary care.

Okay. And then on the federal fund side, any highlights on, you know, risks, or you guys kind of handling everything okay?

We do have... We did have some scares with our Office of Homeland Security. So what that office does, it works with our federal partners for, you know, threats against, you know, bomb threats, terrorist threats, you know, weather threats that come in. We did have a scare, but we're confident that after the federal funding was released that we're going to be okay. But we are monitoring that very closely.

Okay. Members, questions for the Department. Break the ice. Go for it.

Hi, Director. Thank you for being here, and to your team. I was just curious, in the, in Budget and Finance and Governor's decision, is there an issue the administration raised you about the trade off transfers and why they didn't approve those?

Yeah, we're not too sure why the, why it had to come up to this pathway.

And yeah, thank you for all your work with the illegal fireworks task force. Definitely in my community, you know, I got feedback very early on that, you know, it didn't start, you know, right after usually Halloween, actually sometimes, or definitely after Thanksgiving. And, you know, it was very just concentrated.

They did see illegals or some things that kind of get on their nerves, but it was very concentrated around actual New Year's Eve. And I think that's a credit to the work you guys have been doing and just keeping things out of community, a lot of that education campaign. So thank you for that work. Could you go a little bit more into the buyback program for the fireworks specifically? Did that work pretty much like the gun buyback?

Very similar. So we got over a ton of fireworks over the course of last year. And the most important or the most significant effort that was made in that is that we wanted to remove the, "I had nothing. I had nowhere to take the ones that I already had. I had it prior to the new law."

"It was left over from last year." So what we wanted to do is give everybody the opportunity to legally turn it in to avoid the stiffer penalties. The penalties this year are harsh, but they're appropriate based on the type of danger that they had.

I think if you guys saw on social media the one that hit that Maui house and it ripped off the siding. If somebody had been standing there, they would have died. So, you know, it's not a joke. I know it's very controversial to some people, but, you know, we're not talking about bottle rockets and jumping jacks. You know, that's... If that was what we had, I doubt we'd be having these conversations. So we're just, you know, moving forward.

You guys plan to... I just couldn't... Are you guys gonna do it on a regular interval? I guess like after the major holidays, you know, just get it out of your...

We are. It's gonna be a recurring mission. So fortunately, you know, through the House, we were able to get a large amount for undercover operations for at least Oahu County. So we're gonna continue those. You know, I live near Ho'opili. It did lit up from about, you know, 11:30 to 12:30, per my fiancée.

I was out. I was out trying to battle the best I could. But, you know, it's actually been quiet afterwards. So I think we're moving in the right direction, we're going to follow up on tips and a lot. We're still going to utilize the drones.

So moving forward, because what happened New Year's Eve is everybody kind of went under the cover of each other, knowing that we would be overwhelmed. But with people popping independently throughout the year, it's much easier for us to, at the very least, utilize the fireworks section and the nuisance abatement law.

A lot of people may balk and say oh that's nothing. For nuisance abatement to work, you have to give the property owner an opportunity to abate the illegal activity. So it's not a... It's not a toothless thing. It's actually just the first phase in abatement.

So when you guys hear that abatement letters went out, please understand that that is required by law. If we do intend to do any, do any further civil action beyond that.

Sorry. So that's the... Those are letters that are going to be sent out based on the drone footage and other information collected?

Correct. So it's gonna... We're scouring through all of the tips that we can get through. For tips that did include photographs, if we feel that there's enough evidence... So the difference between criminal prosecution and civil prosecution or civil litigation is that for criminal prosecution, you need beyond a reasonable doubt, which is essentially 99% likely that it occurred.

For civil process, you just need a preponderance of evidence, which means that it was more likely than not that it occurred. So although we can always get criminal prosecution against people, if we can leverage the reasonableness of more than likely, then we want to use those avenues.

Okay. No, that's good. Thank you. And yeah, I did see some of the initial numbers that were printed in the news that you guys released. You know, the comment sections were a little, you know, this is all that happened when you guys are doing all this work.

So that's really good to know that there's another round of kind of warnings, enforcement kind of thing happening. And yeah, please, I hope you guys do share that with the public so that they can kind of see things happening in community because I think that does help a lot that people know. Right.

They know somebody got a letter, so you're gonna think twice before you actually do something next year kind of thing. So, yeah, thank you for your work on that.

And I appreciate your feedback and questions on that. For the tickets, I'm just gonna say that that was a number that I was not happy with. You know, the counties are great partners, so I'm just gonna have to figure out, you know, what hindered them from giving more tickets that night.

Again, the kuleana. If you guys watch the KHON special, I was very clear. The kuleana in the state is the importation. And I think we did a great job at that. We just need to partner with our counties more to understand what the limitations are in giving those tickets.

Rep Alcos.

Hi, Director. What is your plans on bringing down drug trafficking and human trafficking? Can you speak a little bit about that this year or how it compared to a couple years ago? Is it coming down?

So drug trafficking has kind of remained flat. The biggest indicator for illegal drugs is the street level cost. Unfortunately, the street level cost is lowering, which means that there's more supply. So, you know, the Department of Law Enforcement does have its State Narcotics Office.

It is a member of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Initiative, which is a federal initiative that brings everyone together. So we are working on that. The state does not technically have an Internet crimes against children...

I'm sorry, the Department of Law Enforcement doesn't have a dedicated unit to Internet crimes against children, which is a kind of a national thing. We do participate in it, but we don't have full time investigators attached to it.

So in regards to the human trafficking part, we just provide additional assistance to the counties upon request. For drug trafficking, we do, we do make active investigations. Predominantly, a lot of our cases are at port, so it's the people that try to bring it in via the airport.

Thank you.

All right, Rep Morikawa, and then Kusch.

I have a compensation question. Your deputy sheriff, you have 1, 2, and 3. Why are the ones and the twos getting the same SR rating?

So a lot of it has to do with that's a recruit. So they're on recruit status. And then once they pass their probation and they switch to two. They become a two. Yeah. So one is like the journey.

When can they become a three?

So that's when they get promoted. So that's at the rank of sergeant.

So if these employees end up being long term, you could always... You could have all threes?

No, because you would need supervision. So typically what you would see in our agency is you would see bulk of our employees being twos. And then of course, it would go smaller from there. Typically, our span of control is anywhere from five to eight. So for every three that you see, there would be about five to eight twos.

So the threes are the supervisors?

Correct.

Okay. I'm just thinking compensation. How can you get more, better compensation for your workers?

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of it has to do with collective bargaining agreements. Again, we're not asking for anything this year with everything going on. Next year, I'll probably be hoping that someone will introduce some type of parity bill. Some of the ideas that I've had is a price, is a base match.

So what that would do is instead of increasing their pay, which could hurt over time, you know, calculations, it's that $20,000 difference. Basically, they get a $15,000 flat match every year. So at the very least, when I go to a recruitment event, our poster will say at least 70,000 compared to the county, 79,000 versus... It's embarrassing. Our signs say 55 to 79 versus their 79. And it's amazing that even anybody takes our jobs. So for the 350 sworn that I have, I'm really appreciative to them.

Are they all called sheriffs?

So three fourths of our agency are considered sheriffs. The other half are considered state investigators or general police. We are looking... We are working with DHRD to create an actual state police class. So within our agency, we would have parity with the counties.

And instead of people trying to kind of cut their teeth with the sheriffs and then vie for a county job or a mainland job, if they want, they could come in at the more basic functions of a sheriff and then transition to a state police officer at some point.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks for all your gains in the labor force side. And for those don't know, in Hilo, they had a huge fireworks bust. So that was great. With two possible felony convictions, along with your ag theft work. You had mentioned that there was going to be four people available for an ag crimes unit on Hawaii Island. Do you... Do you foresee hiring that in the near future or any progress on that front?

So we're hoping... So because we actually want to eventually spec that as the first state police because of their broad authority, that's taking some time, some work with DHRD.

So what we're trying to do is do it as a special project now so that we can just set the rate at the county rate and then hopefully attract some good people. So, yes, for Hawaii County, you guys would have one sergeant, sergeant detective, and three regular patrol officers. So we're working as quickly as we can. DHRD has helped us, you know, along with what we need to fill out. I guess it's just a matter of the processes that are in the way.

Any speculation on timelines when that might be recruiting, recruitable?

We're hoping, we have to talk to see what the status is on a special project request. Of course, a lot of that has to do with, you know, where would the funding come from beyond the pilot period. So I think that's what the question that needs to be answered. And so we're working with Gov's Office on that.

Okay, do you have the funds to continue it or is that something that you need to request from the legislation?

We definitely have enough for this fiscal and next fiscal whenever it should kick on. But definitely we're going to have to talk about year 3, 4, and 5. It would be nice if that funding existed so that the special project would kind of sail through because it's just a matter of who pays for it after.

We've already made some great gains in regards to community. We had some positive press in recovery and a prize cow which, you know, I didn't realize that they could be worth 25 grand. So that was, that was interesting. So it's definitely just a matter of the process.

I'm confident that, that we're going to show some gains and add, of course, we're coming out of firework season, so the focus is going to be ag crimes, traffic safety is huge, and of course we need to kick up on drug issues.

One more additional. I didn't see it here, but will the Fire Marshal be speaking today?

Yes, if you would... If you guys have questions for her, we can go ahead and bring her up.

Is that on the agenda, or just questions?

Yeah, I got a couple small ones. Members, any additional questions for the Director? Okay, yeah. Hold on. We'll stay with the Director for now and then we'll... That way we can kind of, you know, avoid the musical chairs. So Vice Chair, and then Rep Perruso.

Director, can you mention the traffic safety issue? And if it's, if it's more appropriate to ask DOT when they're here, I can ask them instead of. Because Director Sniffen has kind of talked to me about speeding issues along Pali Highway and your surface streets and partnering with your Department to do a state highway patrol. Are you able to share anything about that work? Is that coming from his department this year and how's that going to kind of work?

So the funding would come from DOT. We don't have it in our current budget to support. But he did work with the federal DOT to allocate funding to us. Typically only the counties would get funding for additional enforcement, so we're very grateful to him.

So what we're going to do is we're going to work with him on a data driven plan. Being that we're so tiny and we can't be everywhere, we're going to focus around schools during the day for speeding, distracted driving, whatnot. And then on the weekends and evenings, it's speeding and DUI. So again, we're tiny.

So you might only see, you know, one or two squads per area. And this is statewide. So in every county there's going to be on the weekends and whatnot. So if you guys are aware of complaints of speeding, particularly near schools or state buildings, please reach out to us or the DOT and we can go ahead and work on that.

You know, I think that if we stay in our lane... And we definitely don't want to undermine or get in the way of the county, but being that they're short, we're coordinating with them. So I talk directly to the traffic major and the relationship is this.

If a request comes through, I call up that traffic major and I say, do you guys have any plans for, let's say, H3 tomorrow night? They say no, and then we'll go ahead and send our sheriffs out there to fill in.

Again, the goal of the DLE, because we're so tiny, we only make up 10% of the law enforcement community. Our job is to supplement and support the county. So it's not to interfere.

So is the programs going to be run with existing personnel, or are you still looking to scale up to specifically do this program?

Right now it's going to be existing personnel. Director Sniffen through his federal pathways are trying to see if those people that are assigned to airports, harbors, and eventually the traffic division could be given a supplemental pay.

So there would be a sheriff, but those assigned to that would be a supplemental pay through federal DOT or federal airports to match the county pay. Because I will acknowledge that our judiciary section is a very basic function. But for my airports, harbors, and some of my others, they do the same thing as the county do. And it's really disheartening that they're not paid.

A little off track, but I want to share this, that in that Kapahulu incident where a sheriff was shot as a, you know, doing task force work with the DEA, there was an office HP officer to no fault of his own 10ft away that didn't get shot, but makes 20 grand more a year. So when I hear that we're not doing what they do, I'd like to highlight that as an example of not being true.

Rep Perruso.

My question was just about vacancies and whether or not they're concentrated in one particular area or geographically.

So for us right now, out of 490 authorized positions, we have 136 vacancies. So we really are hurting. There's a lot of pressure from Judiciary to staff. I've had some very plain conversations with them that, you know, I can't take from Peter to pay Paul.

And it's not like I have 100% staffing at the airport and I'm refusing to put them in the courts. The courts are probably the best staffed, you know, because we understand what's going on there.

But I also have to balance the fact that if we don't have enough sheriffs at the airport, we could lose international status, which would be devastating to our economy. So it's important that I have parity so that I can recruit, so that our courts, our airports, and harbors can be well staffed.

Members, additional questions for the Director? I have a couple small ones, I think. Yeah. So just conceptually, I know, like in terms of tonnage seized and stuff, I think for a lot of drug operations, it's kind of easier to conceptualize. What does it, what does 121,000 pounds mean?

So typically your average consumer, so not the people that like really piss you off in your neighborhood, but you just average Joe Schmo family will buy around 50 to 100 pounds. So that would equate to the fact that anywhere from 1,200 to 2,400 families didn't have illegal fireworks this year.

And like an average kind of aerial firework is, what, one to five pounds, give or take?

Yeah. So like, for example, a 24 shot kit of mortars, one that goes boom. Right. The ones that are, you know, I need to fight. Sorry, sorry. I'm a sound guy. So a 24 shot pack can run you 500 bucks. So just to put that into context, so. And a pack weighs about 13 pounds.

Okay. On the high end?

Yeah, on the high end, yeah.

Okay. And you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, from various departments on how to implement AI. But I would imagine that like one pretty, like, low level application would be, you know, utilizing those drones or even like just steady cameras to track activity and just be able to maybe get an approximation for where we are in terms of current, you know, aerial fireworks versus where we will be. Are you guys doing anything like that?

Yeah. So we're big on tech. Drones is what everybody sees, but we have large investments in license plate readers. And one of the most exciting investments that we made this year, which I hope you guys will support, is a shot spotter. So what it does, it indicates gunshot detection, but it also, as a secondary tool, can give us overlay of firework. So we only have enough for the pilot here to do 10 square miles.

So we're gonna have it around this area, obviously, for, you know, gunshot detection in Kalihi, and then we're going to put some into Waianae. Or the, you know, actually from Nānākuli to Waianae. And what that's going to do is it's going to give us a temperature check year over year based on sound if we're making improvement.

The more important part is that, you know, a lot of people wondered why we put so much emphasis on fireworks. And the issue is that people are debating whether or not that's allowable. Nobody's fighting us on guns, right? So just to be very clear, we are focused on guns, we are focused on traffic, we are focused on all the traditional things, but no one's fighting us with that.

So what we're going to see, particularly in Kalihi, where we've had gunshot or gun incidents, and in Waianae, unfortunately, we have gunshot incidents, we're going to overlay that technology with AI to kind of tell us how people are flowing.

So, in other words, what that would look like in real time is a gunshot comes in, the indicator would give us within 10ft of where the sound generated, and then that would overlay with license plate readers. So predominantly, a lot of our shooters will flee in vehicles.

So what will happen is, let's just say if there's a sound shot down here and the system was set in place, we would know every car that fled from this area, which would give us a lead. Typically, right now, what happens in these instances, if nobody saw it, there's really no leads.

And AI is integrated in that generation, or generation of information. Other things that we are utilizing AI for is also for fireworks tracking. We're trying to get more input data from our shippers. It's something that might have to happen at the federal level to allow us to draw down shipping data.

And we could feed it. Just to let you know, the manifest would probably be about this high per day, and it would take a person a week. If we were able to get that data and ingest it into AI and looking for irregularities, it could complete that search within five minutes. So we are looking into it.

So some other AI things that we're using for DHRD for HR issues and whatnot is automatic responding to applicants that apply so they know where they are in the status. We're working with a vendor Workday. Several things that does for us is it keeps people engaged to the employment process, though it takes long.

Secondly, what it'll do is it'll create a file of that individual's growth for their career. So some of the things that we have when we're trying to respect or people are trying to get other positions is that we can't track their training records and that that obviously becomes problematic. So we are in full embrace of AI type tools.

Gotcha. Okay, Any follow ups for the Director? Okay, thank you very much. We have our Fire Marshall here. I have a quick kind of broad question. You know, you know, we worked together over the last year to kind of get things set up and set up the initial framework and no, just... Sorry, it's been a rough one, but someone else come up.

Can you maybe just keep us abreast of what the activity's been this last year?

Absolutely. The first now seven months, just reached that a couple days ago, has really been about getting to know the stakeholders across the state. Traveling from the different counties to learn what their fire prevention bureaus are doing as well as fire operations, community organizations, nonprofits, to really see what's currently happening in the state, where we can improve upon what needs to be improved upon and changed.

Some of the key focuses, like I said this year was really that relationship building so far and identifying how to streamline and standardize our relationships together. Working with kind of that gap analysis of code enforcement, whether it's from the wildland urban interface, which each county...

And similar to what the Director had mentioned, code enforcement really lies within the county fire departments, you know, outside of state lands and properties. That's where my kuleana lies, is there.

But also that direction of training and certifications which I'm now at a point, I'm actually traveling to a conference next week for accreditation with Chief Jacobs to make sure that our fire inspections, fire investigations, fire life safety educators are part of that accreditation process. So we can start seeing that streamlined organization across the board.

Also working with identifying for statewide fire response for wildfire this coming season, knowing what resources are available, MOUs, mutual aid contracts, those types of scenarios where knowing that each island literally is on their own for probably that first 24 to 48 hours of initial attack.

How do we build depth in our system not only statewide but nationwide to ensure that we've got any mechanism in place to be able to get as many boots on the ground as possible.

Our fires also working with ALERTWest trying to get additional early detection cameras and similar to AI of how that's going to play in to make sure that we can get on top of these fires sooner than later. Working through staffing. We've got a couple been working with this team here, DHRD and Governor's Office. Likely going to be doing a special project for staffing just to better align the types of staff that we need to really get the foundation correct to build the office from the ground up to start.

And then looking at doing a staffing assessment or community risk assessment over the next year to be able to identify what State Fire Marshal's Office would look for minimum staffing to be a proactive versus reactive to make sure that we're meeting the objectives of Act 302 but also the implied tasks and things that might not have been necessary at least stated in there.

Okay. Members, any additional questions? Yeah, go ahead.

You know for firefighters, you guys are not just fighting fire. You guys fight, I mean you help with the ambulance or the roads or something in the water. What is your percentage of emergency calls that you're trying to, your team attack mostly? It's so busy, you know.

I would say statewide and you know really is community risk reduction in general is identifying that data collection just as you're saying. I would say largely, probably 90% of the calls across the state are going to be your EMS, medical, or rescue types, with the 10% ish being fire response, which is pretty typical across the country, you know.

So now with that, in the nationwide we're transitioning from a National Incident Fire Reporting System to National Emergency Reporting Information System, where all of the different departments feed in there. So we can identify what trends we're seeing to help create campaigns and pocket communities to help reduce that risk.

But largely I'd say at this point without having the specific data to know exactly, I would say probably about 85-90% is going to be medical, EMS, rescue type, and then the remaining is going to be fire.

Thank you. I will see you guys first at the scene for EMS mostly.

I think that depends on the on the island too because I know not not each fire department has EMS embedded. I know the Big Island does have EMS. Maui I think has some. But then the private ambulances are also part of a big part of the picture, the state EMS as well.

Thanks. Members, additional questions for the Fire Marshal? Anything else or... Sorry, go ahead.

I just... Do you feel like you have the resources this coming year? Do you have any... I was looking through, I didn't see any. And there's a lot of data here.

So this year was very much a plan and we get ready for the next biennium to bring back kind of that more robust future looking plan of what the State Fire Marshal's Office ideally would look like.

You know, in staffing that out, I can say based on the current, the current bill and the duties with inspecting like annually, I think we have around 8,000 buildings statewide and would be by statute to inspect those annually.

I could say we definitely don't have enough staffing. But part of that assessment is going to be identifying what those buildings are, giving them a risk profile to come back to, you know, come back and say we're, you know, annually is a bit extensive, but we have a plan based on the risk category of these occupancy types to do them cyclical.

Whether, you know, annually would be our critical infrastructures, hotels, motels, those types of things. And then dialing it down to every two or three years for the less critical. I would say that for this coming year we'll have enough to really start getting that foundation. But the biennium, the 2027 session, will probably be a heavy lift and a heavy ask.

Thank you, Chair.

Additional questions? If not... And any additional questions for the Department, for the Director? Okay. If not, thank you, and thanks for holding up better than I did.

We're going to recess briefly before we have-- thank you. Aloha. We are reconvening the Committee on Finance for budget briefing from UH. Before we get started, since you guys weren't here at, like, 9:00 a.m., we have a new microphone system. So green means it's on, red means it's off.

As it's being calibrated, please try to do your best to keep side conversations to minimum because it may actually pick it up and broadcast it. I think we're pretty much worked through that kink, but in case. Yeah. Okay. Saw it. All right. Well, welcome, and please proceed.

Morning. Good morning, Chair Todd, Vice Chair Takenouchi--she's here--and members of the House Finance Committee. My name is Wendy Hensel, and I'm honored to serve as the president of the University of Hawaii. Thank you for the opportunity today to review our budget request with you, and I'm pleased to introduce two members of the leadership team here at UH, who are here with me today.

From the Board Office, Board of Regents Chair Gabriel Lee, and from the System Office, Vice President for Budget and Finance Luis Salaveria, formerly known as Luis. We can answer those questions if you have them.

I'm also pleased, as you can see behind me, to have more than 20 leaders from the system and the campuses here today who are here to support our testimony and answer any specific questions that may come up.

In 2025, my first year as president, we worked to implement transformative programs and opportunities to enhance academic excellence, eradicate barriers to student success, and infuse innovation and design thinking across the system to improve effectiveness and efficiency. The university is wholeheartedly committed to collaborating with the governor, the Legislature, community, business leaders, and other stakeholders to turn this vision into a reality.

Of course, our budget request today is foundational to that collaboration, and your support for our mission both today and in the future is incredibly important. We also understand that funding, the funding that we receive from the state, brings with it accountability for results, and to that end, let me take just a few moments to briefly share with you a few key initiatives and forward momentum that we have achieved this past year.

In Fall 2025, UH enrollment reached over 51,000 students, which is a 2% increase from Fall 2024, marking the third consecutive year of growth and the highest enrollment since 2017.

Our research endeavors achieved remarkable success with extramurally funded research, setting yet another record at $734 million in fiscal year 25, the fourth consecutive year of record numbers, underscoring our role as a leader in innovation and academic excellence. Simultaneously, our philanthropic support shattered previous records, raising $171.7 million to support students, faculty, and groundbreaking research.

As you may have seen on the news, UH launched Direct2UH in conjunction with the Department of Education, which allows our public high school seniors to apply to nine of our 10 campuses with just a few short clicks, rather than a full application.

The goal is not only to encourage more applicants, but to create earlier connections that allow us to show how our range of career and degree programs meet the needs of literally every student at the high schools. As of November, our applications are up across the system by 122%.

UH also began implementing a system-wide artificial intelligence strategy that includes hiring the university's first AI leader, creating an Office of Academic Technology and Innovation, initiating a task force to develop recommendations for strategic investment, launching a comprehensive plan to equip every student and educator with AI skills, and building secure system-wide infrastructure.

We also commenced an innovative system-wide rollout of integrated student success technology, including EAB Navigate and Edify, to ensure a common standard of care and equitable support for every student on our campuses, no matter where they sit. EAB Navigate uses predictive analytics to flag students at risk and trigger early outreach and prevention from faculty and advisors.

This technology will play an important role in our comprehensive evaluation of system-wide barriers to student retention and graduation rates. You also may have heard we initiated a redesign of leadership positions and structure across the university to ensure we respond to our changing environment and meet the needs of Hawaii.

Our infrastructure must support our key strategies and ensure accountability at every level. We've begun the separation of the two positions that I personally hold, the president of the system and the Chancellor of the Manoa campus, and launched a pilot combination of leadership across UH West Oahu and Leeward Community College to explore how more integrated operations at these two campuses might fuel innovation and workforce responsiveness for West and Central Oahu.

And finally, we have worked to enhance our partnership with our legislative colleagues by implementing regular strategic briefings to ensure that our directions and priorities are transparent, collaborative, and to the greatest extent possible, aligned. Thank you, Chair Todd and others here who have participated in those sessions.

The forward momentum I described here is particularly notable because it occurred in an environment of significant challenge for the university that resulted in shifts at the federal level in policy and funding. As of mid-December, 85 extramural grants totaling approximately $109.5 million have been terminated due to shifting federal priorities.

An additional $80 million in UH funding has received notice that it is at risk due to a December U.S. Department of Education finding that minority-serving programs are unconstitutional. The issue is compounded going forward by the reduction in new funding opportunities. As of December 1, UH has experienced a 50% decrease in the number of new federal grant awards and a 60% decrease in the total dollar value of those awards compared to this time last year.

In addition, our momentum in research is threatened by federal proposals to cap indirect cost recovery at 15% for research grants. If enacted, this has the potential to create significant financial gaps, increase administrative costs, and constrain momentum in biomedical research.

The university has and will continue to navigate these uncharted waters thoughtfully and with a commitment to creating a stronger, brighter future for UH and for the state. We will push forward with our strategic priorities regardless of these challenges, which brings us to the budget.

We are also aware of the funding challenges facing the state in the upcoming year, and for that reason, have elected to identify only two proposals for consideration in the Board of Regents's budget. These proposals specifically were chosen because they are time-sensitive and because they are highly impactful, not just for UH, but also for the state's economy and for quality of life for its residents.

UH plans to use its internal operating funds to support the additional strategic investment and needs that we identified for the forthcoming year. Beginning with our Healthcare Workforce Initiative request, we are requesting 3.7 million and 18.5 full-time positions to help address critical healthcare workforce shortages across Hawaii.

Severe shortages exist in practically all health professional disciplines and most medical specialties, limiting access to care, especially in rural and underserved communities and vulnerable populations.

The requested funding would support coordinated system-wide health, science, and healthcare workforce initiatives, spanning multiple campuses and units, including the John A. Burns School of Medicine, the School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene, Thompson School of Social Work and Public Health, Daniel Inouye College of Pharmacy, and the UH Cancer Center. These initiatives focus on three urgent areas that directly affect access to statewide care: cancer, neurology and dementia, and behavioral health integration and addiction.

UH Manoa Interim Provost Syrmos and UH Hilo Chancellor Bonnie Irwin are here to answer any detailed questions that you may have about those proposals. Moving on to UH Manoa Athletics, we are requesting additional economic support for our Athletics Department at Manoa in recognition of the impact these operations have for our entire state.

This request reflects the need for additional resources to maintain competitiveness in light of the university's transition to the Mountain West for most sports in 2026 and to respond to challenges and NCAA rules regarding student athletes. The proposed initiatives are anticipated to deliver direct economic benefit and value to the state while advancing the athletic program's mission of excellence, community engagement, and student athlete development.

First, we seek to institutionalize 17 general funded FTEs from temporary roles and also to convert 35 existing special funded positions into general funded positions. This change will ensure stability and critical staff roles in compliance, training, finance, and communications, and notably, this conversion does not require the issuance of new funding to UH but will provide long-term staffing, security, and cost savings on the fringe benefits.

We also request 10.08 million in annual operational funding to enhance areas like nutrition, recruiting, travel, equipment, apparel, insurance, medical care, academic support, and facility maintenance. This funding will support such things as providing basic meals and enhanced performance nutrition for our student athletes, addressing significant rising travel costs and ensuring health, academic, and facility resources meet Division 1 standards as well as the Mountain West.

Finally, $5 million annually is requested to establish an institutional name, image, and likeness program that provides fair and competitive compensation to our student athletes. In the current landscape of college sports, NIL opportunities are critical for retaining our local talent and attracting elite athletes who can elevate Hawaii's national profile.

This request has already been discussed publicly, and AD Matt Elliott and I are here to answer your questions about that proposal. Finally, our Capital Improvement program budget request totaled $283.1 million for FY 26.7, supporting primarily capital renewal, deferred maintenance, and modernization projects across all 10 campuses.

We focused on the priority areas that we could not afford to do within our own resources, and these investments are essential to maintaining safe, functional, and up-to-date learning and working environments system-wide. VP Jan Govea is also here to help answer questions relating to our CIP requests.

In closing, we sincerely thank you, of course, for taking the time today to speak with us and for all of the incredible past support for the university. We're enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with you this year and look forward to the conversation. Thank you.

Thank you. Before I turn it over to members, I was wondering if you could give us a brief update on the Direct Admissions Program.

Certainly. You mean in terms of what it does?

Well, just kind of the current status and where things are going.

Sure. So this was a program that had been in discussions for probably five years when I arrived, and I had the benefit of having created such a program in my last position and wanted to ensure that it launched this year. And so working with Superintendent Hayashi, we committed to delivering it as of August.

And essentially, what it-- you know, these are our students. Many of these students are early college students, about 20-- you know, 27% of DOE high school students take early college. Requiring the process of having to fill out all of these forms a second time is unnecessary and creates burdens that deter some people.

Clearly, most of our students are not going to be deterred by putting through the application. We try to, in particular, target those who may not see themselves as college material to be clear that we see you as college material, and in fact, we have open admissions to our community colleges so long as you graduate.

And for two of our schools at UH West Oahu and also UH Hilo, provided you also have a 2.7, you would be eligible for admissions there. And so literally, with a few clicks, you go in, we receive, we pre-populate all the information by data sharing with the Department of Education, and we ask you to identify which schools you're interested in, and we go from there.

So the point is not simply to raise the number of applicants, but it's to get them applying early so that we can engage with them in the fall as opposed to late in spring when students are: I don't know what I'm going to do next; I'm not sure this is the right place for me. So the fact that as of date to day in November we're up by 122% is a strong statement of the success of that program.

Great, thank you. Okay, members. Questions? Question.

Hi. Thank you for being here and bringing so much of your team with you and thank you for the-- I kind of want to talk about the healthcare positions that you guys had requested. You know, thank you to so many of the colleges and departments within the system, all the schools who have kind of helped us to kind of, you know, really focus on this healthcare workforce issue. I just recently went to the Maui College program for the CNA to LPN Glide Pathway graduations.

Was really great to see all those kind of nurses get that new designation and get back into the field. Could I get maybe the-- I saw that the positions weren't included and the Governor <inaudible> colleges might be able to talk about what kind of expansion that would mean for the programs. Like would that be bigger cohort sizes?

What kind of-- you know, if the positions were to be funded, what would that look like for each of the programs and the timeline for getting more people right into the specific workforces for each of these sections?

So there are three positions at the School of Nursing under this program. Most of those three, or the majority of these three positions, are targeted towards their simulation care lab, which they have at Webster. There is also collaboration between our School of Nursing at UH Manoa <inaudible>. So most of those positions are to staff the lab <inaudible>. It is targeted on three areas, or actually two areas for the nursing. One is on the cancer care and the other--

Other one is on dementia and neurology treatment.

Okay, so. And then, so, it would just be more classes available, or would it get people through the programs faster?

That actually will allow us to increase the number of nurses that graduate both from, UH Manoa and UH Hilo. Certified nurses as well, and especially with certifications in dementia, diagnosing Alzheimer's. And that is the workforce that we're looking at this morning.

And if you need a little bit more detail, I can have the Dean of the medical school that is here to actually give you a little bit more detail.

Yeah. If anyone could provide maybe what those actual numbers might be looking with any kind of expansion of either graduates or programs or classes, that would be helpful.

Good morning, everyone. Sam Shomaker, Dean of... Delighted to be here with you this morning. This is a workforce initiative, and it will directly contribute to training more healthcare providers for the state. These—the proposal we put together is truly interdisciplinary, so that we have positions requested from all the health science programs at the university.

Healthcare is a team sport these days, so physicians, nurses, pharmacists, all work together to provide patient care.

We picked three major public health issues for the state of Hawaii to focus on, and I'm happy to report that at least in two of these areas, cancer and neurology, we are starting new training programs that will augment the healthcare workforce in those particular disciplines.

So, we are starting a hematology oncology fellowship program to build out the cancer workforce in the state, and we're also starting a neurology residency program which will contribute not only to stroke care, which is a major public health issue, but also to dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

So, those are two tangible examples of how this funding would help to directly support enhancing the healthcare workforce.

And are these areas that I guess where you guys—so, since they're going to be a little bit, are these new programs that we're going to be able to focus on? Has this come—were these requests coming, you know, from the existing student body, from, you know, healthcare community looking to expand?

Are you guys already seeing the interest from, you know, the existing enrollment that you think you're going to be like, if we were to be able to get this started sooner rather than later, that we could really get people through very quickly? What's that kind of looking like on your end?

So, in considering what programs we wanted to support, we took a look at the specialty availability across the state, and it turns out that hematology, oncology physicians are in very short supply, as our neurologists. So, these programs will directly contribute to augmenting the healthcare workforce in those particular areas.

We also are focusing on substance abuse, which we feel is a very significant public health problem in our state, and we wanted to create a program that can both train additional providers in that area but also conduct research into how we can most effectively deal with these patients who suffer from substance abuse disorders across the state.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Rep. Alcos and then Rep. Perruso.

Hi, doctor. What is an average cost for student now per, per year or four years?

How much does it cost to educate a student?

Oh, how much does a student have to pay?

Oh, the student—our tuition is $37,000 for each academic year.

So, when a student graduate, how much is the student in debt, on average?

140,000 roughly. We do have almost all of our students qualify for some kind of financial aid or scholarship support. So, we constantly work with the UH Foundation to find new funding, new scholarship opportunities, to cut down on the debt that our students graduate with, because we believe that if they graduate with less debt, they will be able to select specialties that they're passionate about rather than those specialties that pay the most.

So, again, how much was it? Is it per year or?

Is there a question for the medical school or for UH in general?

UH, for the students.

From Manoa but not for the medical school at all?

Yeah, not from the medical school.

Oh, okay.

Oh, you're asking a general question about—he's talking. Those are the statistics for the medical school. Our tuition is I believe here I have the exact number. Hold on.

The tuition is $12,186 for UH Manoa. It is $7,838 for Hilo, $7,584 for West Oahu, and $3,229 for our community colleges. The, the median, the median debt is $17,000. About 20%—about 20% of our graduates carry a debt in about a median amount of $17,500.

Is that per year?

Overall, at the end of whatever degree program.

Yeah. And 39% of our students pay no tuition at all. So, it is—we are significantly below the average as it relates to an institution of our standing and terms of what we charge.

One more question. You speak a little bit about athletes in Hawaii, and you know, keeping our athletes home. University of Hawaii, are you guys putting scholarship money? Because a lot of college now is paying—I mean schools are paying college players.

You know, how are you seeing to generate with this state of Hawaii football and to build that up or any sports in the state of Hawaii with your college player by keeping them home instead of they're going out, how you plan on keeping some of them home?

Do you have enough funds or do you need to work on more funds on that?

That's the process that we're working on right now. This new landscape with NIL. So, about half of our student athletes receive scholarships or we give about 250 scholarships to the 500 overall student athletes.

But now, with the new name, image, and likeness model, we are offering students both scholarship and on top of that, these name, image, and likeness payments that are used to help recruit them to the university. Just as a very small example, the newest signing football class of high school freshmen, more than half of those students are from here in the state.

And is some of them getting paid?

So, there's a combination, yes, of scholarship plus now name, image, and likeness payments on top of that. Yes.

Is University of Hawaii getting funds from the state to pay them or is it outside funds?

Currently, all of that is privately funded.

You guys have a plan on working on building that—plan on getting more payment to the students?

Yes, that's what we're working on. So, over the last—this system just started six months ago. So, July 1st was the first time that we could make these payments.

In this course of the first year, we tried to identify what we think is the appropriate budget for the university, for the Athletics Department overall and per team to be able to sustain the level of success that we're seeking and what we're seeking today, and part of this conversation, is to see if we can find a combination of both private funding, new revenue streams, and state funding to help meet that at those NIL goals.

Thank you. I would like to know the budget later on if you guys ever come up with one. Awesome. Thank you, Chair.

So, over on a topic, and we've been talking over the last few months about whether we're going to have—we're kind of feeling out where other teams within the Mountain West will be or other programs. Do we have any indication or any updates on where other programs have landed for NIL?

Or is it still kind of guesswork a little bit?

It is guesswork, but it is also starting—we are starting to see data and anecdotal evidence based on what we're seeing in the marketplace. The, the way this all is originated was looking at about 20% of your revenues in certain categories. That's how they came up with the NIL number for the country overall.

And that was what led to this 20 million dollar cap for all Division 1 institutions. When we look at the Mountain West and the competitors that we'll have, we think it's about 25% of that would be the average. So, about $5 million is that the correlated percentage of that total revenue.

So, across all sports, we think that's the right number.

Okay. And, you know, so that's the request that's on the table from the Legislature. If that amount is not, you know, the final amount, if you fall short of that during the session, is there a plan to make up the gap through student fees?

I know with other programs, many of them charge somewhat exorbitant, actually, student fees to fund athletics. So, let's say you ended up with like 2 or 3 million from the Legislature. Would you try to make up that gap with student fees, or is that unclear or being discussed?

Yeah. Chair Todd, I would say that we have not looked at our fees and, in some cases, in decades, in more areas than just athletics. And so, part of our responsibility to the institution is to look across and see where we have not kept pace with, with inflation and costs. So, yes, we will look at athletic fees.

I don't believe they've been changed in many, many years. But the answer to your question is we will use what we have, whatever we have, and it is—it was an intentional strategy on our part to identify this funding as NIL. There are many programs that will not identify it as NIL as a public funding source.

We felt like it was important to be partners with the Legislature to indicate transparently what's necessary in order to generate the returns in the Mountain West. And so, you know, this is our belief of what is necessary to be competitive.

But we will do our best to be competitive in every way, no matter what resources we have going forward.

Okay. And current student fees are about eight to $900 a year, or is that a ballpark?

That I don't have written down, but we can get that for you.

In that range?

Yeah, it looks like it's right around $882.

Okay, thank you. Members, additional questions?

For Manoa, which would be the highest.

I think Rep. Perruso and then Rep. Kusch.

I have a question going back to the healthcare Workforce initiative. So, historically, and I know that you're with the medical school, but historically, we've seen a real choke point for the nursing workforce at the university level.

So, we have a lot of really qualified students, so many who are interested in nursing, so many that it becomes extraordinarily competitive to get into programs. I think the community colleges have been facilitating and they've been broadening their capacity and deepening their capacity.

But I'm wondering if the funding that you're requesting, we should also expect to see that strengthening of capacity at the four year level for those nursing students. Should we expect to see increased numbers admitted to nursing programs?

I can't directly speak to nursing and what their plans are in terms of expansion. We do—we do recognize that there's a huge nursing shortage in the state of Hawaii. I think latest data I saw was 4 or 5,000 short number of nurses we would ideally have.

And I know the school of nursing is working very diligently to expand capacity. So, this will help. I can't say it's going to be a panacea where it's going to result in a huge number of new nursing graduates. But one of the perennial problems with expanding the nursing class size is a lack of qualified faculty.

So, to the extent that we can augment the number of faculty positions that the school of nursing has, it will result in at least some progress towards meeting that gap between what we actually produce and what we do.

I'll be looking for those numbers of students that you're admitting to the point of progress.

Thank you for coming today. A couple questions. First, starting abroad and then focusing to UH Hilo, I think.

Is UH Manoa like near capacity and is there any administrative tools that you folks use to keep people engaged in the UH system collectively from community college up to UH Manoa, but shift, try to shift people around or refocus them to underutilized resources within the university? UH has chronically kind of been underutilized in that respect.

Is there any tools that you have or are planning to use to?

Yeah, I think in general, we have not taken a system wide approach to enrollment, which is part of what you're reflecting, you know, where if, for example, if Manoa is incredibly successful in recruiting, it may come at the expense of UH West Oahu or the community college where there might be actually more capacity to accommodate those students.

And so, one of the things that we've launched and that we're working on is a system wide strategy that looks comprehensively at where those programs are placed and where the levels of enrollment are.

And frankly, things like what we call heat maps, what's the usage of those facilities on the campuses so that we don't have a lot of excess capacity in some places and we're bursting at the seams than others. So yes, that is absolutely part of our strategy.

And we're looking at all different types of AI tools and an evaluation of really how to bring folks together to make these decisions versus independent strategies on the ground.

Okay, great. And then, part two of that is even more focused. And I know Bonnie way back there in the back row, but she...the UHH School of Pharmacy, Daniel K. Noi School of Pharmacy.

You know that every state seemed to recognize the need for pharmacists and everybody opened the schools and then there was kind of a glut and it's underutilized. Is there any plans to that being kind of this part of this, this bigger conversation to utilize that facility in different ways?

Yes. So, a number of things going on with pharmacy. And as you know, enrollment at UH Hilo overall has been down, although we're turning a corner right now. So, I'm optimistic. For pharmacy in particular, we just launched our XO Program which will allow students to pursue their PharmD degree part time, and we didn't have much time to market it this year.

So, this first cohort is going to be pretty small, but we're expecting that to grow not only in state but also nationally because this is the first, I believe, part time pharmacy program to launch is predominantly online. So, we'll be able to serve as many people who want to do it.

So, that is one thing and then the other thing that we continue to do on the pharmacy side is partner across. And so, with the Healthcare request that we have this year, each one of those three areas includes a pharmacist because as people have already mentioned today, Healthcare today is a team effort.

And so, having a pharmacist in that mix is really important. And for our island in particular, in the area of behavioral health and addiction, that's something we could really use. Lastly, Pharmacy has been partnering more with our nursing program at UH Hilo.

And so, some of the modular buildings adjacent to the main building have been used for nursing labs and we're hoping to build out again because the emphasis is now even more on integrated healthcare working across because our nursing program is vibrant and doing quite well.

And so, I think all of these things will position the College of Pharmacy to grow as we move forward.

Okay, thank you. Thanks, Chair.

Thanks everyone for being here. I have a question about EAB, so I kind of wanted to ask just to get a little bit more information about it. So, I don't know if you're familiar. I worked at UH for many years and as an academic advisor and so, worked with Star.

And so, I've heard concerns about the transition and the decision to move away from Star, which was built in house and really could do all kinds of things.

And as I was doing academic advising, you know, I've seen the progression of Star and just how it changed to meet the needs of the academic community and how it integrated both community college to the four years. So, I'm looking at your document here. I see contracts that EAB is now contracted.

$8 million I think, when I'm adding them all up. So, I'm wondering what was the decision behind transitioning from Star, which, you know, won all these awards and presented at all these conferences over the years, to moving to EAB? What can EAB do that Star was not able to do?

The rationale behind moving to EAB and then figuring out what is the total amount that we are now paying for EAB going into the future. From my understanding, Star was in house, so there were staff, they built it. It was, you know, there wasn't this contracting cost that came along with Star.

So, if you can maybe provide a little bit more information about this extra expense that UH is now gonna have to be paid for.

Yeah, I think the first thing to be really clear about is EAB is a company as opposed to a thing. Right? So, EAB Navigate is what you're referring to, which is a contract for an analytical program and proactive advising platform that has some components that were reflected in Star in an early capacity.

You know, the, the best way I can explain it, outside of a lot of technical pieces of it, is imagine those of you who are using Chat GPT. The difference between Chat GPT today and what it was two years ago, it's, it's night and day in terms of the functionality.

It is more than doubling in functionality in a single year. To keep that, there is no capacity to maintain that in house and maintain a state-of-the-art type of program.

It's simply, it's, it's replicating and advancing at such a pace that we are really limiting the utility of it by thinking that one or two people internally can meet the massive investments in AI that are taking place externally. So, you know, there is a significantly more sophisticated functionality under EAB navigate.

And it's a long tested program that continues to expand that shows graduation of retention changes up to 10 to 15% over the span of like three to five years.

So, it's quite, it's quite significant, lengthy history of detailed graduation and retention outcomes which frankly then help pay for that technology, simply by keeping people enrolled both in turn in real time, but then of course over the life of their contribution to the tax into the State Treasury.

So, I'm happy we have detailed analyses of what functionality we're gaining that I'm happy to provide to you. So, you know, kind of get into the nitty gritty.

But that's why it is simply in the environment that we're in with artificial intelligence it's not comparable to even five years ago and it's not, we are not possible internally of maintaining that type of advancement and we'll be at the losing end of it if we don't find ways to, to bring that kind of technology in.

EAB Edify is another part of that contract and what is wonderful about that is it takes all the diverse technology systems that we have internally and makes them talk to each other.

So, right now, I like to say that we are data rich and information poor because we have individual technologies in place at the 10 campuses that don't talk to each other and don't actually provide information without significant manual manipulation that nobody has time to do.

EAB Edify actually integrates—it's a data integration platform that helps us take all of the money we've already invested in all of these different places and actually use it for data-rich insights, so that what we do is not based on a feeling that it's working, but hard data that this, in fact, is moving the needle appreciably and it's worth the investment.

There's also EAB Strategic Advisory Services. EAB is the national, if not international, leader in best practices, in efficiency, in effectiveness, where, again, that investment I expect to pay off more in terms of the enhanced operational effectiveness and efficiencies.

It's the kind of expertise we've done we don't have in house and that it would cost us a tremendous amount to employ internally. That said, everything that we do is an assessment between what is the external cost going out and how can we staff it internally.

Can we meet that with a lower level of investment of internal personnel? And so, where those trade offs are positive for the university, we'll make them.

But in terms of EAB Navigate, there is, I know that there were people who loved STAR and who felt really comfortable with it as most people, most people don't like change in technology, but the increased capacity and efficiency is unmatched by anything that we have internally.

So, what is the total cost? What is it going to cost going forward to have this new system?

Which, again.

There's many, I guess all of them because they all work together. Right? So, what, what's the, I mean this additional cost moving forward.

I don't have that in front of me, it is in our tables in separate columns. I'm happy to go back and provide that to you in a single place.

Okay, so in the, I mean, I think it's in the contracts, it's like 8,000—8 million, sorry.

For multiple years, to be clear.

So, it would be whatever, I mean, that's the cost, and then, you just have to renew each time if you wanted to.

Some of it, some of that is relating to training and the implementation expertise, et cetera. So, not all of that is recurring costs, but some of it will be as a subscription service for the product.

And then, again, what you're paying for with the subscription is the constant updates to ensure that what you actually have is state of the art and it should generate sufficient savings with graduation and retention rates to actually be very cost effective in the long term.

So, when do you, sorry, wwhen do you anticipate, when do you anticipate seeing, I guess, improved graduation and retention rates based on this new system?

Actually there's, there's, as I said, there's at least 10 to 15 years of data now out there where these practices has been implemented. I happen to be at Georgia State University which actually created this in a, with EAB navigate as a pilot. And so, that was about 15 years ago.

And there's extensive data showing it's not like a 5-10 year window. You can see immediate impacts in terms of retention that are quite appreciable and unmatched.

I want to add too, it's a particularly important time for us to invest in this type of technology because the Federal Government is coming at identity-based student support interventions and so anything that we can do that is based on removing barriers across the board that's not identity based to increase retention and graduation actually is more important than it's ever been because we will be losing some of that support based on identity based intervention.

So, it's actually quite timely as a strategy and should significantly enhance our efforts to ensure that every student on every campus has a baseline level of support that's equivalent to.

Great, thanks.

Rep. Perruso.

This is a question, I think for VP Salivaria. So, on page 24 of your submission, it provides something of an overview of the restrictions, your budget restrictions, and I'm curious and maybe together you can respond to this question.

They are pretty—even though they seem to be small percentages, in my eyes, they seem to be significant amounts and I'm wondering how that translates for our student experiences and you know, if your emphasis is workforce preparation, how that translates on, in that effort.

Can you tell me again what page?

Page 24.

So, in answering your question, Rep., I mean, the restrictions that are placed on the university, I mean, literally kind of come from the overarching restrictions that are.

No, I understand that. I'm asking for the translation. So, the implications for students.

So, because the university has, again, a degree of autonomy, we get both tuition and fees, we get university, we get General Fund support, which we are very, very appreciative for, you know, it's imperative upon us to try and minimize the impact that it has. I'm not going to say that there is no impact.

Any loss in General Funds is always going to have some degree of impact. But in taking in the entire context of the university, I mean, it would be very difficult to kind of get down to like a specific, you know, impacted area. Obviously, we can use that money. We would want to use that money, but we would probably have to give you a little bit.

Yeah, if you could come back to me with that answer, because I do think that there are probably concrete answers in, under the various, you know, ID numbers.

We can give you the detail on where we took the restrictions within the particular program IDs. We can get that.

Thank you. Members, additional questions for the University?

I got a couple small ones, probably more related to athletics.

Again, sorry, just because it's one of the few things I tied into. Okay. So, you know, given the nature of our budget cycle, you're in an awkward place right now, right, where you have a request on the table, but you have athletics teams that are actively recruiting.

So, in the meantime, when this is still in flux, what does that mean for the university? Are you already stepping into some of that NIL funding directly now, whereas it's, I think you said earlier, it's still 100% private because there's no budget for it?

So, during this kind of awkward window of time, I mean, in theory at least, you're losing out on that recruiting now.

I mean, we are making decisions, real time, about what we think we can raise from the private sector and what we can generate from corporate sponsorships that can be applied directly to NIL for this fiscal year as we are making payments to students.

So, those were very strategic decisions about what we thought our capacity was and what it would take to retain the core elements of our team. But you're right, it is, we are kind of doing this real time as we're going, decisions for our fall teams about trying to retain those rosters had to be made over the course of these last couple weeks.

And now, for example, in college football, the transfer portal opened this week, and we have to be out there recruiting student athletes to come here to fill our roles.

Sure. And then, you know, in addition to the NIL request, there's substantial requests, but mostly like maybe costs you guys are already absorbing or taking on or areas we're even falling short. Whether it's meal subs, meal programs, nutrition travel, various positions, converting funding sources for existing positions.

I know it's difficult to prioritize, but given the size of these requests, where does that first dollar go?

Yeah, I think it's a good question because I think the dollars will help us in all spaces. And we've created a vision for excellence which has four pillars. And each of those pillars are addressed in some way or manner, shape, or form by these requests.

But at the core is the student athlete experience and recruiting and retaining student athletes.

I think that the, probably the fair answer—I don't know if this is absolutely a certainty, but because NIL is so new, because it's something that has been imposed on us by this new framework that's resulting from legislation and litigation, to be able to create that funding source and allow us to retain student athletes to try to get to graduation and be able to prioritize the competitive level of our team, that's a place where I think we probably have the greatest need right now.

These other pieces, we will work on generating, you know, as much revenue as we can to stay competitive and create the best possible student athlete experience. But I think NIL is really kind of the biggest challenge in front of us right now.

Okay, and then do you have a picture of the financial implications? So, this year, it changed from a pay per view model towards, you know, everyone was able to just kind of absorb it, which is especially on the new islands. Fantastic. We're very happy. Do you know what the financial implications are for that?

So, we don't know the sole picture because it's—we are being supported by the Mountain West Conference's TV deal as well. But I think it will be about $200,000 is the cost overall.

That's, that's the net loss, pay per view, revenue? I got you. Okay, Members, additional questions? Seeing none. We are adjourned. Thank you. Just as a quick announcement, because I've read that it's yesterday, tomorrow, or actually not tomorrow, January 8th, 9:00 AM, here we'll have economic outlook and the financial plan for the Administration. And then, 1:00 PM, we'll have DLIR and DHHL. Thank. You. Sa.