to his program this program starts on one five seven of your performance budget and then on for day twenty four opportunity to discuss to propose the fiscal year two thousand and seventeen budget for the office of the county auditor the office of the county auditor it consists of the county auditor two senior analysts and an administrative officer i have with here here with me today my administrative officer camille and our office is responsible for promoting economy efficiency and improve service in the transaction a public business in both the legislative and executive branch the mission of the office is noted on page one forty seven of your program budget which is to improve government accountability three independent analysis strategies of the office are noted on page one forty nine of the program budget specifically serve as a catalyst for positive change in a county government through focus independent audit and examination advocate for the efficient and appropriate use of public resources increased government transparency for the purpose of bringing a higher quality supplementary supplemental schedule for section eight and home programs and to perform agreed upon procedures for section eight and whole programs these audits and procedures were completed on march sixteenth regarding self initiated projects the author of a call the office has issued the audit of the county road resurfacing improvement and maintenance practices which was completed in october two thousand and fifteen and discuss with you here in the here in the chamber in january two thousand and sixteen our ongoing audits are in the in various stages the audit of county procurements is currently in the planning stage  sometime in june two thousand and sixteen the audit of the counties use of premium payment over time is in the planning stage the audit of the expenditures of the fiscal year two thousand and twelve budget appropriation for the local post office rehabilitation but finally the off of the county auditor continues to provide limited initiative support to the cost of government commission and that's the end of my opening comments i wish every department submitted something like this but we understand it's not the same for you basically have a flat budget in all accounts so stating that members first so ask you if you do the general guideline that i followed by going to seminars and talking to other audit shops is approximately one per audit staff on that in general on average audit takes around nine months from start to finish it really depends upon the audit area the cooperation you receive and the various other things that can happen in the audit in regards to providing more audit says i nor we always strive to try and provide more orders but we're constantly faced with the dilemma and that's basically we can provide more audit's if we limit school in other words if we narrow school on an audit we can't produce audit's quicker the problem with narron school is that you know audit becomes a lot of times less meaningful you know we could do like audit of cash receipts of a particular entity rather than a broader subject so far the authors that we've tried to do was broader in scope my hope was that it would be finding more meaningful recommendations which would help the fishies of the county that's why we did the treasury audit and the road we audit there is always that i will be trying in fiscal two thousand and seventeen to produce more audit reports on some of the audit shops within the general consensus that i can find is that these audit steps are outsource are more limited in the school they tried to narrow on it's because when you outsource an audit there's still a lot of work that our office would have to do and a lot of that work is involved in the planning scoping procurement of the audit i think this council you know procured an audit so i think you're well aware of some of the challenges that must be overcome when you do appear many over when you try to audit an issue that being said in two thousand and seventeen in two thousand and sixteen i listed an audit to be procured which which was intended to be procured however i ran into some difficulty so i'm going to try and do outsource audit in two thousand and seventeen it's not noted here because it's the audit that was in my two thousand and sixteen proposal but once again there are ways and generally the two ways is to outsource audit or i can expand staff the challenges that i have fallen expanding staff one is encountered in recruiting staff auditor this is not as there aren't as many staff auditors in the state is willing to move to molly i had hoped that some of the auditors maybe in the state auditor's office of the city auditors office because they have a large staff would would be willing or would be interested in coming to my county however that has not been the case so will i will not possibly look to see if i believe that there will be more opportunities but for now my focus in two thousand and seventeen would be to outsource a so you're not interested or think it's needed to follow up i mean you recommend two different departments whatever your findings are i think that's like one of the most important things out was like go straight for an audit to see what the recommendations are to rectify an issue that prompted this audit and thereby we want to know that you know that they're following up with corrective corrective measures so i'm just wondering if you can give comment on that thank you for the question member cochran follow up is a critical part of our office for every office office because followup provides a mechanism to try and make sure that some of the recommendations are followed and if not follow then people will know that it's not followed and if there's a good reason the reason why there is none in two thousand and seventeen is because what i want to do and what most audit shops do the wheel all the audit t some time to implement the recommendations especially because a lot a lot of their recommendations are we require a lot of work for the departments to do sometimes that require the department to hire more staff or rearrange their procedures or utilize a particular software so organizations it's true which employees are affiliated and these are cool who are they it looks like you have eighteen affiliations then you drop down this year to ten government auditors like we do we call it that is three initially we had a higher amount than we kind of changed the way we looked at and be part of these organization is good and bad i costs money to be a member sometimes we are members because we need to get control of professional education and veena member you get significantly discounted  the seminars and sessions are significantly discounted so we kind of pick and choose which ones will be associated with and which one is the best value for the office and individual  individual auditors the other thing that may change it time to time is if we are in an audit that requires some kind of special background we will we will consider joining that association auditor and therefore the chair will inform the committee this morning that the chair is now considering to amend section ten of the budget ordinance to address some of the important concerns the auditor has and again the staff know about it but in the end do not going to be happy i am considering implementing appendix d on the budget which will be a and more specific parameter of what each c a p project will be obama not going to let me run through a general language to avoid issues and concerns from the auditor so i'm looking at other departments if i remember correctly premium and maybe as we fire what was to cover anticipated salary increases but this when we put it under salary adjustments auditors program this was what was presented to us from the staff instead of reflecting the increases in the actual individual position by position as the administration there are no if you look at page four dash twenty three there are no proposed increases to the individual salaries but that amount there in what it is is a three point or possibly three point five percent increase for the staff which would be composed to all of the two senior editors and the discussion the camille in discussion with sandy we decided to present it that way but the description is a little misleading it's not a one  questions you might have thank agency performs the emergency management functions for the county and we do that in a comprehensive emergency management approach of you see it up here preparedness response mitigation recovery those are the traditional emergency management function  and we organize ourselves in those functions on our day to day basis and then we go into the incident command system when we operate get into a disaster or an emergency event when we activate the e e o c we are in the fifth year of our of our initial strategic plan and our initial plan when i first came back to civil defense was really to get our agency back on solid ground in to build a good foundation for our agency we didn't have a lot of policies and procedures that had been updated to really reflect the new changes of the incident command structure so we've done those things over the past few years we've brought our staff training up to those levels and as i mentioned we're in that final year of really building that solid foundation and you'll see some of those things in our in our budget so just some highlights of things that we've done so far this fiscal year we've completed the hazard mitigation plan which is a federal requirement and we worked department multi in order to get that done and it was approved in august and that was approved through fema we continue to roll out our market notification system which is a much more robust system than what we had been doing in the past we currently have thirty four hundred subscribers to that system we also use it for internal notifications and call outs and we've also opened it up to other departments to use for their own callback so i know that the fire department uses it for callbacks and then we've also shared it with the department of water supplies that they can do public notifications for when they have water main brakes and other outages and things like that you'll be happy to know that phase one of the siren modernization program has finally been completed over the years the modernization program has really taken a long time to get some traction and you know we're working with the state who has my mary responsibility for that so our role really has been helping them push through any permitting that needs to happen regarding s m a permits from the county or lease agreements from  sirens that are on county property while the siren modernization program was going forward there had been some issues then about maintenance of the current sirens that were there so as we move forward into phases two and three we're going to be requesting them to previously we've also been working with our counterparts at state so defense to ensure that we have a maintenance program for the sirens because that had been an issue before where we were only going out when a siren didn't sound and then trying to troubleshoot it or work on it at that point we want to make sure that we don't get to that situation before we have outages in coverage so the other things that we've had our community emergency response team program continues and this year we've had ten people so we'll be doing another one for them first at the beginning of the fiscal we're going to be at the end of the month to start one for them it'll be the second training that we've had for those folks and i'm sorry to say that the whole class was cancelled we only had two registrants for that particular class so we're working with the community to try to find a better time to reschedule and also to figure out what's the best way to reach the community and get them to commit to the training that we have scheduled some other things that are happening right now april is tsunami awareness month and we have published our extreme tsunami evacuation zone map so those are currently on the civil defense website and we have the shape files that have gone to know us so that when people go to the interactive know a website they'll be able to put their address in and they'll be able to see where they fall within the tsunami evacuation zones we had a very active hurricane season this year there were fifteen named storms i'm sure you've seen this in the news and it had been covered ten of those required an easy activation at some level so we had a very busy summer and early fall the last hurricane went well into november so the full full june through november season was on us and actively right now we are working with the department of health on the mosquito borne illness outbreak that hed occurred initially on the big island and at first it was all about the but as you know the world health organization has declared an epidemic for crisis four and then also there's another virus out there called she didn't and they're all transmitted by the same mosquito so which we do have here in mali so we have been meeting with them regularly to talk about what we're doing for surveillance and also to finalize our plans for if it becomes locally transmitted here in mali county how we will th aggressively go after that particular respond to that particular situation so what you see in our budget in front of you some of the biggest changes for f y seventeen this is the first time you've seen us come before you for expansion position requests an pretty minimal when i asked for positions in terms of building that foundation for a agency i'm asking for a quarter time position for somebody on the east somebody on and somebody in honna while we have been able to in the past continue working with volunteers from those areas when we have fifteen hurricanes in a season in addition to being gay in addition to a tsunami advisory we had earlier most of the folks that we have been counting on in those remote or the remote or rural communities are already full time assigned to another department and so we're asking them to do some things for our department and during an activation that's usually ok because we are using this incident command structure but it's things like th s class that ended up being canceled because i don't have a person who's not a volunteer that i can task and have them going out and doing some of these information gathering community meetings and things like that on our behalf so that's what you see in our expansion position for us the civil defense district coordinator and then in our operations budget you see that we added funds to do an update to our emergency operations plan the last update was done in tw and as i mentioned we've done some things operationally within our own agency that have changed and laws have changed other things have changed so we're going to be doing an update to our emergency operations planned this year so with that i'll go ahead and answer any questions that you may have thank you for your presentation was very good we appreciate that it was a lot of good information question no question but i would like to complement this fall she's done an outstanding job you know it's really nice when we're caught up in these emergency situations to know that we've got very competent people taking care of us thank you thank you very much initial conversation we had from civil defense into the emergency management arena some things that happened that really are good for our county previously our mayor had to be appointed by the adjutant general who is the head of state sort of fence or hawaii emergency management agency as well as the national guard and that had to be then approved by you as the council for him for the mayor to be the head person in their own jurisdiction so that went away where it just automatically says that the mayor or the highest elected official of the county has jurisdiction over his or her own jurisdiction so that's one thing that happened some other things that happen is that it gives the mayor of each county the same types of powers that the governor has at the local level so it spells it out very clearly that the mayor has the same types of  authority that the governor has at the state level so that doesn't mean that the mayor can direct state assets necessarily but it means that the suspension of county ordinances or other things like that the things that the mayor can or the governor can do at the state level are also automatically given to the mayor or designee during an event so those are the main things that have happened in our charter does say you know it's pretty brief in how it describes civil defense in accordance with state law so there are some small changes that i think we're going to look into making with name changes and things like that but it will automatically just revert to what the h r s's ok you have very good and that's what i was trying to figure out if things of that nature have changed and then the next sentence below that paragraph local national guard unit mission a same is changing and what does that sentence mean which will diminish t organic backup communication capability so thank you for that question the air national guard here on maui has traditionally been a communications unit and so they have a lot of equipment that would be able to be brought in support of our county that is here automatically at their facility because their mission has been changed in the or being used as a support to another unit still in a communications capacity the actual communications equipment that they had which was called a just package that included satellites laptops communications to off island communications as well as on island communications will not be available to us any longer currently that is done yes and how we doing in place of it i guess sure so we're still in conversations with them because it's not like the equipment necessarily went away a lot of it is probably still operational so we're talking with them about creating an m o you to keep that equipment as a capability for us the maintenance of that equipment because as you know with technology things change so quickly if it's not updated and if there isn't some money put into that it may become obsolete anyway in the meantime we do have several satellite phones that we have deployed both for ourselves it's called a began satellite we have as you know county wide we have a much more robust public safety radio system we also there's a statewide system called the shit state wide shared blended system so we have radios on that particular system as well we always rely on our amateur radio operators through the race season the areas clubs as you know or may not know  actually historically the amateur radio community has been the first up and operating communications wise after disasters and so we do maintain those relationships and we actually have a position in our emergency operations center with the amateur radio and we have members of the amateur radio club common staff that for us during events and then we also have another satellite system push to talk sat with state civil defense they keep calling in that whole emergency management agency on a while who and then we're also using a lot of web you see it's called so we do have a reliance on internet communications at times that is a little bit worrisome so we do still have the satellite back up but i think what people need to understand is that in a time of an emergency you know communications will be diminished so it's always we talk about mission critical communications and to make sure that we're focusing our  limiting our communications to that and it's hard in this day and age when we're texting and having instant communication with folks about so many things it's hard for people harder down for people to filter what does that mean mission critical thank you very much and share if you don't mind when last question next paragraph following a high profile event was that oh that's just a that's just a general statement all whenever there's a big event  people we have an opportunity or a window to reinforce preparedness i also have that fear though what happened this year we have a lot of anxiety we'll call it or things that come close but then don't actually hit us or do damage so it almost becomes that balance of cry wolf verses is that an opportunity now to talk about continued preparedness ok again thank you very much and year knowledge and management agencies statewide the state and county levels during is sell when the big island was the one that really took the brunt of that impact i said staff to assist them and it was twofold they needed personnel obviously and also i had some newer staff so it was an opportunity for some of our staff to participate in a real event to enhance the training that is book knowledge and things like that so we do things like that on a fairly regular basis we train issues within the state and work together on those i think you've done a fabulous job in many areas and also responding to the needs of our communities and i want the communities very appreciative of the siren that had fallen down two years ago i know that nobility to be better prepared for emergencies in the future thank you for that question yes i really do as i mentioned you know we are in communications with them when we have an event and i'm reliant on somebody though from a police role or in a fire role another crew have primary duties in their role already so i appreciate the extra effort that they give us and even before events and some of those folks because they live in those communities obviously go the extra mile and give us time just on their own and i appreciate that very much i do really though want to have a go to person who i know is  trained in the incident command system isn't going to be i don't want to say distracted but have their attention divided among first responder duties and some of the emergency management duties and i think that things like getting the word out for the mold community are being able to go to community meetings and it's just the importance of the community emergency response teams that we get participation because i know that the community wants it that but not having a person there on the island to really have them ask questions to or again just to even go in that face to face meeting with them to get the participation levels up is is detrimental to us now so we are doing what we can but i think that even just ten hours a week is really going to enhance our presence and our preparedness in those areas thank you always top of mind if you dare they see you to hear you they tend to be ready and i agree that even now i hear people say well we have so many false alarms we have so many you know you will find  situations and we already we get all our water we get all our suppliers of medicines and nothing happens and my response to them is be thing the lord for that because you don't want to experience the tragedy of a disaster exactly and i also don't want us as a community to fall into a false sense of how prepared we are because nothing happened we all sometimes people come away from that patting themselves on the back like oh we did so well we didn't we did well for what we did well in  preparation but we don't know on the other side of it what it would look like so i also want to caution us as a community not to get too self congratulatory when we make it through an event without anything happening because that's just sheer luck frankly  date we have already the monies that are in ours for seventeen we just went before the department of defense grant management office and our other colleagues we haven't been awarded those monies yet but when we do go in for our grant requests we come with investment justifications and what we put in for for our best and justification is lined up with the department of defense and why emerge for rescue systems training for the fire department we've put in monies for one of the things that we want to do as an agency is a public private partnership conference so the funds that we have submitted for are already spoken to in the update was not part of that and if i may just on my justifications for those there are some things that a and emergency management agency is required to do fundamentally and having an emergency operations plan is one of those so some of the things that we're required to do or that are part of our basic function for what we do for the county i feel like those should be paid for us as the county things that are  things that are in hansing i feel like it should be inherent on us as a community too to do those types of things that are basic functions and then we use the homeland security grant funds which we don't know we don't ever know really what we're going to get from those we put in submissions for those for enhancements within our entire operations of the emergency management community is your agency on the short form system yes we are we also community there is a project in the east my community and other rural areas where first responders are having a hard time finding homes or finding people when they call nine one one and it's been delaying responses we did get a grant a small grant amount for five thousand dollars to pay for the the signs and selves so this would be to help distribute those and install those in the rural communities and we want to make it so that persons who live in those areas that need those reflective signs so that the fire and ambulance and police can find them quickly without driving pastor back and forth would be able to do so so we want to make that available to those communities and to assist our first responders enable enabling to get them to get there in a quick fashion is to occur is it in the code that the property one is required to do this the street strange i believe there is a requirement to sign on the street number however this is a program that's been brought up by the i didn't ask that question but ok yeah i believe it is in the code thank you thank you of sixty five thousand going to be used for so for the first part of the question is far as what is involved with the emergency operations plan so it is similar to what we did with hazard mitigation plan we will  contract someone to come in they'll use the fema comprehensive planning guidelines and they'll do a review of our current plan and then it will involve meetings with each of our departments to talk about their own emergency plans so it'll be helping them to update their  emergency plans and then coordinating and really his language that's used all the time cross walking it or conflicting things to make sure that they are all thinking or using the same resource for different purposes are a so it will involve meetings with these department rewrites of the planned community meetings going to some of our outer to streets to do the same things  looking at our additional plans not just the emergency operations plan but again cross referencing back to the has medication plan and then writing the actual plan so that's what that usually entails the other would just for clarification i understand of they'll be right in the plan but house and your department you mentioned that they're going to be talking to each department talking about their plans does this include  their assistance and be ready departmental emergency preparedness plan it will not include rewriting their plans it will be a review of their again to make sure that they're current with the regulations that have e so last year we didn't have those increases that was a mistake on my part on some of those in terms of movements that didn't get included in here so you see that their contractual step movements plus there were those updates from previous step movements that had not been that had been on hold in the past that were then granted so those increases are high those so no this happened at the time but last year i was short in my town and had to use moneys and move monies from the b account which obviously we cannot do you going forward so movements even though collective bargaining required it the the partment all had to manually go through and calculate them in and then present them to my office in the request in for fiscal year sixteen and as you can see a few of them got missed throughout there so that's why it looks like they're getting a significant increase from sixteen to seventeen but what's really happening is they already got their increase by collective bargaining and so now just the budget is being put there to cover the increase is there a god but she mentioned that there were steps that were not initiated by the department so she didn't go held my office are you having difficulties with the short system and be be candid because if we don't know the issue is hard for us to help address i thank you i think similar to others occasionally the system is down so you know there's either you aren't receiving calls or unable to make calls or maybe just can't make long distance calls or maybe you can't make calls just dialing the four digit number  too in some of like perhaps sharing with police fire or other areas so it would be primarily cell phone but it would be issue to radio as well but also i am looking for a place for them to be house dollar appropriation the past two years we have put in the twenty five thousand dollars for their operations here from our county so this year we did put in their full request it is to fund their one full time position that they have here from our county and you'll be seeing another letter from the red cross as well outlining what they will be using that for they've also seen an increase in the number of responses that they have made  here in our county so it's just to make sure again that we have them written into our plans to do some very significant things both before during and after any kind of a major event and we really need to ensure that we have  and they also are usually a two or three year performance period and i would just make a note and we've talked about this before chair you've brought it up with us in terms of old grants that we have that are still on the books we're working very diligently with  fifteen and so the monies that we're putting in for an hour for federal fiscal sixteen which we're getting in october thank you for that members any further questions from thank you very much for your support over the last five years that i've been back it's a defense i feel like our ability to continue to build our agency and to build that trust that we have in our community has been enhanced by this point that we've received through there's no hurricane like the hurricane season you know earthquakes of which we've been having have been seems like fairly regularly or more regularly so just that note again and if people can revisit the evacuation maps and then we'll be pushing out more information about the difference between the two evacuation zones with the extreme tsunami so those things will be coming from our office and i appreciate again any support you had you can give us in those areas and thank you for the hours that you folks have been putting him under emergency manager and it's meant we're going to get it when we get it so we thank you very much for being here with us this morning members we're plan on monday we are going to go to before we go to mode we still have some need of worth and this i live and so monday morning the committee will start the review of capital improvement that would be appreciated there be no for the business of this committee for today this meeting is adjour