On Friday mornings in Kailua-Kona, a business networking group gathers to, well, network. They come together as peers over coffee to share ideas, wants and needs in their respective business worlds.
The desires of the different businesses are as various as the trades they represent. Some are looking for clients, some are looking for property, and some are looking for referrals or contact information to managers who can make deals happen.
But often enough, some of the businesses are looking for labor. Good, steady, reliable labor is actually hard to find nowadays. Nowadays being when Hawaii County’s unemployment rate is at 2.9 percent, as it was in December.
One business owner asking for potential employees recently listed a desirable candidate as one who can show up for work every day they’re supposed to. That was pretty much it. The room got a good chuckle, but everyone also understood. It’s a worker’s market, and then some.
We share this story to soften Mayor Harry Kim’s threats of possibly having to lay off employees. They don’t sound like threats, really, they sound like the right thing to do.
After more than a year of raising fees and taxes, Kim is asking for more. He’s asking the County Council to increase the recently approved GET tax more to help balance the budget. He warned that without the full one-half percent of the county’s option on the GET, property taxes could rise and county workers could be let go.
The problem is, the budget crisis is a recurring theme. Each budgeting cycle since Kim took office in 2016 reflects just that. But this year is worse.
To be fair, we support the proposal to raise the GET amount to the one-half percent and extending its life 10 years, but more so as a bailout.
The county didn’t have chance to balance its books immediately after the Kilauea eruption last year mostly because of the unforeseen disaster, but that wasn’t all of it. Even before Pele obliterated 700 homes from the county’s property tax roll, the county was struggling to balance the books due to collective bargaining raises and pensions.
The GET increase — which the council will pass — will give the county $50 million annually. But it will be a Band-Aid, not a fix. The county will be back, if not next year, soon enough, citing employee expenses as a reason for increases because those have been the reasons every year.
The county likes to say that those expenses are out of their control. They say the raises and wages are due to collective bargaining agreements, on which all counties vote but don’t outright control.
We think counties across the state are more implicit in it than that. Nearly the entire county and state voting board is composed of people who would benefit from such raises.
But fine.
Let’s just control what we can, then.
If laying off workers is one way to reduce the pressure employee finances puts on the budget every year, then let’s do it.
With more than 1,000 employees on the rolls, there’s enough overlap to trim without affecting services too drastically.
One constant under the Kim administration has been this very struggle, so regardless of the fate of the GET increase, let’s trim those ranks now. Even if the GET increase falls soon into county coffers, reductions now will save everyone from having to do this dance again next year.