Maui County’s rapid growth strains its human resources system, slowing hiring, Council committee told

In just six years, Maui County’s budget has nearly doubled. Five new departments have been added, and the county absorbed the aftermath of the 2023 Lahaina wildfires — all while the administrative rules governing hiring and personnel matters have not been updated since December 2002, county officials told a Maui County Council committee Thursday.

The Kōmike Aloha ʻĀina Committee received a detailed briefing on Align HR, the countywide effort to overhaul human resources practices that the Department of Management announced last month.

The county’s budget has grown from about $850 million in 2020 to $1.6 billion today, said Cynthia Razo-Porter, director of the Department of Personnel Services. Thursday was her second-to-last day before retirement after 30 years of Maui County service, 23 of those years in the department and director since 2023.

“The hiring process can be lengthy and difficult to navigate,” Razo-Porter said. “Recruitment is highly competitive, with all the growth on the island in addition to just the different market conditions, the labor conditions with the impacts of the fire and just the cost of housing and everything. The rules and policies are not simple and easy to understand for most that haven’t been working in civil service.”

The county launched the human resources revamp to take a comprehensive look at how human services are organized, delivered and supported, she said, with the ultimate goal of faster, more transparent hiring, more consistent human resources service delivery across departments.

“We don’t want change just for the sake of change,” Razo-Porter said. “We want this to be meaningful and grow with the county in the future.”

Managing Director Josiah Nishita and consultants from Guidehouse, the firm hired to lead the two-year project, told council members the gap between the county’s size and its human resources infrastructure is contributing to hiring delays and staffing bottlenecks across departments.

“The structures and processes that were in place many years ago haven’t changed with the times quickly enough to where we are today and what our workforce demands,” Nishita said.

“We need to reflect that we’re now a $1.6 billion organization,” Nishita said. “Things that may have worked or were okay in a smaller organization are not going to be as efficient or work as well in a larger organization.”

Entry-level pay falls short of cost of living

Council Member Shane Sinenci noted that it takes the county six months to a year to create new job positions. However, even when the county has entry-level positions open, jobs that pay $35,000 to $40,000 are not attracting applicants because of Hawaiʻi’s high cost of living.

Residents need an income of “upwards of $90,000 to $100,000 a year” to survive in Hawaiʻi, he said, citing testimony that the county can hire at higher pay-range steps. “If that’s true or not, how do we move people along or help them get that training to get them to those steps where they can afford to live (in Hawaiʻi)?”

Guidehouse Project Director Matt Pietrowski said there aren’t simple answers, especially at such an early stage of the project.

“Honestly, it would be reckless for me to get too specific around guaranteed solutions at this point,” he said. “I know legislative changes have been mentioned so far; understand that those are complex and take time.”

Council members point to hiring bottlenecks

Several committee members aired long-standing frustrations with how the county recruits and hires employees. The county’s struggle to fill hundreds of vacant positions resurfaced during recent fiscal 2027 budget deliberations, including Budget, Finance and Economic Development Committee reviews of the Department of Planning, Maui Police Department and Department of Public Works.

Council Member Tom Cook, who chairs the Council’s Water and Infrastructure Committee, works closely with engineering-heavy departments such as Public Works, Environmental Management and the Department of Water Supply.

Cook identified three recurring problems with engineer recruitment and retention: the Department of Personnel Services filtering out applicants before hiring managers ever see them; the department’s overly rigid minimum qualification requirements that disqualify capable candidates; and the inability of county departments to offer merit pay to reward and retain high-performing engineers.

Council Member Gabe Johnson urged the county to consider low-cost retention tools such as employee daycare, adult daycare and gym memberships. “Those are small details that I think we wouldn’t know unless we actually go out and interview our workforce,” he said.

Public- and private-sector organizations share the goals of reducing hiring cycle times and providing more transparency for applicants, Pietrowski said, but achieving those goals differs significantly between the two sectors.

“Public-sector organizations pretty much universally, frankly, have more rules, regulations and constraints tied to their HR processes,” he said. “I’ve led projects where we’ve cut the hiring time by 30%, a couple examples maybe even 50% with the understanding that there are multiple parties involved in the hiring process.”

Council Chair Alice Lee asked Pietrowski to describe typical examples of workforce problems encountered in Guidehouse’s consulting work and how it helped solve them.

Pietrowski said he’s worked with clients who lack tracking mechanisms to monitor individual steps in the hiring process. System improvements allow personnel managers to spot places, for example, where engineer applicants are stuck in the scoring phase for a job vacancy, he said.

Lee said she wasn’t hearing the answers she was hoping for.

“You know, this is kind of going down a long and winding road,” she said. “I take the short road, yeah, right to the point.”

She asked Razo-Porter: “The bottom line, which everybody avoids, is the issues with the union and collective bargaining, isn’t that true?”

“So, talking about the hiring process,” Razo-Porter said. “The union’s not really involved in the hiring process. We collectively bargain for salaries and benefits and rights, but they’re not involved in the hiring process.”

As one example, she said the county recognized the need for engineers and increased their pay three years ago.

“Is it possible to revisit that to increase it even further?” Lee asked.

“Sure, if the county’s got the money,” Razo-Porter said.

Lee said: “In your department, you shouldn’t worry about that. That’s our department, worrying about the money… You figure out the solutions, and we figure out how to pay for it.”

Wages, state barriers

Committee Vice Chair Tamara Paltin, a 26-year county employee, asked whether the project would examine state legislative barriers to civil service reform.

“Civil service reform is needed, but nobody knows where to start,” she said, referencing related discussions at the Hawaiʻi State Association of Counties. She also asked whether the county could tie salaries more directly to Maui’s actual cost of living.

Nishita said a formal classification and compensation analysis falls outside the current scope of Align HR, but he said the county would likely flag such a study for follow-up later.

Decades-old rules draw scrutiny

Committee Chair Keani Rawlins-Fernandez noted that the Department of Personnel Services’ administrative rules, as posted on the county website, were last updated in December 2002.

“I just graduated high school in 2002,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “That was a long time ago.”

“What is the process for updating this?” she asked.

Nishita confirmed that updating those rules is a core piece of the Align HR project. Any rule changes will require a public hearing before going into effect, he added.

Overall, Guidehouse’s two-year contract for the Align HR project includes options for the county to extend it for up to three additional one-year terms. The consultant expects to complete its first round of recommendations by around January 2027, when the committee plans to revisit the human resources overhaul for a progress update.

Dispatcher reclassification, legislative hurdles

Council Vice Chair Yuki Lei Sugimura raised a yearslong effort to reclassify 911 dispatchers — currently categorized as clerical workers — as first responders to improve their compensation. Nishita said the change would require the Legislature to create a new bargaining unit, an effort that has failed to advance so far.

“I think what we’re trying to do is really like control what we can control; fix what we can fix; (and) identify those other barriers, and then we can continue follow-up as the years go on,” he said.

One job applicant’s story

Johnson said a constituent with a business degree and 10 years of management experience applied for an entry-level county position 16 times before finally being hired on the 17th attempt.

“It shouldn’t be that way,” he said.