The Finance and Economic Development Committee continued its departmental budget reviews for Fiscal Year 2025-2026 on April 4, 2025, hearing from the Department of Finance (including its divisions and the Kauai Humane Society contract), the Office of Economic Development, and the Planning Department. The meeting focused on staffing, technology modernization, revenue collection, and program funding.
Department of Finance
Kauai Humane Society
Office of Economic Development
Planning Department
Good morning, Carol. Can you type something? Thank you. I see you. Good morning. I'd like to call back to order the Finance and Economic Development Committee and the fiscal year twenty twenty-five, twenty twenty-six departmental budget reviews. On the schedule today, we'll be hearing from Department of Finance, Office of Economic Development, and Planning Department. As we do each morning, we'll take public testimony at the beginning relating to any of the departments or agencies that we are reviewing for the day. Is there anyone in the public wishing to testify? Seeing none, I will suspend the rules. And um, with that, we'll get started with Department of Finance. And you have a list of the departments we're gonna go through. We're gonna start with admin, accounting, IT, Treasury, motor vehicle, rural property tax, RPT collections, purchasing, and then and with quite humane societies contract. Um but yeah, if you wanna uh just go over the synopsis first and then we'll hit the budgets after. Good morning, Chelsea Sakai, Director of Finance. Um so our approach to our budget this year um again was a large focus on our staff. Um so that includes uh training for them as well as finding software things that can help them make their jobs easier. Um we've had the benefit of having fresh eyes looking at a lot of our processes, myself included. Um so a lot of the things that we are asking for was with the intention of making things easier for our new staff coming in and the existing staff and kind of modernizing a lot of our processes. Um of our increases come from contractual increases, our insurance um goes up every year, so we increased our insurance there. Um we took a closer look at our travel budgets uh for a lot of our divisions. We did not necessarily budget specifically for travel, and we would just need money throughout the year. So this year we tried to true up what our travel budgets actually look like. And of course, our biggest is asking for um the lease for the ER key. Um there were a couple of things that I noticed after the fact that we will have to fix in supplemental. Um in an attempt to move the Hoike contract to the right account, it kind of just disappeared, so we do have to put that back in, as well as the very last line of our budget, the lease for our postage machine for purchasing also kind of just fell off. So we will have to fix that in supplemental. Okay, any questions on the synopsis? Council member called it. I I do, and um, hey, by the way. So is she in there? Would be next, our treasurer. Um thank you. Very, very good. Very, very good. Um so um I just wanted to see this thing about claims and auto adjustments. It's kind of like only that, like what what kind of claims and auto adjustments do we have? Um, like damages to automobiles. To our own automobiles or other when people sue us, okay. When there's claims against us. I would think we would have more than that. And then um our insurance, is that like property insurance? Is that the kind of insurance? Property liability workers' comp. Okay, and um we can really do um in the items by items, but um the build America bond refunding. That's good that we were able to accomplish that. And um who did that? Uh Nancy, our treasurer. Okay, thank you again. Um, those those kind of things really make a difference.