Maui hospital settlement veto likely to stand

Lawmakers are tentatively planning to close out their special veto override session Monday without taking any further action on a proposal for special severance payments and retirement benefits for the Maui hospital workers who will lose their state jobs when Gov. David Ige’s administration privatizes three hospitals in Maui County.

If lawmakers leave the state Capitol without acting on the issue, that would effectively kill the severance and retirement proposals agreed to by the state Legislature and the Hawaii Government Employees Association during the regular session this spring. Those proposals were included in Senate Bill 2077, which Ige vetoed last week.

Lawmakers convened again on Tuesday in the veto override session in an effort to approve a new version of the bill that would be more appealing to Ige, but negotiations over a new draft haven’t advanced to a point where the Legislature has a specific proposal it can act upon, according to lawmakers and others familiar with the effort.

The Ige administration has the option of calling lawmakers back into a special session later this year if an agreement can be reached later with the public worker unions over the Maui privatization, which would allow Kaiser Permanents to operate what are now three publicly run hospitals.

Randy Perreira, executive director of the HGEA, described the Ige team as “incompetent fools,” and said he refused to meet with Ige last week to discuss the issue because “we knew the governor is not looking at something that we would view to be equitable for the employees.”

HGEA is “very, very seriously” considering filing a lawsuit over the privatization effort similar to one filed by the United Public Workers union, Perreira said.

“We’re not looking to be obstructionist to Kaiser, but it seems that being obstructionist is the path to getting David Ige’s attention,” Pereira said.

That UPW lawsuit alleges the administration’s Maui privatization effort violates its state contracts with the unions that extend until June 30, 2017.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in May issued an injunction in the UPW lawsuit that temporarily halted the privatization effort. Kaiser was scheduled to take control of the hospitals on July 1 but has been unable to do so because of the injunction.

Ige’s office has been in closed-door negotiations this week with UPW representatives to try to develop a severance package for the UPW Maui hospital workers that would persuade that union to agree to settle its lawsuit.

Ige on Friday met with lawmakers to brief them on a tentative agreement reached with the UPW on those issues that included severance payments, but lawmakers told Ige they want the HGEA included in any such agreement, according to officials familiar with those talks.

Ige’s chief of staff, Mike McCartney, is “unable to make any comment at this time” about lawmakers’ plans or the ongoing settlement negotiations, according to an Ige administration spokeswoman. A spokeswoman for the House Democrats also declined comment.

Lawmakers last year authorized privatization of Maui Memorial Medical Center, Kula Hospital &Clinic and Lanai Community Hospital, and the state reached an agreement in January to have Kaiser Permanente operate all three.

The hospital deal would be the largest privatization of public facilities in state history, and Ige has predicted it will save the state $260 million in hospital subsidies over the next decade.

Other state-run hospitals are considering privatization, and the public-worker unions that represent about 1,400 employees at the Maui hospitals have fought the hospital privatization effort. Many or most of the hospital staffers are expected to continue working at the hospitals for Kaiser, but they will no longer be state workers.

Perreira said the proposed severance package for Maui workers incorporated into SB 2077 uses the same formula that was included in a package of “civil service reforms” lawmakers passed in 2000 during former Gov. Ben Cayetano’s administration. “This is the formula they came up with. We didn’t concoct it, we just copied theirs,” Perreira said.

The union also wanted a retirement “bonus” to help union members who are almost qualified for retirement to secure their pensions and other benefits. However, “it is our understanding that the governor would not agree to any kind of retirement benefits, so he’s going to screw these people out of 20-plus years of employment and whatever they’ve invested in state government,” Perreira said.

Perreira said state Director of Finance Wesley Machida is “vehemently opposed” to any early retirement benefit, which means “one man is dictating public policy for the state of Hawaii, and that’s Wesley Machida.”

“Our upset with the governor is at this point immeasurable, because these are people who’ve dedicated their careers to that hospital or to the three hospitals,” Perreira said.