State officials do not know how many state workers were allowed to leave early Wednesday to avoid a repeat of Tuesday’s horrific H-1 freeway traffic jam, but likely hundreds of both state and city employees got paid to go home.
And they’re all off again for the Good Friday holiday.
The state executive branch has 4,951 employees who work downtown. The number does not account for other large state agencies with sizable downtown workforces, such as the Department of Education and state Judiciary, said Jodi Leong, spokeswoman for Gov. David Ige.
The city has 8,500 employees, and 747 went home early on "ZipMobile Admin Leave," Carolee Kubo, city director of Human Resources, wrote in an email. "Offices servicing the public such as satellite city halls, permit offices, and park maintenance remained open as directed to provide public service," Kubo wrote.
The city employees who went home early Wednesday were on "‘administrative leave,’ meaning they get paid as usual and do not have to use vacation leave," city spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said. "Mayor (Kirk) Caldwell made that decision because it was an emergency and he did not want to penalize workers by making them use their vacation time under the circumstances. The state contacted us … and asked us to follow their lead on staggered, early departure for some workers in hopes of getting people off the freeway sooner and freeing up capacity for all the other Oahu commuters."
Gov. David Ige said the state easily has thousands of workers downtown, and, at his direction, department heads also had the option of letting state workers off early on Wednesday — with pay.
No classes were canceled at any University of Hawaii campus Wednesday, but UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said supervisors were given the option of letting UH employees leave early.
Instead of taking another five hours to get home to Royal Kunia, Ron Callihan on Wednesday decided to leave early from his job as a parts department adviser for an Ala Moana Boulevard car dealership.
The decision cost Callihan, 52, four hours of pay.
But then he found himself stuck in westbound traffic Wednesday anyway because "they let all the state workers and city and county workers go home. So I had people beside me who were on the clock getting paid. It’s a further burden on all of us who pay taxes because of the work that did not get done. They’ve had a very short week for the same amount of pay. I’m not angry about it; I’m just disappointed."
Oahu drivers faced nightmare traffic starting Tuesday morning when a faulty power pack and central processing unit died in one of the state’s two ZipMobiles, which left two lanes of the four-lane H-1 freeway closed in the westbound direction from Sand Island to the Waiawa overpass.
Instead of following state Department of Transportation protocol to use the backup ZipMobile, the DOT’s deputy director of highways, Ed Sniffen, decided to remove the working power pack and CPU from the backup ZipMobile and put them into the disabled one.
Sniffen said it would have taken the backup ZipMobile 90 minutes to get to Waikele, where the first ZipMobile died, then another three hours for the backup to unzip the ZipperLane and return it to its noncommute configuration.
But the idea to swap out the power pack and CPU backfired when the replacement parts also failed. With both ZipMobiles disabled, the ZipperLane remained stuck for about 28 hours.
Brendon Hanna, 49, could not find a bus to get home to Mililani around 10 p.m. Tuesday. Instead, Hanna rode his bicycle 14.6 miles from the Alapai Transit Center to the Foodland in Waipio. He was irritated that government workers got paid to go home early the next day.
"That’s a little disingenuous to have all those employees get paid time off for a problem that could have been avoided," Hanna said. "I don’t support that decision. That doesn’t sound like a really good idea to me, certainly not fair, anyway. That seems like a poor call, in my opinion."
But driver Daniela Jordan, 21, believes government workers should have been able to go home early and still get paid.
She called it "a fair trade-off for the time they wasted in traffic" the day before.
"The zipper thing had nothing to do with them," Jordan said. "They should be compensated."
By Thursday morning both ZipMobiles were back in action.
