Question: I went to the Department of Health’s vital records office on Punchbowl Street on Feb. 20 to get copies of my birth and marriage certificates because I was not able to request them online. I could not believe there was only one person at a window to assist the people in the line. There was a pickup window that was not busy during the entire two hours I was there, so why couldn’t they have had someone help out? There were elderly people as well as parents with children waiting in that same line for two hours. The room was extremely small, and it was extremely frustrating for all of us. I know it’s not their fault, but I do think the people of Hawaii deserve better.
Answer: The long waits are the result of more people requesting copies of vital records because of the new requirements for getting driver’s licenses and state IDs, and the Health Department facing a staff shortage.
The remedy may require increasing fees.
DOH spokeswoman Janice Okubo apologized for the inconvenience but said the records issuance window “has been seriously understaffed recently with employees on leave for unexpected illness, supplemental time off without pay and planned vacation time.”
(Under a contract agreement with the state, employees took 5 percent pay cuts, as well as unpaid “supplemental time off” that, for full-time employees, totals 12 unpaid days off between July 1, 2012, and June 30.)
Normally the office is staffed by five people during public hours.
When the office is not open to the public, issuance staff work on processing hundreds of mail and email requests for records, as well as looking up filed records that are not in the electronic system and manually making copies of those records, Okubo said. More than 1,000 certified copies are requested and issued each day, she said.
Other employees work on registrations and corrections.
“Workload has increased significantly over the years with new security requirements,” Okubo said, with no increases in staffing for more than 10 years.
On the day you went, she said only one person was available to process new requests at one window. A second employee was pulled from the registration section to issue records previously ordered and ready for pickup at the second window.
That allowed people who had already ordered and paid for documents to avoid standing in line, she said.
However, the worker at the second window was not able to help process new requests because of regular duties: registering and inputting new births, deaths and marriages into the system.
On top of increased demand, Okubo said previous mandatory furlough days created “a serious backlog of work” from which the office has “never recovered.”
“The vital records staff is very committed to providing quality service to the public and often go over and beyond to help where they can,” she said. Retired workers have even volunteered to help “with the overwhelming and sometimes unpredictable workload,” she said.
To deal with insufficient staffing and to provide better service, the department has asked that fees for vital records, which have not changed in more than 15 years, be increased.
Proposed legislation would increase the fee for copies to $15, with $6 earmarked for vital records operations. Currently the Health Department charges $10 for the first certified copy and receives $1.
The department also has plans to renovate the window area to increase the space and provide a more comfortable waiting area, Okubo said.
Plan Ahead, Go Online
To avoid long waits, people are encouraged to plan ahead and to go to www.ehawaii.gov/ohsm to order records online whenever possible.
Online payment for records requires a credit card with a cardholder’s name that is an exact match to a name on the requested record, Okubo emphasized. “This ensures the requester is eligible to access the record under Hawaii law.”
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