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Maui voters are being asked to allow the county Board of Ethics to hire its own full-time staff, including an executive director, a secretary and an investigator.

The all-volunteer board currently has no staff, and the proposed county charter amendment would allow more opportunities for ethics training of county employees and investigations of ethics violations.

“If you can educate and you can train public employees, then you can help to keep them from running afoul of the ethics rules,” vice chair Michael Lilly said at a council committee meeting in June.

Council member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez said the intention of staffing the board is to give it more efficiency, autonomy and consistency through membership changes.

The staff members would assist the board in giving informal ethics opinions and advice, and in reviewing financial disclosure statements and lobbyist filings. The executive director would have to be an attorney qualified to work in Hawaii.

Board Chair Steven Sturdevant said at the same meeting that a lot of the work the board currently does is related to deciding when county officials have potential conflicts of interest that require them to recuse themselves.

“That’s the only educational process we have at this point,” Sturdevant said.

Lilly said full-time staff members would be able to give informal but timely opinions and react to ethics concerns.

“We can’t do that without full-time staff,” Lilly said. “We don’t train anybody. The training is in the (county) Department of Personnel, and it’s done on hiring.”

Both Honolulu and the Hawaii State Ethics Commission provide training programs online, and Maui County could “piggyback” on those examples with a full-time staff, Lilly said. It would be able to monitor who is getting trained and when, he added.

Lilly previously served on the Honolulu Ethics Commission for several years. At its outset, it had three staff members who were soon overworked — Honolulu City and County has almost 10,000 employees, he said, adding the commision staff has been expanded.

With an initial staff of three employees in Maui County, “there’s going to be a lot of work,” he said.

“I think a team of three exclusively staffing BOE is good. To start thinking about hiring more before we see how this works is premature,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “However, I’m sure the team will closely monitor the workload and systems design.”

While the staff members would report to the Board of Ethics, funding for the positions would be in a stand-alone section of the Corporation Counsel’s budget. Lilly estimated the annual cost of the three positions at $200,000-$250,000.

The investigator would be a resource for the staff, not just an employee tasked with following up on complaints, Lilly said.

Proper training would educate employees on avoiding potential violations, while also giving them the confidence and knowledge to identify and report violations, he said.

The council unanimously approved on July 5 to place the issue on the general election ballot.

The ballot question reads: “Shall the Charter be amended, effectively July 1, 2025, to authorize the Board of Ethics of the County of Maui to hire independent staff?”