Where the System Fails the People Who Do the Work

Government pays two kinds of people: the small number it elects and appoints to lead, and the tens of thousands who do the actual work of public service. It sets those two kinds of pay in opposite ways. For its own officials, it commissions a study and adopts the number the study recommends. For everyone else, the teachers, the nurses, the police officers, the corrections and institutional workers, the blue- and white-collar civil servants, the ocean safety officers, and the firefighters, the number is fought out across a bargaining table, where the government sits as the side arguing to pay the least it can defend. Same government, same budget, two different machines.

Two Systems, One Government

This is not a story about a single unfair decision, or a single group of workers. It is a story about two systems that begin from opposite places. One starts by asking what the top of the market looks like and then moves toward it. The other starts at the government's offer and asks the worker to prove their way up from there. Who you are, whether you set the budget or live on it, decides which system sets your pay.

Track One: The Study

The Salary Commission holds the authority under the county charter to set pay for the mayor, the council, and the county's directors and their deputies. In 2025 it drew on a Classification and Compensation Study by MGT Consulting, which surveyed what comparable communities pay. The study laid out three tiers, the 50th, 65th, and 75th percentile of the field, and its own recommendation was the 50th, the market average. The commission chose the 75th, the tier the study labeled a "market leader," about 25 percent above the middle of the field.

The numbers followed the choice. On a 5-to-1 vote, the commission raised the mayor's salary from $159,578 to $245,000, an increase of about 54 percent, enough to make him the highest-paid mayor in the state, out-earning the governor. The council chair's pay rose from $86,336 to $106,367, about 23 percent; council members' from $80,299 to $101,302, about 26 percent. The county's department heads were moved to the same 75th-percentile target, to the dollar: the fire chief, police chief, and corporation counsel tier to $239,043, the other directors to $192,458. All of it took effect July 1, 2025.

The same study's logic, and what it meant for the Fire Chief's own pay, is covered in Maui County's Own Study Made the Case for Firefighter Raises.

Track Two: The Table

The people who do the work do not get a study. By statute, the mayor, the council, the directors and their deputies are excluded from collective bargaining altogether; their pay runs through the commission. Everyone else, nearly every other public employee, from the teacher to the nurse to the firefighter, belongs to one of fifteen bargaining units, and the wage in each is negotiated between the union and the government. When the two sides cannot agree, the law routes the disagreement one of two ways. Police officers and firefighters are barred from striking, so their contracts go to binding arbitration. Most other units keep the right to strike and bargain under that pressure instead. Either way, the starting point is the same: the government's offer. And because the government is the party that has to find the money, its offer is the low one.

The employer on the other side of that table is not one small county office. Under state law, for firefighters and police the public employer is the governor and the four county mayors together, and the statute gives the governor four votes to each mayor's one. A raise is argued against a statewide employer group, not a single department. And even a "final and binding" arbitration award still has to be funded by the council or the legislature that sat across the table.

What the commission was told about that gap is covered in What the Fire Commission Was Told About Firefighter Pay.

Who Pays for the Argument

The clearest way to see the difference is to follow the money that pays for the arguments. To raise its officials' pay, the government paid a consultant to build the case for a higher number. To settle with its workforce, it pays negotiators, and when a contract reaches arbitration, a team to build the case for a lower one. The same treasury funds the argument for the raise on one track and the argument against it on every other.

That is not a claim about anyone's intent. It is a description of how the two processes are built. One is designed to find the market and match it. The other is designed to reach an agreement the government can afford, and the government decides what it can afford.

Opposite Defaults

The starting point is everything. On the officials' track, the target was set at the top of the market, and the only real question was how close to reach it. On the workforce's track, the starting point is the government's offer, and the burden sits with the workers to move it. One process assumes the answer is near the 75th percentile. The other assumes the answer is whatever the government can defend paying. One is built to find the market and match it. The other is built to test how little will hold. Same government, opposite defaults.

What This Is and Isn't

To be clear, this is not a complaint about the raises the mayor, the council, and the directors received. We support them. We believe Maui County, and the State of Hawaii, should pay at the higher end of the market, and the study makes a sound case that the government's leaders belong there. The 75th percentile is a fair standard, and setting it was the right call.

The disappointment, and what we believe is the real injustice, is narrower. The people who were recognized at the percentage they deserve have not handed that same yardstick to anyone else. Not the teachers, not the nurses, not the police officers, not the corrections and institutional workers, not the blue- and white-collar civil servants, not the ocean safety officers, and not the firefighters. Every one of them is measured against a market too, and belongs at the 75th percentile of their own profession, the same standard the government's leaders were measured against. If a market study is trustworthy enough to move the mayor's pay 54 percent in a single year, it is trustworthy enough to measure the people who teach, heal, guard, and answer the calls. The standard is not the problem. The problem is that it stopped at the top.

Takeaways

• Government sets its own officials' pay and its entire workforce's pay through two separate systems that start from opposite assumptions.
• For officials, the Salary Commission chose the 75th-percentile "market leader" tier, about 25 percent above the market midpoint, though its own consultant recommended the midpoint. The mayor's pay rose about 54 percent, to $245,000, the highest of any mayor in the state.
• For the workforce, all fifteen of Hawaii's public bargaining units have pay set by adversarial bargaining. Police officers and firefighters, barred from striking, go to binding arbitration; other units bargain under the right to strike. Every one starts from the government's offer.
• Firefighters are the sharpest recent example: an award of 3, 3, 2.5, and 2.5 percent over four years with no step movement, which the Fire Chief called lower than most contracts settled that year.
• The same treasury funds the case for the officials' raise and the case against the workforce's. The gap is in the design of the two processes, not in the worth of the work.
• The point is not that county leaders were paid too much. It is that the same market-leader standard was never extended to the people who do the work.

The two systems are set by county charters and by state law, which means they can be examined and changed by the people the government answers to. If you believe the public workers who serve your community, the teachers, nurses, police officers, corrections and institutional workers, civil servants, ocean safety officers, and firefighters, deserve the same market-leader standard the government set for its own leaders, make that known to your county council member, your state legislator, or your salary commission.