State officials pleased with compliance among contractors on day one of new mandate

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Monday marks day one of the new vaccination mandate for all state contractors and visitors at many state facilities.

Under the new rules, private employees working on state property need to be vaccinated or provided weekly negative COVID tests.

It impacts companies like Hawaiian Dredging Construction Company, which employs about 900 people statewide and has multiple government projects.

Management says most of their employees are already vaccinated.

“For the ones that weren’t, we were able to find them work elsewhere within other areas to ensure that we are complying with those state specific jobs,” said Manu Bermudes, Director of Human Resources.

Goodfellow Bros. has about 1,200 employees and is also working on several government projects.

The CEO said they too have had to shuffle around workers to make sure they were following the new rules for state property.

“Thankfully not all of our work is state work, so we have been able to move employees around to make sure we’re in compliance with the governor’s mandate,” said Chad Goodfellow.

Despite the last-minute announcement, the state comptroller said he is pleased with the level of compliance with private companies and contractors.

Angelo Ong is a nurse in Los Angeles and is visiting Maui. He was glad to hear about the rules to make state facilities safer.

“I’m in full support of it. I feel like getting out of this pandemic will be a collective effort and I think that vaccines are the pathway to that,” Ong said. “This virus, this pandemic, it’s a public health problem. And for us to finally ditch these stupid masks, and go back to a sense of normalcy, I really think everyone needs to be on the same page.”

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