University of Hawaii President David Lassner said Thursday that a search for a permanent chancellor to lead the flagship Manoa campus will now get underway — 18 months after he terminated the last chancellor.

Some members of the university’s Board of Regents had objected to starting a search sooner. They first wanted to explore whether the Manoa chancellor post should be retained or recombined with the system president’s position. The roles previously were separate until the 1980s, when the positions were combined, before being separated again in 2001.

The regents a year ago asked the nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education — Hawaii is one of 16 member states — to analyze the university’s current management structure and make a recommendation. It recommended UH keep the posts separate.

“Perhaps most importantly, the roles and responsibilities of the two positions are sufficiently different and demanding that serving the university and the state of Hawaii well requires two individuals with different but complementary skills and interests,” WICHE’s president and director of policy analysis wrote in a report that was presented to the board in May.

Still, some regents maintained UH would benefit from a reorganization to eliminate redundant services, evidenced in part by the number of vice presidents at the system level and vice chancellors and assistant vice chancellors at Manoa with similar titles and duties. The board in August took a vote “affirming” the roles should remain separate but directed Lassner to design and implement “organizational changes and consolidations to improve efficiency and effectiveness of support services.”

At the board’s monthly meeting Thursday, Lassner updated regents on the plan, which includes consolidating several administrative support functions at Manoa and at the system level, including research compliance; facilities and construction; human resources; finance; government relations; and communications. Most of the areas would be consolidated under the system vice president for administration, Jan Gouveia.

“People ask about savings,” Lassner said. “In general, we are not observing that we are overstaffed in any of these areas, but we do believe that the services need to be improved. So, we are not looking at cutting HR people because we’re merging two HR offices; we’re looking at investing our people and improving services that make us more effective. … Our goal is to make the best use of what we have and identify where the gaps are and pursue opportunities for shifting within the existing resources but not increasing investment in the administration at this time.”

Regent Jeffrey Portnoy asked Lassner about the status of the chancellor search. “We’ve been talking about this for months as to whether the search is going to start before this or wait,” he said, referring to the reorganization plan.

Lassner said he suspects some regents were still uncomfortable about launching a search at the board’s last meeting in November.

“I did not feel it in my best interest or the search’s best interest to start that before this meeting,” Lassner replied. “I would like the regents more comfortable, because a chancellor search cannot succeed if the regents do not believe it should have started. I expect, I hope, to walk out of this meeting and be sending memos to people, inviting them to serve on that search and proceed expeditiously with such a search.”

Regent Chairman Randy Moore said, “I don’t hear objections to beginning search.”

Soon after Lassner was named president of the 10-campus system in July 2014, he terminated Tom Apple as chancellor, following what Lassner said was an unsatisfactory performance review. Robert Bley-Vroman, who had been dean of Manoa’s College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, was named interim chancellor and has been serving in that role since.

Bley-Vroman has no plans to apply for the permanent post “at this point in time,” according to UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl.

Manoa professor Robert Cooney, chairman of the Manoa Faculty Senate, said he was glad to hear that the search is starting for a permanent chancellor but added, “I’m not pleased that Manoa’s being gutted by the system.”

“Basically they’re taking over everything and then saying, ‘Oh, but you can still have a chancellor,’” Cooney said after the meeting.