21-07-28 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

lot of moving parts. And one of the things we recognize is somebody's got to do that base work and keep all the pieces together, and juggling all the pieces, and that's when we overload the few people that we have. Once you establish outreach and education, Director Mansour said, then the next step when we go out and ask for fees or funding, it becomes easier politically, and it will be accepted easier because everybody will understand. But to go out and say we are setting fees without educating the public, it's going to be outrageous. Chair Adams said the model we have on this island is Hi-5. We pay a nickel for every can of soda and drinks. And some of us take the time to get our money back. And a lot of us do not, and it hardly stops anybody from buying cans and bottled drinks. It's like a gasoline tax, if you want to reduce consumption, you have to put a pretty high price on things to affect people's behavior. Commissioner Olson commented that the kickoff funding, as with the bottle bill, always comes back to the money, and we start with a guaranteed source. If we start with any sum of money, we can use it to build the infrastructure that it's going to take to make the solid waste stream self -funding. It should not be on the property tax. There's no longer a correlation, particularly with the fact that we are dependent at this point on the visitor industry. We've all traveled. We buy an immense amount of stuff that never makes it home. It's the only thing as a starting point that makes sense. Chair Adams asked whether we should look at the transient accommodations tax as a revenue source and how far to push it and how much we could use some money. How much money does the Department even need? How many pennies would we have to charge on the goods that get purchased here? We could only, as she understands it, get a maximum of $19 million from the TAT 3. The volume of need has got to be a whole package of ideas. We are not going to find a single solution. Director Mansour said the cost is driven by the cost of services we provide. We have transfer stations that are operated seven days a week. The reason is because of convenience to the users. But if you look at it from a collection point of view, your waste only gets collected once a week. If we could get a human to rethink that, on this day we will use transfer station, rather than just whenever the person feels like going to a transfer station, that could save a lot of money. But we need to start setting a fee for that convenience, for the beneficial use of the landfill, because everybody uses the landfill. Waste comes from every house and ends up at the landfill. We could manage with what we got, but the level of service is going to drop, and people need to have to acclimate to the change if they don't want to see extra fees. So it depends. Things come at a cost. s The amount of revenue that a County transient accommodations tax would raise is unknown and depends on several factors. Act 1, Special Session 2021, repealed the $19,158,000 allocation to the County of Hawai'i from the State TAT beginning in FY 21-22, and authorized the counties to enact legislation establishing a County TAT of up to 3 percent, in addition to the State TAT. The County of Hawai'i has not yet enacted such legislation. 11