21-07-28 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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modified to say within 10 years of 1989, so we need to go back and that should not have a drop date on it. This is standard practice anywhere in the country. When you are in the service area, you provide both. And it's cheaper now to pass the cost to the consumer than wait 20 years and try to dig up the road. That would become as costly as Pahala and Na'alehu. He wanted to see what commissioners think. As you navigate through the policies, we may find that one size fits all may not be adequate. We may need to have different strategies about how to connect the dots and be able to do it early in the game, rather than late in the game, and figure out who is going to pay for it. The County cannot continue picking up the tab forever for everybody. It gets very expensive. Chair Adams said that as she understands it, the current County Code had set up a requirement that new subdivisions had to put in sewer lines that would connect to a sewer treatment plant, even if the treatment plant had not been in place yet. They had set this hard date of 1989 and and time within 10 years. Well, we are way past that time so it seems like there should be modifications, so it seems like it makes sense that when you build a new subdivision, you put in lines that will eventually connect to a sewage treatment plant. She doesn't see personally any problem with that for new developments. And there may be some rare exceptions to that rule, but you deal with it as an exception rather than as a general requirement, unless there are those who think of some reason that we wouldn't want to go to sewer treatment. Commissioner McIntosh asked the Director to clarify the question. Director Mansour said some Council districts don't have a wastewater treatment plant, and that's going to be the exception. Your only way of disposal would either be an aerobic treatment unit or some other approved option. Ms. Pruder was saying that subdivisions will need to have their own treatment systems, because they cannot have clusters of septic tanks. It's going to be a lot of challenges and a lot of changes coming. He asked the Commission how from an advisory point of view it foresees DEM's policies to be shaped with regards to regulating our sewer system and our wastewater treatment plants with regards to subdivisions and new developments. Commissioner Burns said it's a really important consideration. Unfortunately, it's rare that government action plans adopt any form of a pragmatic approach, but considering the budget constraints and the realities with retrofitting a lot of these systems, it's going be difficult and it might be unrealistic. But there needs to be sort of prioritized areas that don't need full investigations but can rely on common sense. We have a lot of soil in Council District 1. The issues we have with contaminants going into groundwater or out into ocean waters is dramatically different from areas in South Kona or areas near the coastline. In the Kona Coast, he has been involved in a lot of research projects with the University of Hawai'i, looking at the flow of water from the mountain through our very dynamic subterranean water system. But we know that the closer you are to that runoff area, the more you have an issue of contaminants. It's just going to be nearly impossible on an island of this size with the different environments that we have to make a one -size -fits -all plan, and it's going to have to be dynamic. Maybe that's like reaching for the stars, but maybe that rubric of saying let's go into this, adapting unique 21