2021-09-22 EMC minutes draft - Laserfiche WebLink

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Director Mansour said that Commissioner Cardwell brought up a good point about public convenience. People use the Mr. K’s facility because of the convenience. But convenience has a price attached to it. That’s the bottom line. We do not have a transfer station located at each corner. We aren’t like Starbucks. At least Starbucks charges you for each coffee. And here, because we collect only every $40, for every $1,000 we are charged, we have the feeling of entitlement that we need a station at each corner. We need to be realistic. Sometimes he’s bluntly speaking because he wants to be transparent. He has to speak to what he sees. We have a challenge, and we need to have as he stated yesterday, a paradigm change. We need to start thinking about, not only from a business point of view but also from a human behavior point of view. We need to change that behavior. If people are going to do illegal dumping, we need to hold them accountable. And the way we used to hold them account in my experience is we go through their garbage, we find their phone number, we find their address. We send them a citation of $1,000. We need to hold them accountable. We cannot just destroy the island because people decided to behave that way. You cannot just take your waste and throw it out in a public area. Commissioner McIntosh asked about the transfer stations that are open seven days a week. They had a lower per-ton cost than those were open three days a week. Those that were open longer often accept more trash, so they accepted more tons to offset the cost. So his question is, if the other transfer stations were open seven days a week, how would that affect the cost per ton? Would it significantly go down and be on par with the others, or would it stay the same? How would the current schedule of Waihinu being open three days a week change if it were open seven days a week? Director Mansour said the tonnage question is a good question. If you don’t have the human behavior change, a paradigm change about reduce, reuse, recycle, divert, you are going to have the same tonnage. People have the tendency to generate the amount of waste that they do. If there’s no public information, no motivation to divert and reduce, you are going to have the same tonnage. And the Commissioner is correct about the reason other facilities are cheaper per ton. It’s more centralized. The more centralized facility you have, the more users you have. The decentralized locations are open every other day because we have a certain size of trailer. To be financially efficient we have to compact the trailer to the max. Otherwise we cannot haul it half full. You have to look at all these factors together. (In many cases) you have so much smaller distances between transfer stations, under 10 miles apart. So the question becomes, do you need that transfer station if it’s only 10 miles apart from the Hilo Reload Facility? That’s where the convenience comes in. So maybe eliminate some of the transfer stations and come up with a distance of a 40-mile radius that people could drive, or 30 miles. But people want just to walk with their garbage bags, it’s not going to happen unless you have a collection system. Commissioner Olson asked if there is a breakdown on the differential between what the Department receives from property taxes as opposed to other fees. 14