2021-10-27 EMC minutes draft - Laserfiche WebLink

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Establishing a County TAT, the tourist tax that now we are authorized for up to 3 percent. The Council just discussed this. They are still discussing it, and it’s something perhaps we could as a Commission support, but certainly it is something for consideration. She personally submitted some comments about using a portion of the TAT to cover solid waste issues. Extended Producer Responsibility: We spent a fair amount oftime talking about that. Council Member HeatherKimball is very interested and will be taking that to the Hawai‘i State Association of Counties. It’s going to be difficult to pull off as a County effort, it’s a state effort. And there are lots of categories we could look at. Waste reduction programs:We talked about increasing recyclingopportunities, get some more education out there so people think first to not generate waste in the first place, expanding our capabilities to reusematerials. B2B, businessto business, exchanges of material that could be supported by the County.There could be policies that encourage or require recycling collection services by business and residential owner associations,and bans. Chair Adams is not a fan of bans,but they are a tool. Organics is our biggest landfill proportion, followed by paper and construction and demolition waste. Plastics are about 10 percent. The others are twice as much, if not four times as much. But bans are an option for us to look at. Point of sale service fee on products: The more complex it is, the more costly it is to administer. Regarding thepoint of sale service fee on products, Chair Adams heard the Director say if we could charge 10 to 15 cents per pound for everything that comeson the island, we could cover our solid waste expenses. She didn’t know where that number came from and whether it’s realistic, but administering a program to collect this fee, if it were possible, would take some work. Grants: Grants are wonderful, but there is an art to getting a grant, and they aren’t a good, sustainable source of money. And you have to pay people to get those grants. Support Public-Private Partnerships and figure out how can we get that to happen. Those who might have listened to the most recent Council meeting when Heather Kimball raised the issue of potentially looking at the Konno decision by HSAC, she got some blowback on it. It is an issue on this County and there continues to be work on how can we make it happenso that we can get the things done that we need to get done, and not be held back by unreasonable restrictions when it is so hard to find qualified people to take all the openings that we have got. We have current contracts in place. There are efforts under way with Waste Management Hawai‘i to re-negotiate the contract that we have with them, but there are others out there that need some work, and act as barriers for DEM to be able to do their thing. Chair Adams was frustrated to find out that schools cannot work with PTA organizations to help do recycling. They have to use the County contractor because they are a public entity, and that just seems really dumb to her. We need to figure out how to do that better. We need to make sure that practices are safe, but we need every option available to us. As we did with wastewater, we can look at how we can leverage those Energy Savings Performance Contracts, cutting the time it takes to find a contractor, and wrap it up because everything involves energy. If you have an 6