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is being provided, and the County could charge a fee for that if the money is being used for the processing and disposal of waste. Tentatively, without looking into it further, taxing a product that is being purchased is the power of the State. Director Mansour asked if we could put a user fee on the real property tax bill. Counsel SalasFerguson, describing a typical budget process,said the Administration would request a certain amount of money to properly dispose of waste, and you put that forward to the budget. That’s the regular process. The Department says, we need this amount of money, and does the real property tax revenue cover that? If it doesn’t, they will have to raise the tax a little bit. That’s the process that funds your department, he said. Director Mansour said he was wondering from a legal point of view. Because in different states they allow assessment fees to be tacked to the property tax bill, not as a tax , but as a user fee. In California you go through a Proposition 218 process, and for collection purposes, it’s easier to collect a property tax rather than to send a bill to all the homes. But from a legal point of view in Hawaii, he didn’t know. He had asked Deputy Corporation Counsel Diana Mellon-Lacey to see if we could assess a fee on the property tax bill for solid waste or wastewater services. Counsel SalasFerguson said that is an interesting question. Counsel Mellon-Lacey would need to look into that deeper for him. But for real property tax, we just adjust it higher or lower depending on the needs of the County. So that would be the time, during the budget process, when the department says, I need this amount of money to properly dispose of my waste, and then the Council either approves the money or it doesn’t. Director Mansour said our goal is to not make it a tax, because that’s misleading. It’s a service. A service is not a tax. And he was trying to make a distinction on this by attaching a service fee from a same property tax bill. Commissioner Cardwell said the issue with it being treated as a tax is that it becomes an invisible cost, and people are not associating the amount of trash they are producing with having to pay for it. But with the PAYT program, people pay for the amount of trash they are producing, which then could potentially incent them to produce less trash. That’s the incentive behind the PAYT program. There is a direct correlation between the amount of trash a person is producing and what that person is having to pay for it. That is a smarter way of doing it, as opposed to having this hidden cost attached to property tax. We are losing the potential incentive possibility. Commissioner Robinson said the Director’s idea was really creative, but she was concerned there would be pushback on the difference between someone who owns a single home with two people in it, versus 10. And obviously the household with more people will have more waste. So there will be an unequal perspective on having a user fee based on the real property tax value. But the Director also mentioned something about putting this on the developers of new subdivisions. Can you talk a little bit more about that, she asked. 16