21-10-27 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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needed for the applications, and also because, at one of the meetings that Jerome Nickerson who is the general manager for the Boating Division, one of the meetings that he went to nationwide pursuing EDA funding, there were 17,000 people on the call. And every single one of them thinks that they are going to be able to get a piece of that money. And if you talk to the experts, they will tell you that less than 10 percent of the people that apply for these moneys actually get them, and are actually considered qualified. One of the issues that we ran up against is that if you pursue federal funding, then you have to do a federal EIS, which is a much more complicated EIS than one that you can do at just the State or County level. That changes everything. So the bottom line is that although it sounds like there is a lot of money out there, and it sounds like there are a lot of people willing to solve our problems,the reality is,when you pursue it you essentially need somebody working on it full time. Mr. Nickerson is going in to his office on Sundays on his own time, and pursuing theseapplications.There is no one at DEM who is currently pursuing Federal or State grants, because they do not have a grant writer on staff. The County as a whole has a very limited number of people with a background or experience in grant writing. So without that, it makes a lot of what we are talking about exceedingly difficult. We need to consider all of the different ways that funding could possibly be available to us. And one of those is public-private partnerships. There is some reluctanceon the County’s part. The County presumes that the Konno decision prevents them from doing public-private partnerships. But that is apparently not correct because the City and County of Honolulu is regularly doing public-private partnerships for wastewater management. It is an option for us, and we need to get past this roadblock at the County level that says we can’t because there are some obvious places, Keauhou and at the tail end of Ali‘i Drive, and also Puak, are obvious places where a public-private partnership could solve an immediate problem. Chair Adams said we might circle back on this topic when we get back to the wastewater discussion with DEM. b. Status report on action items from previous meeting. i. Letter to Mayor, Council, and DEM regarding recommendations for water 2 reuse and recycling at Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant. Chair Adams said that EMC did send on October 20, 2021, the letter about the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant. And we will see what kind of response we get from the Mayor and the Council. 3 ii. Review solid waste funding options paper. Chair Adams presented her paper. We have sent out three different letters dealing with wastewater funding, and maybe we need even more, but the same funding options may be appropriate now for solid waste. This is just kind of trying to wrap up different ideas on where we think the County can focus on solid waste funding. She presented at the July EMC meeting a breakdown of where the money is coming from right now, which is mostly the General Fund 2 Letter to Mayor, et al. regarding recommendations for Kealakehe WWTP: http://records.hawaiicounty.gov/weblink/DocView.aspx?dbid=1&id=112850 3 Solid waste funding options: http://records.hawaiicounty.gov/weblink/DocView.aspx?dbid=1&id=112856 4