2022-01-07 EMC special meeting draft minutes

Home

HENDERSON: Director Mansour, is there any language in Section 21-31 that gives the director the authority to charge a sewer user fee for a storage room, utility room, and bath? MANSOUR: It's not qualified as storage units or utility. In your own definition, you define it as a building, and even our own chapter defines it as a building. So it is a detached building, a storage room. Most of the storage room(s) doesn't have a toilet, doesn't have a water heater, it doesn't have all these plumbing fixtures. Storing room is for storage. (Unintelligible) You have stated earlier that the resident itself has the plumbing fixtures to qualify it as a building. So you have the same building, mimicking the same plumbing fixture as the resident house, and thus then you have two units. It's not attached, it's detached. It's about 40 feet away from last year, plus or minus from your main residence. So it becomes a detached unit, detached structure, detached building, and it qualifies for a dwelling. And you have a Y connection to it. HENDERSON: So in the code, you're saying that the code allows you to charge for a storage building? MANSOUR: I think that's where the disagreement, you call it a storage building. I call it a building with a detached accessory. HENDERSON: Director Mansour, are you familiar with the Hawai‘i County Ordinance 92-77, (Bill No. 595, as amended to Draft 3), the purpose of which was to revise the sewer billing system to comply with the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, PL 92-500? MANSOUR: Not in detail. I was reading what I was supplied. HENDERSON: This important ordinance was passed so that the county could receive grants through the Environmental Protection Agency. Are you familiar with the federal regulation that required that the system must collect sufficient revenue to ensure that the federal funded treatment works are properly maintained and operated, and that all users of the system pay their proportionate share based on the user's proportionate wastewater loading? MANSOUR: Yes. HENDERSON: Director Mansour, does a residential dwelling that has a laundry and bath area located in an annex building create a larger wastewater loading than a dwelling that those facilities are located within the dwelling? They both have the same water consumption? MANSOUR: No, it does not because it has two separate Ys. So now that additional building with the Y connection to it adds additional loading, because it is a standalone attached structure. If you don't have that structure, you don't have the Y that connects to the sewer, you only have one Y. Now your lot has two separate Ys connected. 11