2022-05-19 Leeward Exh B (Item 2 Council Bill No 120 PL-CC-2022-000001)

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VITOUSEK: Mahalo. Please proceed with your presentation. KIMBALL: Thank you so much, Chair Vitousek and honorable members of the Commission. Thank you for all your time today deliberating this bill. It is something that I have been working on for probably about nine months; it's like producing a child. And, you know, even at this stage the child needs a little more education and evolution. And so I'm grateful for your time today to add your expertise to this piece of legislation. I wanted to just talk a little bit about the context and the purpose from my side of introducing this bill and what I'm hoping to achieve, and then Noel who is here from the Big Island Electric Vehicle Association has some slides to share basically to give you just the lay of the land where we are with EV adoption and charging infrastructure across the island right now. So, you know, on the surface this is, very clearly it's an environmental bill, right? It's about reducing carbon emissions, it's about better air quality, and it's part of this important transition that we need to make as a community and as a state and as a country to non-ICE vehicles, or internal combustion engine vehicles. And so it is all those things. But fundamentally, for me, what was really the trigger here was it's a bill about equity. And it's a bill about equity because the cost of electric vehicles are coming down to be comparable to a typical ICE vehicle, and there's even starting to be a secondary market for electric vehicles, but if you are a low or moderate income person, and you have, you don't own your home and you are renting a home, or you are, you know, in an apartment complex or something like that, you don't have the ability to take advantage of owning an electric vehicle because you can't have that charger at your home, you need a place of accommodate, public accommodations where you can go and charge reliably and know you are going to be able to get home. There's substantial cost savings to owning an electric vehicle aside from all of those environmental benefits because you are not paying for gasoline and you are also not paying a lot of those maintenance fees that take place; you don't need oil changes, you don't need new air filters, and so the cost over the lifetime of owning an electric vehicle, there's significant cost benefits. And so we want to make sure that that opportunity is widely available for all the members of our community, as well as creating those environmental benefits. There's some, you know—and thank you, Mr. Kay, for doing such an excellent job of going through the nuts and bolts of the bill. To the Commission, welcome to how the sausage is made. It's a, it's a messy and detailed process, but eventually, we get to something, something beautiful. You know, at the bare bones, we are trying to create the ordinance, as the HRS enabled us to do, to actually meet what is already in the Hawaii Revised Statutes. So it's already law that there are these required one charger per 100 stalls, but we wanted to go a little bit further, and that is moving that requirement down for new development to 50 and then also adding this stepped up, so every two years we are increasing that requirement. Why did we do that? Well, we are Big Island; people drive a lot more. And so we needed to make sure that there were more places of public accommodation to charge so that people can get, you know, from school to work to doctor's office, and they are not going to be worried about being stranded. The other thing—and you'll see this a little bit in Noel's presentation—is because we are a rural community that is fairly largely dispersed, a lot of those bigger parking lots are in Hilo or in Kona, and you have other areas of the island where there aren't 100-stall parking lots. 10 EXHIBIT B