2010-12-14 exhibit_a - Laserfiche WebLink

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ARAI: Yes. Your recommendation will be forwarded to the County Council for its consideration. At that point they will conduct their own hearings on the bill itself. WOODWARD: I would make several other points that are not necessarily completely germane to this issue. But the whole issue of tsunami sirens and the Civil Defense here in the County and the State is really a joke. A tsunami siren, my understanding is -- and these things are set up so that you have to have them a mile apart; well, they don’t have a radius of a mile --my understanding is that they’re lucky if they get a quarter of a mile from these sirens. They are nonspecific. It’s like trying to communicate an emergency by Morse Code. You know, they go off and people they test them periodically, and nobody pays any attention. It’s like a burglar alarm in a car. When they go off in a parking lot, nobody pays any attention to it. And if they do go off you don’t know if it’s because there’s a tsunami that’s coming in three days or you’ve got lava flowing down the back of your hill. The other potential problem is that these things cannot be set off. You can’t just say, okay, there’s a lava flow in Puna and Kau we need to set off the sirens down there, can’t do that. It’s the whole island. It’s all connected. So they cannot say, okay, just turn on the sirens in Puna and Kau, and not Kohala and, you know, Hamakua, and North Hilo, and so on and so forth. So there are so many things that they’ve worked out so poorly. And now to try and get people to pay for this as part of the construction of a facility, when this is really a State function, not a County function – I mean we’re talking State Civil Defense. They have some money but they don’t quite have enough. So now the County wants to go get it from people in the County. It’s amazing what they come up with sometimes. So, anyway, that’s another piece of information and my feelings about this tsunami warning system in general. So anybody else have any other comments? Okay, Daryn, I guess we’re ready for a vote. ARAI: Okay, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let’s see, Commissioner Kern? KERN: Aye. Aye for an unfavorable recommendation. ARAI: Right. The motion is an unfavorable recommendation to the County Council. KERN: Aye. ARAI: Commissioner Ishibashi? ISHIBASHI: Aye. ARAI: Commissioner Au? AU: Aye. ARAI: Chairman Woodward? WOODWARD: Aye. ARAI: Mr. Chairman, motion carries with four aye votes. WOODWARD: Very good, thank you. 3