2024_08_20 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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instance, that comes into the treatment process and upsets the biological processing of wastewater. The deadline for this under the Clean Water Act, by the way, was 25 years ago – so the County is a little behind the curve on this – this means that they have to – not only do grab samples in sewer collection systems and do reporting on that to EPA but they also have to sample waste that is coming in from septic haulers and that’s coming into the treatment process. That means that they have to have labs and/or they have to contract out to private laboratories to look for these types of chemical impacts to the treatment process. Ah, going back to the larger county-wide AOC – not only are they required to connect homes but they’re also required to fix the existing collection system – so we – in Hilo for instance we have sewer lines that date back to the 1960s. And they’re cracked and broken – we have a lot of earthquakes on the Big Island so not surprising – and there’s a process called Insituform that Honolulu has used successfully under their consent decree – that can line those old cracked and broken pipes and that will prevent saltwater intrusion that has caused much of the problems at the treatment plant – it will reduce the flows and allow more homes to be connected. About 400,000 gallons per day of saltwater intrusion is coming into the Hilo Wastewater Treatment Plant out of a total of 2 million gallons per day of average daily flows so it’s really quite excessive and it can lead to spills and bypasses, during high rain conditions the ground becomes saturated – water comes in through all those cracks and breaks and then it overwhelms pump stations and we see headlines in the paper about discharges into Hilo Bay. And, so, lining the collection system and addressing that deficiency is also part of the AOC. They are also required to establish a financial plan. I mentioned the need to connect more homes, create more revenues. In Honolulu I was on the City Council and we were facing a global consent decree there – we adopted what’s called a wastewater inter-prize fund approach and that stands apart from the general fund revenues and you have to create and self-sustaining revenue based for wastewater operations going forward – so you need to be able to prove that you can meet the obligations of the consent decree for all of the capital projects and to handle operation and maintenance in a proper way going forward so it’s going to be quite significant – the County is gonna need work with their bond counsel attorneys and to come up with a working plan on how to put that financing plan together. So, they’re gonna need new forms of revenue to address that so insufficient funding has led to all this, and so EPA is saying – show us the money – we need to be able to see from the County that they will have sufficient funds going forward to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act. So that’s kind of a brief overview. I thought I would just leave it up to any questions that you might have on where we are on all of this. LT: All right, thank you sir. Any questions from the Commissioners and discussions? RD: District – 1, Robert Duerr. Thanks, Steve, for coming. That was very informative, especially as a fisherman and a surfer – as a surfer I can’t – as an, 71-year-old I can’t go into the water anymore with brown water. I could do it when I was younger – I can’t do it – numerous surfers – you can say every surfer has suffered from this and, as a fisherman I see this, this – the foam – the brown foam that’s in this Bay on a constant basis and works its way to two miles offshore, three miles offshore is ridiculous. This has been obviously a big, complicated and expensive project that’s been kicked down the road for decades. Is the County going to be able to perform to EPA decrees? SH: Well, as a former federal law enforcement officer I guess my answer is they have no choice. If they don’t – they’ve signed a hand shake agreement with the EPA in the AOC and there are conditions in that – that if they don’t meet the terms that are laid out: the deadlines, all of the 9