2004-04-27 Water Board Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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South Point to Ho` okena. The Mayor asked Governor Cayetano if he would release funds if he was successful in asking the Legislature for funding again, this time for a plan. This was agreed to, and $500,000.00 was budgeted and released. Townscape, Inc., was hired for preparation of this report. In the report on Page 1 -4, Townscape has done an excellent job in pointing out the benefits to be derived from having a plan adopted and bringing water to this area -- talking about fire protection, public health -- better system than catchment, also ability to have a health clinic if there is water available. The idea of bringing a school to the area has been stymied by lack of water. Another obvious issue is droughts. Old- timers will talk about the maps they were shown when they first purchased their properties where there was something like 80 inches of rain a year, and now it appears they are getting about 20 inches of rain a year -- drastic changes. Also the agriculture and economic potential of the area is enormous. After Ms. Hillarie Keehne's ( Townscape, Inc.) review of the draft plan, questions were as follows: Ms. Scarr asked why the stand -alone well in Opihihale in the alternative study was not explored financially, instead of the Ho`okena extension. It is a big difference in price if you are talking about 335 in Kona Paradise and only 100 stretched along the other 5'/2 miles. Then the cost - effective thing to do soon would be to go for the Opihihale well at $1.7 million vs. the Ho`okena extension at $5.1 million when you are only serving 3/4 of the available customers. Ms. Keehne explained that the stand -alone well only serves that section of the community, whereas there are residents spread from Ho`okena to Opihihale. The 100 customers are just those that already have structures along the highway. Not all 335 lots have homes on them. If they did a community improvement district, they would all be required to contribute. Another difficulty with a stand -alone well is lack of integration with existing systems. Ms. Scarr commented that the most of the Department's systems are not connected now, and we can live with stand -alone systems if they are serving significant numbers of people. Mr. Wilkins was troubled with the statement that the average water consumption under the new plan would run 40 to 60 gallons per person, per day. Assuming there are multiple people in an average household, this would still be only' /4 of the current allocation to other people on the island, which is 600 gallons per day. He asked if the Plan is assuming that people will still rely on catchment water and wondered how many people are aware of this. Ms. Keehne stated that they have stated throughout this process that this is to supplement existing catchment systems. Right now, this plan only calls for putting in a spigot at the well site so there would be no distribution. Mr. Wilkins felt that it would make more sense to put in a larger pipeline, and the plans are shortsighted in that respect. Mr. Kawamura explained that pipe size is based on projected population growth. They did not want to oversize any pipe because if you start running the water and there is no usage, you would have to flush that water out because it becomes stale. Mr. Wilkins disagreed and pointed out that you could always keep a pipe empty or have it on standby. It is cheaper to put in a larger pipe than to have to dig another ditch. Page 6 of 25 4- 27 -04min (Ocean View).doc