2003-09-05 Committee on People with Disabilities Minutes

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D. MEMBERSHIP SUBCOMMITTEE Î M. GLEASON/L. TOBOSA/B. WHITNEY M. Gleason reported that this subcommittee did not meet. B. Whitney stated that she will follow up with N. Olesen because he may know a potential candidate who has an engineering background. MCPD decided that the subcommittee will come up with names and circulate them through email. Once consensus is reached, the subcommittee will submit recommendations to the Mayor within the next two weeks. A. Levin pointed out that there are currently two vacancies on MCPD. The county administration will still welcome recommendations for the other vacancy, even if a person with an engineering background fills one. UNFINISHED BUSINESS A. VOLUNTEER PARKING VIOLATION ENFORCEMENT PROGRAM UPDATE ÎSGT. APELE Sergeant R. Apele reported that the pilot program for the volunteer disabled parking enforcement program has just finished in Kona. As part of the pilot program, volunteers were recruited for the Hilo and Kona districts. There were not enough qualified volunteers for the Hilo district and only one person passed through the process. As a result, enforcement has not been conducted for the Hilo district. Currently, there are five volunteers actively working in Kona. The program has been in operation for approximately eight or nine months. There are some minor problems that are being worked out regarding logistics in supervision, proper completion of administrative paperwork, and volunteers meeting their required hours. They have had a minimal amount of citations (100) issued in Kona because of limited hours and strict guidelines to abide by where the volunteers are allowed to conduct enforcement during scheduled hours and they must provide a TH schedule to the Police Department by the 25 of the previous month. Also, they are not allowed to deviate from that schedule. The volunteers are requesting to extend their hours which is something the Police Department is looking at. The volunteers have discovered that many of the accessible parking stalls in the Kona area are not in compliance with federal regulations. Therefore, the volunteers are unable to issue citations to violators within those stalls because the citations are not prosecutable in court. However, violation letters still can be sent to the violators. The best part that has come out of the program is we are now gaining compliance from many of the Kona establishments. They were given the proper requirements and many of them have become compliant. The Police Department is looking at expanding the program and doing another recruitment for the Hilo and Kona districts only either this month or next month. They would like to work out some minor problems before more peop board and proceeding with the next recruitment. They would like to recruit more people in the Hilo district so an enforcement program could begin. 3