2010-11-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

code. So then that becomes an issue. The most interesting experience I had with this, was that we had a lady buy 13 buses from Robert's Tours and from I think the county got some school buses. She bought 13 of them. She did this based on the idea there was a big article in the paper. Governor Lingle was working with a group over on Oahu to outfit a bus for homeless folks. And so the government was an active player in this, and she thought, oh, this is great. So she bought 13 buses, cleared her land. She bought the buses at $500 apiece. Robert's Tours was happy to get rid of all their buses, because they had no place to take them. We don't take them at the landfill. There's noway to get rid of these things except just to store them somewhere. So they were happy to get rid of them. So she spent several thousand dollars to set up all these buses. Complaint comes in. We investigate. You can't do this. You have to get rid of these buses. There's no place for her to get rid of them except to sell them to another person, and then that other person now takes it to another piece of property and does something illegal with it. So now we can take 13 buses, or one complaint, and multiply that by 13 times. So it again, a domino effect. So the recommendation here is that if I'm Robert's Tours, or if I'm the county, and I'm going to buy a bus, I'm going to take a it should be a requirement that I have a trade -in. I'm going to buy a bus from a mainland company. I'm going to bring your bus in, but you're going to take my old bus. And what you do with it is your business. They have more resources on the mainland to do something with a trade -in. So that gets these buses off of this island that are no longer useful for us and eliminates a lot of violations with regards to building and zoning. CHAIR: How can you require a private company to do a trade -in? I can see that for county buses, but the county can tell a private person that they have to do a trade -in when they buy something? LEONARD: That's what I'm suggesting, and how exactly you do that, I'm not sure. So that's something that you know, we create these problems for ourselves, but we don't necessarily the solution is not clearly at hand how to do it, particularly from the legal aspect. I mean, is it legal to do that? And that's something that we need to explore and determine. Now I know when I was talking to Environmental Management a couple of years ago, and I'm sorry, I forget his name. But he was even saying that this is something that we need to do, because the landfill can't take the buses. And so we just kind of push them off in the remote areas. And you know what's happening over the last several years, is our remote areas aren't so remote any more. People are coming in, they're grading, they're building nice houses. And then they look out and they go oh, I don't want that bus next door to me anymore. MATSUDA: Make it as a condition of the purchase. O'HARA: Then it gets traded in. But you're saying that the scrap metal program does not take buses any more? They have in the past. LEONARD: No. One of the when we first had this lady with her 13 buses, we tried to get the metal recyclers to do something. There was a company that was trying to come in and set up business here on the Big Island for recycling. Their name was Co Part. And I talked to Co-Part, and they were willing to go to her property and tear down all the buses and clear her property. So I thought we had a win -win situation for the county. But they 0j