2010-11-03 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MR. TORIGOE: We haven’t received any direct communication from the Legislative Auditor’s office. But we expect that they will be looking again at the collection performance. And that’s something, as I stated earlier, we are already working on. MS. WONG: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: : Other questions? MR. TAKABA: I think in 2006, did you say 2006? MS. WONG: 2006 and there was a follow up on March 2009. MR. TAKABA: I’m not sure that at that time there was a Legislative Auditor doing the same kind of a role as they are now. I think she did a study once at the request of one of the council members. But to study the contracts, the recycling contracts. It was like a special request from the council. It wasn’t brought on upon themselves. 2008 is when we started, we actually had a legislative body for doing auditing. MS. O’HARA: Yeah. He’s right. The 2006 audit was at the request of one particular council woman. MS. WONG: I have just one more open ended question to anyone here. We’re the Cost of Government Commission, is there anything that you would like to recommend or suggest besides IT to improve your departments or improve the county cost or efficiency or revenues, operations? Open ended question. Besides giving all of you a raise. MS. O’HARA: What about the concept of pay as you throw? This is an unusual county in that residential rubbish hauling, you can self haul to the transfer station and get rid of your rubbish for free. I’ve lived in many places in the U.S. and it doesn’t operate that way anywhere else. It also makes it very difficult to put incentives in place for recycling, since it’s all free. So, if there’s no incentive to reduce the amount of rubbish that you haul to the landfill. This has been something that’s been battled around for years in the county. Where does the department stand on that today? MR. TORIGOE: That is a concept that has been discussed and the department has made some proposals along those lines, but it’s going to probably take a good deal of interaction with the public to see if that is really something that will be acceptable. There’s been some real questions raised regarding it. MR. TAKABA: Another program discussed, the proposal that was discussed was tacking on a fee on the property tax bill. We checked with Stan on that. Stan said we do have the capacity to do that but we have to really look at specifically who we charge. MR. SITKO: It would require us to redesign our bills section. 23