2011-04-27 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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committees to take on more of that responsibility. And then in the interim, what we’ve been doing is looking at meetings every other month in order to scale back a little bit. At this point, there isn’t much cost savings in eliminating them because we’ve already cut all of that back and we didn’t put anything in the budget to continue any on of the contractual services. It does cost us sometimes a little bit in overtime. We’ve been asking the committees and the staff to either flex. So I’ve got some of them that are using flex time to accommodate the meetings in the evenings. And then we’ve been asking the committees to try and move the meetings up during the daytime so that I could reduce overtime. So, basically because of the financial situation, we’ve eliminated most of the cost attached to those committees just by shifting the work either for the committee or trying to do more of it in-house. MS. WONG: So a budget in the amount of $400,000 for each action committee? MS. LEITHEAD-TODD: No. The $400,000 was for the steering committees and development of the CDP. And most of that money is in consultant contracts. That’s Ka‘u and Hamakua. Those are the steering committees. The action committees, previously we used to fund them at about $25,000 per action committee. So for four action committees you’re looking at about $100,000. We’ve cut that out of the budget entirely. And talked to staff and so we’ve done flex. We’re doing alternate months if there isn’t much. We haven’t been able to that with Kona and that’s because Kona had additional studies that were already funded and paid for. One is to come up with village design, guidelines which would be kind of a model for smart code used throughout the island. And another is a financing study because the Kona CDP calls for $800 million in infrastructure to be built in Kona. So the big question is how are you going to pay for that? We have a financing plan and basically they’re evaluating that and because we’re evaluating that, it requires that that committee meet every month. And it does take up more time. What we’re now finding sometimes is it’s very difficult to achieve a quorum because we’re constantly loosing committees and have to get more people. And you’re competing with other boards and commissions. Maybe, I don’t know whether we’re not doing as effective a job of getting the word out or just that the pool of people who can commit that amount of time starts getting limited because it does require a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of reading. I think that what we have right now we can sustain. If down the road, the county decides they want to do more CDP under the current County Code, every CDP that you created creates an action committee after you adopt the CDP. So perspectively the theory is if you did a CDP just for Downtown Hilo, then that would have its own action committee. If you did a CDP for smaller areas like if you wanted to do one for Keaukaha/Panaewa, then that would create its own action committee. And at some point, it just has more committees, I think than we can sustain, which is why the last one we argued for larger areas rather than doing smaller CDPs. And we have no money in the budget to do one in Hilo. Hilo hasn’t had a community development plan in something like 33 years. But there just wasn’t any money in the budget to plan for that. MS. O’HARA: You’re talking about the inaudible MS. LEITHEAD-TODD: Well the Hamakua one includes rural South Hilo, so basically from the Haulalani Place is, that little stream, Pukihai. From Pukuihai towards Honokaa is the Hamakua CDP. So it’s rural South Hilo, North Hilo and Hamakua. It’s called 25