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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION c/o Office of the Corporation Counsel, 101 Aupuni Street, Suite 325, Hilo, Hawai‘i 96720 MINUTES Friday, April 8, 2011 – 10:00 a.m. Department of Liquor Control Conference Room 101 Aupuni Street, Suite 230 Hilo, Hawai‘i 96720 CALL TO ORDER: MS. NICHOLSON: I’d like to call the meeting to order at 10:03. Present: Marilyn Nicholson, Chair Gloria Wong, Vice-Chair Kenneth Armour Glen Matsuda Eileen O’Hara Bill Takaba, ex-officio Katherine A. Garson, Assistant Corporation Counsel Shanell Sarsuelo, Clerk III, Corporation Counsel Emarie Carvalho, Legal Clerk III, Corporation Counsel Absent: Patricia Provalenko STATEMENTS FROM THE PUBLIC: MS. NICHOLSON: Do we have any statements from the public? MS. GARSON: No, for Eric Tanouye… APPROVAL OF MINUTES (March 23, 2011): MS. NICHOLSON: Do I hear a motion to approve the minutes? MOTION: MR. MATSUDA: So moved. MS. O’HARA: Second. MS. NICHOLSON: I have a comment on page 7 it should be review not renew I think, Glen? 1 MR. MATSUDA: Yes. MS. NICHOLSON: Any other comments? MR. MATSUDA: Page 30 what should be changed to why. MS. NICHOLSON: Can we vote on the minutes as amended. ACTION ON MOTION: All: Aye. MS. NICHOLSON: Minutes passed. DISCUSSION, AND QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION WITH ERIC TANOUYE, AGRICULTURAL ADVISORY COMMISSION REGARDING HIS RESPONSE DATED DECEMBER 9, 2010 TO QUESTIONS IN THE COST OF GOVERNMENT’S AUGUST 5, 2010 LETTER: MS. NICHOLSON: We do not have Eric Tanouye… MS. POMEROY: I’m the chair as of last week. My name is Kathie Pomeroy. MS. NICHOLSON: Good, come to the table. Kathie, we have two things that I can think of that we would like to address. One is we had a discussion about consolidation of two commissions and the other was do you have a copy of the response that Eric sent to us dated December 9, 2010? MS. POMEROY: I have a copy without a date on it. MS. NICHOLSON: The heading is Hawai‘i County Agriculture Advisory Commission Responses to the Cost of Government Commission Questions. MS. POMEROY: Yes. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay. We may have other things but those are the two things that I can think of. I have some questions on response number two under suggestions. It says combine agriculture product approvals into one office, and make sure the various regulations are not in conflict with their demands. MS. O’HARA: Excuse me Chair could you give the number on that communication. MS. NICHOLSON: I’m sorry it’s communication 2010-147. We have an awful lot of paper here. MS. POMEROY: I understand. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, under suggestion a it says combine agriculture product approvals into one office, i.e. building permits, water permits, and make sure the various regulations are not in conflict with their demands. I didn’t quite understand that one. Can you address that? 2 MS. POMEROY: I believe that’s referring to various criteria having to be met to get various permits in different departments and sometimes there could be a conflict between what one department asks and what another department asks. I agree the wording is a little bit ambiguous. MS. NICHOLSON: Soit’s all about permits or product approvals? MS. POMEROY: Yeah, product approvals might involve a permit because if you’re for example processing something in a clean room or certified kitchen then you would need to get a certain kind of permit. So they are related. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay any questions about that anyone? I have questions about each one of these. The second suggestion, Research and Development: Create economic development incubation for edible and non-edible small agriculture entrepreneurial business to increase efficiency and revenue for the County of Hawai‘i. Can you address how having this incubation would increase efficiency and revenue for the County of Hawai‘i. MS. POMEROY: I believe it’sreferring to having more agriculture business in this county. By having more agricultural business you could increase revenue for the county. That’s my take on it. MS. NICHOLSON: Sorry to put you on the spot for something you didn’t respond to. MS. POMEROY: Nothat’s okay I was part of putting this together and I just want to speak for the commission and not from my own opinions. MS. NICHOLSON: Because our charge is really to look at efficiency and revenue generation as well as cost savings so we’re trying to help you put your suggestions forward so if we have something real clear and cogent from you than we can put it forward or suggest it for our report. Ifthere’s a way to phrase this that’s clear to the reader, since I didn’t really understand this when I read it, clear to our report audience which is the county council and administration that would be good. MS. POMEROY: Do I need to revise it right now? MS. NICHOLSON: You don’t have to revise it right now but if there is a particular suggestion you want to make, if you find that there is a clearer way to express it you could put it forward to us and then we could discuss it and decide whether we want to include it in our report or not. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Because that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re really trying to help you be more efficient and generate more revenue for the County of Hawai‘i. MS. POMEROY: When is the deadline if we decide to revise something? MS. NICHOLSON: The sooner the better because we’re working on our draft report right now and we need to have our draft report done in about a month and a half. It would need to come to us and then go on the agenda and then be discussed. 3 MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. O’HARA: I’m curious, following up on that increase revenue for the county, would that be through increased product sales? MS. POMEROY: Yeah I think there’s confusion here about revenue for the County of Hawai‘i, the government versus a business which is private. MS. NICHOLSON: But that still generates tax revenue for the county so if there’s a way we can support agriculture it would still generate more revenue for the county. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. O’HARA: How does that directly create revenue for the county? MS. NICHOLSON: Through taxes probably. MR. ARMOUR: And more jobs. MS. NICHOLSON: More jobs. More revenue. MS. O’HARA: Okay, I just want that clearer. MS. NICHOLSON: But we would need it more clear in order to include it in our report. MS. POMEROY: I think I can clarify it right now. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay. MS. POMEROY: Create economic development incubation for edible and non-edible small ag entrepreneurial businesses to increase efficiency and revenue for the County of Hawai‘i via more jobs and tax revenue. MS. NICHOLSON: That still seems a little vague for us. MS. POMEROY: Still vague. MS. NICHOLSON: Still a little... Iguess I would like something a little bit more specific. MS. O’HARA: Specific interms of the taxes because certain taxes don’t accrue to the county they accrue to the state, like GE taxes and stuff. So I just want it clear how that directly benefits the county. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Suggestion c Planning Department: Collaborate with Public Works and Real Property Tax Division to create efficiency and opportunity incentives for important agricultural land.Can you talk about that a little bit like what kind of efficiencies are we talking about? 4 MS. POMEROY: Well important agricultural lands was, you might know this, mandated in 2008 that the county needs to designate important agricultural lands. I’m not an expert on that topic but what that does is it gives incentives to property owners that have the best ag land to designate their land as agricultural under IAL. There’s tax incentives for them to do that. There’s farm labor housing allowances that they would get that they don’t normally get and some other things in the package that would give them incentive to do that because the idea of designating important ag lands is to keep the land in agriculture rather than development. MS. NICHOLSON: So how does that generate more money for the county if you’re looking at tax incentives? So these are county tax incentives then for the most part? MS. POMEROY: I’m not sure if it’s also state or just county. I don’t have the answer to that. MS. NICHOLSON: We had some discussion, Ken, maybe you can recall because you were kind of looking at this, of use of agricultural lands and some people who claim use of agricultural lands that perhaps are not really agricultural lands. But you’re sort of on the other side of that. You’re talking about encouraging agricultural lands. MR. ARMOUR: I think this is two different issues. I don’t understand this whole program that you… My understanding is that under this program that Kathie’s talking about you have 100 acres and you say I want to dedicate this to agriculture so you sign a kind of contract to put that land into agriculture. The other thing that we were talking about is if somebody has 4 acres or 10 acres, they put a fence around it and then they go apply and say this is agriculture now and they get tax benefits by doing that. The county says all right you qualify so now your taxes are $100 or $150 a year and that’s no commitment at all on the land owner. MS. POMEROY: Ithink you have to backup even another step before that because designating important ag lands is about making maps because we don’t really have a picture of what the best ag lands are now. We need to get all the data that we have already and find out what is the best land for ag. So that’s the first step. I just want to put that in because some people fence their rocky area in Kawaihae and it gets counted as ag. We’re talking about land that can be productive. MR. ARMOUR: The second part was that anybody can do it if they think they can get an agricultural exemption. They’re supposed to justify it by actually doing agriculture but in our conversation we had there’s some lands that they fence up two sides of it and then they go and get a permit or not even a permit, they file for agricultural lands and they never do anything on it to get the tax break. MS. POMEROY: Yeah well this is… Important ag lands is to help prevent that kind of setup like Kohala ranch or any number of developments that are really not agriculturally productive. So getting back to the whole statement; Collaborate with Public Works and Real Property Tax Division to create efficiency and opportunity incentives for important ag lands. I think important ag lands are our number one priority for the Ag Advisory Commission right now to try to get this designated and followed through. It’s been mandated. So the whole picture of that happening is a step in the direction of having more efficiency and opportunity incentives for agriculture. It’s like the most important step that needs to be done right now and it costs money so it’s kind of been put off and put off and is still being put off. MS. NICHOLSON: It costs money for the farmers or for the county? 5 MS. POMEROY: Well it depends on who’s supposed to be paying for it. I think the Planning Department is the agency that’s supposed to be helping to get a consultant for that and then the Legislature, it would be nice if they put some money towards it, they’re the ones that decided that all counties needed to do this. So the holdup is that getting a consultant to do all this costs money for the county. Probably the Planning Department is the one that I keep hearing is supposed to ante up for this and then the rest perhaps from if you know a bill could be passed and there’s a couple bills right now for that. Does that answer your question? MS. NICHOLSON: Given that this is a response to opportunities for consolidation of functions within the county, I guess I was looking in the response for something more like how cangovernment better serve agriculture so that agriculture can better servecounty government. I was looking for more of a tie in and granted that was not the question we asked but how can we assist you so that you can work more effectively with the county and the county can benefit from that. MS. POMEROY: We being the county right? MS. NICHOLSON: Mmhmm. MS. POMEROY: We really need the Planning Department to help with this important ag lands. So we are going to be hopefully meeting with them soon about that again. Once that land is designated it’s going to make it easier for farmers to farm and ranchers to ranch so if it becomes easier to do that then there will be more revenue for the agricultural sector. MS. NICHOLSON: Is there a way that you can put that in some sort of letter to us so that we could consider some actual recommendations that would direct the county to make the process easier for you and thus generate more revenue or save time within the county staff so that you’re not going from one permitting to another to another. MS. POMEROY: Yeah that would be great. I think Mayor Kenoi is behind it because we already talked to him about that and he already accomplished it with building permits.We actually spoke to him about that a little more in detail and he’s very supportive. So a letter that explains about streamlining permitting and important ag lands and how that can generate revenue for the county? MS. NICHOLSON: Revenue and efficiency within county government. MS. POMEROY: About those two things? MS. NICHOLSON: Right. MS. POMEROY: Okay and streamlining permitting for infrastructure and ag product approvals? MS. NICHOLSON: Well whatever you need. You’re in control of what you need we’re not. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. OHARA: Does the county actually provide permits for product approval? 6 MS. POMEROY: I think they don’t but what they do is well I shouldn’t speak because Eric Tanouye is a nursery person so he would know a lot more about that but when you process an ag product you have to have a certain infrastructure in place… MS. OHARA: Right. I understand the infrastructure piece but in terms of the actual product I don’t know that the county actually gets involved in any permit processing. MS. POMEROY: Yeah, I’m not sure about that, beyond mailing invasive species and stuff like that but I can find out. So a letter addressed to Cost of Government Commission? MS. NICHOLSON: You can send it to Kathy Garson and it will come to us from her. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Another thing, under number 3 identify ways to enhance revenue and revenue collections for the county, the last thing is decrease purchases of imports. Can you explain that a little bit? Who is the purchaser of the imports? Are you talking about the county purchasing imports? MS. POMEROY: Well the county does and everything is set up in the state and county level and private sector for importing. So one of our goals is to produce more food for this island, be more food self sufficient and a big part of that is about not just growing the food but all the infrastructures in place for importing. So to relate it to ways to enhance revenue and revenue collections within the county if we were more self sufficient we would be having the money stay here rather than going to the mainland or overseas. MS. NICHOLSON: I’m not sure what we can make of that. MS. O’HARA: I fully understand the argument it has been around a long time. MS. NICHOLSON: Yeah, I think we totally support…. MS. O’HARA: Import substitution. MS. NICHOLSON: Yeah. But I’m trying to tie it back to revenue collection for the county. MS. O’HARA: It would improve the quality of life for our citizens. MS. POMEROY: Well wouldn’t you collect more revenue if we were having a busier business economy here? MS. NICHOLSON: Definitely. MS.O’HARA: Well yes and no. Some of that accrues to the state as we’re pointing out. The county doesn’t receive direct taxes like GE taxes so yes and no, most of our revenue comes from our property taxes but there is a spill over for the county in terms of benefits and there’s definitely a spill over for the residents of the county the more we can substitute imported foods, absolutely. So yeah we recognize that. 7 MR. MATSUDA: The food that is imported should we stop the importing? Is there enough supply that is generated on the island of Hawai‘i to substitute this importing of additional foods oris it something that we need to identify because if you are importing food it means that either somebody’s not growing it or it’s not being provided because that’s why you have to import the additional foods. MS. POMEROY: Right now there’s not enough food growing to meet our demands on this island or in this state. So it would have to be a transition over to being able to do that. So you wouldn’t automatically stop imports. You have to get the supply in place and all the legislation in place to make it worth it for the farmers to sell for example to institutions or just private consumers. We’re not there yet. MS. NICHOLSON: Any other questions on the response that we got? If not, we will move on to some questions we had about consolidation of the Agricultural Advisory Commission and the Energy Commission. MR. ARMOUR: If we could have Kathie maybe take five minutes and explain what their board looks at and does. MS. NICHOLSON: Certainly. MS. POMEROY: Okay we started in April or May of 2010. Our first task was to go over the Hawai‘i county ag development plan, I’m not sure if you heard of that. I have a copy just fresh off the press here. This had been reviewed at I think thirteen or twenty community meetings. The Kohala Center was the consultant for this plan. They had thirteen community meetings to get input from the ag and general community to make a viable plan because the last ag development plan was in 1992 and it was all plantation based, really outdated, so this plan was made up and final look at it was by the Ag Advisory Commission which is under the office of Research and Development.DayDay Hopkins is the one ag employee for the whole county. So we added some things to it. There’s action items that we thought were important. Now it is being, as of yesterday,it is going to the Mayor and then the Mayor will put it before the county council to be voted on as a resolution. They will make a resolution up and see if we can pass this as a resolution, there’s about 60 action items in here. So of these 60 action items we have made recommendations to the mayor of what the top dozen are. We have advised him that we think these need to be funded but of course there’s not very much money to fund anything now so these come back to us and say well we can do a, b and c but you know what can we do that doesn’t need to be funded. So there’s a lot with the permitting, that’s a policy change that would actually save the county money I think if that was streamlined. At this point the commission will be working on making… 11 commissioners we meet once a month, we have ad hoc committees and at this point we’re narrowing down what do we actually want to accomplish in this next year of all these priorities that we’ve submitted so we’re in the process right now of deciding… We know important ag lands is one of them, one of the top priorities. Then there’s several others but right now we are still formulating exactly what we’re going to be honing in on with the amount of person power we have on the commission. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay Ken? All right, Gloria? MS.WONG: You answered some of the questions that I was prepared to ask you. How often you meet; once a month. You are a fairly new commission. 8 MS. POMEROY: Mmhmm May 2010. MS. WONG: I understand that Councilman Hoffman was one of the people that sort of put the idea of an ag advisory commission together. One of the discussions we had recently was to perhaps combine or consolidate Ag and Energy Commissions. There’s some thought behind that which Eileen might be able to talk about. What are your thoughts about combining with another commission? Is your focus so focused on ag that energy would be outside of your focus or what are your general thoughts? MS. POMEROY: Those two things do go hand in hand because of obvious reasons I don’t need to explain it to you but energy is one of our main topics in this plan. So I don’t see it as being a bad fit. I see it as being a good fit. However I’m thinking how would that work? Would we all meet in the same room at the same time? If we did that that might be a little cumbersome because even though they are related you have to break them down to a certain degree. MS. O’HARA: I think, just to help with how that might happen is you have a collection of individuals on each of the commission who have been chosen for their particular expertise in this point in time and how long are your appointments for? MS. POMEROY: The term of the mayor. MS. O’HARA: So it’s four years. So it would be something that would be more of a transition. Something the next appointments would choose people who have both expertise in ag and energy or individuals with energy and individuals with ag so that your next commission if it were combined or consolidated would have individuals with both expertise on it. It would be difficult at this point to take your commission and gel it with the other commission because of the selection of the individuals. I’m sure that not everybody on your commission has background on energy and likewise on the energy commission so it might be difficult to do but something to strive for in the future is what we would be suggesting. MS. NICHOLSON: When your subcommittees meet your subcommittees consists of how many people? MS.POMEROY : Two people. MS. NICHOLSON: So you don’t call upon county staff to support your subcommittee meetings? MS.POMEROY :On staff no. Sometimes meetings are by phone, sometimes they are in person but there’s no extra staff there. MS. WONG: Does R&D staff Energy Commission as well? MS. O’HARA: Mmhmm. The energy coordinator is under R&D also. MS. WONG: One of my other questions is it has been mentioned before that DayDay is really the only person addressing ag in R&D right now. Ag is huge. Is one person enough to address ag or in the plan that you have would it require more than one person to address? 9 MS. POMEROY: Yes, that’s one of the priorities that the community put forth and the Ag Advisory Commission supports it also. I can read it to you if you want but there’s not enough staff for really accomplishing as much as we would like to accomplish for agriculture and that’s one of the main reasons the Ag Advisory Commission was set up, volunteers that will help advance the needs of the agricultural sector. MS. WONG: How many people are you suggesting or recommending? MS. POMEROY: Ican’t really say that because the commission has not come up with a number but I would say as much as possible. I mean at least two but I can’t speak for my own opinion as the Chair so that’s a real specific question that we never came up with a number but I can read what it says in the plan, it’s just a paragraph. MS. WONG: Okay. While you’re looking, might it be adequate to have still just one person and contract consultants to bring in resources to assist or do you think it would be necessary to hire another person in the county? MS. POMEROY: I think I can say without just speaking for my opinion on behalf of the commission that another staff person would be great. There’s also other kinds of staff that well I think is more state level for inspectors and things like that that got cut back. But here’s the short paragraph about that, this was the number one priority on the action items from the community: increase or reallocate existing resources for the County of Hawai‘i Department of Research and Development agricultural program so the county can be an active and more effective leader in implementing or facilitating the actions deemed important by the stakeholders consulted during the planning process and which are embodied in this plan. MS. O’HARA: Do you see the additional staffing being needed more on a geographical basis like I mean somebody in West Hawai‘i versus somebody in East Hawai‘i or is it more of a commodity focus? I’m just curious how you see that. MS. POMEROY: Again I am speaking off the top of my head rather than what the commission has discussed but I think often having a west and east is good for convenience but they would work together as one. MS. NICHOLSON: Do you see grant opportunities that are available for the county to apply to support agriculture that you are unable to take advantage of because there’s just no one to work on those? MS. POMEROY: Yes. MS. WONG: Isanything like that in the plan? MS. POMEROY: About grants? MS. WONG: Yes. MS. POMEROY: I don’t recall that that’s addressed directly. I think it might be kind of across the board that there could be more grants utilized by the county. 10 MS. NICHOLSON: Because we’re looking at grant writing and it would be helpful to us if we had some idea of what kind of grants we’re talking about that might be available to the county but the county is unable to apply for that support agriculture. MS. O’HARA: There’s ahuge amount of grants. USDA rural development, our whole island qualifies for rural development funding and there’s just all types of programs under there that we could be applying for. MS. POMEROY: Yeah, I’m a grant writer too. I follow them. We do have a department, I mean the USDA rural development department is operative here but there are other ones besides that, sustainable agriculture research and education and there’s a lot of other ones under the USDA. There’s a lot coming up with farmers school that would be fairly substantial grants. Yeah that would be great if they could get another grant writer and I think you have one now right? So that would help out not just agriculture but a lot of different departments. MS. NICHOLSON: Any other questions? Is there anything you would like to add? MS. POMEROY: I just want to be clear on what you want from me now because I see that for number 2a that wasn’t clear to you how that was worded right? MS. NICHOLSON: Yeah. Do you understand what our charge is? MS. POMEROY: Why don’t you explain it to me. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, briefly what we were appointed to do is assist the county in making suggestions of how the county can operate more efficiently and effectively and maximize revenues and so our report will include general recommendations as well as specific department recommendations and so our focus is very much on the county revenue end so if you have something you would like to add to the response we already have that would focus a little bit more clearly on that then we can consider including it in our report for recommendation to say the Planning Department or any of the other departments that we mentioned today. MS. POMEROY: Okay. So 2a and b the wording was vague and try to get that in to you within the next few weeks which would be easy to do to make that clearer and then 2c in the form of a letter to Kathy Garson. MS. NICHOLSON: Well actually all your responses would go to Kathy who is our attorney who represents us and then she will disseminate it to us. MS. GARSON: So you address it to the Cost of Government Commission it’s just that you can use our address the 101 Aupuni Street, Suite 325, Office of the Corporation Counsel. MS. POMEROY: So use the same format for 2a, b and c. So for 2a, for example, make sure the various regulations are not in conflict with their demands. The part that’s not clear about that is specific examples or? MS. NICHOLSON: Well I wasn’t even sure what the regulations were having to do with permits. Are they having to do with approvals? MS. O’HARA: At the county level. Focus on things that the county has jurisdiction over. 11 MS. NICHOLSON: And how will that increase the efficiency of the county as well as serve the agricultural community. MS. POMEROY: Okay. MS. O’HARA: I’m not sure that the county is going to be able to make sure that there’s no conflict in the demands from the different permitting agencies because you’re dealing with federal, state and county and conflicts do occur, we understand that but to the extent that we can help yeah. MS. POMEROY: All right. MS. WONG: When is your next commission meeting? th MS. POMEROY: April 20. MS. WONG: If you have a meeting before you write the letter would you be able to ask your commission whether they would be amendable to the combination of Ag & Energy Commissions. MS. O’HARA: Down the road. th MS. POMEROY: Yeah Ican’t ask it on the 20because the agenda was just established yesterday. We could put it on the agenda…. I could just bring it up but we got so much stuff on the agenda that… I could mention it for the May agenda but to really get into a discussion I think we would have to wait until like June. MS. WONG: We’re done in June. MS. POMEROY: Oh okay so you would need it done in May. MS. NICHOLSON: Yes because we need to get our draft done in May. MS. POMEROY: Okay so about combining that so the date of the May meeting you want me to tell you when it is? MS. NICHOLSON: No. MS. POMEROY: It’s mid May. May 19 I think. So put that on the agenda. Would that give you enough time because when is your report due? MS. O’HARA: I don’t think so. MS. WONG: I think we get the sense that you’re in favor of it, it makes sense on this side. MS. NICHOLSON: Although we haven’t talked to anyone from the Energy Commission. MS. POMEROY: The thing is that this is a whole new idea and Ican’t speak for the commission except for what they tell me and there’s nothing about this on this letter. So like I 12 was just commenting about my impressions but I don’t think you can take my opinion and say this is where it stands. The whole commission has to be introduced to the concept and I can tell you for sure that there is an energy component in this plan and we talk about energy a lot. MS. O’HARA: We understand. I think what you basically gave us is that there are synergies between the Energy and the Ag and it’s up to us to decide whether we want to make this recommendation and so I think that’s fine you don’t need to address it. MS. POMEROY: Okay. All right. MS. NICHOLSON: Anything else? All right well thank you Kathie. MS. O’HARA: Yes, thank you Kathie very much. MS. NICHOLSON: Thank you for taking the time to come and visit us this morning. MS. POMEROY: No thank you, all the way from North Kohala. MS. O’HARA: Thank you very much then. MS. POMEROY: I appreciate your work too. MS. O’HARA: Chair, can I bring up a point out of order? MS. NICHOLSON: Yes. MS. O’HARA: Mr. Buklarewicz arrived late for the statements from the public and he has some material that relates to item 12 on our agenda. I don’t know if you would be willing to take it out of order or how you want to handle this but he does have some information. MS. NICHOLSON: Well we would be going back to statements from the public. MS. GARSON: No, actually you can take item 12 out of order. He came for discussion on e- waste and pay as you throw? MS. O’HARA: Yes. MS. GARSON: Because you already passed public statements. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay so if the rest of you agree we will jump to item 12 and get that one out of the way. You all understand I do need to leave at noon to catch a flight. MS. O’HARA: Okay, we’ll make it fast. MS. NICHOLSON: And Paul understands that too. DISCUSSION ON E-WASTE AND PAY AS YOU THROW PROGRAMS: MS. NICHOLSON: Okay would you like to come join us and introduce yourself and tell us what you’re talking about. 13 MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Paul Buklarewicz, I am the Executive Director for Recycle Hawai‘i and I guess we had a flurry of Emails between myself, Marilyn and Eileen about the sad state of electronic waste collections here on this island and then pay as you throw also came up in the discussion. I offered to bring a hard copy of this 13 year old 1999 recommendations developed by Recycle Hawai‘i on rural community pay as you throw system. Back in 99 this was a trend on mainland communities to incentivize recycling while at the same time having residents pay for throwing away whatever is non-recyclable. There’s a number of recommendations for ordinance changes throughout here which would have to go through before such a system could be implemented here. So I thought I would just bring this plan. It was introduced through the solid waste management committee. I served on Mayor Kim’s solid waste advisory committee where we reviewed the integrated resource solid waste management plan. So it was brought up, at that time it was kind of set aside, nobody really wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole because it did involve paying to throw away rubbish and there’s a number of ways it could be done: assign a special type of bag, people self haul the rubbish to the transfer station and they only pay for rubbish that is non-recyclable. Recycling is free. So it’s a system of bringing in some revenues to help pay for solid waste management costs and at the same time incentivizing recycling.I’ll leave this with the committee if you’re interested in making additional copies, that’s the reason I was late, I could only find one copy left I think I distributed most of the copies to the solid waste committee a couple years ago.I’ll leave this here with the committee that’s something to consider. Was E-waste also on the agenda? MS. O’HARA: Yeah. Yes it is. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Okay, just to bring you up to date on what’s happening with electronic waste recycling, about 8 years ago another trend to keep electronic waste out of landfills because e-waste consists of nickel, cadmium, lead,mercury, all kinds of toxic materials that if allowed to go into the landfill getting busted up by the heavy equipment there. These types of toxic chemicals do leak into the ground water especially in unlined landfills like we have over here in Hilo so we made a pretty big effort to start collecting e-waste, this is back in 2004when Eileen was recycling coordinator, we brought in a grant from Dell, facilitated what we did for about three years by annual collections, one in Hilo, one in Kona. We would have special collection days for computers and peripherals and other types of e-waste. That went on for about three years. We also collected about 50 tons of e-waste as a result of the 2006 earthquake over in the Kohala coast. We also did a big drive that cleaned out a lot of the e- waste that was collecting in county buildings, state offices, schools and other federal and state office buildings, maybe about 35 tons. So in that first three years we kept about 500 tons of e- waste out of the landfills. We decided well there’s really a steady stream of this stuff that we should make a more continuous effort to try keep this stuff out of the landfills. So we opened up a couple of drop off depots, one in Hilo and one in Kona. Just to give you an example in calendar year 2009 we shipped 87, 40 foot containers to California for recycling. January 1, 2010, new state legislation came into effect that put the onus on the original equipment manufacturers to pay for the end of life recycling of their products. So they had to register… In 2010 it was just computers and peripherals. So any company that wanted to sell their products here in the State of Hawai‘i would register $5000 fee and give a plan, how they’re going to deal with their recycling. Most of the 35 plus manufacturers opted for a mail back system where they would give their customers a sticky label, box up this equipment and send it to whatever recycler they designate as their recycler. It totally destroyed the efforts that we had set up as far th as the depots here in Hilo. Only about four container loads got shipped in 2010 after April 30. We were funded by the county to provide free residential e-waste collection right up until April 14 th 30of last year. Department of Environmental Management decided that since the original equipment manufacturers were responsible now no monies had to be expended for e-waste collection. So in the first four months of 2010 we shipped probably about 30 containers of e- waste. Funding stopped in April, since then maybe 4 containers went out. Right now the two depots are full to overflowing with containers ready to ship but no funding to pay for the st, shipping of these e-waste containers. March 31last week was the deadline for all these original equipment manufacturers to report to the State Department of Health how much e- waste was processed out of the big island through this new legislative program and I just checked with the Department of Health so far only 3 companies out of the 39 doing business in the State of Hawai‘i reported any stream of electronic waste coming out of this island and it amounted to a little over one hundred thousand pounds which is a fraction of what we were able to collect in a four month period in 2010. So basically without the funding that we were getting from the Department of Environmental Management these two depots are on the verge of bankruptcy. They haven’t been able to collect e-waste because they’re full to overflowing. The warehouses are full and there’s no monies coming in from the private sector who are supposed to be responsible for the e-waste recycling. The problem as I see it isthe legislative was Oahu centric, it probably works okay for Oahu because they have quite a few number of depots where they can collect the e-waste but when our guys try to make their agreements with the original equipment manufacturers they were told we already have agreements, of course those agreements are for companies over on Oahu. They are not willing to acknowledge that there are neighbor islands other than Oahu so we’re stuck with all this e-waste and it will probably end up in the landfill eventually. A lot of it is going into the landfills. So this is a problem that has to be dealt with if the county cares about whether or not toxic materials are going into the landfill. MS. WONG: Paul,can you give us anaverage weight on a container load of e-waste. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Average weight probably about 18,000 pounds for one 40 foot container of processed e-waste subtracting the terra of the pallets. The cost associated with sending a 40 foot container to California for recycling because there’s no recycling per se going on in the State of Hawai‘i as far as I know so it all has to be shipped off island.There’s two options, we can sell it to China, Pakistan or India and then it becomes their problem where they have child labor picking apart this stuff in unsafe conditions or we can send it to a reputable recycler in California that provides certificates of assured destruction, where we know they’re recycling it and all the materials get separated out and sold to the mainland markets. That’s where the cost comes in, it’s not cheap it’s expensive to do it properly. We’ve purposely chosen not to sell any of the e-waste to China. They’re asking us all the time, they’re begging us to buy the stuff but we try to do the right thing and send it to reputable recyclers. Now on this end we have ground transportation, we have labor, we have warehousing, loading the equipment safely, that’s palletizing it, shrink wrapping it, putting it on the 40 foot containers, getting it down to Matson. Matson’s 40 foot container even with a break for when we had the contract as a non-profit organization, each container costs at least $2,300 to send to California. The fuel surcharge goes up and down and is separate from that $2,300. You probably saw in the news a few weeks ago that Matson jacked it up 30% the fuel surcharge so that’s on top of the $2,300 so now it’s probably costing about $2,500, $2,600 per container to ship. Then we also pay for the ground transportation on that side to get it to the recycler. At that time we were also paying about $2,000 a container for the actual recycling. That cost has been shaved off with this new legislation because the OEMs are supposed to be paying for the actual recycling. The thing that’s missing is in the legislation who is paying for the collection, loading, ground transportation, shipping to get it to the recyclers, nobody’s been paying. That’s why we’re 15 backed up with overflowing e-waste warehouses and hopefully it’s not going to wind up in a landfill. MS. NICHOLSON: So where are you with working with the county and does the county actually maybe Bill knows this, does the county generate a whole lot of e-waste and what do you do with it? MR. TAKABA: We give it to Environmental Management. MS. NICHOLSON: So it ends up in the landfill or warehouse somewhere? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Actually they’ve been bringing it to the depots. MS. O’HARA: They’ve been bringing it to the depots and he is having to refuse it because they’re not funding the program anymore since 2004 when we started this program at the county. MS. NICHOLSON: And that was grant funded so… MS. O’HARA: No, just the first collection. I wrote a grant to Dell to get this kicked off and it was a one day event. We cleaned out quite a bit of the ground floor of the old county building which was full of old, old Wang computers stacked to the ceiling. There was just almost no space down there so when the county realized a) you can get a certificate of destruction by recycling and b) you get more space to use for other storage, they got onboard with it and they started funding it through contract hired to Recycle Hawai‘i to do this program. Recycle Hawai‘i morphed from event days to having these depots because it’s an ongoing problem and the county and state agencies around have gotten used to going and dropping off their computers at these depots. What Paulis saying is they can’t afford to ship them out because of the new legislation it basically only covers shipping from Oahu so they’re not able to cover it and… MS. NICHOLSON: I’m trying to figure out where Cost of Government might fit into this whole thing. MS. O’HARA: The thing is that you have to understand what the cost is to the government to not deal with this if this stuff goes into the landfill. We are fighting time here at the Hilo landfill. Not only does this stuff produce contaminants and we have an unlined landfill thank you, it’s also a matter of volume and so if we are not diverting material from this landfill we are forcing ourselves into the construction of a new landfill or some kind of mechanism to deal with our trash, which is a huge expense to the county. The longer we can defer that, the more we can recycle and keep out of the landfill, the longer we can defer that huge capital cost. Unfortunately because it’s hard to put this into a this is how much it would cost us to do this and this is how much it costs us to do that, we tend to ignore this problem. We could come down and put dollars on how much that diversion is worth to the county but that’s really the issue we are looking at here. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Right up until the time the program was unfunded we diverted over two million pounds of e-waste from the landfill so that’s 1,500 tons or something like that. About the weight of a displacement of a Navy destroyer I would think in terms of weight and space in the landfill. So that is calculatedas saved space in the landfill. 16 MS. O’HARA: 23 million was it? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Two million, three hundred thousand pounds right up until April of last year when the contract was finished. MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: So right now the county gives their stuff to DEM who takes it to these depots which the county doesn’t pay for or is there a current cost to the county for storing all of this e-waste that the county is generating oris it just somebody’s paying for that somewhere? MR. TAKABA: I’m not sure. I think we’ve been having drives at Aupuni Center. The county we take it over there but it’s not something that we put on it’s more of a private concern. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: That was our program. That was our annual/biannual program. MS. O’HARA: That was the program the county was paying for. The county was paying for the shipping. MR. TAKABA: So we would have done it that way. MS. O’HARA: We did it that way but what Paul has told us is that because of the passage of the state legislation which is a bit Oahu centric DEM has stopped funding, the county has stopped funding the e-waste program so he still has county guys coming to drop off e-waste at the depot because the information has not trickled down that the county is no longer supporting the program. They can’t afford to do it, there is no money to be made in recycling e-waste off of this island, it’s simply a cost. Do we bear the cost of filling up our landfill with this stuff or do we bear the cost of shipping it off island? This is why I decided to put on the topic pay as you throw because this is an underlined issue with recycling on this island, you cannot encourage people to recycle when you give them free disposal. There is no way to incentivize recycling. If we all had to pay as we throw and the stats are 85% of residential homeowners here on this island self haul their garbage to one of our 21 transfer stations. Now those transfer stations are supposed to accept all residential garbage for free but we also are taking in a considerable amount of commercial garbage for free. Surveys done at the transfer station indicate 30%-35% of the usage is by commercial businesses self hauling their trash to our residential transfer stations and getting free garbage. They do not haul it to the landfill. So we are bypassing a considerable amount of fees right there and if everyone had to pay to ditch a bag into the transfer station be it a dollar or two dollars the incentive to pull out all the recyclables would be much, much greater. Everywhere I’ve ever lived you had to pay to have your garbage either hauled away or taken to a dump or transfer station so if we were to do a pay as you throw system we would be creating the funding that’s needed to support these types of programs. It is always going to be an expense to get e-waste off of this island. We will never have the volume on the big island in order to justify a recycling business. They’re huge, I’ve visited these types of businesses on the mainland and they bring in a tremendous volume and they in two minutes will completely dismantle a computer and a monitor. They de-lead the glass, they take all of the contaminants out, the copper goes in this box, different metals in different boxes, the white plastic is separate from the black plastic and then it all gets pushed back into production as a material stream, it is no longer waste. It is a material stream used for new production. So you have to have huge volume to justify businesses like that plus California 17 has very significant financial incentives for the recycling of e-waste which has driven the industry and that’s why they are set up there but for us over here on these islands the legislation that did pass last year does not benefit the outer islands as Paul was pointing out and we are not getting the results that we expected. The 35 manufacturers are not paying to have the material brought back off of this island so it’s a problem but I’ve always…. MS. NICHOLSON: It seems to me that for our purposes probably the discussion item is pay as you throw. MS. O’HARA: I believe so. I believe so. MS. NICHOLSON: So how would you folks like to handle pay as you throw as an issue? MS. O’HARA: Well Paul has given us a report, it is a little dated ten years or so but it is something that has probably got a lot of currency to it still. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: Would you all like a copy of that and then it goes on the agenda as a discussion item to see if we want to come up with a pay as you throw recommendation or would you like to handle it some other way? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: I should point out that the state legislation prohibits charging a fee for dropping off e-waste. MS. NICHOLSON: Well I think we’re talking about garbage in more general terms. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Oh you’re talking about… MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Okay, well it’s really a different subject soI would recommend no need to reinvent the wheel it has been done and it’s in this document. You can review that and see if that’s viable. MS. NICHOLSON: Would you like a copy of it and it goes on the agenda for a future meeting or would you rather not handle it at all, what is your pleasure? MS. WONG: I certainly would like to read it. I would also like to pass it on to some other entity but I’ve been trying to think of who else would hear this and I don’t know who would hear this at this point. MS. O’HARA: What do you mean hear it? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: It’s also incorporated into the current… MS. WONG: Would it be county council or a department or… MS. O’HARA: Well a pay as you throw recommendation would be to put a fee on residential waste. 18 MS. WONG: So that would be policy, council. MS. NICHOLSON: And I think it’s appropriate for recommendation to come from this committee after we have learned a little bit more and can formulate some sort of recommendation. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: What I was going to say is it is incorporated into the current integrated resource solid waste management plan as an alternative means of revenue production for helping the solid waste division generate revenue. MS. NICHOLSON: So why has the county chosen not to adopt any sort of pay as you throw? It has been discussed. I know it has been discussed. But what are the barriers of the county? MR. BUKLAREWICZ: I think it’s just there is a lot of resistance to it. The biggest resistance comes from the fact that there is a spike in illegal dumping once you institute a program such as this but fact is communities that have adopted this they do experience that spike in illegal dumping but then once education takes hold and everybody gets with the program that level of illegal dumping does go down. The other objection is… I introduced this to a…. It was a seminar on illegal dumping by the prosecutor’s office a couple of months ago down in Oceanview and everybody got up in arms, they didn’t want to pay anymore fees for whatever. So as soon as you introduce the idea of having to pay extra money everybody knocks it down. MS. NICHOLSON: Well I don’t think that we would shy away from that. We’re not the implementers but I think we should see the report. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Yeah. In serving on that committee, the solid waste advisory committee, I kind of got the sense that there is kind of a catch 22 in the solid waste area that the more recycling gets done the fewer revenues come in to support the mission of the solid waste division. So they were kind of ambivalent about the idea of incentivizing recycling because then their budget is based on tipping fees that come in right. So more recycling, fewer tipping fees coming in. MS. O’HARA: But the tipping fees are only charged at the landfill at this point in time and most residentials do not use the landfill. I personally just would like to say thank you Paul and I would like to see this agendized in the future if we could get a copy of the report. It is a big issue. Solid waste is underfunded by the tip fee and part of that is because as I pointed out 30% of commercial businesses use our free transfer station system. So if we’re looking at enhancing revenues to be able to support the programs that we need to be environmentally correct here then I think this is something that we need to consider. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay any other questions for Paul? MS. GARSON: We’ll scan it in. MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Scan it and send me a copy too. MS. NICHOLSON: Thank you Paul. 19 MR. BUKLAREWICZ: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Any other discussion on that before we move… MR. TAKABA: There might be other options to pay as you throw. That’s not the only option to raise revenues. Another option would be to put it on your tax bill for all the residents then everybody pays right or another way would be to raise the tipping fee. MS. O’HARA: It’s pretty high already. MR. TAKABA: Or charge a tipping fee or just raise it. Environmental Management knows about how much garbage each household generates so it would cost each household about $85 a year. MS. NICHOLSON: So would it be helpful after we have read this to have the discussion at a time when we have someone from DEM here to talk about it or not? What is your… MS. O’HARA: Do we have on the agenda next time Bobby Jean Leithead coming to speak with us? MS. CARVALHO: Yes, she is going to be talking about impact fees and consolidation. That is all we requested. MS. O’HARA: Right. I happened to have a chance meeting with her last week and she’s a big advocate of putting everything on the property tax bill in terms of what we need to support infrastructure, what we need to support solid waste disposal, everything. I think this is a discussion we might be able to have with her, she has considerable background as well having served as the attorney to the Department of Environmental Management when she was with Corp Counsel. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay. MR. TAKABA: I guess the reason this is a very important issue is because there’s such a big subsidy that goes to the solid waste fund from the general fund. You know like twenty million dollars a year and it keeps going up. MS. O’HARA: Yeah we need another way to directly fund… MR. TAKABA: Some jurisdictions treat it as a self sustained utility where they have to make ends meet by raising enough revenue. MS. NICHOLSON: Well at the next meeting which I will not be here for but if we have a chance to read the report and maybe ask Bobby Jean then you can decide if you want to do something else before making any kind of recommendation or not making a recommendation. MR. MATSUDA: Is there any kind of fees whatsoever charged on your real property tax for something similar to this? MR. TAKABA: It can be done. 20 MR. MATSUDA: I understand that but is there anything currently on the books? MR. TAKABA: Well Kona has abusiness improvement district and that’s part of the tax bill for the residents well businesses in that district. MS. O’HARA: The way we do our tax bill currently and correct me if I’m wrong Bill but we do have basically a percentage set aside for the different services, no? MR. TAKABA: No, it’s not a set percentage set aside. MS. O’HARA: Oh, I thought it was. MR. TAKABA: No. You’re talking about the use of the tax? MS. O’HARA: Yeah the use of the tax revenues. MR. TAKABA: No, you talking about the chart that comes out? MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MR. TAKABA: No, that’s after the fact. When you do your budget you show how much of your tax dollars are going for what types of services. MS. O’HARA: Oh okay. MS. NICHOLSON: So basically it goes into the general fund and then a percentage of that comes out but it’s not a fixed percent it depends on what the department requests and is given. MR. TAKABA: It is based on the department’s needs. MS. O’HARA: So we don’t have a break down on in terms of… When we set the tax rates we don’t have a break down on what percentage of that rate goes to the different services? MR. TAKABA: No, it’s after the fact, after you do your budget and after you get your revenues and then you do the pie chart on how it’s being spent. MS. O’HARA: Yeah that’s…. You really need that justification on the front end so you know what you should be charging. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay any other discussion on item number 12? If not let’s move back up to item number 5. REPORTS FROM SUBCOMMITTEES: MS. NICHOLSON: Do we have anyreports from any of our subcommittees? MR. MATSUDA: No reports. MS. NICHOLSON: No Reports? 21 MR. ARMOUR: No report. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, then we have discussion regarding items previously placed. I would like to skip this one for right now because I’m looking at the clock to see what we really need to get through. MS. GARSON: Madam Chair if I could make a suggestion if you can run down to item 9 and go to the outline then at least if you have your outline set we can start looking at the report. MS. NICHOLSON: That’s what I was looking at. Okay, so we are jumping to item number 9. DISCUSSION OF DRAFT OUTLINE OF FINAL COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION REPORT: MS. NICHOLSON: Item 9 is the wonderful draft that Eileen did for us of how we’re going to organize our report. Does everyone have a copy of that in front of them? Any comments? Did you all have a chance to really look at it and think about how we would slot things in here? Is there something missing? I would like to thank you very much for doing this. It’s kind of hard to see until we start to plug things into here how it’s going to work but… MS. O’HARA: I just want to say the appendicesare just kind of dangling. I mean there may be more, there may be less, I don’t know, that was just to have a place to put stuff. MS. WONG: Page 3… MS. O’HARA: Part 3? MS. NICHOLSON: That’s the summary of COG FY 2011 efforts. This is one that you did early on it’s in different font. MS. O’HARA: Are we onto item 10? Because the draft outline is 9 and 10 is the proposed part 1. MS. NICHOLSON : I think because it all came together we’re thinking it’s all one. MS. O’HARA: The outline is just one sheet and so we’re on item 9. So the outline is just the outline. MS. WONG: Okay, it was in the middle so I thought why is this in the middle? That was my question, I don’t get it. MS. O’HARA: Okay. Okay. MS.NICHOLSON: Okay so the sheet we are looking at is one piece of paper here and actually Gloria has already worked on the essential services provided by the county so she’s got an initial draft on that which will be sent out to everyone. So I’m thinking that if the staff is going to go ahead and plug in our recommendations into this format would it be helpful to go ahead and plug in Gloria’s draft at the same time so then we can talk about that at the same time on the agenda as part of then our draft? 22 MS. O’HARA: Mmhmmm. MS. GARSON: Sure, I mean that’s not a problem because we’re going to discuss Gloria’s handout at the next meeting so if it’s part of the draft… MS. O’HARA: I guess my question to the rest of the commissioners isdoes this seem like a reasonable way to approach the report? Basically have a part 1 that is a overview of what we have discussed and some county level specific recommendations that we have come up with, and then part 2 will be department specific, and then part three will contain a lot of the recommendations that we received through the employee survey that are not department specific but very employee specific type of recommendations. Does that seem like a reasonable way to organize the report? MS. NICHOLSON: It seems reasonable to me. I guess my only concern is someone who is maybe in Public Works will just flip to the Public Works and look at that section. MR. MATSUDA: Only. MS. NICHOLSON: Bill, what do you think about the way this is organized? MR. TAKABA: I’m thinking that there is going to be overlap with the employee section and the department specific section where an employee might be talking about the Police Department.Because these are our recommendations right? It seems like you go department by department but you start with the overall I guess and then you can go department by department and somewhere if you want to indicate that it came from an employee or the department itself or whatever that might be okay but… MS. O’HARA: A lot of the recommendations that we got from the employees were not department specific. They were more about compensation packages and… MS. NICHOLSON: There were some that were department specific. MS. O’HARA: There were. MS. NICHOLSON: But for the most part they were not. MS. O’HARA: And I think we have gone through and tried to identify those that were department specific versus those that were just general to do with employee situation at the county. MS. NICHOLSON: So by saying employee specific recommendations we’re not saying or implying these were all recommendations that came from employees butmaybe they are relating to employment…. Maybe we should call it something else. MS. O’HARA: Okay, gotcha. MR. TAKABA: Okay, maybe I misunderstood it. MS. O’HARA: How about employment specific? 23 MS. NICHOLSON: Employee benefits and compensation or something like that. Employee benefits and compensation? MS. O’HARA: Okay. MR. TAKABA: Could that be under c or what? MS. GARSON: Part 1c item 5? MS. O’HARA: Part 1c item 5, county level specific…. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, you could do it that way too. I just thought this was going to be a pretty large section from what I’m seeing us come up with. We could do it that way. MS. WONG: So c5 would be what? MS. NICHOLSON: Actually I think it would probably be c1 and everything would move down from there because it seems to me it’s probably a key one so I would put it up first and so it would become part1c1 and the rest would just move down one. MS. GARSON: And you’re calling it employee benefits and compensation? MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: Yeah because I don’t think that we do want to imply that these are all just from employees because they actually aren’t all just from employees but they are relating to employee benefits and compensation. MS. O’HARA: Okay. So that eliminates part 3 altogether. MS. NICHOLSON: Part 3. MS. O’HARA: Shorter the better. MS. GARSON: Would you mind adding a 6 for miscellaneous and if you do away with it as you’re going through the draft you do away with it. MS. O’HARA: Sounds great. MS. NICHOLSON: Because we do have a bunch of miscellaneous ones at the moment. MS. GARSON: Yeah. MS. O’HARA: Okay, so add a miscellaneous number 6. MS. NICHOLSON: I would like us to end up calling it something other than miscellaneous but until we see it… MS. O’HARA: Okay any other…. 24 MS. WONG: I know we’re still only looking at the outline but in my portion I put what the Charter asks the commission to do so that it sort of flows through that’s what we’re doing. I like the way that you introduced how we went about getting our recommendations. MS. O’HARA: Do you want a different title on 1b in the outline? MS. WONG: No, I labeled mine what you said. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. WONG: But I just wasn’t sure whether the intent was to put our charter in there. MS. NICHOLSON: Maybe that should be in the appendices. I think it’s probably useful to have it but I would think that the charter might be in the appendices because it’s not something that most people would want to read unless they really want to know what we are doing. MR. TAKABA: Usually there’s a report format that’s commonly used and it has like a beginning where you talk about the legal basis for what you’re doing. If somebody picks it up at least they will know up front what this is all about, who the members of the commission were. MS. O’HARA: I think that’s our preface. MS. NICHOLSON: Yeah Ithink we have that. MS. O’HARA: In the preface. MR. TAKABA: Oh that’s where. Preface and acknowledgments. MS. O’HARA: Preface and acknowledgments yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: Well let’s plug things into this format and see what it looks like. MR. TAKABA: Previous reports, you can follow the same… I don’t know if the previous reports had a…. MS. GARSON: It was like an introduction but a preface and acknowledgment is fine. MS. O’HARA: Actually I looked and they didn’t have executive summaries or anything. So I just kind of went by some of that and we want it to be a little different. MS. GARSON: Not the way we’ve always done things right. MS. O’HARA: Yeah, right, we want it to be a little different. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay any other discussion on item number 9? If not, let’s move to item number 10. 25 DISCUSSION OF DRAFT OF PROPOSED PART 1 OF FINAL COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION REPORT –“OVERARCHING COST AND REVENUE CONCERNS FOR COUNTY OF HAWAII”: MS. NICHOLSON: Again thank you Eileen for drafting this. Do we have anything we want to add, edit to this at the moment? Again it’s still in draft form so we’ll have a chance to do it butI think this is a good overview of our process and I love the quote that you put from the councilperson up front but I’m wondering if it might turn some people off. I don’t know. I don’t know what the feeling is among… Maybe Bill could give us a little guidance on this, is having a quote from Councilmember Hoffman right up front there, is that…. I mean I like it but I thought well it might put some people off. MR. TAKABA: Yeah, I think it might. Yeah. Although he was the only one who testified but I don’t know I don’t think it’s appropriate. MS. WONG: It made me pause every time I looked at it. MS. NICHOLSON: I like the statement. MS. WONG: If any statement came from anyone it ought to be the Mayor I think. MS. NICHOLSON: And the mayor is still planning to come and talk to us in May because I talked to him the other night and he said he still plans to appear. I think we should actually take it out to be diplomatic. MR. MATSUDA: I agree. MS. NICHOLSON: Maybe we can find another place to stick in something like that. MS. WONG: We could quote the chair. MS. GARSON: Okay so then you have to take out the first sentence. MS. O’HARA: You have to take out quite a bit. MS. NICHOLSON: Oh, yes. MS. O’HARA: It comes back to that over and over and over again. That’s the whole basis for the front piece. MS. NICHOLSON: That certainly is. MR. TAKABA: That’s up to you I mean that was just my thought but I think it’s more the commission comfort level you have to decide on. MS. NICHOLSON: Well what do you think? MS. O’HARA: We can just do as Kathy said take it out and take out the first sentence and see how it reads with that gone. 26 MR. ARMOUR: Or change it to a more generic statement without a quote on it. MS. NICHOLSON: It’s so nice I really do like it and just starting out… MS. O’HARA: How about anonymous? If you guys want to remove it, just remove it and remove the first sentence and just go from there. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay what’s the pleasure folks leave it in at this point or take it out now? MS. WONG: My feeling is to take it out but we might come up with another quote. I think Eileen could say it. MS. NICHOLSON: Well it would actually be really good if the Mayor would say something that we would want to put there. MS. O’HARA: Well the past reports have had a Mayor’s message on them I believe. MS. NICHOLSON: A mayor’s message? MS. O’HARA: Yeah. MS. NICHOLSON: I’m not sure. MS. O’HARA: No, maybe not. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay let’s take it out and take out the first sentence for now and we’ll listen for a good quote when the Mayor comes to talk to us. Maybe he’ll say something similar. Any other discussion on this draft of agenda item 10? MS. GARSON: Just for clarification so this is the…. The page with the narrative is what goes in the report and the summary of the efforts is something that was going to go with that? Okay, so it’s all one? MS. O’HARA: Mmhmm. MS. NICHOLSON: So wait a minute so now I’m not clear. So the summary goes where? I was thinking that the summary was maybe an appendices item. MS. O’HARA: I thought the summary could go following the part 1 overarching costs and revenue concerns for the County of Hawai‘i to give some graphical representation of how we approached our task, our mandate, because I explained that several times, well not several times but I explained it in this write up in part 1 that the commission decided to tackle its mandate by looking not only at ways to reduce the cost of government but also identifying ways to enhance revenues and that we organized with the three overarching issues, etc. This is all described in this narrative part 1a and this is just a graphic of what I’ve described in the previous page so I just thought it would follow but however you want to do it. Some people like to look at things. Some people like to read things. MS. NICHOLSON: Any comments from other commissioners? I quite frankly would rather see it in the appendices section so that we jump into content earlier on so there’s not a whole lot 27 of preamble but that’s my opinion. Other people feel differently, same way, differently? We should give the staff some direction now so that when we see the next version it is somewhere and then we can move it around again. MS. WONG: I don’t have a preference either way. MS. NICHOLSON: You don’t have a preference. Glen? MR. MATSUDA: What is going to be on the preface and acknowledgments? MS. NICHOLSON: Where are you looking at? MS. O’HARA: Outline. MR. MATSUDA: The outline okay. Appendices, so you talking about putting appendices b? MS. NICHOLSON: I don’t know about the order. Somewhere in the appendices. MR. MATSUDA: Well anywhere in the appendices. MS. NICHOLSON: If it was going to go in the appendices it would probably be the first thing. MR. MATSUDA: Yes okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Because it’s talking about… Summarizing so… MR. MATSUDA: What we doing, yeah, exactly. Like Gloria I don’t have any particular wish to put it anyplace. Appendices, beginning would be good it’s just a matter of do we want to leave it as Summary of Cost of Government fiscal year efforts, the title or change that but that can be done later. We can still plug it in the appendices and work it from there. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay so for now we will leaveit following the part 1A where you had originally put it. So for our first draft. MS. O’HARA: And place holder for B which I guess Gloria has written Essential Services Provided by the County. MS. WONG: I have a draft. MS. NICHOLSON: She has a draft so when we get the… For the next meeting it will be plugged in there. MS. WONG: And you know for my draft I’m just looking, part 2 you’ve listed it by department specific recommendations and when I look at the Hawai‘i county functional or services because we’re looking at services or are we looking at services or departments? Because if we look at the services you look at it in a different way rather than departments. MS. O’HARA: Oh I see what you’re saying. 28 MS. WONG: Let me just pass this to you so you can see what I’m talking about and it’s in the blue, second and third page is blue is Hawai‘i County service categories so it would be different than this. MS. NICHOLSON: The past two reports have done it by departments, that’s the way the groups worked and we chose to work it a little different way but in terms of it being accessible information for the readers which are basically the departments and the county council I think they’re going to find it easier to look at it by departments rather than as a service even though we didn’t really tackle our task in that way. I’m trying to think of how this is going to be used and if somebody can go to a department and see that that’s a department consideration it’s going to be easier to use. MS. WONG: That’s right. MS. GARSON: And next month when we can discuss the way she organized her essential services then you can see if it makes better sense to organize it that way. Because that will be on as a discussion item for next month. MS. WONG: For next time yeah I see where you’re going with this and I think this has merit. A little bit of refinement and I think you will be able to incorporate that. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay again Eileen, thank you for putting all that time and thought and your wonderful way of expressing yourself, ourselves on our behalf. Okay, let’s see where we want to go on our agenda next. Do we want to defer or would you like to go ahead and do a discussion on impact fees and fair share? We don’t have any additional information to really talk about it we were just going to carry it forward. I’m not sure what we would talk about. DISCUSSION ON IMPACT FEES AND FAIR SHARE: MS. O’HARA: It’s on the agenda now and we do have a pending bill at council. Can you give us the status on this? MR. TAKABA: I think they deferred it. Councilman Hoffman wanted to do some more work on it. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. GARSON: So we’ll just move this item forward and we’ll just keep deferring it until our next meeting and Ms. Leithead-Todd is coming next month so you can ask her about it too. MS. O’HARA: Yeah, sounds good. MS. GARSON: So item 11 is deferred. ITEMS TO BE PLACED ON NEXT AGENDA: MS. NICHOLSON: Okay so before because I’m looking at the clock sorry folks but do we want to talk about items to be placed on the next agenda before we actually start talking about our…. We were each going to go through the drafts recommendations that we got electronically and do a little fine tuning of them. What do we have right now for our next agenda? Well the 29 two things we just talked about the outline and the summary that’s one sort of… What the draft report looks like, we have the… We’re going to carry forward impact fees and fair share. We know Bobby Jean is coming. Is there anyone else who we know is coming next meeting? MS. CARVALHO: Director Kurohara. MS. GARSON: Research and Development Director Randy Kurohara. MS. O’HARA: And this was to address the consolidation of commissions? MS. CARVALHO: Yes. MS. NICHOLSON: Consolidation and probably other things. MS. O’HARA: And then we have the pay as you throw program too to discuss once we’ve gotten copies of the report that was handed in. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay anything else that we want to put on the next agenda before we tackle our… MS. GARSON: So basically all of your items that are on your agenda that you don’t deal with the assumption is that they are deferred until the next meeting and so we will just keep carrying them forward. I assume that’s the commission’s desire. MS. NICHOLSON: Right. MS. WONG: Madam Chair I know I’m slow on this but on item number 9 can I ask one last question. MS. NICHOLSON: Certainly. MS. WONG: We step two steps ahead and then I… MS. NICHOLSON: Yes we’re way ahead by now Gloria. MS. WONG: In our report can we, or do we want to, and I’d like to recommend that we make a recommendation for the next Cost of Government Commission. MS. O’HARA: Assuming we’re not recommending getting rid of the Cost of Government Commission. MS. WONG: Or to recommend to delete the commission. Make a recommendation about us. MS. NICHOLSON: Where would we put that on the… MS. O’HARA: At the very end. MS. WONG: Before appendices. At any rate I’d like to close that thought if… 30 MS. NICHOHLSON: I think it’s a good idea. I’m not sure what we would want to say yet at this point but I think sort of being reflective on the experience and if we’re either saying we should eliminate this or is there a way to put it together in a more effective way. MS. WONG: The beginning says this is how we went about what we did and sort of closing the picture and saying this is what should go next. That’s what I’d like to suggest. MS. NICHOLSON :So part 3 would be? MS. O’HARA: Top 10 actions to take. MS. NICHOLSON: Unless we make it as part of an executive summary because the recommendation about this commission may be already included in the report right. MS. O’HARA: I would like a summary either an executive summary or a conclusion that provides prioritized recommendations.I think that’s great. I mean really if you can just bullet it, these are the top ten recommendations for cost savings and revenue enhancement, that page would be read. MS. NICHOLSON: So that would be our new part 3, a summary conclusion. Okay, good recommendation. MS. O’HARA: Yeah, conclusions and recommendations. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, now we are onto agenda item number 6. DISCUSSION REGARDING ITEMS PREVIOUSLY RECOMMENDED TO BE PLACED IN DRAFT REPORT: MS. NICHOLSON: Did everyone have a chance to go through and actually do some serious looking at what we have so far? I did but I’m not sure if we’ll get there. How did you tackle this? Let’s start out generally because I basically just did wordsmithing and I didn’t really add a lot of content and I only came up with one thing that I found totally confusing. But how did the rest of you tackle this? Basically wordsmithing or did you? MS. O’HARA: Iactually didn’t work on that I worked on the other piece. MS. NICHOLSON: That’s right you were exempt from this. MS. O’HARA: Sorry. MS. WONG: And I thought I would take my way out by doing my draft. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, so the three remaining standing here, Glen and Ken how did you tackle this? MR. MATSUDA: I took it individually. 31 MR. ARMOUR: I did not tackle it our general manager is still off work, he just came back yesterday. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay so do you want to go item by item and Glen and I can say what we did with these? So we are going to start from the top and then go just before noon and then whatever we… MS. GARSON: Can I recommend that Chair Nicholson give us her changes even if they are out of order first since you won’t be here for the next meeting because Mr. Matsuda can give us his at the next meeting if we run out of time. MR. MATSUDA: I don’t have many changes but yes please. MS. NICHOLSON: Ihave a lot of little things. MS. O’HARA: Go for it. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay so 7a number 1, shall I just read them off? MS. O’HARA: 6a. MR. MATSUDA: 6a. MS. NICHOLSON: Oh well I’m looking at the thing we got Emailed which was 7. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: The sheet we got Emailed. Okay A review of the complete compensation package for employees. How shall I do this so you know what I have changed? Shall I just read you my new version? MR. MATSUDA: Yes. MS. O’HARA: Sure. MS. NICHOLSON: Because you’ve got the old one in front of you. Allow employees to work ten hours four days a week. Potential savings are lower utility costs, reduction in overtime costs for staff required to attend evening public meetings, reduction in travel time/mileage, and increased employee morale. MS. O’HARA: Travel time and mileage and? MS. NICHOLSON: Increased employee morale. 2: Institute a performance-based reward program. Rewards might be a bonus, time off, increase in compensation, etc. Number 3: Set the work… You know I can give you this. MS. CARVALHO: Please. MS. NICHOLSON: So don’t worry about it. Set the work week at 40-hours a week rather than eight hours a day, and allow an employee to flex their work schedules during the 40-hour 32 work week to reduce overtime. I just thought it was a little confusing the way it currently read. Number 5 I just made it departments so: Focus work-hour cuts or shift personnel in departments that have less demand for their services in a slow economy to departments or tasks acquiring additional man hours. I just added an s. MS. GARSON: Can I ask that… I’m assuming that if the other commission members aren’t making an objection that we’re just going to go ahead and make these changes in the next draft. Is that a safe assumption? MS. NICHOLSON: Yes and it’s still a draft. MS. O’HARA: And number 4 had no changes? MS. NICHOLSON: Number 4 I didn’t do anything. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Number 6c: Each eligible full-time employee may take a maximum of one day per week (two days per pay period) without pay. I think I just re-ordered the words a little bit. MS. O’HARA: What was it each eligible full-time employee? MS. NICHOLSON: Each eligible full-time employee may take a maximum of one day per week (two days per pay period) without pay. E: Eligible employees agree to a 90-day commitment to the voluntary furlough program, which may be renewed by application at least 20 days prior to expiration the rest of it’s the same. Now we’re on B again it’s just language things:Review policies on reimbursements and per diem payments. C: Examine county policies on travel and vehicle use. And then under 1: Limit attendance at off-island conferences and/or hold off-island conferences via Skype or video conferencing. Hold department and division meetings via video conferencing. Utilize multimedia communications… And 3, I added a new item C3: Implement avehicle pool that would be accessible to all county departments to limit vehicle purchases by individual departments. We had talked about a vehicle pool and it never made it into anything. Okay I’m onto D and the one that I couldn’t figure out how it fit in with our report is D2: Recommend creating a position dedicated to focusing on health care and education industries. I thought that needed something else and I didn’t know what else was needed but I didn’t see how it was relating to cost saving or efficiency so I think it needs something more and Gloria I think you’re the one to figure out what something more should say because it just stuck out here as what’s that with us. Number D4: Review and streamline the procedures for disciplining and terminating employees. Number 5: Cross train employees to perform multiple functions within a department. Number 6: Pool clerical staff among departments where possible. Number 9: it just says Identify all those jobs and tasks the rest is the same. Number 11: Propose a resolution to the state allowing each county to negotiate collective bargaining contracts on behalf of the county. This would allow the county to be more responsive to the economic conditions and demographics of the areas served. MS. O’HARA: Is this 11 or 10? MS. NICHOLSON: That’s 11. 33 MS. O’HARA: Okay I got lost there. So 10 is identify? MS. NICHOLSON: 10 I just started with a capital I identify. I probably deleted something there but I’m not sure. Do you want me to read 11 again? Yes, no? Okay 12: Consolidate similar functions such as project managers, engineers, maintenance personnel from various departments into a county-wide pool that all departments can draw from. And then our famous miscellaneous category: Review and update the entire County Code at least every five years, rather than making changes on a piecemeal basis (or not at all). We had put establish a schedule for and I just thought it was a little strong to say how often and I picked out every five years off the top of my head thinking that the term of the Mayor is four years but I’m way open to another schedule. I just thought we should say how often it happens. MS. WONG: 12 backing up… MS. O’HARA: Five is very ambitious. MS. NICHOLSON: So what ten? Every ten years? MS. O’HARA: Mmhmm. MS. NICHOLSON: I’m fine with that. Okay Gloria, you want to go back to 12? MS. WONG: Yeah on 12 seems like it would need to work with the union and consolidate because if you’re going to be moving positions you’re going to need to work with the union to okay that. MS. NICHOLSON: So you want to add work with the union to consolidate? I think a lot of it you have to work with the union to accomplish. MS. O’HARA: Yeah, I think that’s a presumption. Let’s just give the directive and they can figure out how to do it. MS. WONG: So maybe we can put one more additional in there to say work with the union to do this stuff. MS. NICHOLSON: I think that’s a given because that’s the only way to implement this stuff. That’s the implementation because they have to work with the union to implement probably 50% of what we’re proposing here. MS. WONG: Okay. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Number E2:Evaluate the frequency of Board and Commissions meetings to reduce the number of meetings to the minimum required. In addition, eliminate inactive boards and commissions and review existing boards and commissions on a regular basis for potential consolidations to limit their number. Reducing the number of board and commissions and/or the frequency of meetings would result in staff time cost savings. MS. O’HARA: Sounds good. 34 MS. NICHOLSON: Again these are still drafts we can still change them again. Number 3: Develop and implement a county-wide technology management plan. Number 7: Develop three different budget scenarios for each department as part of the annual budgeting process. One version would be based on the current budget allocation, another version would reflect a five percent increase in funding, and the third would be based on a 10% decrease from the current budget. I still feel that needs something but I didn’t get there. Number 8: Review the county’s operating budget semi-annually or quarterly to make needed adjustments. Now I’m onto department specific suggestions F7: Recommend that a one-time auto salvage fee be assessed when a vehicle is first registered in the county. Number 8: Allow standardized housing that meets the minimum duh duh duh all the rest is the same. MS. O’HARA: Can we go back, I’m sorry which is the? MS. NICHOLSON: 7? MS. O’HARA: 7. MS. NICHOLSON: Uh huh. I sort of re-ordered it so that it reads better: Recommend that a one-time auto salvage fee be assessed when a vehicle is first registered in the county MS. O’HARA: I object to the word first. MS. NICHOLSON: Weren’t we talking about when it’s just first registered? It’s a one time fee? MR. ARMOUR: Yeah it’s a one time fee. MS. O’HARA: Yeah it’s a one time fee but if it’s the first time it’s registered then you’re not going to capture all the autos that are on island. MS. NICHOLSON: Oh if it’s resold? So if it’s resold would it be charged again? MS. O’HARA: Well if I go in and register my car that I have registered for three years previously and it has never paid the salvage fee and I go in next year to register it and the salvage fee should be assessed one time on this vehicle I will not have paid it if it’s the first time I register it. MS. NICHOLSON: I thought that’s what we were talking about that it would be phased in. MS. O’HARA: Oh, okay. MS. NICHOLSON: If I’m wrong… MS. O’HARA: Okay, okay I thought it was just a one time salvage fee. MR. TAKABA: There’s a disposal fee when you register your car every year. MS. O’HARA: Yes we know. 35 MR. TAKABA: So I’m not sure if this replaces that. MS. NICHOLSON: It’s in addition. MS. O’HARA: It’s in addition to it. MR. TAKABA: Oh, okay. MS. O’HARA: That’s the scrap metal processing fee that’s used for all scrap metal on island not just autos. MS. NICHOLSON: Well let’s leave it like this now and then we’ll look at it again. MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: 9: Investigate the cost effectiveness of implementing a jet ski program. 10:Streamline the re-contracting process for continuing, part-time temporary staff including eliminating the yearly requirement for a physical exam. 11: I added a word a, create a separate position for heavy waste. 14: I added a word base the, base the fuel reimbursement for all Police Department personnel. 18: I took out to be examined by Human Resources because I didn’t really know why we had that in there. So I just took out that part. It just seemed kind of weird to have to be examined by Human Resources. MS. O’HARA: I guess the question was who was going to examine the overtime policies? You don’t want the Fire Department examining their own policies; I think that was the issue. MS. NICHOLSON: Should we say direct the Human Resources to examine overtime policies? MS. O’HARA: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: That’s it. MS. O’HARA: That was all your recommendations? MS. NICHOLSON: At the moment. MS. O’HARA: Oh, good. MS. NICHOLSON: I think that’s it, yeah. MS.O’HARA :Should we say something when you say eliminate the yearly exam because at some point you have to ensure that they’re physically fit. How often would that requirement be? I guess when you’re saying remove it it’s not remove it forever. I don’t know. MR. TAKABA: Right now the county physician performs all the physical exams. MS. O’HARA: But if you come in as a county employee you get your physical exam but you don’t have to go back yearly. So we are requiring that the contract people go back yearly. 36 MR. TAKABA: Yeah, I think that’s a valid point. It sounds like they are referring to like instructors, people who temporarily… MS. O’HARA: I mean I know you have to have your TB thing current if you’re interacting…. I don’t know. Let them figure it out. MS.NICHOLSON: Hey you guys I have to be out the door so sorry this is the end of the meeting so I’m just going to go right to announcements. ANNOUNCEMENTS: MS. NICHOLSON: The next meeting of the Cost of Government Commission will be held on Wednesday, April 27, 2011, at 10:00 a.m., at the Liquor Control Conference Room, Hilo Lagoon Centre, 101 Aupuni Street, Suite 230, Hilo, HI 96720. ADJOURNMENT: MS. NICHOLSON: We are now adjourning. Respectfully submitted, Emarie Carvalho 37