2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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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to make a viable plan because the last ag development plan was in 1992 and it was all plantation based, really outdated, so this plan was made up and final look at it was by the Ag Advisory Commission which is under the office of Research and Development.DayDay Hopkins is the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