2012-10-04 Windward Transcript PD yagong & blas

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KERN: Thank you. Madam Director, you want to address this? LEITHEAD TODD: The request is actually not so much how the County Council authorizes a study, but it’s directed to the Planning Commission as to how the Asset Fund can be utilized. TRAVIS: I understand. LEITHEAD TODD: And so that, you know, is being looked at. As to Mr. Adler’s study, to some extent I was involved in conversations before that contract was signed. And, you know, the concerns that I had over going down the road is I have possibly, you know, because of my legal background, I had concerns over procurement; and in order to procure a study you kind of have to know what it is you’re procuring. In other words, you don’t necessarily hire somebody and say, oh, go and study this issue, without knowing what it is you’re hiring them to do. TRAVIS: Asking that question is very important. LEITHEAD TODD: Yeah. And so that was why I thought that, you know, the administration’s move to utilize money that’s not in the Asset Fund but came out of the R&D Department to start that investigation was, it lined up with the concerns that I had over procurement. Because typically when you want to do some type of a study, you have a number of ways of doing it. One, you can determine here’s the parameters and then you put up, this is what I want studied and I want this, this, this and this included in the study, and then you can either go to a list of professionals that are qualified to do that study, and go take them from that list. Or you do something that’s called like a request for proposals. And in a request for proposals you outline what it is you want the study to cover. And it could be things like, other circumstance like let’s say we’re going to design a transfer station, and you tell people the size of the transfer station, what components you want in the transfer station. And then you ask people to respond to that proposal and tell you what you would do. Or sometime back when we were looking at waste to energy, you also do a request for proposal and you say, hey, this is what we want you to do, this is how many tons we’re going to process, and we want electricity to be an output, so give us your proposal on what you could build and how it would fit what we’re looking for. But you have a request for a proposal that outlines all the things that you want. And then people submit a proposal saying I can do this, this and this; and here’s the team that I would put together to do it, and here’s the credentials of the team. And I thought that what you needed to know is what you’re going to study and what kinds of set of things you have to include in that study before you can determine who you’re going to hire. And so I liked the idea of kick-starting that process. Because obviously in order for us to use the Asset Fund it would have taken much longer to go and hire somebody like Dr. Adler to go and do that. It’s my understanding, and one of the things that I like is that Dr. Adler is contacting people on both sides of the issue. When I talked to Mr. Petricci today, he said he’d gotten a phone call from Dr. Adler. So I’m very happy that, I’m staying away from that process, but I’m happy to hear from Mr. Petricci that Dr. Adler is doing what I had hoped he would do, which was to get a cross-section of the communities and particularly to pay attention to those people who have had specific concerns about potential health impacts of PGV. Because ultimately I don’t want the Commission, the County, the Council to go down a road where we hire somebody to do a study and then the study comes in and it gets attacked by other, you know, members of the community. I would like to go into a process where 21 EXHIBIT C