2014-12-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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cashier at each transfer station to collect the money? And that’s one of the reasons why prior director had suggested that we have those prepaid bags and you could only throw away trash in the bags and then they then if you have to charge a, one of the rationales for charging a fee is not about revenue, it’s about getting people to reduce the amount of trash they create because if you have to pay for it then you reduce the amount and then you start doing more recycling or more reuse and that’s frequently one of the rationales for a fee, it’s not just revenue it’s about changing people’s habits. Mr. Mitchell: I have an enormous respect for what you’re doing, it’s a very unique world because you’re blending the science and the business world and I think your sort of touch upon that really well. One of my final concerns is that it looks like we’re trying to within your, moving to the vision 2015 green government action plan, how far along are we in meeting the target of saving 20% by 2015? So I appreciate because you’re talking about changing habits and that’s very much in a way we’re trying to help do. Are we on mark or is that still a current target to save 20% by 2015? Ms. Leithead-Todd: For the entire County or for my department? Mr. Mitchell: Your department. That we’re looking to development and greener island economy, that we reduce energy cost and energy use by 20%, in addition, fuel, energy and waste technologies or waste diversion. That’s waste diversion and conservation practices one comma apart so I imagine its two pieces of that pie. Ms. Leithead-Todd: Well you know one thing was we had put some PV, photovoltaic panels, which we recently removed because the lava was coming out at the Pāhoa transfer station. We are also, just did a contract for Kealakehe for sludge removal which will reduce our electric costs there significantly. Long range as you get new infrastructure I think it’s easier to incorporate some of the savings. On old infrastructure I think we’re so tied up with just making sure it still runs that we haven’t really gotten around to doing photovoltaic, but at the County, as a whole, has tried when we renovate so you’ll see PV on the County building, you’ll see PV at West Hawai‘i Civic Center, Water Supply is doing windmills to try and reduce their electric and I think as the technologies improve we’ll be able to incorporate them more into our buildings, but the most recent thing we’re doing and I’m not sure whether this will have a real change on the bottom line in terms of money, but we haven’t announced it yet, but we are about to switch to biodiesel and that announcement will be coming out of the Mayor’s office shortly and that is part of the, that would mean that we can probably help support the local producer of biodiesel which is out in the Kea‘au shipment industrial area and that will help sustainability because he is using plants that he grows here. His plan is to grow his facility by actually having an agricultural base plants here that he can use to produce diesel, the biodiesel, not just the used cooking oil and so the County is looking to move our entire diesel fleet over to that, so expecting some kind of announcement out of the Mayor’s office within a week or two probably. On other things you know I think we try to do energy efficiency, but part of it is just you know what projects can you get to and that’s one of the reasons when Dora has facilities designed everything is trying to do gravity flow so you don’t have to use electricity for pumps. More than any other department I think other than Water Supply, you try to do your infrastructure in a means that you’re taking advantage of terrain so things just flow downhill and that department’s been doing that for a long time. We have a few pump 10