2014-12-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Mr. Medeiros: It goes through the scales. Ms. Maddox: You mentioned the sewer fees study. How far a long into that study are you? Ms. Beck: Roughly about 75%. Ms. Maddox: That’s better than 5%, so about three quarters of the way through the study. Ms. Beck: Yeah. Ms. Maddox: Okay, thank you. Ms. Leithead-Todd: And we, the other thing is, we haven’t announced it yet, but we are in discussions with the administration about implementing the green waste fee. It was put into the County Code back in 2005, it wasn’t intended to be implemented right away, but it basically it’s a charge of about one-fourth of what the tipping fee would be. If we get to implement it, it would provide us with about half a million dollars a year in revenue. Our current contract for the green waste diversion runs us about 1.5 million, so we would be able to collect about one-third of the cost of the program. Mr. Perry: And that’s going to be for commercial? Mr. Medeiros: All commercial. Ms. Leithead-Todd: Yeah all commercial. Just the commercial, residents are still free, it would be just for the commercial haulers so it’s basically targeted at landscapers, golf courses and we think it’s a bargain because it’s one-fourth of what the tipping fee is, but there’s a cost for us for taking all their green waste. So we think that it makes it worthwhile for them to pay a little bit. Ms. Maddox: Other questions, Ashley? Ms. Kierkiewicz: How would a waste reduction facility impact the County budget if the Council decides to pass such a project? Ms. Leithead-Todd: A lot of it will depend on the efficiency of the waste reduction technology in terms of producing a product that you can get money for. So if you, the intent is to produce electricity a lot of that would be tagged to your power purchase agreement that you could get with HELCO. And you also have to, it’s difficult to answer that in terms of the impact on the budget because one it would be a question of how expensive the facility is to build and how you structure paying for the facility. And also you have to look at whether you’re reducing other costs. The reality is that the Hilo landfill at some point in time is going to be closed and you have limited options. I know there are a lot of people who think we can recycle our way out of the rubbish and that there will be no rubbish left, but that costs money to. Recycling is not free. So you can either haul all the rubbish to the other side of the island and that has a couple of impacts. One is that because the volume per day goes up then the amount you pay per 13