2014-12-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Ms. Maddox: Thank you very much for joining us. At this point I would like to let Delan and Glen, even though you haven’t been here, I know you’ve kept up with what we’re doing. This was actually your particular group to talk with, so if you would like to help lead our discussion that would be great. Mr. Matsuda: I just have a few questions that Bobby’s letter here answered some of the questions that I had. What my main concern is the, as we discussed before, how are the delinquencies on the, for DEM, ‘cause I know that the delinquencies are very or were very, very high and there was a push to go in and try to decrease it and since then, you know I know you we’re saying here, but what have you done? Ms. Leithead-Todd: We’ve significantly decreased delinquencies in Solid Waste by cutting off access to the haulers. If you’re running behind we don’t let you go to the landfill and so we’ve caught up or they either paid us or entered into payment plans. And I think we reduced that by twenty-five, thirty percent and then with water we, our problem is always been we don’t have a hammer to kind of force people. It’s expensive to take them to court, we’ve tried in the past to, we, our strategy for Wastewater delinquencies was to try and get the ability to shut water off. The department has been trying to do that for more than ten years in all honesty. This was an issue when I was on the County Council. We just got Bill 194, first we took it through Board of Water Supply and we came up with basically they didn’t have an objection to the Bill as we proposed. It gives us, if somebody is delinquent, after we have given them notice that of potential water shut off, and they’ll have an opportunity to appeal that notice, which would go to our Environmental Management Commission, we can then request the Department of Water Supply to go and turn off people’s water and this is the way many other jurisdictions do it. We think we’re more likely to get people willing to come in and enter into either paying us or a payment plan with the threaten loss of their water because they sure seem to go and pay their water bill when they’re threatened with the water being shut off. So we thought that would be a more cost effective mechanism because we’ve tried collection agencies in the past, it hasn’t been effective. It’s very expensive and time consuming to try and take every account through the court system and then even if you get a judgment in court, then you get a lien on the property and you still don’t get payment. We went through this when I was at the Planning Department. We had an $80,000 judgment against somebody for zoning violations and the guys, you know that was like four or five years ago and he still has not paid. It’s still a lien on his property, so you have to wait for somebody to die or sell their property to collect and we need money to operate. So we think this will help us a lot, however, Councilmember Willie amended the Bill so that the implementation date is not until December 2015. Yes, so it gives us a year to advertise and notify people and set the procedures into place. We needed both so we agreed to whatever the, as long as we could get the Bill passed. Other questions? Mr. Matsuda: Do you have just an idea of aging schedule, how old are these delinquencies? Ms. Leithead-Todd: For some of the water bills, they’re six years old, people who have never paid. So at some point you end up having to write off accounts because if you haven’t reduced it to a judgment you’ve lost the ability to go and get enforcement of it. There’s also an issue that some of the people have not connected to the sewer 2