Laserfiche WebLink
<br /> <br /> Ms. Leithead-Todd: Well they have to come into our office, typically. That has to <br />do basically with who can handle money and who can process payments. So basically <br />you have to come into our office to take care of it. <br /> <br /> Mr. Matsuda: Okay. <br /> <br /> Ms. Maddox: John, do you have any questions? <br /> <br /> Mr. Mitchell: Thank you very much and thank you very much for your time in <br />being here, I’m sure that you’re very, very busy, thank you very much. So one of the <br />things that I looked at and I’m pretty old fashioned I just look at the County of Hawai‘i <br />and the comprehensive annual budget that they handed us and as I went through this <br />and I mentioned this to some of my colleagues in other meetings, is your guys budget, <br />for me, sort of jumped out. And in addition, one of the notes here is that since we’ve <br />been cutting budgets in the County, that sanitation capital grants are the only thing <br />that’s gone up from 2012, but the fees haven’t gone up, they’re still actually less than <br />one percent, the fees that are collected in comparison to our budget. And then the next <br />thing that sort of jumps out is the incredible amount of deficiencies, and thank you very <br />much for your honesty, the fact that there are a lot of folks that owe a big chunk of <br />money. We’re talking almost $18 million, $18 million now that’s not counting the <br />interest, that’s a lot of money in interest compounded daily. So the fact there’s so much <br />money there we could literally even be the bank of Solid Waste fund with this amount of <br />money you could literally loan people and that’s not what I’m recommending, but just to <br />give you an idea of the amount of money we’re talking. We could make money by <br />financing the people their debt and they pay you back, your department, with an <br />interest. So we’re talking a very sizable amount of money I’m sure this obviously isn’t <br />news to you. We’re talking $18 million. Have you folks thought about ways to help <br />these folks? And I love and I appreciate you saying, we’re going to bring a hammer to <br />these folks and we’ll cut off their water or their access to the landfill that’s wonderful, but <br />to me just as a business person, if you have $18 million in arrears, you can take $5 <br />million of that help finance these people their payments and they could pay your <br />department back. As I say this, does this make sense to you or do you think this is not <br />within the realm of your jurisdiction and maybe we should turn this over to Corporation <br />Counsel, because we’re talking $18 million, that’s a lot of money. <br /> <br /> Ms. Leithead-Todd: Up until recently we were charging 18% per annum on bills <br />that people have not paid. <br /> <br /> Mr. Mitchell: Beautiful. <br /> <br /> Ms. Leithead-Todd: Which was not consistent with what other departments <br />were, so that’s recently been reduced to 12%, so some of those delinquencies that you <br />see reflect interest on the delinquent accounts and earlier it was at 18% and so what we <br />would do when we setup a payment plan, we might suspend future interest, but we still <br />collect for the interest on the past due. <br /> <br /> Mr. Mitchell: It seems as if you have a lot of leverage and I’m really pleased to <br />hear it seems as if you’re, you folks are being sort of creative in the variety of hammers <br />you can use to get people to pay up. Does that make, does that sound about right? <br /> <br />8 <br /> <br /> <br />