2014-12-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Ms. Leithead-Todd: We’ve become more aggressive and Corporation Counsel has taken people to court to get judgments and we have gone in that route in the past. It’s just that because of the number, if you talking, you’ve got 500 delinquent accounts, to take 500 accounts to court is just, Corp Counsel would have to hire another one or two attorneys just to handle that and so that’s why we went the route of trying to turn off water because we thought that that would be easier to get people’s attention and it wouldn’t be as time consuming in terms of prepping the case and going to court. Going forward, we are hoping that partially through education and then also we have to be prepared that when we do raise fees eventually because we’re going to have to, that that’s going to possible create more delinquencies which is one reason why we needed to have the ability to shut off water in place in some of our procedures on the landfill. The biggest loss of revenue, it depends on how you are looking at our departments, our divisions. Wastewater is supposed to be paying for itself through fees as opposed to Solid Waste, where we only charge the commercial haulers a tipping fee. Residents who take their rubbish to transfer stations do not pay a fee; their portion I guess of our budget is paid through real property taxes. There’s been many recommendations for us to do some kind of a pay as you throw, to do a fee that’s included on real property taxes, but it’s a question of how you view that. Is that a service that gets paid for out of real property taxes just like Police and Fire and everything else or is that division, is my department, supposed to be self-sustaining, in other words not on real property taxes and through fees, if you’re going to do a fee system for residents, then you either have to have a system where we can collect fees at transfer stations, assess a fee through the real property tax bill, or require people to pay for the bags that they throw their rubbish away which is how some people do it. Rather than collect money at the transfer station, you can only dump your rubbish in the bright pink County of Hawai‘i bag that you had to pay $3 a bag for because we don’t do residential pick up and that’s the difference that the other counties do offer in the urban areas where they actually go door to door and pick up rubbish from people and they’ve been trying to figure out how to do a fee on that too. Mr. Mitchell: Looks like on the fees we’re bringing in about almost little about $6.4 million on our tipping fees and that’s a good amount of money, but again how much we’re spending? You know for counties there’s only it seems like there’s four ways to make money as a county. You have the property taxes, it’s revenue sharing from the federal government or the state and fees. I’m so pleased you’re really nailing this sort of fees item because if we’re not increasing the amount of fees we’re bringing in from the public this County’s going to have a difficult time sustaining its growth. Ms. Leithead-Todd: I think it partially, like I said, Wastewater has always been setup to be kind of like Water Supply in that the fees you charge are supposed to pay for all your operations. Right now we’re falling behind that target because we haven’t raised the fees in so long which is one reason why we’re having that sewer rate study being done. Solid Waste there’s never been a mandate from the Council or the administration that solid waste pays for itself. So we charge the commercial haulers a fee, but we do not charge residents so if there’s going to be a change in that, the big issue becomes how do you implement a fee on property owners and residents. Nobody has really wanted to deal with that because part of the problem is if I’m collecting through 22 transfer stations, then do I issue a bill when people come in, do I need a scale in order to weigh the trash, do I charge them by the bag, do I have to have a 9