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certainly not least, I put 'reducing the politics in decision making' which, as many of you
<br />are aware, is a concern. It's often very difficult to accomplish even some basic things.
<br />Witness the recent attempts to get the sewer exemption for private extensions passed
<br />through Council. Had every reason in the world to remove the exemption but the
<br />decision wasn't taken.
<br />Disadvantages, again, echoing Milton, while the chance may be slight, there is always
<br />the opportunity for cross -contamination. We have some seriously hazardous materials,
<br />if you will, and from an interest of trying to maintain the integrity of his system, I can
<br />certainly understand his concerns in that regard.
<br />The more serious issues, getting down to the Witty gritty, is what do we do with the debt
<br />load of all our capital facilities. Milton kind of talked about this. I think he is of the
<br />understanding that our operations are subsidized by the General Fund, when currently
<br />they are not. We are strictly on Sewer User Fees as of this year, although we may be
<br />going in for an increase in rates because the administrative portion of that was
<br />eliminated last year. But we feel our operations are funded by the sewer fees.
<br />However, the debt load is not, and that's not insignificant. I don't know the total amount,
<br />but I would suspect it's in the millions of dollars annually, to pay down the debt load,
<br />and that comes from the General Fund, which, basically, is everybody, and the concept
<br />behind that is everybody's reaping the benefits of the wastewater system so therefore,
<br />• that's a way for the public, in general, to be paying. Now how that would get shifted to
<br />Water Supply, I have no idea how the heck we would do that, and the ownership of the
<br />assets. Milton's right, there's no way I could imagine the sewer fees could be raised
<br />enough to pay down the debt load on that. We might be talking about doubling the
<br />sewer fees, so their only option would, essentially, be to raise the water fees, Or, I
<br />suppose, the other alternative is to leave the debt service with the County now, and
<br />future capital improvements could be funded as you go. But that is certainly a problem
<br />and it requires some real study.
<br />Similarly, responsibility for previous agreements, in particular, grant conditions that the
<br />County entered into for construction of our, primarily the Hilo, Kealakehe and
<br />Pepeekeo Plants. We'd now be asking the Department of Water Supply, a semi-
<br />autonomous agency, to be responsible for those grant conditions. Is that fair? I don't
<br />know. That's a tough one, also.
<br />For the record, in preparation for this meeting, I did put a post -it on various e-mail
<br />boards for the Water Environment Federation, the American Waterworks Association,
<br />and, I forget the name of it, but it had something to do with County government,
<br />Association of County Governments, or whatever, and I asked what other agencies'
<br />experiences had been. If anybody could shed any light about the advantages and
<br />disadvantages of merging these utilities, and I only got about five or six responses, and
<br />basically, they were all positive, for what it's worth, with the exception of one, who
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