MILLIONS SPENT, SOLUTIONS REMAIN OUTSTANDING ADVERTISING BY NANCY COOK LAUER AND ERIN MILLER WEST HAWAII TODAY ncook-lauer@westhawaiitoday.com Hawaii County is on its third Environmental Management director in as many years. It’s on its second Solid Waste Division chief. County taxpayers
MILLIONS SPENT, SOLUTIONS REMAIN OUTSTANDING
BY NANCY COOK LAUER
AND ERIN MILLER
WEST HAWAII TODAY
ncook-lauer@westhawaiitoday.com
Hawaii County is on its third Environmental Management director in as many years. It’s on its second Solid Waste Division chief.
County taxpayers have spent nearly $3 million on consultants and studies over the past 11 years.
The County Council in 2006 opted for a waste-to-energy garbage incinerator, then two years later, after more than $1 million in studies, opted out.
County administration sold its landfill bulldozer, an essential piece of equipment in controlling the fast-growing Hilo landfill, then rented it back, wasting almost $1 million of taxpayer money. Attempting to stop the bleeding, the County Council last January voted to buy a new D8 ‘dozer through a five-year lease-to-own agreement for $796,000, including interest and maintenance.
The county in 2003 began to build a reload facility to send Hilo garbage to West Hawaii, then changed its mind, leaving the $9.3 million white elephant vacant years later. Several private companies have recently expressed interest in using the facility in a public-private partnership, but the administration is reluctant, saying it wants to use government workers there instead.
The county also wants to keep its options open. The Integrated Resources and Solid Waste Plan specifies that the facility will be used to sort Hilo-side garbage to be sent to West Hawaii to be disposed of at the Puuanahulu landfill, if expansion of the Hilo landfill is not an option.
“If trucking waste to the West Hawaii Sanitary Landfill is the more feasible option, the county may begin that activity while the (Hilo landfill) is still active,” the report adds.
The county let 33 private garbage haulers lag far behind paying their bills, resulting in more than $1.5 million in arrears taxpayers may never see. County administrators announced in September they filed lawsuits against the biggest scofflaws, but Deputy Corporation Counsel Brooks Bancroft said last week that some haulers have yet to be served court papers.
Dating back to the early 1990s, county officials have hesitated in taking major steps to address the problem of what to do with rubbish on an island with limited space for disposal. The default answer, for the better part of 20 years, has been to make steeper the slopes of the Hilo landfill, delaying the inevitable need to close that site.
The county has faced a series of anticipated deadlines for closure of the Hilo landfill, a date that became a moving target when solid waste officials began using a “sliver-fill” technique to pile the sides steeper. In 2009, officials thought the landfill would have to be closed by 2010, a date that was then moved to 2011, and finally to 2013.
County Council Chairman Dominic Yagong, a staunch opponent of trucking garbage cross-island, has pushed for the Hilo landfill to be expanded. Kohala Councilman Pete Hoffmann has joked he’d have to throw himself in front of the trucks to stop them — if his constituents didn’t push him there first.
“There needs to be a whole different view at what we’re doing with solid waste and the whole Department of Environmental Management,” says Hoffmann, who’s been on the council for seven years. “I don’t know what the administration hasn’t tried to put forward. They’ve tried; they’ve advocated for solid waste systems and we didn’t go forward.”
The county envisions a day when the Solid Waste Division will become self-supporting. Indeed, the division this year is slated to receive $7.8 million from state grants and tipping fees. But that pales in comparison to the $18.2 million transferred from the taxpayer-subsidized general fund to run the division. An attempt to buffer that loss with a pay-to-throw system was quickly scrapped in the face of residents’ opposition.
But despite all the problems, Hawaii County is making some strides on its solid waste programs. Its diversion rate for 2010, the most recent data available, is second in the state. Hawaii County diverted 35.9 percent of its garbage into recycling programs, compared to 41.5 percent on Oahu, 35.3 percent on Maui and 25 percent on Kauai, according to the state Department of Health Office of Solid Waste Management report to the 2011 Legislature.
The statewide recycling rate of 39.6 percent is higher than the national rate of 33.2 percent but still below the state’s 1991 goal of 50 percent diversion by 2000.
Mayor Billy Kenoi, who inherited some of the problems when he was elected in 2008, is determined to stay the course of reducing waste to the landfills rather than look to landfill expansion or waste-to-energy technology as the answer in the short-term.
Kenoi had nothing but positive things to say about Acting Environmental Management Director Dora Beck and Solid Waste Division Chief Greg Goodale. Beck, especially, has been overseeing wastewater projects in addition to solid waste, and Kenoi said he plans to make a decision soon whether she’ll become the permanent director or return to her old post as wastewater division chief.
“She’s been doing an outstanding job,” Kenoi said. “I wish I had three or four Doras. She’s saved the county millions of dollars.”
Kenoi points to the county’s Integrated Resources and Solid Waste Plan as the blueprint his administration is following. The 230-page document, last updated in December 2009, says there should be no attempt to build waste reduction technology during the plan’s five-year life cycle.
Instead, it advocates a long-term plan that emphasizes “zero waste” as the solution to the garbage problem. The more immediate goal is a 44 percent diversion rate by 2015.
The document recommends building a new landfill within the quarry adjacent to the Hilo landfill, if it’s cost-effective. If not, the plan is to transport Hilo’s garbage over to the Puuanahulu landfill, which has decades of remaining room.
“We live in the middle of the Pacific,” Kenoi said. “There’s no magic bullet to manage our solid waste. … Our administration is committed to fulfilling the goals of the Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan.”
