development agency and also as a property owner and said look we would like to request support for a budget item for them out a redevelopment agency which is currently under planning and i believe it's a line item for the re a three five hundred and the breakdown of the programs that we've been working on for several years and are a lot of our programs are starting to bear fruit i'd like to give a very brief description of what's in the three eighty five hundred which is  the parking management plan for the redevelopment agency area in central y loco which would give us guidelines on how hard things should be handle feel would probably be moving away from free twelve hour parking and looking at limited time parking that will come back to council possibly pay parking in the future but we have a project using a excellent national consultant to help us get a framework that we can act upon but also additional  e for why logo and things like our website and banners and street furniture and keeping the trash cans empty etc etc etc there is a hundred thousand dollar item which i number of us came to you last year and we weren't able to fund last year but now we're completely ready for a clean and safe program there's a lot of safety issues and while there is a lot of substance abusers living on the street and we need a program clean and safe is based on the international downtown association program that's in place in over a thousand towns and cities across the u s it puts clean and safe and batteries to work with the police and with community members and with shop owners and people who have problems and are living on the street to create a safe and clean environment using resources to get rid of graffiti and trash pickup the other two hundred thousand dollars for an integrated infrastructure study we know that we have a lot of infrastructure problems that are  precluding development the sewerage line running down main street which feeds just about all of central why local is vitreous clay three minutes at capacity and it was built in the twent there's almost no record of it as we need to find how to improve our infrastructure and utilize professionals to put it all on and create a  program for systematically opening up the streets one time and replacing what's necessary to be replace so that we can have and how is saying and shops into why lo we are following a model that is used in many other places successfully and we would really love to get that done until we do there's almost no hope for being able to move forward in my local we  of other successes and other programs are moving on nicely i'm proud to be a part of this group and i ask your support and we want to come back to the council and after your budget for a much longer and deep its budget but does the either the one hundred thousand dollar amount or the two hundred thousand dollars include any matching from the private sector and any kind of formula for matching no there's no no for me as a created though a lot of community members have been putting in a lot of time and effort into them and will it's ok with the disability state disability and working he's you know he's for fashionable hawaii land to sign so he's certainly put in a huge amount of time and effort to make that happen and you know it's going out for a bit because of that effort that is certainly one way that we'll be doing that kind of an ad hoc manner ok thank you members any other questions so you none thank you for coming this morning and access to fire is frank de rego and he will be followed by sandy ryan chair council chair mike white and members of the budget and finance committee i am frank junior director of business development projects for molly economic development board first of all mahal newly for the added funding last year toward creating new businesses and business opportunities that can lead to new jobs we asked for your continued support for this line item in the fiscal year two thousand and sixteen budget and need to be would also encourage continued support for the office of economic development with whom we have a fruitful relationship in addition to the work we continue to do in business attraction retention and expansion alike to expand into other initiatives we have launched in business development with the additional funding with this funding we have focused on providing new business start ups in the existing small businesses the opportunity not only to survive but to thrive the m e b business development team developed a technical assistance series aimed at helping startups and small businesses build firm foundation for building business success sound legal and accounting vice advice is essential but not all is affordable in cooperation with the legal research respected legal firms on here in a while who  organize seminars breakout sessions and individual consultations on the following how to structure your business to avoid legal tax in the counting pitfalls in it the ins and outs of raising capital including protecting your own stake in the business intellectual property including protecting your business brand and safeguarding the computer support systems that house your business information and how to use wealth the wealth of information provided by the u census in your strategic business planning we are in the process of developing two other seminars in the series fiscal management and structure in order to optimize financial performance and how to connect startups and small businesses to federal and other available resources through these efforts m e d b has reached one hundred seventy three participants today ninety percent of whom are new to m e d b and many that are startups the next initiative would like to highlight is the comprehensive economic development strategy or sets of idea again has asked us to lead this effort that occurs every five years this process is mandated by the u s department of commerce and the tournaments eligibility for certain economic development grants this is boots on the ground stuff reaching out to one hundred forty stakeholders to create an economic roadmap for my way county in targeted sectors to determine specific actions to foster business growth this meaningful conversation debate and the ultimate choices that are made will build a platform for innovation and economic renewal to support our collective efforts in business development in closing i want to tell a story in one of our seminars one participant in front of everyone gathered said and i'm paraphrasing this i came here to find out how to structure my business so i can leave it to my children in the best shape possible this workshop has given me the chance to do that that's chicken skin when you know that you have impacted a life that way on behalf of m e b i want to thank all of you for your kind attention and ask for your continued support  area one before we get the final one done which we usually turn in with our our grant report at the end we could actually work one up for his just specifically for the additional two hundred thousand that we provided last year good morning chair white and members of the county council my name is sandy ryan and i'm a program director cannot make development board and i direct the annual amos conference i mean to be has organized and presented the amos conference since one thousand nine hundred nine and in the sixteen years since the conference has evolved to address the global challenges and technological advances of space object identification and debris tracking shared by the international a community their vital work touches each of us every single day with every mobile phone call we make every satellite t v show we watch and every a t m withdrawal we make in tw fourteen the amos conference contributed well over one million dollars to the mo economy our audience has grown to include commercial groups that launch satellites and the civil agencies that monitor them government and military organizations private industry national labs and international universities space news is the trade publication that every executive in the space industry has on their desk i've prepared some written remarks for you and in your packet you'll see a handout from two thousand and fourteen the space news sent a reporter to the amos conference and was the first time ever that we've had that type of coverage news from the amos conference in that publication this year a record one hundred thirty researchers have chosen the amos conference as the technical gathering to present their latest research we've received the highest number of international submissions also to date with input from australia canada china france germany italy japan korea spain and switzerland we look forward to welcoming all of these folks to the amos conference in september we will also welcome three hundred middle school students from to our space in the classroom event which features an audience with an astronaut hands on science activities and a tour of the exhibit center really designed to help show these students possible career paths that they might pursue the amos conference is also a key business development tool that m e b uses to nurture my space in optics sector for example last year's amos conference spondon new collaboration between a company and a larger national company that led to work being conducted on maui and resulted in renting office space in the my way research and technology par we questing mr starr are ready to brief you on the various aspects of it the three hundred thousand eight hundred three three hundred eighty three thousand five hundred that we're requesting comes in the form of this clean and safe infrastructure integration as well as the parking plan i was interested in chairman white's  question about the private industry because in fact it is important can comicon of what we're working on is to entice and private industry to come to  local i'm a while local girl i was born in my local and i chose to live there as an adult as well sure adults and it's but it's more than sentimentality that i believe in the redevelopment of w it is our town it's the civic center and the county seat and we deserve a lot more than it demonstrates presently we do need some money to get started but of it we've already begun with the planning part of it and working with private industry as well as the county to create a plan that will make everyone proud of our  hometown hometown development seems to be kind of a fad out but it's more than a fad for us it's a very very important thing and certainly the members of our agency as well as all of us i know will be revitalized to be something that we can all be proud of in your day what what do you remember about the town itself just so that people have a better understanding revitalization is just not revive it's really putting together a town that we can be proud of but your memories well when i was growing up there was no other town hall we didn't exist there were two drugstores to stores to bakeries to banks  good morning my name's ashley talking tony leahy i'm one of the owners of the thing for those of you that don't know which i'm hoping is none of you here we're a boutique on market street or a little store we've been there for seven years now this summer will mark our seventh year on market street  i'm here as well to support the clean and safe program the integrated infrastructure program as well as parking management in our town in the past seven years it's been extremely difficult we've seen businesses come and go constantly small businesses local owners you know with the same complaints of parking no foot traffic things like that but we've also seen so much improvement and again i'm you know i'm a girl i've been here all my life when away to college came back and in the past seven years of being a business owner on market street we have seen a ton of improvement a ton of forward movement a lot of growth and initially opening our store in way that our reasoning behind it was that we had affordable rents and again because it's our hometown we're well you girls and we want to stay and we're going to be honest we don't really leave while we go all that often and so we fought for its revitalization and for its forward growth from the success of i'm really excited and i think the time is right now to support these kinds of projects in our town because the energies there the motivation is there the businesses are there and i think it be a great way to attract new businesses to where we go as well that said i'm especially in support of the clean and safe program speaking on behalf of our with merchants there have been multiple instances instances recently of theft and vagrancy there's been child left there out the streets and it's you know people like us that are on the street every day that are picking up the trash or you know volunteers that are coming to clean in fact this saturday we actually have the rotary club doing a street cleanup for us on saturday and you know it would really really help facilitate all of that if we could get a little bit of support in that room to make sure that all of our employees as well as all of our visitors are are safe and where the we are you know because of the small town charm and community feel we picked i would go again to open  small business where we could have picked them all you know we could've picked them all we could've picked another town that you know had a ton more foot traffic but we did it and these malls and i know hina town they have a security program they have kind of a clean and safe program  you know they're currently and so if we could get that i would go we would really appreciate it again i cannot emphasize enough for the safety of our employees in our store as well as the other the other stores and the other local businesses in whether t you mr crew will be followed by michael riley good morning council chair members of the budget and finance committee my name is tony craig on the c e o of holley mcu and as you heard me testify earlier this week in cali we are requesting that the council approve the two hundred fifty thousand dollars line item request which is included in the mayor's version of the proposed county budget these funds will provide some relief for the cost of providing physician services to maui residents who need to be admitted to our two nursing homes but i'm here specifically to address two questions one isn't this a problem that the state of hawaii should fix and haven't us haven't we asked the state for money before i do that though i want to bring this home a little bit as a couple members of this body know holly mcu is there to help with post acute services when you are discharged from the hospital or waiting for hospitalization and a couple of the members of this body were being served by holy mcu and they were extremely fortunate because they had kaiser permanente as their physician if they did not and they were a customer of the largest medical group in our town they might still be waiting to get out of the hospital or if we had not brought a physician over from the  mainland or they may have had to go somewhere else off island so this isn't a problem for the entire state because if it was we would have joined forces with other nursing homes to a sk for kind of a collective approach to this physician problem a wahoo facilities are still served in the community by actually them the school of medicine and community physicians have asked the state for funds but we're doing so in terms of improving our our medicaid budget over the last four years year over year we've had a deficit and eighty one percent of our revenue comes from the medicaid program and we do have there is a senate bill nine twelve which is now in conference which would restore an inflation factor to nursing homes across the state i don't know whether that bill will survive but we have tried to ask the state for funds collectively with other nursing homes so we we strive to be self sustaining we try to work with physicians in the community but they have other interests we've had numerous discussions with mowing memorial and at one point i was really hopeful that the community clinic of maui which does an excellent job and provides physician services to medicaid recipients in our community would be part of the solution but their federal handler if you will disapprove that might partner with them in the near future on the physician problem so i think that's it thanks for thanks for hearing me say thank you mr craig emerson questions for the test fire see none thanks for coming today and thanks for the added information and michael riley will be followed by rhonda sat thousand and seven so i've gotten to see the internal workings and the many things that they do i participate in many conferences amos conferences and you ryan participated in i presented papers at that in the past the energy conference that they co sponsor with the office of economic development with a county been on panels there as well so i just wanted to you know it's coming from somebody who has really seen what's what's there wanted to on the president of each growing and involved in many different things and i just wanted to bring to the council's attention some of the things that have been instrumental to us so we been a partner on the jump smart project with toci and with  development board we've designed and installed all the quick charge stations that you see around the island and put in many many different homes and the community outreach that m e b is done there is as been just a critical role you know  and myself have served on the serve but presented on these panels including in kyoto japan last november so we're out in the community who are out in the world promoting maoi growing economic development and partnering together the bio conference my company want to big award the buzz of bio for the most promising technology that's resulting in putting our technology up on the international space station and i mean once again in bringing at the original bio conference when we were quote unquote discovered by nasa in order leading up to the space act agreement we have it was facilitated by now economic development board so they're behind the scenes a lot there out in the thank you for coming this morning thanks very much testimony and run satcher is the last person to have signed up to testify this morning so if there's anyone else in the chamber who would like to provide months i have lived on maui upcountry for twenty years and i feel i know at least the retail aspect of pretty well because i was a sales rep for fifteen years and i had territory from cop lua to hana so i've been in all the shopping areas and i would just like to say that i think you have the momentum now with the merchants association that's being formed to do some improvements and by the coup and the will is there the energies there is actually said i want to thank her for all of her efforts to promoting my look and i think too if you look around you see a lot of strip malls in court yard miles but people are always drawn to downtown there's just something about all town and downtown that people like to hang out to shop and i think like ready for it and it's a great place to have a business and there's a lot of friendly people you also have a unique situation where you have more made on maui products and then you have a place that is so so really nervous so i think it's a unique shopping experience if nothing else and you have all the historic buildings but it's a huge draw for visitors and for people who live in the area there are so many residents here you know there are immediately you could buy care you can walk here so keeping  friendly and you know sprucing it up a bit and just getting us a little more promotion i think would be huge and that's why i have to say thank you thank you very much for such or any questions of the test fire thank you very much thank you very much members saying that there's no one in the chambers or the district offices that you're in like to close public testimony objections thank you we're going to take just a very short recess like and reorganize my the budget and finance committee will come back to order and members as you'll recall we were going to we're going to start off this morning with a review of the and all management and back into the remainder of the grants that we were unable to complete yesterday and will move into the clerk and auditors departments and that will move into morning the topic of the animal manners management program which primarily is mandated by charter that the county needs to or has to provide certain services so i would like to read those services to you and then we do have in the audience the c e o of humane society and her financial  person so they are here to answer specific questions that you may have the animal management program provides sheltering adoptions reclaims dog licensing investigations and enforcement of animal related laws pick up of deceased animals responding to injured animals humane education and other public assistance and community service programs including neuter airport release disaster preparedness and first response humane trap rentals euthanasia and cremation historically sixty five to seventy percent seventy percent of them all  man society expenses are directly related to contract obligations for the county recent cuts and shortfalls in county funding have been leverage by private fund raising so as  minimize impact on programs and services private funding has covered up to thirty five percent of annual expenses related to our county contract having said that i'm open hundred thousand correct from seventy seven to fifty to one hundred cells in ok members questions especially i would be very interested chair white and committee members my name is jerry lane bryant c e o of mao humane society the feral animal program correct that was new for fiscal year fifteen that was a little bit of a journey that  because when when that was allocated to us of originally the plan was to bring in an expert that was an expert in feral chickens because when we talk about feral animals it's not just cats that come to mind feral cats it was the feral chicken problem on maui too and after extensive research we realised there was no feral chicken expert to bring in to to assess the island the needs and help us put together a plan for it so we took a step back and we looked at ways that that this funding could help the community if it effectively not just we just didn't want to throw good money after bad we wanted it to really have an impact on the community and the issues with feral cats and chickens one of the things that  is we purchased many many more traps and it used to be that we would rent these traps out and we no longer charge for them so we also increased our outreach and our communication with the community to help help guide them through their feral animal issues whether they were in a neighborhood whether they had a problem chicken or multiple cats ultimately so there was a variety of ways that we were looking at really addressing the issue and helping the community with it what we have finally come now to plan b and we are in the process of hiring a feral animal specialist who because we have staffing shortages at the shelter i think that's you know not a surprise to anybody so we wanted somebody specific to this situation that would be there to help guide the community in all of their all of their issues and there is a job description it's much more expansive that yeah we seeing any results we are we are people are not so panicked anymore and they feel like they have some control over that over the situation that is affecting them and i know that this last year  so i guess fiscal fourteen or at the end there was quite a bit of you know i would see letters to and in the paper and complaints about the feral and calls me and many calls coming and i know that the that the mayor and probably you the council members were hearing it from the community that they were frustrated with the feral animals and the chickens and the cats and my understanding is that is abated some and it's i would like to believe it's through our you know  historically we i think it's no surprise to anyone we have too many animals on this island not a surprise you don't even have to be on the inside of the animal welfare community to know that over the years there's been multiple agencies putting their efforts towards this problem and through spay and neuter efforts unfortunately regardless of how much has been put forth our intake of animals is still overwhelming so we bring in about the same number of animals every year we spayed and neutered about the same number we adopt about the same number and the cycle continues it's i think that's a what do they call that the definition of insanity  so last june i was appointed c e o of the shelter and while there were some housekeeping items i needed to address certainly within the shelter in various departments my white hot burning goal was to stop that vicious cycle and the only way we can do that is through aggressive spay and neuter campaigns so we have just launched what would be the most aggressive spay neuter campaign this island has ever seen and the very first clinic we had was tuesday and in one day we were able to fix one hundred two dogs and yesterday i'm a little tired today because we finished at the shelter at eleven p m last night and we were able to spay and neuter one hundred eight animals so in two days it was two hundred ten animals friday and saturday will be doing the same thing will be having another clinic in june and it will be very consistent we need to effectively deal with this and we're doing everything we can have you been able to trap well so we as a shelter we do not go out and trap the chickens we absolutely do not have that ability or that that type of staffing however we educate the community in how to effectively trap chickens that are a nuisance on their property we you know help them with the you know the trap and again there's no charge for that and then they are welcome to bring those chickens to us and  will deal with it simply we will we will take it from there so when i don't i honestly don't have that number today i can get you that number but that's not anything that i fifty thousand goes to the feral animal control program which i what do you feel like this will be able to be adequate enough to get the job as you have kind of drawn out process i do when we're speaking about enforcement our enforcement officers work very hard and i will admit that what is that ten months ago or so in june i raised the bar very significantly for them change is difficult it was certainly an uncomfortable for some of them but we weren't asking them for anything that that they shouldn't be doing i hired a new enforcement director he comes with thirty years of experience with the highway patrol where he had retired so while he didn't have an animal control experience he had human you know experience and frankly that's where our problems usually life so he together we did raise the bar  officers have been doing an excellent job every month they respond to an average of between eight and nine hundred calls for service they drive thousands of miles they they are doing a very good job the increase we asked for in enforcement would help would allow us to hire one extra officer nationals national standards based on the that the area that we serve indicates that we are one officer short and it feels like that it feels that way so you know along with the additional officer and some other additional funding and supplies and that gets in there but you're comfortable with those provisos and the amount that you're getting for the sheltering part of the program yes so just to clarify that increase of four hundred eighty one thousand includes the shortage that we experienced last year so this year we are only asking for an additional so last year for fiscal fifteen what we received was short of what it cost us to provide the services for this contract so the additional funding that we asked for this year was really two hundred forty five thousand more than what we asked for what we received last year what we needed now what we received but what we what we needed so that the difference between that two hundred forty five and three hundred thirty six is what you're getting up from last year there and i did i know that you get inundated with information from every agency but i did bring a copy of that we tried it can be very confusing it's confusing for we understand we're looking at something like four hundred fifty animals over the next four or five that's what the numbers they were giving us last night but still in your opinion dependent on our commitment to this campaign and our commitment is very strong so if we just simply had one clinic here and there it would it would help those animals it would make a little bit of a difference we may not even see  shelter as far as our intake numbers but but we are taking it to a whole nother level we are looking at putting every bit of resources we have into this i'm soliciting other agencies on the mainland to to help support us in this campaign we truly failure is not an option we have to make a difference and so we plan on making a difference and but to do that we also do need the support of the county and our council know hopefully be able to continue to support you financially and in other means yes but more and more importantly you know i think the public has to understand that this problem is just not the means you think you know it isn't every one of us our respon i thought in the one remark which i remembered last night when somebody said that homeless man that his dog fixed but it was two years old and i had already twenty puppies i thought maybe more she wasn't even three years old and she had had three you so a lot now you know i realized as soon as i said that i didn't i wasn't looking at the numbers last year when we had asked submitted for our f p what we received was two hundred thirty six thousand dollars less than what we needed this year we made an additional two hundred forty five thousand and neuter because that is a very very very critical part of us getting our arms around the intake issue and i've seen  balance and they typically work outside of the united states fighting pet overpopulation on remote islands and when i sat down with the executive director of this agency who happens to be from the town i'm from in oregon and her she fetter an area and is from the same town so i knew no one about the work that they had done i explained to her that while yes we we are in the united states  at least it usually feels like that we do we are on an island and we do have an overpopulation crisis and would she consider joining forces with us and what they look for is commitment from agency leaders because they want to actually make a sustainable difference they don't want to go in and put a band aid on an area and i didn't want to band aid i want to make change and so what they are able to do is they are a nonprofit and she is she has a network of of medical professionals veterinarians and it's kind of like the doctors without borders but for animals so veterinarians vet techs and volunteers and they she is able to recruit them to come to and they're all in some sort of you know they practice veterinary medicine on the mainland in a variety of ways either private practice veterinary shelter medicine or spay neuter clinics whatnot and so they have a great system for these high volume clinics and these veterinarians aren't your typical veterinarian they are trained in high volume high quality sterilization which means the difference in one veterinarian without that training might be able to fix twenty animals in a day and these veterinarians can fix in excess of fifty but it's high quality there is no we're not making any concessions as far as the care for the animal so she so so we have joined forces with animal balance and to put on these facilitate these high volume spay neuter clinics in this campaign so i didn't have i didn't have the resources to be able to do this all on my own so it   there's quite a bit of an investment that is required from now humane society too and but this other agency has expenses as well and typically they do charge they  decreased rate but they do charge i didn't want to charge on this island i don't want the cost of the surgery to be a deterrent for people coming even if it was twenty dollars some people don't have twenty dollars and and yet they have an animal that is going to reproduce and can reproduce so what we did and it was a little tricky and i'll tell you moving forward i won't i won't be able to sustain this campaign if mao humane society is supplementing our contract i mean that's just the that's just the truth of it but i didn't want to wait on this campaign to see it was kind of the cart before the horse of the horse before the cart and so we jumped in with both feet and i'm we're committed to this but  're going to need support anyways so not only would anybody in the community be able to bring their animal and have it spayed or neutered at no charge we also as the humane society we included a microchip a county license which that funding will come out of our pocket for the county license because that's not you know that doesn't stay with us so a microchip county license vaccination if the animal needs  topical product and dewormer they were also getting their nails trimmed and their ears cleaned while they were put out so anything that we could do we did and it was a hit so so and we have a waiting list for the next one so right there that tells us there's a need right you know i know that s p c a uses the uses their their funds yeah offset costs for you know who can afford it yes everybody's working in the in the same direction and we and we need to keep any further questions for animal management thank you very much thank you very  have rob parsons joining us thank you for coming and we'll start our last page with grants and disbursements for water environmental resource protection and conservation so which d that is our contact on that contractor and so i have met with him recently he said that there are a elf project that they are trying to get up and running over there the status on that is that they have to go through department of health to have the quality of the water tested in the fish pond that they're working on this by the elf project so that's a little ways off before they can actually harvest oysters from that from that fish so that's what that  is moving on to the environmental protection program grants and i'm going to i'm going to give you the list of the grantees that we gave the funding to in this section and then i'll let all that mr parsons take over and discuss some of these projects with you so went to  is the that's that's that's the south maui volunteers you heard them testify yesterday that we knew a marine resources which is the reef recovery action you also heard from robin newbold yesterday seeds of hope this is the fleming arboretum this is for them to continue their work on their plants that they keep up there and the arbor read them and the outreach to the community that they do and then of course the large grant to invasive species committee so  to finish off that section we have and i watershed we did not put funding into this this year because we could not spend the funding on land i had last year controls the land districts of course provide excellent work for the carrying out of conservation and soil conservation in the four districts in maui and then there's the molokai and lanai district that we also fund so coordinator in my ninth year of service to the community and our conservation partners here and we're hoping we get called up yesterday so i could wish all of you a very happy earth day but happy day after earth day to put things in perspective yesterday was earth day number forty six the original earth day being in one nine hundred seventy founded by us senator gaylord nelson from the great state of wisconsin who felt that at that time it was necessary to raise public consciousness about environmental protection and it's estimated that twenty million people coast to coast participated in the first earth day it's now a global event on lunch break yesterday i dashed down to you h m c and there were a number of probably twenty booths down there including some of our grantees misc was down there with their display of little fire ants knew a marine resource council was there sharing what they do and i just feel honored to be working with such dedicated partners in our community i'm in a role that doesn't really exist in the other counties as a liaison for conservation restoration environmental protection efforts i think it's fair to say that around the state maui is looked at as being the best in how we  fund and support these efforts here which is not to say that we don't have environmental challenges we absolutely do so i'm just appreciative of your understanding of the issues and the means that we have to support them so i thank you for that i did make a couple of notes while we were listening to testifiers yesterday including many of our grantees it occurred to me that  maybe a name change is appropriate from the mayor's office of economic development to the little office the could i think would be a great name just because i was impressed and i moved over here two years ago because of the environmental protection protection line i'm a line item budget we generally don't pencil that out completely at the beginning of the year and going back to the very first arc how administration we kept what we titled emergency environmental response fund in the past we've used that to respond to things like willie willie go off we helped fund bio control efforts to send dr ramadan to africa to find adequate bio control we used that for a number of years to assist with them elia pump out program this year we worked with a council member carol's office and on loan on hanna and  they were very concerned about the discovery of little fire ants in the we've done public meetings there's another public meeting coming up next month the unallocated money that was in that environmental protection line item we  bumped up what we're allocating to misc for rapid response for little fire ants and i think they're doing a very good job that will help them reduce their administration fee from their fiscal sponsor and it will also enable them to more easily accept direct donations so i think that's noteworthy  the a who management of the sixty four coastal acres that was acquired in two thousand and twelve you heard from duke savella i think you proviso that last year that they wouldn't receive any funds until they received their nonprofit status and it took about fifteen months from the time they applied with the r s but they they have done so and so they have submitted their grants and you see that no new funds are requested for f y sixteen because they're just getting started on the f y fifteen and  it's been a real pleasure and privilege working with duke and his or hanna there and you should if you haven't been down there lately it's dramatically cleaned up from where mouth misc i know you heard from teo one thing you may not be aware of is the amount of dedication that she has to tracking legislation and again we work with the council member carol's office and with the merest liaison at the legislature to pursue making sure that the white invasive species council is adequately funded and then can disperse funds to each of the  they have landed a one hundred thousand dollar foundation grant that's going to be helping them out as well so they won't be just dependent upon any of my my we knew if she would recovery project able to show up and talk a little bit about what they've been able to accomplish the other thing of note is that i believe at some point next year will come to you and discuss in greater detail the fact that the i u c n is bringing the world conservation congress to hawaii and tina no i have had meetings one last week about prevent because we anticipate somewhere eight thousand or more people from one hundred sixty nations will be coming to hawaii to highlight and discuss our conservation efforts here and worldwide conservation efforts with the largest conservation group in the world the i u c n i think that covers the notes that i had thank you again for allowing me to show that thank you very much for your comments i  think it is important for people to know the degree to which we differ from the other counties because it's in this happened under mr carroll and other people's watches  before i got on the council but we had struck out on our own to address environmental issues and much more direct and effective fashion and the other counties have provided for later to continue to fund them because they the results are pretty spectacular and we know that there's a lot of very very hard work put into those those efforts and i appreciate your sharing that with us one of the questions i had was on this handout you provided us i believe it's only to have the breakdown of the two thousand and fifteen wards is it appropriate to assume that the funding levels for two thousand and sixteen will be roughly the same or you know there's a seventy two thousand dollars or seventy one thousand dollar increase  projected primarily going to be asked or ok i'll go ahead and take that i think that yes i think we can expect a similar breakout but i think that if there is any increase at all we would probably try to deploy that to misc because of their ability i mean they need to really be able to ramp up with another team of eradicator is to work on both kochi frog and little fire ant and that's really where we want to get so that they have two teams that they can deploy is here in the audience if you had further questions for her about that but as she said yesterday in her testimony in order to get to that point there they're going to need more funding so  we want to help them ramp up and and i so if there is any extra i would put it there thank you we've heard a lot of testimony looking for money and start targeting these areas that are really potentially can just explode that we are going to lose it because once you have spirit as much as they have now it's a great danger of them getting  getting order vehicles being transported in play and we want help to have somebody else bring it in we'll spread or buy or so and i would hope to get a comment from c to come up with the numbers that you need to have in front of you to evaluate the control methods you know you know the concerns that are coming in from our residence everyone that i have read or heard talk to people on the phone say misc is great they show up when we call them they take care of the ones in our yard but they're coming back and what's happened is we've had two very wet winters  their populations have multiplied these frogs are climbers they climb up the sides of the goats they climb up trees and they can be controlled misc has come up with some very innovative ways to deal with this terrain basically water cannons gravity fed because you know they they need to reach down and you know we all know that helicopter control is very very expensive so that they can perch at the top of the gulch and shoot a citric acid solution down which will kill the frogs but it won't kill the foliage so they've distributed i think the last quarterly report said fifty pounds of citric acid to people that have their own spares and want to do their own control  they're professionals but as mr penniman said yesterday they do probably need a couple additional people on cookie frog patrol to be effective so we hope to have those numbers to you folks in the next day or two thank you very thank you very much jared there isn't a whole lot that i can add to what member carol has already stated and i want to say that i'm very supportive of us doing whatever it takes i mean if it takes an all out attack to stop this i think it's worth the money because if we don't it's going to come back and it's going to cost us a lot more and what i'm really worried about is the effect on our visitor industry if we start having this cookie stuff all over the place my daughter lives in on the big island and oftentimes with were talking on the phone to let me listen and let me tell you it's not something that you want to be a part of they learn to kind of ignore it you know background noise but for people who are not used to it it's really don't know where we're going to find the money but that's ok we have miracle workers around here will find thank you this cochran thank you chair and good morning and pardon my tardiness this morning but i'm glad to be here now so and thank you department for being here so forgive me if i'm didn't hear all of your presentation mr parsons and ms rasmussen but on the subject matter of cokie we had lots of testimony last night up  and of course here in the chambers but you know it just dawned on me that nobody's talking about access to dear anymore so i'm like that because it was a hot topic a year ago and now i mean are they gone i mean did we eradicate them because now it's the big hoopla issues so yeah i know they do the best they can so i concur with other comments in regards to more resources for them more you know constant coverage eradication efforts on their part so we'll see how that moves but i know the are the best ones to do the job and the forward to helping assist with that but again if anyone has answers about the access deer and i guess m is here if you have any specific questions for i think i'd like to hear from her because i think we just heard third party about her we had a million dollars we could do it all comment but to actually hear from her if they do have a plan or working on a penniman species committee good morning good morning so a specific question about with your specific question this time and it's just in regards to you know everyone appreciates that you do with what make do with what you guys so i guess with the efforts to ramp it up what do you have a plan in place you know have you been discussing if we had x amount of dollars we could there by implementing x y and z in order to you we've actually done that plan numerous times over the years looked at it and put it out and in one year we had i think four hundred thousand dollars that we secured from the fish and wildlife service specifically form go we probably would be a lot worse if we hadn't had that but basically including it curbs that we think are infested and it's from all the way to the ocean and it's not  hundred percent dense all the way down it's more like pockets in different places and that area as well as the the rim the which is the folks you're hearing from the residential areas along the rim is about one hundred eighty five somewhere between one hundred eighty five and two hundred acres that are infested it costs about two thousand dollars an acre in citric acid costs for a single treatment so you're talking if you wanted to do to try and we figure when we when we've done other heavily infested areas it takes six to eight treatments to really feel like we've got it so you're talking about one hundred eighty five times times two is about three hundred  seventy thousand dollars for to do a complete treatment of the gulch so in order to do that i'm sorry my brain isn't completely functioning on the math but it's you're talking somewhere and i think in the two to three million dollars to do the entire area so when we've done it out before like we can't just go do it all at once and doesn't make sense from an operational perspective we don't have an army of people to do that you can as rob was  explaining we happy tools the techniques to deliver the citric acid spray using gravity fed systems fire hoses in the gulch it's really is quite ingenious approach but it's more like you need to work our idea is to contain along the rim so to keep it from spreading and we're actually we recently learned that there's some development going in that maybe a mile of fence that's put in along that area i think by a and b or whoever is purchasing that area well may be looking at trying to do containment along there if you recall a few years ago driving along cluny road there used to be a cookie barrier and a white fabric fencing in there it will keep the kochi from moving past that area so that's something we like to look at as a containment option to keep them from spreading that lease along one section of the gulch but basically when we put it out before we looked at it is doing it maybe in the like it may be seven fifty k a year for a couple of years and then five hundred five hundred ramping it down like that because if you get through it it will cost less but but long term if you want like a ballpark and as of settle we'll write that up and give you a clearer picture of that because  realize that's kind of a broad range but still we're talking in the two and a half to three million dollars is what i would say and yes we do have plans we have the bay area it's not just random while we have management units defined  so that we know where we're working when we've been there how often we've been when we'll go back but the the problem is we get diverted by all the other locations that were there we're working on by the fire ems and also by to be honest by residents who are screaming in our years saying you've got to come get this i can't sleep i've got people coming to rent the house and so we may not always be doing it as effectively as we would like to because we've been so staffed thinkingness tenements of that gives me a better picture and looking forward to the final report or you know implementation plan what have you so misc is statewide nowhere malak county only in m now accounting just so other county there are invasive species committees on other islands and so we collectively get our funding from the state through the whole way invasive species council we work on there's a separate committee the molex invasive species committee that has its own committee they have their own targets they have their own staff but all of that funding as it ministers of lee handled through mit ok well because i'm trying to figure out chair for something like this if you want to just mobilize you know an army for now just the initial attack with extra like limited term type employees just to cut power oust this area from other invasive species people you know i just thought if you could pull resources from other places come in hey help us part out and then they're not full time employees to keep on but just for the initial  project you know we have the flexibility to do that kind of firing and that's what we would look at doing as opposed to you have a long term job when we can't promise that we would bring in folks on short term in fact what we've been looking at is is maybe not only short term but focus more starting to bickley our r for a crew start working at about twelve thirty and then they work till ten thirty or eleven but maybe if we had those folks who could help get the get the do the prep work in advance and you just bring in folks for a shorter duration just to work in the evening hours to do that work that would be also a cost effective way to do it also to answer the question about the university and all of the invasive species committees or projects of the university of originate from as i understand a lot of lands there have been subdivided reconsolidate or what have you into big parcels for future real estate ventures so know they're gone and haven't heard a peep we have some great photos of our staff hauling gear through the ritz carlton at night i have to say i did call them because i heard things in my i thank you for being here i think miss cochran such a lot of the questions i was hoping to ask and you were able to but you know you mentioned you started off for the seven hundred fifty five and five hundred what is your the amount you see for this particular project the cookie for that's the that's the two point five to three million is the total that's my best  that was started by a group of concerned ranchers farmers who wanted to come together to try and address the issue and it wasn't it wasn't something that that misc ever said let's take this on as our project because this doesn't typically fall within within our type of i think well no i'm not i'm not stepping away completely from it because we did end up taking an active role in it we did write the grant and i am managing that and i did supervise that was a supervisor for the deer coordinator problem was we lost the coordinator and we're currently he took another position on big island and wildlife management for the state and so we've had a hiatus with that project and we've we're also kind of in limbo right now with hiring the new coordinator but we're trying to move that forward but to answer your question about what's the strategy it's a comprehensive extremely difficult problem to tackle and the first thing that we had agreed to do was to try and get a better handle on the population still doing that there's still plans to do that but at the same time it's like well that's nice knowing it's nice to know in terms of knowing if what you're doing is making a difference but there's still that problem of how do you control them i still believe that it needs to be aerial control i don't think that we will ever make a difference in the population unless we just say that's was going to happen that's problematic because you have to have landowners who are willing to allow that to happen and then there are also some legal issues within the state about aerial control of animals so that as well as outreach and education i don't i actually just had a question earlier today about someone who's putting a paper about about what the status is of the deer harvest co op i don't know if that's still active or not i know that they had removed a number of animals but i don't think making a difference at the population level so we're not there was not a request for funding for this coming year for that because i don't think that's we still there's still funding in the budget for that project and it's not appropriate to ask for more until we do something with what we have so you have a  so they there grant is still open we gave him an extension because the information that i mean they have worked very hard to find all kinds of ways to eradicate these deer the biggest problem i have is getting enough land owners to give them access that is the number one problem so we've given them more time because that whole entire grant was basically an experiment you know they were to experiment with different ways to eradicate and they've tried corralling them they've tried to entice them to come into the corrals and then they would go in and you know it's been very difficult on the dry conditions there it was much easier to shoot animals or even take them out both where i live for the last eighteen months we've had rain every month so the grass in many areas is so tall you if you go out hunting you can see the deer bed down and they're invisible two years ago they shot nearly nine hundred animals last year the shark fifty they tried using a t v s and mounting a frame on top so they could have like a higher place to look down to the animals and it's still very difficult to see deer but there are not as active now in the farming areas because they have lots of food out there they do not have to put themselves in danger by going into you know areas where people will shoot at them so it's been very difficult if we get drier conditions i'm sure the harvesting co op could do a much better job very difficult to see that here so it's not gotten any better and could you share with us what the what the total amount that the state sets aside what i always portion has been maybe  too we never know exactly what we would what we will be because it's a competitive process last year was the best year for funding for invasive species it was five point seven five million for the white invasive species council in previous years it had been more like four and then right now before it's my understanding that the finance committee is looking at a four million dollars request and what's in the ways and means package is three point four million so  assuming a lot and last year to answer your question last year for our base of operations funding we received about eight hundred thousand from the state which was the most we had ever received so i would i would assume that we would have a proportionate reduction so when i've done my forecasting my my my whatever you call that black ball that you look into to try and get an answer to i'm assuming something like maybe six hundred thousand from the state so several hundred thousand dollar reduction is what i would would be mine but the other question you'd mentioned earlier you would receive four hundred thousand dollars from fish and wildlife is there any fund the work but just because of their budget reductions we used to get anywhere from one to two hundred thousand from fish and always service we're now getting in the ten to twenty five thousand dollars range and the same is true for the national park service which typically used to fund hollyhock a lot was very supportive of work on my konya and they largely funded helicopter operations and sometimes a significant portion of staffing  that has been less than one hundred thousand so unfortunately are cut from federal partners have been close to somewhere and in the four to five hundred thousand dollars a year difference and the county as always has stepped up again to fill that to fill that gap you know and i'm i always feel embarrassed that that we have to carry such a load in and i have to ask for the county to carry such a load but that's the stark reality of where we are thank you for that information is just another reminder that when i look at the fact that our employment cost for the county challenges sure be nice to have a little extra cash lying around it would and have to follow up on one of the other questions that that council member cochrane had about asking landowners to support we've had exceptional support from our landowners within the goal to do things like let us use or use their equipment to help with habitat alteration let a store citric acid and a number of them make donations as well and that's something that that i would really like for us to focus more on is looking at the private sector i'd like to spend more of my time over the next year developing that as a robust part of our overall operating funds would it help you to raise money if we required a match of one dollar for every four that we're putting up no i don't think so i mean acknowledge that we've had for example this last year we had eighty thousand from the white tourism authority we also had the mallee quarantine fund which is managed by the now a chamber of commerce who gave us  funding for the little fire ant detector program we've had funding from the lawrence dorsey foundation also for fire ants so so we do what we can to go out and get those private foundation grant  regard to that just origination of this does someone have the historical background why this was created and what it was created to address and  i could read you something here that's in their report so it says the purpose of this request is to continue to obtain much needed support to carry out the sale and water conservation district programs one eighty hawaii revised statutes we were organized as volunteers of the state of hawaii for the protection and conservation of soil and water resources in the interest of health safety general welfare of the people in this region so their volunteers but this money supports one to one persons their cord nader's salary and the program that they run basically so plan conservation education land judging for the high school students technical support for the coral reef taskforce they serve on the trial resource conservation and development board and conservation planning for agricultural land users as mandated by state law hopefully that helps sort of but basically i'm trying to figure if this is created after a lot of these this point so i was just kind of looking back in history and trying to figure out if it's sort of started to protect negative impacts from that and now we're funding things of this nature via the government entities when literally the issues and negative impacts started from private people so that was i was just trying to figure that  out so i didn't you know ok ok so this this organization is decades old this is not something new and this is not something that was created from the absence of plantations they do they do work in some of their those areas but they work and all kinds of areas across our state and they get a very extraordinary small amount of money from the state of hawaii erosion also comes from ranching erosion come from the fair animals eating all of you know that's when our watershed disappears and i would have to say that people are sort of conservation but as far back as i can remember and that's pretty far back you know that back home you know the  largely volunteers that are coming together from various types of people but miss cochrane brings up a i think a very valid point is that there are areas i'm guessing on state land as well as private land where we could be doing a better job of stopping runoff and i think as fields become fallow like they did in the hina i don't know whether we have the ability to require and and other places so they've done a lot of very important work but there's obviously much left to be done with that members we're going to take a lunch break and please be back at one thirty eighty six internships they had a graduation rate of ninety percent the scholarships they provided were ten thousand dollars and keep in mind this organization is funded also by other  entities the and the participation in the program was two hundred and ten and there were twenty two community partners and seventy eight percent of them went on from high school to college so i think that's very impressive statistics and the last one in this area is the visitor bureau and you have before you in the document that we sent its own m five you have a dashboard for the maui visitors bureau and i thought that was the best way for you to see the statistics on the visitor industry for our county  we had them leave two thousand and seven on the dashboard because we wanted you to see prior to the recession the numbers that we were and as you can see we've exceeded those numbers now so i think we're all very relieved by that and we can say that we have got our visitors back the spending is just slightly up i think the per day spending and actually it looks like yeah it is just slightly up but i do believe that i've talked with  members of the visitor bureau board as i sit on that as ex officio member and they are very concerned about the competition out there and the very very aggressive nature of these other resort communities so that's going to be on our minds as we go forward and that's why i believe that we cannot ever stop funding our efforts here i think it's what's made the difference for our county versus some other counties and visitor bureau has been a great partner with us they have assisted us with our initiatives in helping us promote for instance that ma county festival they helped us by putting it on their calendars and and worked with us on that and they have done and we've done a workshops together we did a south korean workshop we did a china workshop  and we're talking about our next subjects this year being customer service because we're hearing rumblings that the aloha spirit and some of our customer service areas are a little bit lacking on our island so we wholeheartedly support this budget request thank you if you go on and finish up the two items it's really two more economic development initiatives there's a long list of projects that were accomplished under this and the maui comedy festival  brand new event this year we funded that to the tune of ten thousand we were presented an opportunity to do a broadband assessment for our county that consulting has been completed and we're waiting for the final report and as soon as we do it be transmitting that to you and there may be other follow on work well we expect there will be follow on work because now he's facing believe it or not with all the other problems that we have we're facing a future not so long in the future broadband capacity shortage for our for our island  and then we took some of the funding for the made him out of county festival here the maui invitational had come to us two years ago and expressed the problem of the the line a gymnasium of being having inadequate broadband capacity for all the streaming video and all of the people that were doing social media at the games even the news agencies that were there the sports agencies were having a hard time getting photos out so we brought together the parties the visitor bureau  was a part of this we brought together camper lezak and oceanic time warner cable and the parks department and we came up with a plan to  get that broadband coverage adequate for this last year's games and it was a small it was a fix that we split and three different ways i think that each of the invitational this military affairs mobile workshop was this was just paying for transportation for guests to attend the hawaii chamber of commerce military affairs council mobile workshop that was held here on this island and i'm not exactly i don't have a lot more details than that as i think this was organized by someone else in our department but they came here and there was some very important festival or day i think it was a day long celebration in la and then again basketball maoi provided some school assemblies and clinics  and the last one was the small business revitalization grant with love cocky and a portion of that came out of this fund and then the last item on our list is our renewable energy program so this fund is managed by the energy commission there and of course as you know we don't have an energy commission i right now but it is absolutely our intention rehiring an energy commissioner at the beginning of the fiscal year we've asked for a small increase in this fund because this next year is going to be a pivotal extremely important year for maui county in the energy arena as travel and time and so we asked for a small increase in that it might turn to stand at the majority of this money really is not going to be automatically we're going to give money to these same things but it's more discretionary and as needs arise your department will decide hey this is we can use some money here yes and you know we appreciate that because it's quite amazing you know the opportunities that come along during the year that you don't know about in advance and as i said you know if we were trying to run an economic development program and didn't have and every single thing was in convertor proviso you would really have no flexibility to take advantage of these opportunities and no they don't have automatic funding and we make that very clear to our grantees that just because you do get funded one year does not mean you get funded forever and we really make that clear to them thank you very much just but the title of it you know i can see we're  needs to be flexible and of course everybody has ideas but i understand your need to kind of react to his and unity we all need those pots of money it's like you know even in our home budget it's good to have a little bit of stash somewhere for something that comes along but you know i like some of the i mean i like the ideas that did come up and that we're funded because they are economic development and of course we can always sit here and argue forever but  was expended was it given was it not utilize is it carried over oh there grant the mowing their grant was just given to them i was just executed in february so they have they have their ground ok well the event was cancelled due to the hurricane so my question is the money that you just gave them is it to roll over into this upcoming maybe planned event because it should pay for something they got  canceled that that maybe the kids if they're if they have money left over that they couldn't expand they have the ability to spend it for next year and so if that's if that's the case then you know you may want to consider not provisos because we have no option then you know it needs i mean we can't do anything else with those funds and they may have still incurred some expense even if it was canceled and i you know i'm sorry i do not know that i haven't talked to them but we can certainly find that out but they may have already put money down for something you know or paid for something that they didn't have the ability to to cancel you know right organizer of both of these events is the same organizer there's questions whether they they want to do the command commemoration again and they have brought us a new project actually it's a very exciting project and i really like the project they brought to us it's based around a wahoos fashion week and they want to bring a series of events here and i really like that because rather than it just being a single cultural event this has economic development implications it really helps our local fashion designers and our our  entrepreneurs that want to elevate themselves in that arena and so i'm actually very excited about that and the last word i got from him was that he will more than likely will not do the command celebration ok so are you looking to do that as an initiative on your department's behalf then you're talking about the fashion we write we have to see we haven't even got we have as of a couple paragraphs description of what they want to do we need to have it baked a little bit more than that before we put money into it we haven't seen the full proposal but it just came to me like a week ago and so i would absolutely consider this fund for that but i wouldn't necessarily want to see  proviso until i see the proposal because you know it could i mean i want to make sure it's fully baked you know and that they can really pull it off so and so this and never mention that this year makes the hundred year commemoration of the command may day parade know they did that it's kind of a big you know milestone and to say we're going to just do a fashion show instead it's it  doesn't mean that someone else couldn't take that event and run with it and maybe that's maybe maybe they want to do that but this was just the word that i got that thank you share and are the categories yes really dark on the xerox copy and so these figures as in per person per day expenditures where have you is it distinguishing between hotel guests versus timeshare guests just visitors in general is that it it's it's not even counting it's not your money accommodations it is accounting it it does account accommodation oh yeah i guess you're right because it's per person per day so that if it was a couple probably it would include accommodations i'm sorry go ahead hi tara thanks for being here yeah i was  referring to the numbers in just figuring you know factoring in figuring out if it was factored in if there's a distinguishment between a hotel per se gas versus a timeshare guest because they know the style of vacation in varies from you know visitor so is that factored in anywhere here the what is in here is yes is they are surveyed sometimes it's next exit survey at the airport been there also followed up sometimes given the information on that they fill out on the plane call that they're followed up so that we can ask them how did they spend and what what was spent on and so these numbers come from the  surveys that are done they do not however include airfare but they do include anybody who's staying in an in a short term accommodation who has filled it out or talk to the survey in that regard and it's everything that they do so for example in a timeshare you're exactly right their expenditures might be a little they might not spin in the same way but if they went to costco and spent ever how much on groceries for that week they put it in here so for a for like food so and they do typically by the way they will say that they they'll say they spent x amount of dollars in their five days or seven days or whatever it is they want they may not say they want to costco but i'm trying to explain that they do put a number in for how much they spend thank you and about the section seen unique visitors want to get seen who are their unique visitors comment you made that they go to costco and and put out how much they spend a lot of that is not local stuff local spending right no no no i mean that is  is coming from a survey of people coming in and going out of the airport or filling out a form this is this is not what you're saying you're saying that a lot of a lot of the timeshare folks go to costco and they say they spend out this much you know ok let me let me say it a different way ok ok so these numbers come from surveys given to visitors either by exit at the airport or and or by surveys that are sent to them via h d c v h v c v and or h d a and the question is how much did you spend on activities how much did you spend on food how much did you spend and whatever the time of day was at the time of their vacation was it does not necessary wear correct ok correct but i thought that that ma that miss cochran was was wondering because there is a difference sometimes in the way they spend and it's not just timeshare it's also condominium sometimes you know where you have the ability to have a refrigerator or cook in your place is there a correlation between or is there a way to verify the total expenditure numbers is there any correlation between these and state revenue records that you can identify  state revenue figures anyway well ok these numbers come from the state and there is a breakdown of every island and a total for the state of of these very idea the it's these very numbers rivals the expenditures the per person per day there's even a per person per trip if it's a family there may be a number for that so it's somewhat of a squishy mist as it's done by survey not by imperial well it's you have a question to  whether it be d e or d a t or anything related to those type of visitor expenditure so it think that's what you are asking for is if we can come up with a figure is there some way to correlate whether this is correct or not or the actual numbers of visitors no no it isn't numbers i was yeah yeah what we're looking for is is for these from from our far working group site is what revenues generated by the don't know whether it's my employee or one of my guests right and same thing for you know obviously a lot of activities are going to be mostly visitor but retail and restaurants kind of hard to identify which is a visitor expenditure which is resident well we'll see how the state tax office replies to us but we kind of you know we understand it's going to be very i like your term squishy but all of this information is fairly squishy while you're in communication with the tax office would you ask them to please provide us with an accurate assessment of what is what general excise taxes generated in each county because currently that's not they're not recording hotel excise tax to my knowledge as far as i want to have with mr we did have a conversation with them about that and they felt very comfortable in the numbers they're actually in each district because coney is would be charging four and a half percent if they were staying in in a city county and of honolulu hotel would be four and a half percent so they felt that the numbers that they were getting from the hotel industries in their reports were accurate to the district that it was being generated in ok good good to hear any other questions f and so thank you very much bill one of the questions i had that the ten thousand dollars for a wage to my recollection is that used to be provided by h g is that your recollection i think we actually had a grant in the county prior to our administration came in and and i think we let it go for a couple years and then they came back you know and you know asked for the funding and i think the reason they came back to ask for the funding is because h g h decided to move everything to do a lot of my gran's manager the three plus million dollar portion in our budget we administer that directly to m v p so they put their receipts into our office and requests for payment and we process their payments right out of our office now they receive a lot of other funding from the state but they deal that comes directly to them from the state so our money is completely separated it doesn't co mingle with any state monies so when they develop their budget it's all about what they're going to provide for our county and and i believe it's also correct to say that the yeah yeah we're not paying for salt so now so actually the cheryl and her group are being paid by each team right that's correct so each county has how are the and they're doing surveys to get compiled facts and numbers and figures so how does that relate to what they're being funded by us you know i mean like  yes well i guess i mean if you want to just look at a straight investment you know we're giving up three point eight three point three point eight two five million billion dollars in our county so when you look at the you know the ratio of our investment to what we get i mean it's it's a it's a phenomenal return on people i mean their survey could have gone and they might have come because you're i mean there's no measurement as to specifically envy you know i mean versus i know they travel abroad and  nationwide to bring out you know and what have you if maybe if the track of that person they actually spoke to at the desk and they came off the plane here in will of the service that i spent all this because you i met you at th they do have the ability in some cases to track that person's actual purchase and we have some of that capacity in and our system but it's it's it's not real well refine saying about i just report i'm surely you have a very valid question i don't know how you would know from a visitor if they came because of what spent an advertising versus what versus what we spend in advertising i do know that the things that we concentrate on are very much our demographic i know that the things that we concentrate on are the the things that may be properties for example if that's the exact bill we want to use may not go to the same audience they have a different they may have a little different target audience in some parts of their marketing but i don't know that you would ever be able to say that it's this person's marketing versus this person's marketing i think frankly it takes us all to get two point four million people spending four plus billion dollars and that and you know in my mind the end result of that is how many people are staying employed how many people are still staying in business because visitors are spending there and that's for that's you know for us that's really the bottom line i you know i've i've run the numbers i can tell you what the return is on four billion dollars and it's very high if you look at only three point eight if you look at the other three point six that the state gives us you're looking at seven million dollars budget it's about a five hundred dollar return on the dollar of investment but can i say that that came from what we did versus somebody else i don't know how you would do that your survey how did you what entice you to come to visit or what who did you get you know how did you learn of mine and some surveys those are the questions yes in the survey that that asked how much did you spend and how long did you stay and where did you stay i'm not sure that's part of that survey i mean that would be interesting because i think most events sometimes will say how did you hear bars was it a newspaper article was it a magazine was it the radio ad was so they know to put more money to it right to enhance that target you know i'm not even sure that that's not collected it's not something that i that i track all the time but  breaks these numbers down in several several several ways that i don't look at on a regular basis it could be in one of those surveys and i'm not aware of it thank you because i know that we we're with you and rasmussen went to korea and japan and you had done your outreach there and then i'm looking at the korean numbers and i guess the boom was back into twelve and when were we there thirteen thousand and thirteen well actually in the numbers four to fourteen versus two thirteen i will tell you what they explained to me they have a superstition about traveling for weddings at certain times and it's a certain kind of year do you remember that explanation tina and they they wouldn't travel that's that's romance that didn't travel in fourteen it's kind of like i guess it's kind of like the year of the whatevers for other folks i don't know but that's the explanation it was it was a morning you know a morning well part of it was the fairy fairy yes part of it was the fairy thing and there was a mourning phase that they went through where nobody would travel because they were in mourning across the country but there was also this issue of a went down there to just you know just trying to relate the numbers that were seen verses while japan is down basically because of the the exchange rate i mean in a lot of ways all of them i will tell you are finding it very difficult to fly into honolulu and wait for a very long time to get to maui and that's one of the biggest cruxes that we have in gaining can use to kind of gauge you know where their dollars went and how they went do you guys have that same kind of deal it's kind of hard to say you know you spent three point eight million dollars or seven million dollars and we got this much back versus you know what in each individual tell etc so is there any kind of formula that you guys can use to to put to those numbers you know it's the statistics again i don't have that right now but i'm sure that h g a must use one and i can find out how they do that and i could then apply it i guess you know i think the other thing that i think should be should be really important to you folks is that the funds that come from the county which is briefly been mentioned here are all about marketing they're not about overhead they're not about payroll they're not about anything it's all marketing and that's the way it was set up and that's the way we intend to keep it because that gives us that extra boost in the market that other folks you know may not have and i'm not looking for you to quote me that it's a five hundred with a seven million dollars budget i'm just giving you the if you if you just take what it is that we track that's what it comes out to if you want me to find another formula but i'm just curious because we're you know we're trying to decide ok we've got to deal with our budget ways and if we say for every dollar we spend for the visitors bureau we get five or six hundred back right it makes sense to spend a little bit more till we find out where that number cuts or if we're already up at that number where it starts dropping also you know all the other counties they don't spend anywhere near as much do you have do you have statistics saying well we spent this much on in maui county and we got this increase in visitors versus a while who only spent this much and they only got this much increase or decrease or you know comparing to the other counties how much we spend versus how much they spend and you know the percentage but i didn't see that in your dashboard you know that's not on the dashboard i haven't been asked for that id i can tell you what their occupancy is i can tell you what their per person per day expenditure is right right versus ours that's all in the h g a numbers that come out every month every island is there and so they're always there to be grabbed i'm happy to grab whatever it is that you want me to grab but i don't typically i don't typically track the other islands other than knowing that i'm ahead of them it would be nice if we had that we are at right now but it would be nice if we had that automation in in some sort of forum where we can look at it real quick you know during budget instead of having to go through when we already see the mountains of stuff we have so if maybe if you can come up with that fairly quickly that would be very helpful and next time next year maybe throw that in there to show you know hey we're spending this much and we're getting this much for return that would be very helpful ok ok i'll give you an easier thing to compare  we spend we spend three point eight out of county funds and the visitor plant on maui generates i think this past year was one hundred  this fiscal year is about one hundred million and real property tax we're projecting for next year with this three point eight million figure is going to rise to a little over one hundred nine million same period and the big island is going to generate twelve point six million dollars in their visitor industry so they're getting what they paid for they don't market much and they're not getting much and a little bit more for their county visitor bureau and it fluctuates every year it's not it's not steady but they're at twenty two million so just in county dollars we're getting almost eight times more than the big island gets and the less than five times what you know about five times what co i gets so that's just counting dollars for county dollars also if you look at what most hotels spend they spend the money in order to protect or generate their revenues like our hotel is  revenues of between thirty and thirty five million dollars a year and we spend in direct marketing and margins that we give to wholesalers for them to do marketing about five and a half in between four and a half and six million dollars a year so we're spending six to get thirty and the county spending three point eight to get one hundred nine i take your deal any day of the week and the thing we have to remember is that there's an there's an old saying and terrell probably shoot me for saying this but and this i heard this many many years back so i know half of the money that i'm spending our marketing is really working well for me i just don't know which half yeah and so it's the marketing dollars you know you need to spend but you don't know what's working the best for you and what's not working very well for you except by some measures that we we hope we can find in the internet is actually providing us easier ways of providing some measures but the bottom line is a market in is you know from a destination standpoint it's all about relationships and you've got to be out there on the road all the time maintaining relationships and in the person who's on the spot when some decision is going to get made and i remember having one of my i sent  my head groundsman with my sales department to boston and new york he came back why died and he said you know not a single travel agency that we visited in new york or boston had anything about hawaii it was all cruise ships and caribbean and europe and so his takeaway was if somebody from that area decides to come to hawaii they decide to come to maui and then they decide to come to our resort i have a responsibility to take really good care of them because they've got so many thousands of destinations to go to and hundreds of thousands of hotels to go to so it's you know we we can pick apart the market and kind of expenditures but i'm not a i'm not interested in taking a chance having people lose jobs because we don't have occupancy and so special thank you very much chair you know i never thought i would be sitting here making this statement but i'm going to do it you know when i came to the council i had heard a lot of the negative conversation about us funding the visitor's bureau and i began to look at it too and say well yes this is a lot of money and you know what did do their own thing there you know it's business and business should take care of its own and whatever but you know as i have said here over the years and i've been through good times and bad times as a member also you know i was here during the downturn  was here during the good times and i see us coming back and i also look at the competition that we're getting around the world and as a frequent traveler of mexico i do know that you know they're they're looking at us and saying hey we want some of that hole and money too and so you know we are facing more competitive situation i have learned that our visitor industry is truly a place we look to to keep our economy healthy and we all know what happens when tourism downturn happens we are in big big trouble i lived through nine eleven and the help program and what it did to this community and so i don't want to take that chance i don't want to take their chance of saying let's not spend this money he's wonderful in everything i come anyway and everything's going to be fine i see it as an investment and as you mentioned the investment is very tiny compared to the return how many people are working how many work in this industry now and none of us were before we were sugar people but you know a lot of us have transitioned into different things and work in the visitor industry and are supported by it and so i look at this as an investment a wonderful investment with a huge return on our investment and i don't want to take the chance of not being in competition and waiting and having to live it over we took the money and now look what happened i think we've got some great momentum going there's not a book i read there's not a magazine i read there's not a t v show i don't read that has some mention of and i don't think we get to be the best island in the world by accident i think that's a very deliberate business plan and so i'm going to support it and i think that it's money well spent i'd rather do this than stick to a chance of doing it and i want to say thank you to the people that work in the industry and people like terrell who make it happen  thank you another perspective and that is that you know we talk about diversification a lot around here but not really one of the things that that has not been stated enough is that when the island dependent you know largely on agriculture and terror you can that when when the island dependent on big agriculture all the money came in through through the plantations the plantations decided where they were going to build what stores they were going to provide and so they basically controlled all the inflow of of assets but with the visitor industry the hotels are conduits not just the landing spot for all the cash and as people go out from the hotels it allows people with significant geographic diversity to start their own businesses whether it's hama or on the way to hana or whether it's any place on that they choose to do something in this set up has diversified geographically the access  a regular seat while she's coming down and it's been so the question have you mentioned that the japanese and the koreans that come over here don't want to wait on a walk and then come over here  do you this is your organization involved in trying to get direct flights through here with the different airlines and one for about twenty five years so you do this you watch every move it's made i try to offer every kind of of help i can offer yes and one of the biggest concerns is the customs yes yes yes and we've looked at every angle we've tried every angle you know we we want to have direct flights from the international community but we are not able to do that at this point and until we do we have to take them as secondary visitors or as begin that they go to a wahoo and then come here but i'll take those yeah i'll take those and you know the newspaper asked me recently it looks like the day tripper numbers are on the rise is that a concern meaning or thinking that that means they're not staying long and it's just actually just the opposite for me i like those numbers are rising because what happens is they go there they they come over here they test the water and guess where they come the next time so i think it's just the opposite ok and some of the questioning too i'm very concerned about as mr white says we've got people coming to the hotels and they disperse and spend their their money wherever and other businesses crop up and some of the things we've heard about timeshares in that there may not be that same level of spending it's just more steady throughout the year are you still working on earth are you working on any kind of study to see where the spending is you know hotel guest versus  timeshare gas kind of thing there are studies that have been done and as i mentioned earlier not just timeshare but condo as well right they will cook some meals inside but they are still there in hawaii they're in maui they are going to experience restaurants and retail shops and all of the other things the activities all that go with it so they don't just go and stay put and a lot of the time share is by the way that we see are people who who are not the owners coming back all the time it may be a first timer because they've done whatever they do and they are the people who will obviously spend more your response to that was also with customs what is the problem with getting customs and what does it take to make it happen if if that is something  way when you when you open up that kind of a gate it's not like everything just falls in your lap on that day it opens you know typically it would start with a charter like command like command and like i still get canada does you know we started with charters and then the business grew the reason as i am as i understand it and i was there back in those days of the airport battles is that there was  there was a memorandum of agreement is what i call it signed between d o t and airports i'm sorry d o t and the folks who intervened at that time trying to extend the run well again ok and said you can't do it until certain things happen one you know there's three there's three items on there and some of those things have benet's a big girl right the extension of the runway has now changed it's not in the same number it once was because now we are aircraft has changed and now we don't need as long a runway and and you know you could land the larger planes here all the time but the takeoff because of the heaviness the weight that if you fill up that plane the runway wasn't long enough we don't expenses because most of us don't pay attention to that so that one hundred nine million real property tax and then we take off the three point marketing in some respects we're doing so on behalf of the retail companies the restaurants and the activities that don't ever have to spend any money so tell us have no choice we have to go to the mainland we have to go to asia  have to go to europe we go all over the place to see what we can generate in the way of business but those other entities on island wait until we get the visitors here with visitors bureau help and then they they market to our guests at the same time we're trying to get them to spend money in our restaurant or going activities nearby so you know that's why you know if you guys said we should spend more money i'm fine with that because i know more is going to happen and we're going to be more secure and providing jobs and just another comparison ten years ago the county generated four point eight million dollars in property tax revenue you know how much we gave my visitors bureau then three point six million so we have a sixty million dollar increase in our income from the visitor industry in that ten year period and we're now getting over three point eight so y this victoria no very interesting conversation and sorry joined a little bit late that's all right you know you had i think you need to get and thank you tara and i appreciate it and i wanted to ask you who the new guy was in on down down next because i don't know who that guy is but i pictured him and then i remembered who he was and welcome back mr bush the culture appreciated what i'd like to also add you know you put all the pieces of that puzzle together and i think if anybody's paying attention you know how important all of this is to our community in the area then many people forget and not just talking the cheerio because that's just one i repeat one of many many events or many means for which the hotel industry and i'll put even in the times here because they are intricate part of our vision of visiting industry today contributes to this community and helps many organizations survive imagine what the line would be if we did not get that kind of support from the visitor industry it would be out the door down the corner around the block and all the way out to like a pool and that's how many people would be asking for more help because i know your hotel in particular does a number of great things weston i mean i knew many of the properties they had all the different events that help what is line of luna camp heard i don't care what it was whatever organization they helped so that's something that also is left out of the picture a lot of time because we talk about you know they only take take in they don't give back no i disagree they give way more way more than we ever take and i think that's important those corporations just don't take all the money out of the state a lot of the states right here and helps our individual so i think helping the vision of your at the continue to help us is not a bad thing and other thing i'll mention is that yet of all the other million whatever it was and i says we understand the value we understand what they bring to this community what they bring to this county and what  the support we get from the vision industry is fantastic and i can say in your case your hotel has been so generous for the the charity well you contribute so much and you get like luncheons and all that i mean you  to do that and people still give but you do it because you want to encourage more help and i thank you for that i just want people to know this industry has by anon taking care of our community for more years than we can ever count on and we can continue to count on this support the versity diversity's important you know what we've got it greet and you guys all heard that we were number one of all the islands and all that sort of stuff and the number one i could do you know we've got a golden corral don't let that golden cause it's a golden goose not mr holden calling mike no golden goose is you know as a negative connotation i like the col better association in the state of hawaii you know and in preparation i went to c b and said could you please tell me what the total contributions from the retail industry state wide are for you know the help market hawaii and the amount of money was what i spend in two and a half weeks at my one hotel so that's why that's why i feel it's very comfortable spending tax dollars whether it comes when the say came from the hotels or whether came from someone else i'm comfortable spending tax dollars to make sure that we're marketing to support the retailers the restaurants and activities that we all depend on the closing comments well thank you so much for for listening to us for the last day and a half and we really appreciate the support in the comments that you've made about the programs and and i want to just close with something just from me i i want to give you heard of all of the different programs were involved and all the grantees were involved with an amazing work for this county and i think you know if that had to be replaced by government doing the work it would probably cost as quadruple if not more than quadruple and so i think these programs are carried out by all of these private entities in our county are just so important and it does save the taxpayers money in the end because so much of this work would have to be done and it would cost us more and the last thing i want to say is i want to send a huge  to my entire staff some of them are watching on television some of them are here they're the ones interface with these people every day our grants manager tina silva has been i couldn't have done this presentation without her and i just have so much aloha from my staff and i'm grateful every single day to be working with such great people and that they care so much about our community and i'm very touched and i love working with them and our budget it's been to the finance committee will please come back to order members we're going to proceed with a review of the public works portion of the capitol room and i'm sorry the countywide equipment bond and staff has afternoon chair members of the committee dave good here part of public works and here to talk about the equipment bond items equipment items for department public works and this is all within the highways division i did hand out  some proposed revisions a total the same dollar amount to reflect our priorities as they've changed slightly since our submittal back and end of last year beginning of this year so make sure everybody has that ok our first item is actually in the special maintenance program general fund this is for the local road district just replace  if you ever seen it down there's a lot of big boulders and the d'sevyn struggles at times so we're not as efficient with that piece of gear this is been used a lot and it's time  fourth out this is a new item and expansion four thousand gallon water tanker truck we have an existing truck i believe it's slightly smaller we have in that district of course is just covers we have a lot of tall grass areas that are often on slopes down slopes up slopes etc and you can't get it to get to with a regular tractor more so you need this brush cutter that's qualls highest priority next item is for the easy skid steer was a very versatile little machine with a lot of different attachments there are shown five different attachments here that they can use allows and to get in small smaller working areas  better next more cairo district our street sweeper is fourteen years old used to five days a week when it's running and which is getting more and more time in the garage it's  two hundred thousand dollars and this is you know an integral part of what we do in all the districts that's number one need  it's it's had a lot of wear and tear we're looking upgrade slightly from a decent to a d seven again to handle you know be able to push more material as we need but not being too big that we can't get into areas that are tight  and so this is of again type piece of gear at this age it's got a lot of wear and tear and spends more time the garage a replacement of eighteen year old loader and so the new loaders probably three hundred eighty thousand dollars and again that age it's a lot more wear and tear more time  side a lot of internal bangs at the trailer portion and had has to be spend more time being welded and piece together it's fifteen years old so it's time to be replaced that's needs needs help on a so chair that summarized that's our current list it's the same as a lot of the same items so different items are original request the dollar amount is the questions or concerns cochran director do you have hours on this machine versus year i can get them i don't have hours on any of the machines just because i mean age is one thing on big then the dealer with and do what they what they can with it but they think the value is they could parted out they could sell another country and do all kinds of things with it ok thank chair something that mr good said piqued my interest when you said this trade in with the old equipment is the dollar amount here for the price new without the trade in or are you taking the trade in into account when you give us this request for fair question my understanding is that it takes into account the trade value wow so one point two million after trade in for d h yeah that's it's expensive piece of gear yeah i guess ok thank you well yeah it's at the point where we feel it's you know a new one is needed for both of them if it's if it's if it was a hand me down that we thought was you know usable something that would the other district would welcome and i have another piece of gear that's the same shape we have done that we do move pieces of gear in time to time but the district felt in this case that a job stall it costs contractors much more money so they realize of course every year machine's going to have less and less utility and at some point they cut it out so different businesses have different practices but the ones i'm familiar with the larger companies i don't think the cure is much older and five years on average that would that would surprise me the other question is you mentioned leasing but effectively with the with the bond equipment bond were are simply doing the same thing are w beneficial for the equipment bond one was that the interest rate the financing could basically are just financing options right the interest rate of the bonds that we're issuing is less then the interest rate of the  the net interest rate of the lease and the other factor is that we can you know this equipment we typically keep you know if you look at i don't know if i don't but a lot of the equipment that they're replacing is fifteen to twenty plus years old and if we're doing a ten year equipment bond we're paying that over only the ten years life cycle instead of a lease would be you know five years or something similar to that where so the annual operating expenditure is higher than the then if it was a bond payment that we're making as kind of the fact i wasn't suggesting that we should is eight million dollars this year and that would be a huge chunk to come out of operating to to pay for something immediately you know when the benefit of it is for the taxpayers a very on to the truck to say this is for the additional vehicle this is not a replacement of the one that's in the picture as i correct that's correct any questions members there are instances like we've had tsunami warnings etc that we want to have the water available there's been instances where not frequently but on occasion help water supply out if they need an area that's out and they had to deploy a water truck you know to service a neighborhood kind of thing so if we put reclaim water at it there's a series of steps that one needs to do it's almost like it is big clorox cleaning inside to the one point two million this particular equipment is going to be used on a full time basis or is it just every now and then because mr victor you know mentioned boulders come down after stores  that's not going to be three hundred sixty five days year and if there's another department has such a p c if it is use occasionally you can just grab from them yeah generally we're the only department has those rooms doesn't up and put them back more or less the way they are it takes a long time so we could have an operator there for three four months of the year this rearranging things you know generally starting like this time of the year but  we're yes we're not there every single day of the year so primarily just to get the investment versus usage you're saying typically four times four months a year could takers do we have on my way island and where are they located and i'm pretty sure we have one in every district so we have one and the and i think the sea solid waste should have won at least one pay at the landfill water supply i think has different types of tankers what i'm trying to get the sense of is just how many takers we have and other areas and other departments could be called into into service if the need arises rather than adding another know i'm not sure we got out there in time to do assist the fire department got out there sooner but generally when there's fresh type fires we get a call i know some of the other contractors in a case and they get well get calls as well so  do we generally operate to two good sized crews so it's not unusual to have a crew and he and a crew over here the same need for the same drug ok thank you you know the questions on the tanker truck i can know for a fact this is out of service time to time any questions on the brush cutter mr couch thing was chair of this brush cutter is that just the attachment arm that goes to this device or is it the whole mission the whole vehicle and the attachment device pretty sure it's a whole vehicle because it's it's built to handle that kind of leverage and having an arm out that far so we have an attachment in the back i can't recall ok so when it goes out what usually goes out is it is it the blade or the arm or all of the above or all the above so you can imagine that blade set up could be reaching out ten or twelve feet in the air and also reaching down below if the there's a steep there's a steep drop off so i guess what i'm leading to is can that blade and or that whole attachment be replaced and the vehicle itself be in good running condition it's possible that the whole unit it's twenty two years old at this point the along the shore there we as in certain places are not public works but because we've been doing it all these years people are expecting it there by what's going on why are you doing it  cochran the we have an ordinance that basically says if you have less than fifteen acres and say ag are all residential properties less than fifteen acres you're supposed to take care of the front range so over fifteen acres the county takes care of it so as you drive through the up country district in particular you're going to come across properties that were formerly twenty acres thirty acres now maybe even subdivided into five or six or two or something so there's a lot of areas that we've traditionally maintained and quite frankly continue to maintain even after this two thousand and seven corners change so we've been an education process and i've been on the public talking about  it various venues and trying to get the you know the public to step up and start taking care of some of these areas that said there's still a lot of fifteen acres and greater lots specially upcountry that were responsible for this and for that for the two twenty two hundred twenty thousand dollars price that includes all these attachments or not that's correct questions members as well ok questions on the purchase right so we go out to bid we describe it more generally so that we can get different types of that so that we something like the nine fifty j or equivalent usually different manufacturers have an equivalent product right ok for a lot of different things i mean it could be used to you know clean up and we have trees of all across the road only bucket up we've got to move it and we have to load just about any type of material in a dump truck to move it out  said mentioned here they the division mentioned about using with the asphalt zipper we're actually using we had this discussion here about what the asphalt zipper was a while ago well we've finally got here arrived and we've deployed it  they're pretty impressed with the results of that thing and i actually don't know exactly what they used to load or with with the zippers a lot with the zipper does is actually reconstitutes existing roadway and leads like a new base and then we  was very impressive that group our group went and you know a lot of work for whole lot less money do we had some contract so i think something like this along with all the other things it does is well well received and it's not only for our ok and do any other questions members mr any further questions on any of the other items on public works mr couch thank you mr chair on pretty much all of these items i notice a lot of them are quite old and it just seems like it's the luck of the draw that they all hit at this time or do you have another set of equipment for next year that's about the same age and when eventually are we going to get to hey all of our equipment is only about five or six years old because almost every time every year you've come here a lot of this equipment is pretty old and has been replaced in a long time so what are we going to get out of that old stuff and that's that's i think what i could do is may provide a list of all the equipment we have and the and it's age portion is council has been very helpful last couple of years in providing a lot of money to replace equipment which we've been doing prior to that we got  zero for a couple to three years and so and prior to that i'm not sure what the numbers were but those zeros just delay things right and so that's why we've been having to come back we're very grateful a so i could act i could come up with some kind of list i guess and try to look at the whole idea of like wow are we and what's coming we have we have fifteen years worth of fifteen year old equipment every year so it's always go it's better that everybody chip in on it not just the people who are here now and anybody who comes later in the form of debt service as opposed to pay for it and ash right now is kind of everybody easing about seven hundred forty thousand dollars of unbudgeted whitman and you explain to us why you spent it on the items you purchased instead of on any one of these replacement items or additional items replace the type equipment what number should like we plugging in and sometimes those numbers are good sometimes or overestimate and we've had occasions where there underestimated but they realize that we're giving them a budget number so we have a little bit of play  and so this year we had some items where we'd quest i think two or three of something only bought one because of some other needs we felt like were being met and we had some savings so when we had the savings and equipment we looked to see you know what our current needs were and then we go through a process that's called temps traveling quitman purchase looking at sandy and the name for it but if we're if we want have had slight savings and some electricity so it all added up to us being able to purchase  yeah i can remember which district that was in we don't have an idea what that district was for either it's like it was some of them it was here i think it might be purchase it ok correct all right so something the only reason it's that equipment isn't on the list is because you already but you just bought correct ok thank you members any other questions for public works if not thank you very much director right thank you and thousand water truck at the central valley landfill to help us with our control then we have have at the since my lunch will roll on roll off truck to help us with the residential bins that we have there we have some you know foreign residents come in to drop their trash off for free we have the bins that the truck would help us take to the face of the landfill and then we have a loader that helps us with maintenance of the landfill and then we have the three refuse trucks to refuse trucks in and one in la i know and so with joe we can get into details if you has sixteen thousand hours on it it is reaching nearly nine and a half years old but the hours are a little more critical than the actual age of the equipment this is definitely a workhorse at the landfill and needed on a daily basis where you have over seventy five acres of land space there at the landfill that that has to be available for on a regular basis maintenance cost per year averaging about fifty thousand dollars a year over the last two years and the downtime that we've experienced there is or for five hundred hours a year so roughly thirty five days a year of down time so what that corresponds to is additional premium paid to get work done at the end of the day using other equipment that whether that's a back or something else is less efficient so  what we see this is as i reached the end of its useful life and our cost for maine is beyond what the value of it is ok and you didn't request a dozer last year right no i don't believe so i don't i don't have records for every landfill right in front of me for last year but i don't believe we did we don't show one on my list members questions regarding the dozer mr couch d were do you get that price and we've got a quote for roughly i think that quote that we got was about a year ago at nine hundred and ninety five thousand i believe so we do put in factors for inflation and based on the time from then to when we actually will put this out to bid so we have to factor that in as well but we did get multiple calls for that equipment it is expensive as your mr good ass want for one similar ours requires special bleed and special equipment to be utilized for landfill use  ok this is a four thousand gallon water truck also at the central my landfill this is actually a a new piece of equipment not a replacement we do have an existing truck however that truck is mainly for potable water use and not for leach hauling this truck that we're looking to get now will mainly be used for leach hollinger on a regular basis as well as during emergencies as you guys may or may not be aware we've had some we have a compliance permit that requires us to limit the amount of leach dead is accumulated in the landfill so this piece of equipment is directly related to that questions on the water truck numbers yeah i know that the this four thousand go and taker is costing three hundred thousand versus public works at three hundred ninety five thousand you know what the difference is the road ability or i'm not a sure of what sarees are components they might have on there but different trucks thank you and you don't have other access to other water trucks to use for this purpose we would potentially and we have utilize outsourcing from contractors available for that however our needs are on a on a pretty routine basis and sometimes an emergency basis in the middle of the night depending if there's a you know two three four days worth of rain where we have to corrosive that it's at times difficult to find to outsource that at all other than you know most of those other vehicles they use them for non potable water uses but the older water truck that we do have there that is utilize in the past from in house but the truck is not geared up to actually sustain us for hauling leach because it doesn't have the stainless components inside that truck so our plan was to keep the old one keep it in repair and maintain that one and use that for our non potable water uses central maui  and get this new truck with stainless components to actually enable us to haul the lead that other truck not made for for hauling of this kind of material so we will make use of both and both can actually also be utilized in and out of the islands as well in the case of if we had to ship it from time to time but the outsourcing of the not reliable for us to meet their required compliance how long have we not been able to meet the required compliance with what we have existing i would say we've been fortunate in that we've been able to maintain leach eight levels with research relating within the facility however it is a risk that we would rather not continue to take any further is one of those things where we're trying to be proactive to try and realize ok this is something we should have we did get into some trouble a couple of years back with department of health and we can provide that data but we did we did receive a fine from them for leach i think it was hundred twenty one thousand just a couple years back for this very related type of an issue ok but this is the first time you're requesting i believe so and i would have to double check what i believe so yes ok thank you ok we have a roll off truck at central my landfill that we'd like to be replaced this is actually a two thousand and four g m c truck that we have there so it will be ten and a half to eleven years old by the time we replace it the mileage on it is about one hundred ninety thousand miles with over thirteen thousand miles thirteen thousand hours on it this truck does allow for basically it's used at the drop off area for residents to comment take our bins from up top down to the working face of the landfill so we're constantly relocating those up and back so this is more of a safety concern and customer service concern that we have it presently because this existing one is basically in operable and hasn't been used for over the last six months to a year i believe because it's just the repairs cost exceed the value of the equipment so for the two hundred fifty thousand we can get a new a new roll off chalk to enable us to address the safety concerns because if we don't re bins fast enough the public will keep we'll keep loading them up top and they're not as concerned about where that level of trash is as we are of course but when the wind's blowing around down there there's a safety concern of wind blown debris  as well as just customer service if we're not resort to leaving them fast enough so this is something that definitely justified in our opinion to provide that customer service and address the landfill loaders are an essential piece of equipment necessary to maintain and operate our landfills there's times when our existing loader isn't available or in repairs so having this not only using using it on a day to day basis but also as backup at times when that existing loader goes down again keeping in mind we do have over seventy five acres of land there and this is another main workers for us there it's also would be utilized as a backup for hannah and sometimes when this equipment goes down it's down for weeks and sometimes months at a time so in times like those we would even ship this questions on the stick out he was here is that the same thing as a nine fifty j loader so different i'm not sure what the j designation is for it's probably a specialty type of bucket perhaps on the front of that piece of equipment we can try to get that information for you if you want from public buys might have a picture when our existing one goes down we were either having to fermat out to other contractors to come in to help us out the landfill or we're just without and having to use like a backhoe or something like that which is extremely inefficient as you can imagine for that type of purpose but so we use that to move our litter screens around the landfill which are big massive screens that help litter from blowing up top we use it to load dump trucks we grade the tipping area with those trucks and we remove and relocate debris that's surrounding the landfill and rentals are available and we have expanded cost for those however for our day to day how much we spent on repairs i don't have the actual repair cost right now i do know that we have it down on the order of ten to fifteen times a year and each particular time can be a matter of days up to a matter of a couple of weeks and that varies but it has become increasingly more so but again this reason for this new piece of equipment was not only for central mind but also to be utilized as backup for one on one i am a look i so we saw it as a multi purpose kind of piece of equipment that we could kind of do what similar to what mr victorian i was saying kind of on an in house basis for all of our landfills so that  over nine years old estimated useful life industry wide is is on the order of five to seven years the reason it's so short is because of the the level of use that these vehicles get automated trucks there's thousands and thousands of pics on these things and it simply gets use in that fashion and that's why the useful life is so short  that being said we've also done some studies as to the amount of maintenance costs that we've had in that's on the order of one hundred ten thousand dollars a year over the last two years on average for truck number thirteen eighty two and over one hundred thousand dollars a year for truck number thirteen eighty four in repair costs if you look at your dividing the cost for the truck by that cost you can see that it is more expensive to repair this thing than it is to buy new when it when it reaches a level in addition to that we have approximately fifteen percent down time which is about three days a month being  offline when you compare that to the amount of missed routes that we have been delayed routes upcountry it becomes a significant community impact when it gets to this level so our recommendation is to replace both of these trucks i don't have that right in front of me here i can certainly get that the reason i ask is we approve to twenty cubic yard automated trucks for a country in last year's budget right i think another component of that question is the total number of automated routes versus manual we can get that information maybe even before we're done here i can have a further counsel ok thank you  i can try to get that information for you we might it's about four hundred nine thousand each so we have a factor of for inflation in there so we have enough in our budget to pay for the new ones  to the last item  this is actually also will be about nine years old again estimated useful life industry wide is five to seven years the mileage on this thing is nearly one hundred thousand miles as well  the challenge we have with this and any equipment from line is that it's actually traveling not only picking up the route but bringing it all the way to the central maui landfill the repair and maintenance cost over the past couple years averaging close to sixty thousand dollars a year and the occurrences per year is about thirty six days where it's where it's been offline on average for the for the past two years so when this happens as with any of our refuse trucks as well as the one that is mentioned a mock well when the truck is offline whether it happens on the road or whether it's just off lying what that equates to is additional premium pay potentially when staff has to do a double route that day or come back in the next day on overtime to do that route so that component of cost is on the order of about three hundred fifty dollars per room when that takes place so that's about twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year that we spend on this particular truck just in premium pay when it's offline so that's a component that we use to determine whether something is worthwhile to continue to repair and maintain versus replace ok thank  there is one automated truck and one manual truck there in line as you can't use both obviously for either use we use our automated trucks i'm sorry those back ups or that's it's one automated one manual only there are backups we would utilize trucks from central ok mochel or linus so we kind of have a pool of vehicles that can be used at any of those three  i believe we only have one my notes say here is one auto and one manual backup so at times when any equipment is down we can absorb that but with all the vehicles we have island  wide when more than one goes down in an area that's when we're experiencing the overtime for a double row or for bringing somebody in using the same piece of equipment on a double shift ok but these are the trucks that are being replaced this year will be wholly in the one or two of those pieces as backup no we would not these are trucks that we feel are not fiscally responsible to repair or rehab at this point the other question members discussion thank you so this is the same type of vehicle as the previous two that you're asking for correct yet the other two are i think the four zero nine four nine was the quote that we had that we had gotten when we put our budget together i'm sorry if there was a misunderstanding there so we put a factor of inflation in there to ensure we have enough money in the budget to cover it when this actually goes out to bid you know we're talking august september of this year ahead thank you gentlemen for being here i i have some questions in regards to your employee expansion and i know and and five dash fifty six and i have quite a number of pages but all in all is that start with five dash fifty six on the solid ways it ministration program  was expansion for a civil engineer three you have other civil engineers for mechanical engineer and  the other engineers cannot deal with the brittle tar compliance support  in general looking at the past ten years of history of the division and looking at our regulatory compliance track record i would i would say unequivocally no we have looked at division why it is first of all engineering responsibilities those specifically associated with regulatory compliance as well as all of our operations and engineering projects at our landfills and close landfills we have a number of areas that we're not even doing the work that we should be doing now in so we've already had to prioritize in a very strict manner but just refreshingly we do have on average two or ten c h p projects ongoing over forty regulatory permits in the division and on the order of fifty operations engineering projects on three islands and haunt us so you know our current engineering stuff is well under staffed to address it in a sustainable and compliant manner i would say  i mean not that i agree with your explanation but i can appreciate that also you have on page five does sixty five and you said central landfill  your construction equipment mechanic too but you also see you have a construction mechanic equipment construction equipment getting to and mechanic one are those both so right now you don't have any mechanics is that what i'm told is that that's correct so repairs right now we outsource almost all of our repairs that go on a central mali just to give you an order of understanding of our infrastructure we have probably over fifty million dollars worth of heavy rolling equipment and our landfills without any in house mechanics or maintenance staff whatsoever currently some of our stuff goes what they can i will say that some of that work but eventually  class work that they're doing that being said our thoughts with these with these mechanics is in building a beginning of a maintenance program for us central maui landfill to enable longer term planning and tracking of our main its needs there and we don't have anybody that's dedicated to do that whatsoever right now so it's kind of a run to failure and then the equipments down is down for a longer period of time because it's on plan we want to create i mean is a program there this is the start of that and the start of this maintenance connection program that's similar to what we see water has done over the last five or six years we're actually planning in tracking and forecasting maintenance needs rather than just running to failure obviously outsourcing that takes time and your downtime is much longer than it should be and more expensive even with all the  down time perspective i mean to have this amount of men in our landfills without any in house staff whatsoever to do routine maintenance i'm not talking these guys aren't going to be replacing heavy heavy equipment replacement they're going to be taking care of hydraulic hoses and lines and and doing routine maintenance items that can keep it running and taking it offline on a plan basis versus running it to failure and i'll sourcing it when it's down for days when it could be just planned for our so there's a physical component as well as the actual environmental and community service component address ok the other one i have is the land fill equipment operator for honda i can see the need for that but when we were and your president made mention of the contracting off green also managing or prepping the greenways for community use green waste by itself if it's not processed  is relatively easy if the public wanted to come and pick that up i think the disparity there is that the public can honna potentially may want compost which is what we've heard or mulch which requires processing  this position that we're asking for here is actually to give us a dedicated operator at the end to allow the working supervisor there to manage this a to oversee it to do planning to do budgeting operator abilities there is the supervisor and that person is out on the working face a majority of the time we obviously are able to do that management and oversight so we have a disparity there certainly if there were responses regarding working with the honda community to come up with a local solution for processing of green waste into actual compost or mulch that would be available so we're actively seeking out as solid ways that's correct yeah without any expansion positions without any additional budget per se for that what our vision was was to create a new division with the same employees but have the ability for them  to have priorities that are landfill diversion and recycling orientated rather than being combined with the operations program which as council knows and as the county is mentioned that combining of that is been difficult because a priority is for landfill that it is heavily regulated from an operation perspective versus recycling and diversion has different sets of goals and priorities the thought is taking councils suggestions from last year and some of the criticisms that we've had is to create this to try to solve and make it a win win for not only the landfill in operations to be able to dedicate that effort there but also for recycling diversion to have their own division to be able to focus on their priorities ok thank you i appreciate it i really hoped there would be more consideration to sort of  combine all the regulatory oversight i mean you know how many pages do you have for each land or how many closures you out and why do you have to especially if you want to call them that every other landfill that to meet the closure or compliance requirements it's like right now you mentioned i think you bring somebody from the mainland right you have that outsourced is that  correct no chair for some of our regulatory compliance efforts at some of our landfills yes we do bring in consultants from the mainland to do that it's some of it's very highly specialized and highly technical  only happen every quarter or once a year some some of these reports so we bring in outsourcing for that that's a little different work than the operators that we're talking about our landfills that actually do the operation or that the very propose your folks proposed budget for them one five five zero zero and i'm wondering does that encompass them picking up appliances in the neighborhood and it gives a brief description of what it is they provide services miss cochrane staff has mentioned that that's in the admin section not in the operations not of solid waste operations and suited to manage it so i think last year was the first year that it was transferred to us and so they provide you know the various services for you know little pick ups invasive species removal they can go on private property whereas we can't so we utilize them in that aspect a lot indeed they do some training education for us they do hold some community recycling you see some of the adopt a highway type deals that they're helping out with right well i'm looking to see if they can assist with household appliance pick up in neighborhoods because as i understand at least in the hina it's been difficult with staffing and what have you and it's kind of not like on the high list of priorities to do so things tend to sit month week after week and up into months perhaps a time so i thought if more fine you could go to these folks to me in corporate this type of service into under their  umbrella or something to that effect having been in public works i remember when we had this roadside littering issue and whenever there was a problem with appliances i would say in community work day at the time a notice telling them what was there i would get in tory of what appliances were there i would send them a map where it was located roughly and then they could pick it up if people are leaving their appliances on the side of the road then then we can certainly we've certainly used them in that aspect if their people want to get us to pick it up then you know they shouldn't be leaving on the side of the road until we let them know when we're scheduling that pick up i think we try to call at least twenty four hours in advance we try to notify them hey we're going to have it this week or we're going to have it tomorrow but your clients all put your street your your street number on it so that we know we're picking up the right one so you can be can assist with that and they have they have ok but i would like to take it off your plate i haven't spoken to them i'm just saying what kind of figure though do you feel they would need in order to incorporate it into their current level of service is what i'm trying to out that would be something we'd have to check with them because you know they're going to want to know how often and if it's island wide they already pretty much handle island wide because we do get a lot of public complaints and then we asked him to go out and they'll send the guy out and take a look at it we're supporting them in the landfill diversion grant process also with some additional funding to help them to i think in the past we've we've provided them with funds to purchase a vehicle a truck to help with the lift gate so that they can lift the appliances into the truck so we've we've supported them in that aspect of it and to be honest i really don't know how much more they would want if it was going to be they would want to know how much do we  increasing above what they normally do now right ok just to bounce it off you folks and west maui has there been discussion at all in regards to transfer site or something yeah we've actually you know oh a few years back we actually looked tried look for recycling center and that was a failure because it was just so difficult in the prices of the language looking for wor was out there was just expensive the one site i was thinking about was like you saying you know in that area where that industrial area above the cannery mall in that area and when w looked at that you know we would need probably two or three vacant lots adjacent to each other similar to what i think highways had done and they had bought several lots so that big you have a contiguous base yard they need about two or three vacant lots and it's those lo mainly in line and in that area so now we're we're driving to drive back and then we drive in i guess it's like you're saying it would take us longer to respond in the morning we probably you know if we probably started five in by time we get to the first  might be five thirty a little bit later but it timing wise it can be a challenge because now it's taking longer to get there are you picking up the same amount of time and then driving to the landfill so they maybe even get one done but the landfill but if they need to get a second they may not be able to do it you know in that day the timing of it the landfill close three o'clock the landfill close the so you can imagine trying to make two trips to the landfill in one day from the line area so the entire new base your strictly dedicated to solid waste would it help assisted in all of that cochran i'm  ask you to have this conversation on the side since it's not necessarily something that we're able to deal with right now i was looking to maybe put money in the budget but going to mr boss in regards to all the heavy equipment we just discuss know and even listening to the discussion today the needs of the different departments in the types of equipment they're purchasing the specifications are different for each each you quitman so i don't know that we get necessarily a better deal tryin bundle in by two da three deeds at once or anything like that because they're so different in what they're asking for but i can definitely purchasing and see if if they can work that on the equipment as well but definitely for the vehicle purchase as we do that we've been thinking you know you have overarching companies hawthorne john deere they all carry all these different varieties of equipment so if you went to one company and said hey we want  they may look at us and say wow we're going to you know we're going to spend eight million dollars on equipment and they're all happy just because they know what's coming to as far as a bid is coming but we can't negotiate with them to say hey you know if we buy all of this equipment from you then can you give us a better deal that it's not allowed by state procurement so unfortunately gay members we're going to move on to the office of the county auditor and i want to thank a public here in the c b d at six and since the clerks are handling the public hearing section if we can't get to them by five will take them up after the public hearing so with that sixteen budget of the coughs the county auditor as you know where the mission of the county auditors office is to serve as a catalyst for positive change in county government through focus independent audit said examinations advocate for efficient appropriate use of public resources increased government efficiency improve service in the transactional public business in both the legislative and executive branches we have here two very rigorous and demanding professional audit requirements described in generally accepted government auditing standards more commonly known as yellow book standards these are the same standard utilized by the state auditor and the other county auditor offices throughout the state and the mail at the office of the county auditor has completed its charter mandated projects which includes the audit of the comprehensive annual financial report for fiscal year two thousand and fourteen which we transmitted on january twenty seventh two thousand and fifteen the audit of the department of water supply financial report for fiscal year two thousand and fourteen which we transmitted on february fifth two thousand and fifteen the single audit reports for the federal financial assistance programs for fiscal year two thousand and fourteen which we transmitted on march nineteenth two thousand and fifteen these authors were poor and by using with oversight from our office in addition to these audits our contract with any c p s was amended to include an audit of the supplementary schedule of six for the section eight programs and to perform agreed upon procedures for the section eight and home programs these audit's and procedures were completed as of march twenty two thousand and fifteen regarding these self initiated projects examination of the funk treasury function of the department of finance was completed and transmitted on april second improvement and maintenance practices is also in the field work stage of the audit originally the audit of the county pierrot's was a project goes identified to be outsourced to a contractor however we have been looking into conducting a similar audit and house and continues to provide limited administrative support to the government commission our support is limited to procurement over technical writer and processing of invoices general support at the close of government meetings including posting and copying budget the fiscal year two thousand and sixteen budget request for salary in re wages is three hundred sixty six thousand dollars which is composed of the salaries for the county audit auditor two senior sure do you want me to you can just go through the remainder of your budget for operations we are requesting in the total of seven hundred ninety six thousand and four hundred fifty dollars  primarily large numbers are composed of a four hundred fifty thousand dollar requests for audit services in addition included in the audit services is an allowance for a possible outsourced audit within the next fiscal year the other large appropriation in the be a common would be the professional services appropriation of two hundred thousand dollars i just want to note that  the professional services appropriation is primarily for consultants that we may require going to cost of an audit depending upon what the audit subject is there may be a need to hire third party engineers or perhaps legal counsel part of the two hundred thousand dollars that we are requesting for professional services also would be a  contingency in case we would not be able to cure the third party audit with the hundred thousand dollars that we provided for in audit services from twenty two hundred dollars to thirty five thousand yes ok an index called nine zero one zero one three training and registration fees  we are transferring from index code nine zero one zero one three six two five zero so that continuing to request is a transfer from cards to rental of office equipment there is a decrease of ten thousand dollars on this was primarily due to a three thousand dollars budget transfer to a different index co and the seven thousand reduction because we do not anticipate renting additional office equipment the primary driver for this services in terms of our portion of what would be needed for the software upgrade  under cost of government commission the cost of government commission i transmit their budget requests through my office to the count's not to the mayor and the council and because a government commission has requested a fifteen thousand dollar commissioner from illinois that commissioner commutes on the ferry so there's some ferry there is an additional expense for free rides and ran a car because the ferry lands in the high now and he has to drive over and return the car the other portion of the increase was primarily due to from a from the understanding that there may be a commissioner from if there is a commissioner from will car that would be coming to the monthly meetings then that commissioner would probably have to fly and depending upon the flight schedules i think possibly overnight stay but those were the considerations primary considerations for why the close of government requested fifteen thousand dollars more than the prior year cost of government commission had a twenty thousand dollars appropriation a large part of the appropriation was used to hire a technical writer the technical writer says the cost of government commission with compiling the the technical writers position was partially in response to my my initial request that there is some independence between the cost of government commission and my office my concern when we started to take over the ministry of duties from the office of the mayor was that i i supported there are requests to get a technical writer the technical writer by the way has been something that for certain i think even under the when they were supported for under the they were provided a technical writer for i don't know the pasts for three four years i think so that was still consistent carrying over from the prior years the four fifty the lion's share of the four fifty is for the required moderates we do have an amount that we put in which was about one hundred thousand dollars which  we put into the budget because we wanted to possibly if if we could outsource one of the audience in the course of hiring on my second auditor who has experience in the  area of audits we decided to not outsource it so this year will be lapsing that hundred thousand dollars you know our current budget requests we still provide that hundred dollars there because we would like to outsource an audit if possible if it's the right type of audit and we also have a additional hundred thousand in the professional services area as and case this audit would cost more than one hundred thousand in my conversations with the state auditor in general a small audit that is outsourcing to be done under yellow book now trying to see if that's viable we could i i struggle to find what is sustainable i could hire another auditor but that's a long term commitment because along with the salary comes the training comes benefits and all of this so i'm trying you know i think i have a good base now and i'm trying to see what can work but before making that commitment i you thank you i don't have any questions but when are you meetings held your cost of government meetings that would have the potential overnight stay the course of government is right now  they've moved the time to ten o'clock so it's from ten to generally twelve sometimes they go over but i know with the line i commissioner he is able to come in the morning he just six i don't know how many testifiers we anticipate this evening but i think it's generally relatively quick so if they want to take we can do one of two things we can either break now for dinner and take the clerks after dinner or after the public hearing or take them now and have a shorter dinner break break now for dinner and we'll take the clerks up after oh it's me and the budget and finance committee will come back to order members we're going to proceed with the review of the office of the county clerk and we have with us a clerk dan it and so mr clerk would you please provide your opening comments and then proceed with the presentation of your budget chair white and members of the budget and finance committee thank you for the opportunity of being able to join you this evening for the committee's information i'd like to a very briefly highlight a few of the successes as well as the challenges facing the clerk's office in f english and connell and we're currently working in conjunction with the state office of elections on the state why voter registration program a law allowing for online voter registration which should be going online we see in a few months and successfully rejuvenating the young voters registration program in rolling several hundred high school seniors through their state pre registration program and further we continue to strengthen our educational and informational program awareness awareness program as we now turn to our your vote count initiatives now in at the youngsters in our elementary schools a few of the challenges that we will be addressing in this upcoming fiscal year includes digitizing the huge backlog of county documents same day registration during the absentee walk in period during the primary and general elections space issues for our election section in the twenty sixteen election season an increased possibility of an all male voting process currently being looked at through various bills in the state legislature and the clerk's office has been advised of potentially five initiatives from various groups that are looking looking into the initiative processes and the five potential initiatives includes establishing street voting establishing a county manager form of government prohibit of sugar cane burning prohibiting riding in the back of pickup trucks and legalization of marijuana those are initiat es that are currently being looked at by a variety of individuals with that taking care of at this point i thank you for the opportunity of sharing our successes and challenges and i have had the opportunity to meet review and discuss our proposal with each one of the members regarding our proposal and mr cure of it's ok i will just go right in to  in members questions on the air accounts shown on pages three dash three through three to five spicer everything looks pretty flat except of course the expansion position mystically could you tell us a little bit more about what you need this person that might help then thank you for the question  member by so the position that we're looking at is a position to provide additional services to primarily the clerk and the end  this point in time deputy and i we primarily do our own correspondence e mails scheduling spro grams and the like and some of the programs that involves a lot of time for example is a program that we've embarked on which is the young voter registration program that is a program that involves numerous hours trying to schedule ourselves to get into the schools to digitized and the individual would also be available to help us greatly in that in that regard the individual will also assist with our elections warehouse operations but i would imagine that it takes a lot of time that could better be used by yourself to do so well at this point remember by so there's a lot of requests for documents and general information for example there are real  popular requests for one we get most frequent these requests for birth certificates marriage certificates death certificates and the like and because of the requirement to provide a response within ten days no questions on  purpose they also provide training opportunities for the new camps coming in with the shorter terms those with the twelve month period go through more extensive training because we also used to miss trainers are those the twelve month staff are the regulars that come every other year or do you have to retrain every time they become about you know a year before the yeah every every election goodman training actually kind of never stops in our office you know elections is such a moving target so to say and things are always happening and things are always coming up at the last minute so our stuff undergoes constant training throughout the year most of the people that are indicated on the twelve month as temporary election clerks these individuals are really rely on them for providing services during election days all of the polling places call into our office and we rely on these individuals to basically answer all the questions and put out fires during those days in addition because of a bill that passed i believe last legislative session of the previous one we're going to be allowing voter registration during the absentee walking period previously was thirty days prior to the election so that's going to put an additional strain on our staff to be able to take and influx of individuals who are looking to register to vote during the basically about ten day period prior to each election at this time because the state of hawaii has never done this before we don't know the volume of individuals that will get into our office but we will definitely have a better idea after the twenty sixteen election so you start your recruiting you're recording right now then  o yeah i mean we do have individuals on twelve months schedule as a temporary election clerk that are currently working in our office well i'm i'm impressed that you're able to hire people that us in compared to a lot of other departments just waiting around trying to get people hired thank you thank you mr victory and i think they've done a fine job thank you thank you mr clarke on the temporary hires those who you show as seven six five and four and a half month positions when would you bring those individuals on ahead of the two thousand and sixteen election what month would they be brought on i mean basically you just come back from that june thirtieth end of the fiscal year so you know if you have a six month temporary election clerk will bring them in roughly january a seven month would be about december or so what i'm asking is prior to the election these people serving four and a half months or they serve four and a half five or six months prior to the election itself so if you just take one example like a six month temporary election clerk for f y sixteen we would hire them basically around january first or january second two thousand and sixteen and then they would work through the end of that fiscal year and then we would come in again in f y seventeen asking for an appropriation for them to continue working through the rest of the election cycle and most of our attempts the majority of them stay on to roughly about november thirtieth of last year of this fiscal year running from beginning of july through november i guess i would be well yeah well mr clarke we're not hiring like for the  mean herring that you know mr chair when we're asking for a temporary election clerk for six months we're not necessarily hiring them on july first of that fiscal year so we're hiring them for a six month period but it may start january first within that fiscal year so what you made reference to that that zero zero one three six months previously and six months for this election year i mean for this fiscal year that would basically run from a ok i still feel like we're double booking the number you provide us with a schedule of when when you will be hiring these people for the next election and i just wanted to be sure to note that the two positions that were recognized as vacant one was the council information and reference technician and the other was the elections warehouse technician the first position the paperwork has already been forwarded to personnel that position is is is filled the other position the elections warehouse position that particular position we are in process of securing names so we could in fact fill that particular position so just to clarify the question on vacancy ok thank you thank you moving on to the account the items that i would like to highlight are the in operations are the contractual services which is subject is six one one two that is fourteen thousand dollars for the audio consultant contract and six one three two professional services that would is six one zero one advertisement that includes the radio and print elections in p s ace for elections the six one three zero for print and binding is twenty five thousand dollar recognition for sitting it's for the white and yellow cards and the absentee walk mail outs and subcode six one three two this covers professional services the hundred five thousand is for the hard to intercept a contract renewal which is our elections vendor and twenty five thousand is for our yes thank you chair mr clerk on the professional services this would be subject to six one three two zero what is this additional funding needed for renewal of the heart enters into your civic contract you know what it is that is a contract with can you can you go into details yeah thank clarke if you could explain what the twenty five thousand dollars increases for imogene for additional funding for imaging i'm assuming that's not taking pictures of the council members year for storage space maintaining some of these legislative records that according to state law will be able to image and then possibly get rid of it depending on the  feeling of the council and the chair at that time when we get to that point but basically this project is to help us save money in the long term with warehousing costs as well as help to catch us up to date so that  the general public will have easier access to legislative documents thank you just to add a little bit to that members we have in storage contracts dating back to nineteen forty one so part of the challenge here is deciding what to image and whether to there's some savings if you image everything and obviously then you can make it all available relatively easily the clerk and deputy clerk rightfully are not terribly excited about going through every document in storage and deciding what to image and i don't have any great desire to do that either and i'm not sure any of you would like to do that so that's part of the review that they're going through and the reason for this increased expense  k i'm comfortable with the other expenditures any further questions members other may be our elections assistant members of national association of election officials they also are members of and i don't know the name of the organization but they run these conferences called election centers and basically it's an organization that tries to bring together similar to like neko bringing together all the county officials they bring together election officials from across the nation and the dues provide them hundred dollars that the request is includes the additional monitor that includes the chamber sound system and finally the portable systems for their respective district offices and ms cochrane the other monitor at this point looks like it's going to go on that far wall just because when you when you look at the  biological breaks we can continue to hear the hear our counsel meetings will there be any is the any speakers in the restrooms i mean we don't want to wait please year our old system and i apologize i don't know exactly the terminology i believe is like phantom power something that the old system cannot provide enough phantom power to run a speaker through the eighth floor bathroom however with if we do replace the system in our funding is a proof for that that new system would be able to accommodate that and we would be able to install a one way speaker in the bathroom or mr couch can bring his own that's mean of the budget and finance committee will come back to order numbers the staff is available this evening and tomorrow morning up until ten o'clock if you need any questions answered in the preparation of your while we complete our budget preparation and then budget proposals would be accepted at four o'clock tomorrow afternoon and will be for me any time now well as as you know we sometimes have questions as to whether we can do it that way or not so ricky's feeling is that we turn them in any time  still saying that we need to do it in open session so we will but between now and ten o'clock tomorrow morning we will make a decision so will advise of that to our morning  o leave it at that so we will be back here at ten in the morning and and we look forward to receiving your proposals for  ok with that we are