minutes to testify a two and a half minute blinking light will notify you that your you have thirty seconds to conclude at this point i'm going to go ahead and ask if we have any testifiers present in is nat davis followed by michael rain and for selecting us as one of the first businesses to participate in the program made it possible for me to bring a line of software complex case management here that would have gone offshore without it really made our little outfit on maui  hundred seventy five thousand dollars worth of matching money to maui county as we're well in excess of the four hundred k we were originally were promised based on this one hundred seventy five k in our case and our particular case since we're programming software almost all of this money both you know the ground and then the matching funds have gone to the local economy in terms of salaries for my people benefits the rent on the office things like that we have five people on staff as promised the software is ready for beta testing and we're improving it every day we're still working on it of course we've submitted three proposals already for him we have another marketing weapon are to tomorrow morning you know commuting back and forth to too close to reach and or or again if it weren't for this i appreciate so very much and you know so so to my kids very very grateful to you for this so i hope very much that you continue to fund this wonderful program for more businesses here on now and and bring more opportunities here to the island thank you thank you members seventy questions or comments  groundbreaking we are and space breaking we are actually developing a medical diagnostic platform that we're under space act agreement with nasa and we will be putting this platform up on the international space station starting later next year if it's going to open up discovery for cancer cures stem cell research pharmaceutical companies are interested in this and we too are just very were under separate contract making three three telescopes for them for tracking the mars orbiter so a lot of excitement and i will just say doing business in hawaii is challenging i've been told by many investor groups if you were in silicon valley you'd have the venture capital crawling all over to to try to invent vest and and do that so things like the e t f grant really helps us to attract out outside investors things like the state s i are matching grant we've been recipients of those as well for the small business innovative research projects that we get manufacturing grants and so on all of those things help to make you know to incentivize and motivate high tech companies to help develop this basis and your due to your support and all that encourage you to include continue on in the future i think it pays really large dividends and we're just very thankful and want want to my name is jerry smith and i'm the director of business development for the maui economic development board thank you mr chairman the committee members for having this hearing today and for including the economic development revolving fund on the agenda the goal of the economic economic development is to create an environment an infrastructure for attracting assisting and retaining new business new and expanding businesses create jobs over two hundred years hopefully a living wage new economic activity creates new wealth which is then spent in the economy with and leads to additional job creation public investment such as the economic development revolving fund helps induce and economic activity and private capital investment in a jurisdiction in which such activity or investment would not otherwise take place additionally the fund has contributed to an ever growing landscape of entrepreneurs and through our communities the e t f d e r f is not unique similar programs exist at the city county and state level across the united states these city county and state level programs have many things in common they require matching funds from the recipient their warded using independent peer review process and they seek a living wage jobs and their grants rather than loans from l a county's investment of eight hundred seventy five thousand dollars there was an additional investment of over two million dollars in private equity for these four projects these projects will add an almost immediate infusion of three million dollars economy and if shown the promise of creating over thirty jobs they predicted over the course of the project is solely responsible for the accelerating economic activity the private capital investment and the creation of new jobs without it the activity would have been delayed or not happened at all we applaud the county's wisdom in foresight and in approving the original any d p with its innovation committee was very pleased to assist the office of economic development with the drafting of the after serving on the evaluation committee and staying in touch with the progress of the grantees the results are very encouraging and are evidence of why public investment programs like that are part of economic development strategies across the good afternoon aloha committee chair good men and the members of this excellent committee i am in here today on my own but i am  letting you know that i am a descendant royal heir of fact and i am come to speak with the guards to the proposer they consider renewal of the concession of the parking lot my involvement with the when the organization was under the executive director ship of qana we spoke of many things back then he was i remember so expressing how happy he was that some of the prophecies were coming to pass that families where we turning to a line or i even became a kumu you know doing the walking tours taking the people throughout line so that they could observe and learn of our history through a whole line perspective and firsthand really saw how much they got and gained and i did too because as we kept to keep talking and learning more so i really think that was a still going on i am no longer a coom in fact when my brother moved to mali he became a kumu so this is a good program that they do that helps the visitors learn much about our history through a whole in perspective which is too rare these days one of the memorable experiences i had with them was the official visit from r so now we've all come to know the more cool is there under the park that has become that eventually became known after a couple of major landfills as a park my concern here is that i am greatly  concerned that the renewal of the concession for the parking lot perpetuates the profound conflict of interest because that because the one of but yet it creates this conflict of interest because most of the island lays underneath that parking lot and eventually it has to be the part of the parking that has to be removed so it's just such a as you mention that you were around since khana days was that all part of the bigger picture was that the idea to have this educational component of sorts i guess i was just trying to tie in with that and the mini's generated from the concession in the restoration aspect of all of this is supposed to tie into what you recall him being talked about and  relationship between he kind of get what i'm trying to i think so well the guided the educational tours they were doing was part of the fund raising we only got paid fifty dollars per tour that was for the two hours throughout the town and no matter how many people are on the tour and we did this lovingly knowing that even if we had a dozen people or so the money was mainly going to the cause and we always ended up at the parking lot where we would show the artist's rendering in the artist was it kate and i'm known him personally years ago of what it would look like and we all had this beautiful vision you know and it's a beautiful vision indeed and so yes does that answer your question that it tied in that way that it was a fund raising effort that we were participating in with friends yes ok yes very good thank you don't didn't participate in the whole arc of it and q thank you if they booked them and then we just show up and greet them and take them to see the various locations throughout marina ok thank you very much is there any further follow up questions see none thank you very we have communications  forward seeing nine members without any objections i'd like to close public testimony your objections thank you testimony is now closed turning our attention to the first item on today's agenda to beeston license correspondence that's noted on the agenda and inner binders relating to the auditors contract and the documents produced by the friends and corporation councils opinion as to the status of the parking concessions under the lease and license members this is the fifth meeting of this committee in in this term to review and determine whether to approve the operation of the parking concession on our county property by under the two thousand and three police and license proceeds from the parking concession must be used for only restoration and preservation of  trying to obtain sufficient information to answer the question where is the parking concession money going to it has been a long and difficult process the need for such a long review is due in part  to the difficulty of obtaining the documents from friends your binder contains a table of documents i have requested since last fall from friends showing what has been and what has not been produced in the time it took to a team that you can see in your binders as my march first two thousand and sixteen i'd like to make a correction on the second page effluents contract with the auditor was submitted at our last meeting but it wasn't a contract it was a letter proposing a contract with the auditor so  that's a change in the chart i guess the charter i mean the chart that's indicating the documents and you also see that on november third two thousand and fifteen meeting the director told us that she would obtain an independent audit to answer several of the of our questions however it is now been four months later and we still do not have any answers i ask that is the executive director to provide a ledger tracking the parking concession receipts dollar for dollar to its all to meet use whether by the parking contractor friends or for its for for profit  subsidiary that's their profit side unfortunately we received notice friday from the friends attorneys stanford and the new i think that's how you pronounce the last  the president of the board chemo falkner was apparently off island as well and could not attend today's meeting we have requested information from the friends but have not receive enough information to track the parking lot proceeds to their ultimate use from the information that we received so far staff has put together a handout tracking the parking proceeds for f y fifteen to the extent we were able to so based on the information that we have before us staff has put together a handout and i'd like to have staff explain some of the the documents that are attached to the handout that was receive from friends and from parks parks and recreation department and the other documents that we have within our records thank you chair there's brooks can you please we were able to do along with the records attached that substantiates the numbers if i walk through it i'll start out with the number at your far left hand side and that is the gross parking revenue for fiscal year two thousand and fifteen it's three hundred forty five thousand two hundred seventy seven dollars and seventeen cents from that gross parking revenue seventy percent goes to prince of and thirty percent goes to diamond parking services for maintaining our operating the parking facility and that is pursuant to an agreement which is attached to this chart which is unsigned  undated but is only agreement that we have that shows the relationship between the parent company friends and its subsidiary diamond up to seventy percent that goes to friends friends keeps two hundred eighty nine dollars and ninety cents that's shown on the profit and loss statement which is attached and he has the subsidy or two hundred forty one thousand four hundred four dollars and twelve cents  based on the the in complete agreement that we have manages the parking facility and provide site maintenance and management we don't have any further information than that about what he had does in order to earn the two hundred forty one thousand dollars from the two hundred forty one thousand dollars received by the for profit subsidiary one hundred forty thousand goes back to federal income tax statement for the subsidiary shows expenses larger than that we can only assume that one hundred one thousand dollars goes for expenses of the subsidiary nevertheless there are some things to point out that are bullet bullet pointed bullet pointed on the on the chart the first is that from the tax return we can see that kahlua oaky has total income comes from parking revenue nothing else has shown so that means a subsidiaries income provides their funding for everything that they do france on the other hand has income from other sources both the parking revenues contributions and donations of both in kind of services and in kind facilities and friends also indicate in the attached documents that they share employees operating cost and board members so this is what we've been able to sort out to this point we would appreciate the help of friends to give us more specific and maybe more exact information to substantiate the relationships between the three parties that is between the parking facility contractor dime and the nonprofit friends and the subsidiary  brooks so this is what we've come up with so far other than that we we need more documentation my main concern is i guess getting a one to one  accounting of what the hundred forty thousand is being spent for on the itemized you know for an itemization for friends and clearly on the unsigned mutual agreement between the prophesied in the nonprofit side the profit side is supposed to be i guess in exchange for the parking fines it's supposed to maintain and manage the site so i'm not sure if they're out there actually maintaining a parking concession that is worth you know the maintenance of that is one hundred and one thousand and four four hundred four dollars i'm not sure it's going to cost that much to maintain a parking lot that diamond is in charge of so these are the things that i still have question over and i still have not received the dock titian as clearly stated this my staff this committee has worked very very very hard and you can see the chart and we've charted all the requests and all of their responses and we've documented you know our attempts as well two weeks ago on the subject matter of restoration and at that point we had invited dr klieg or to explain the international procedures as well as some various jurisdiction procedures on restoration what are the standards and we were in lightened to see that while he was very knowledgeable about certain policies that we felt were credible and i had made a comment that i would like to see if this committee and friends and himself could get together and possibly create a position or a program for him to lead the restoration portion of it and the cultural as you know the cultural aspects of it the walking tour the educational programs that would be for left to friends  of the hotel and that's unfortunate i guess there was some words exchanged from friends and dr clear i do have some information that i would like to pass out this was i don't know if that was passed out yet this is passing you know so apparently there was there's a there's some allegations as to you know name calling it that mr cleaver was stealing the project and that the county council should quote screw themselves and that was from the director and executive director and i have that down passing out so it was very disheartening to know that you know we would we had put on in all this effort and idea later we get a response from this you know basically not cooperating with us but anyways i do have some questions to corporation counsel regarding the overall lease and also i sent corporation counsel a letter to foreign opinion and that opinion consisted of whether by letter dated february twenty fourth two thousand and sixteen our request corporation counsel to give us an opinion whether the concession is no longer permitted under the lease and license and number two if it is not permitted or friends has has the can they continue to use the concession as an permitted and what are the counties remedies i wouldn't i ask corporation counsel for the comments and the response to that letter was that it needed to be relayed or elise explained in executive session had the aside from that had the for the record had the executive director been here i would have asked the following questions i would like to state that on the record what does kahlua which is the prophesied do to earn the seventy percent of the parking revenues and what site maintenance and management does it perform water the actual costs of that and is that reasonable and what is the prophesied which is the  kahlua do with the money and what services does diamond parking provide for their thirty percent is that amount reasonable what does friends do with the hundred forty thousand contribution it receives from the profit side  itemized as to what was used for the restoration what are the in kind services and facilities that friends receives and what does friends provide to the profit side apart from the seventy percent of the parking revenues from the subsidiaries quote site maintenance and management so at this time i would like to request or entertain a motion to enter into executive session for item one three pursuit two subsection ninety two dosh five a four of the hawaii vice statutes to consult with legal counsel on questions and issues pertaining to duties privileges in munity s and liabilities of the county council and this committee chair i moved to pursue it led to going to executive session pursuant to section nine to dash five nonprofit that provides drop in youth activities including recreational social educational vocational and cultural experiences for over thirty years it operated its facilities twenty eight hot one highway by  under a lease with with the previous property owner in the properties the county assumed a lease when it up purchased the property from be on of them for six two thousand and fourteen but that lease expired on april first two thousand and fifteen and the department has advised us that the nonprofit has been operating under a temporary agreement with the county since then at our meeting on june sixteenth of september fifteenth two thousand and fifteen  we heard about the efforts of the department of parks and recreation to provide a new lease with terms complying with their code requirements for for the government grants section three point three six point zero nine zero of the maui code requires the council authorization by resolution for any proposed grant of rural property at less than fair market value before us today is the department's revised proposed resolution authorizing your grant the release of the county real property to the youth center together with the proposed grant agreement i'm a shepherd could you please explain the the the procedures that we are in right now and the status yes thank you currently we're still enter an extended license we have one year from the date of acquisition of this property through purchased by the county to extend any heavy use agreements for that property and we've done so there have been a sixth amendment executed since your binders were updated and i will provide that to the committee chair after this meeting basically the sixth amendment takes the current temporary license agreement and maintains it into april thirtieth two thousand and sixteen when that one year period ends the desire is to have a lease that replaces that license and the lease would be a long term thirty five year lease agreement for a one dollar per annum payment of rent and then they can continue their operations as in vision and in that lease agreement there is no separate granting agreement i think when we very first drafted this we had a lease agreement and a grant of the lease agreement and that all became very difficult to manage that paperwork and so we can use the word grant as a verb and resolution authorizes the cap to the granting of this lease agreement then you don't have a separate document that has the lease agreement attached to the ground agreement attached to the resolution which confuses everybody so aware of we are promoting this as a grant of a lease agreement through resolution we've done the very same thing fairly recently with a couple of different leases so that format should look ok to you and raise any questions but if you have any questions  getting comments from the finance department so you show us that the free market for a year to use forty nine ninety five we're going to ask for one dollar a year so are we recognizing the difference as part of the grant also since we are going to basically say you know you don't have to pay the remaining balance of the forty nine million for a fee is that considered also part of the grant to want you know the additional collins to my knowledge yes i want to say that was the the anticipation of when he did the like and working with finance and putting that together will be me shepherd has more and i know that but to my knowledge basically we're going through that county code mr no comment that allows the council to authorize the grant of the lease for less than fair market value so they granted less than their fair market value the fair market value just shows you what it would be if it were a commercial lease agreement with an right so this is a this is a one of the old county i mean for a while back a long time ago county ran you senator right and then we farmed out this is not one of those no this was never run that this young lady and the whole staff do a great job with our youth especially in the fight here area so thank you very much thank you very much so we'll go to the next item here are forty five that cookie frog eradication project grants committees receipt of county communication fifteen dash two ninety two from council member gladys spicer and cookie frog eradication project grants the committee may receive a presentation from the maui invasive species committee and discuss the matter the committee may also consider the filing county communication fifteen dash two ninety two and other related actions members we have today which is the manager of maui base of species committee and adam radford i believe the operations manager who provide a presentation about the status of their work in the cookie frog eradication is a nonprofit organization which is affiliated with the university of hawaii and can and concerned individuals who are working to prevent and control and eliminate most of the threatening invasive plants animal species to protect now he's watersheds the logical resources agriculture and community the county was has his me supported miss by appropriating one point two million to the nonprofit for the fiscal year two thousand and sixteen so we have if you could go ahead and present you have the floor thank you you said you thank you goostman and council members and to penn a man with the invasive species committee and it's our pleasure to be here first of all want to thank you for your longstanding support for invasive species issues and thank you for this opportunity to talk a little bit about the kochi frog project our purpose is to give you an update on what we're doing talk a little bit about our plans and we have a short presentation to give you to cover some of the background information on that and of pointed out adam ratner operations manager will be giving that presentation but we also really want this to an opportunity for you to ask any questions you have about what we're doing and how we're doing it we have had the opportunity to meet with most of you previously to talk about what we're doing so this is just an opportunity to expand a little bit more on that i also want to recognize the founder burke who's here in the in the council chambers eve is the person who feels a lot of the calls that i know you all have fielded a lot of calls from people concerned about cookie frogs and we get those as well and the avis or person who gets a lot of those new help to do scheduling and coordinating and and just as many huge help to the project as well  at the outset i want to say that i know you all probably want to know what we've done with the money that you appropriated and unfortunately despite best efforts of all folks involved we don't actually have that funding yet  county for any work done under this project and the state said well we can't indemnify you we don't do that and so we were kind of stuck for a while between must can't and i think that the lawyers  and i know council here has been working very hard on that issue as well despite that fact we have been working with other partners and and adam will highlight some of that work and how that's been happening with especially the h c m as has been instrumental in helping us clear some areas of their land we will be working with the east my watershed watershed partnership as well as the state department plan a natural resources coming up here in the future so we have been able to move forward we've doubled the staff that we have already by using some funds from the state so in the past we only had about three active staff we've been able to double that and really help to move things forward but with that i think we'd like to just move into the into the presentation and then we'll have the opportunity to make a few closing remarks and then we'll have the opportunity for more questions sure  how's that sound ok ok so as to mention i'm going to just go through a bit of background so just some kind of scope perspective and then we're out with our planning and how we kind of get to our decision making for what we do and where we go and all of that so we're what this also highlights i think is that as a project we're ready to hit the ground running once that funding becomes available and we get people on board and the other is that the timing for that is going to be good because as it gets warmer we're all going to start getting more and more phone calls so i think it will work well for both our needs and the publics but on now we had as many of you have seen in the past or know one thousand places with lots of frogs so these are populations if you will and we've been really successful in the radek ating are moving frogs from those places actually twelve of the nineteen no longer have frogs a cup or what we call like revolving door sites so there are places that continue to get stuff from off island frogs particularly so they're kind of never done but aside from the liko really goldfish lee everywhere else in maui is well in hand meaning there may be a couple frogs left but very few if any and most  are probably and what we would call monitoring phase so will will keep going back to the site for a year or more from the date we last hear a cookie so so we're really pretty good at getting rid of them when we know that they're one other issue though that is taking up a significant amount of time particularly the last couple years and what this map shows and it's a little confusing because it's a lot of different colored dots that are different sizes basically the bigger the dot the more recent the year in the dot represents a place with like one frog so typically these are new random locations where a frog shows up often from off island some time from a liko but we've had more of these occurrences in the last year or maybe two  we've had more in the last year let's say than we've had all the years combined so we've seen this like exponential increase in these new random occurrences that take up quite a bit of time to determine if it's even a valid report much less go out there and catch the frog for example i caught one frog in a property about a month or so ago and it took me two plus hours to catch it but we were pretty confident it was the only one so we wanted to get it so in terms of big picture planning for liko actually in two thousand and six we were asked to put together a plan to deal with them we go infestation and two things of note are just it that time you know we said well we'll need about seven hundred fifty thousand to really get on top of this and that was only dealing with one hundred twenty seven acres or what we believe to be one hundred twenty seven acres at the time right now we're estimating that the working area the area we need to work is well over a thousand acres around him a legal infestation when i say working area that's because it may not all have frogs but you have to be present throughout the area regardless because you have to access it you to be able to monitor what's going on in one day and even then we said we need to get going and we  made significant strides i guess in the area but but we still need to get going to the level this kind of problem warrants and this is what we're dealing with today and you can see the blue is a generalized infested area that's inside the gold and i should have mentioned because i see so many of you following along kind of with the plan there that most or all of this is available in the plan that was handed out or the other documents you received but but the blue and yellow combined is basically that work area i just described that's that's pretty much places that has kochi frogs that need to be controlled in this is just a little bit of perspective on what we're dealing with so it's an incredibly complex area both in terms of it's really big it's really deep and it's got a real mixed vegetation matrix so it's quite complex from a variety of perspectives and this is also just another one for scale you can see the person circled here standing next to a huge wall of well overhead hiking grass in this is infested with frogs so dealing with these kinds of site specific challenges is significant but but we've been successful before as i mentioned so after two thousand and six we actually got additional funding from a variety of sources to start putting an infrastructure to work in the goal and that's what this map shows is there's storage tanks for  and mixed with water to control the frogs there's pipes there's lots of things there ready again for us to kind of hit the ground running and turn the switch on when we have people to do that so what we envision with when i mention the people to do that work we need a lot of people to cover this kind of area and we're going to try to break them out essentially and it least two to three team in one team is going to be on a fixed schedule so that if a community member calls you and says where am i on the list you could actually reply and say this is where the on the list the another team is going to be more like a strike team where they're following mopping up behind the scheduled team or responding to new reports of putting out fires and i think of more eco as a fire that shoots out embers and just like a fire you need to douse those embers before they become significant problems in and of themselves so that the second team is kind of a roving team then a third team really just dedicated to keeping things running a quick note wise and managing or removing kochi friendly habitat which is actually often the best bang for the buck is if you can get rid of that giant wall or king grass it's much easier to get rid of the frogs so i'll go through this relatively quickly but we have organized ourselves to follow sort of an instant command structure so that we're very clear in roles and responsibilities and communication to make sure that we're on track with our project goals and objective s the control options i mention the solution we use we also deliver that solution in both the gravity fed system so that's the big tank on the rim with a pipe down to the bottom and a fire hose plugged into and we also have the sprinkler system an aerial options for delivery and this is the picture of the sprinkler system on the edge of the gulch it essentially can shoot citric solution from the edge to the bottom and this is a picture of an aerial application some of the drawbacks with aerial are the high cost in that you need to do it in the day when the frogs are less active because they're out and more active at night and then hand capturing as appropriate and again habitat modification but i wanted to highlight this one as well as another tool is cokie barrier which is actually a fine insect mash they can be installed in kind of strategic locations and something else that we've used in the past in one magical use in the future and then in terms of organizing so like how do you organize where you go in a in a transparent and thought out manner and it's like a wall you go where there are struggles well there's frogs all over the place so it's like how do you pick where you go first in so some ways to help organize that discussion or things we've done to help organize the discussion is treated management units so that you can have a broken out place name or specific area regions you want to work with the name associated with that and also what i'll get into is some considerations you put on that smaller place like are people down there are active as a community and help being like how bad is the infestation level is it close to roads or places people are going to move the frogs but basically the unit system just helps an organized effort every one of those units then has a site specific plan that  only helps guide what our project is doing but how we want to utilize community resources and help and power the community and then prioritization so we do this kind of two ways we've developed a model that's based on  our spatial and other data that we can manipulate to help give us an output that says well here's your top priorities here's your lowest and it considers things like proximity to road contribution of residence other other things like that and it's so it's quite helpful to guide to discussion that then we weigh what the model output is against on the ground realities so we tweak it a little bit but that's how we come up with our process and i won't go into the nuts and bolts that but it's actually a pretty detailed  driven process and this is just kind of background this is control the eco infestation over all time in one interesting thing if you know the blue lines are actually ditches or endorse streams and you see the red dots often follow the blue line to some extent so that's just also highlighting like that somewhere we would want to prioritize it along one of those blue line  partners and i won't go into that again much except to say that recently with the help of a and b s we actually they reopened some dirt roads on the west side of which is all generally sugarcane in so we hadn't been in there in a couple years because the weather was really bad and also they hadn't harvested those fields and so that's a big unknown is for us is what's going what's the current status on the west side of the culture now are going to be able to figure that out which is very important to planning and cost estimates elements in this actually shows the a and b parcel and state parcels so a and b is the kind of tan distribution program to presidents that are proactively controlling frogs themselves and we're trying to help guide them in a you know farm so they're a unified front basically as a community and this is just an example the yellow on this map is all area that was sprayed by a residence in the course of about a week so pretty significant and very complementary effort to ours so just some of the challenges are equipment in storage this is actually our storage facility up the whole road and you can see it's pretty small and so when we're talking about you know quadrupling or more our staff size or the equipment needed to really do that work we're going to need to address this challenge and then unknown future of the west side of the gulch is there's a challenge that fortunately we're working with h that sea ice to to figure out what's going on over there recalcitran yes but it's such a big project for us like right now they're not hindering our efforts to the point that we're not having successes but they are entering the efforts of community turban groups so like in the big picture it's not as big of an issue for us but if i was a resident of certain communities it would be for me it is and we're trying to help them work through those issues and challenges with this ramp up in just in general  is not so much for attention but expertise it's getting the right people in to do the job we were actually really fortunate we have a really impressive tenure and great staff that are very knowledgeable of the area equipment getting people to do this type of work and stick with it  a challenge and of course sustained funding weather is a big challenge for us because they will keep us out of areas we want to go in a little bit of background on cost testament and you can see just at the bottom that there's a huge range in aston incidents because there's quite a few unknowns at the moment in terms of what we're dealing with and what kind of timeframe we'll take on things like that but i think you know in the relatively near future year or so we'll have much better sense of what it's going to take in that this is just a summary of our strategy for the next year is expand efforts essentially develop necessary infrastructure support the community based efforts and reduce infestation to maui that's basically what we're trying to do so thank you very much for your time and attention thank you point to offer the first questions to you this crisis since this was her item thank you very much here and thank you very much for having this session today i have a lot of constituents who have asked me about this problem and i really am grateful that we have the opportunity to hear from you guys today and i know that many people watch this and be interested in the information just a couple of questions in your presentation you mentioned the revolving door problem and you mentioned that that comes from off i then can you elaborate a little bit more sure so we have a couple nursery this basically that bring in plant material from off island and it seems that they also bring frogs i think in and i should say that those businesses are really cooperate evan terms of working allowing us to work to control the frogs they may not be quite so proactive in terms of preventing their interaction is there any way that the of can help you with that it might save us a lot of money well if that's a huge concern because it's really it's just incredibly frustrating to know that that we all collectively are spending this money and risking our you know doing this dangerous work but knowing that we continue to get this repeat introduction and that's where we provided you with the summary of sort of to keep legal challenges and approaches that other jurisdictions maybe we'll end up follow up on that with you because you know this has to stop this problem is not going to go when it's going to cost us more and more and spread more and more so we've got to try to find a way not to if we know the source to try to plug it which is a nice segue into the next issue you mentioned the cost and the type of work that this is you know when you look at the to rain where this is going on it's kind of frightening i mean this is really hard work for those people that are out there you know running around and going i've been done in this horrible grass and cliffs and god knows what else they're dealing with i hate to ask this but i'm kind of curious you mention is hard to get in keep well you about after six months it's about twenty six hundred a month i can see where that would be difficult but if you can get a job sitting in an office nice and clean you might know want to be stomping around in the grass in the water and god knows what's out there so again i was want to thank you for the work you do i'm very proud of the mask and i'm very proud of our consulate for the support that we we provide but there's a lot more work to do in thank you and thank you again chair  any other questions from the members mr thompson thank you mr chair and yeah thank you guys we've discussed this quite extensively at that gathering and i was there the noise is pretty pretty loud and you were saying that that at that time you had just done a spray so that it was cut way down so members i got to tell you if that was cut way down that noise i'd hate to hear it when it's really bad so that is something important that we we continue to do this and as miss bice's said i'm real concerned about the legal issues with the recalcitrant you said are too bad right now but you did make a point in your statement that the inability to control a high priority species at a single site can thwart years of effort or create a very real probability that overall efforts will fail that's an important statement in that document that's something we have to really be careful of in the other one is you know preventing the spread in or island and i know we export stuff to people and we import stuff from other islands to say ok no you can't send anything anymore it could offer you know opportunities for retaliation or whatever i know we have  to have the state say hey look we don't want this to spread further because you know if it gets to us then next stop is a white one if then and then that would be a huge problem so have we worked with the state as far as saying you know state this is this is very important and you guys need to step up well i don't know what the what the council has done or what the what the i know that in the past the administration has testified in support of increased increased support capacity for inspectors as well as to address enter island movement of pet species it's a it's an issue that i feel like i've been knocking my head against the wall on for years and years and years raising it as an issue it's an issue that the maui conservation alliance takes very seriously and it came out as a top priority for  county do something that is within the county's jurisdiction to do which and again my perspective is that most people are good players and want to do the right thing but we have those few folks that either you know don't care for whatever reason or or have other motivations and that's where if the council were to look into something like regulating businesses that are likely to be importing high risk goods  and suggesting best management practices for those that are shown to be not being good neighbors so the last thing i want to do is impose more regulations on our businesses that are already struggling to make a go of it here but for those that do not then perhaps in order to do business in maui county you have to demonstrate that you are following best management practices something that you know i'm not i'm not certain if i sing the council about what you can and point this is this is not cookie frogs it's little fire ants but something that i know we're all very concerned about just several weeks ago our crew was in hon our well we have our honda crew but our whole base crew was in ha a and had someone stop by saying we think we have fire ants we think we just got this these roofing shingles from hilo and we think we have a chance and so our crew went out our supervisor went out looked at it so it looks like fire ants to me we happen to have a microscope out there confirm that it's fire ants and managed to get in contact with some of the folks in the heat who who have the  fire ants on their property who are controlling they had the chemical that we needed and went out you want to do that last slide they took apart the two pallets of shingles and sprayed each one individually with the chemical so it just underscores how easy it is for things to get through this system because this isn't plant material this is roofing supplies but does the person did the person know or should they have known that they had fire ant infested and it came from hilo from obviously from infested property but it just underscores a number of things one help put in it is to have an educated public that the person who got the got the shipment said this doesn't want to test it and then call the right person and that we had the ability to do a rapid response but it also just really underscores the how often is the stuff moving that we don't know about you know i just think we want more tools to address it at the just from a legal goal which ranges from four point six million to over fifteen million is that one time or breaking it up in five years no no no that would be over multiple years we don't we couldn't do it i mean even i think if we wanted to you couldn't do it in one year because it's so big so how many years do you think that might take i would of we tend to say five plus two or three million dollars you're pretty sure just for military go go that's the that's the range and again it's like one of the things that is adam used the analogy of a fire it's like it's like a fire asking a firefighter will when he going to get this fire out and hauling is going to and how much is it going to cost we don't know if he and i mean we don't really know and as adam said a year in from now we will have a lot better information than we currently have and as well as one could do spend a lot of time doing modeling to say will surely the costs obviously the costs will go down over time as you have fewer infested area areas but we've not gone that route because of the rains of the variables the how many properties actually are infested right now we think it's over five hundred but but the other thing that i want to emphasize is that we believe it's doable we wouldn't be coming to you if we didn't think it was doable the last thing we want to do is put our staff at risk waste taxpayer money and ultimately fail we want to we want to be information to provide to the department ag we contacted them and they were right on top of it and actually did what they call a trace back so they figure out where did it come from who was it was it a business because they had the very same concern is  business that's actually just selling roofing material regularly all throughout the state and it actually turned out to be an individual sale i'm so not a business so kind of a one time things from a proper private property and there was actually there in the picture you saw two pallets there was supposedly a third pallet that the department ag is trying to trace down now we're not actually even sure if it was actually shipped or not but they have instructed young brothers to either immediately point because they come here my son works there and he sees things and he says that there's teams coming in that department of bank being notified all the time and sometimes they come around or going on at the you know it's not like no big deal but if we don't harbor area yeah yeah they did and i want to say that young brothers has been extremely cooperative and proactive as a business they take these issues very seriously and also department of ag i think we have the best inspectors in the state you know  oil and all that at they really do go above and beyond the inspectors that we have they just don't have enough capacity and find me is there no possibility of us getting the state to put in an emergency like to do with being a fever and all that because in a cookie for which is a nuisance i got it i got it it's a new says i go from the big island i know what the nuisance is when i go home i get that cookie from orchestra all night long finds you know is the extreme dangerous in tittie and doing our community next to the wrong tree sneak in something like that this would probably be the worse worst case scenario is to let this get out of hand and i know we can spend all the money we can but really it's stopping it before it gets you saw has the state looked at these issues and helping not only young brothers but our department baggage the airport all the entry points to make sure that we try to new bit at the bud before it gets to like this location and then the issue oh i think we've got far it's going to lead to that point luckily we caught it before it got out but if we hope for more i know one thing that they that they did initiate is for is trying to work with the ship first but of course department of agassi's focus on ag products this isn't an ag product they have the authority to inspect and they regularly do but there's one thing i will point to would be support for the county could support to there is a bio security plan that will be developed this year there's been a contract for that and that hopefully will come out with proposals suggestions and overall plan for how we as a state address this issue and so that would definitely be a place that the county could weigh in once that comes out and this is my final question to you if i was to see how much money would you need to go in and really eradicate i would love to get i know that's the answer you want or think it's a question that people like to ask right like to ask you don't like to ask that question but  do that would do it in two years she said of five years or seven years you know if you would like for us to try to run that number we can do that i like this idea but the other the other aspect one of the things that that adam pointed out is that right now  there's a limit to how much you can ramp up all at once you know i mean you would need to have x number of trucks you need to be able to free his soon to be right at the end well nancy that would help the gulch but our but you're not going to do that on haiku hill you know and i'm pretty sure you know that's that's one of the challenges is that the frogs have spread into these residential neighborhoods which is why it's so much more aware of it is an issue right now but you can't do that there and so you're talking people with weed eaters and tractors and and and tanks and sprayers if as an example the spray or like well how much how much time would it take the sprayer that we ordered that's a really effective spray or it's taken as the year to get it we do we have a we have a stake in this thing here to get it you know and then the ones that you have break down and so it's as much as we want to do it as quickly as possible there's some things that can't be pushed as well as the fact that from a biological perspective you want to knock them back and then wait a while and then come back in yourself that i just resolved we're going to be already into our next budget session so our how is that going to play out and have you have you expended some monies are ready to at least reimbursement  well no we can't expend money that we don't have it so seems to me so does that mean you're going to come back for even though i mean it's difficult because you haven't touched the one point two million and now in terms of if we could double up that money and then have you know increase it wouldn't it actually in increase even more the number of south that we'd be having so that we would help more people because really even ten we plan to hire an additional ten people so the funding that the county has provided basically typically about half of it goes for citric acid and half of that goes for labor and equipment and the kind of thing but yeah if if we had additional funding possible legislation that can be done on our behalf which is quite encouraging to see in regards to the private landowners private businesses and how we can address that because that's really  maddening to hear that the surgeon nurseries continue to bring in a just as kind at the root of so you do all this leg work on the outside in the field and yet these huge ship in it in just you know it's just turn another b get some more plants out there bay it's so i can see where something needs to be done there because there is no penalty on their behalf and just business as usual which i think is wrong and so i'd like to look can move for the lot of these things to help assist in that regards on our behalf as mr bison asked earlier what can we do as council members but i'm kind of curious about that one comment you mentioned about biosecurity plan is this something that the state is going through this this opening ledge of this year where what is that and where's it at and higher can we participate you know the biosecurity plan is the department of agriculture put out an r f p for a private company to help them develop a statewide bio security plan that will encompass not just it will encompass addressing things that come from other countries that come from domestic then and also bit move between islands as well as what we the work that the invasive species committees do or the department of agriculture does it should also address facility issues the fact that now he has the the state of the art facility for a cargo inspection at the airport but oregon specters they go to the harbor they're working outside so if they open up a shipment and it's got flying insects in it there's no way to control that and that's the other the other islands don't even have what we have at our airport so facilities like that as well as issues such as developing effective control biological control agent so it should be wide ranging the comprehensive look at what do what do we need as a state to have better bio security and i would say that there will be it's my understanding there will be opportunities for public input and hopefully some focused working groups as well so we would and that's wishful thinking so i think you've never heard of that so it's good to be abreast of what's happening out there and i think the bottom line question is are we making headway in a swords and i guess i'm a from there i think we are and do want to talk to that i'm just kind of anecdotal statements who as we said we've we've already doubled even without the county money funding on board yet we've doubled the staff that we have that was previously working on it and i think you can give some stories of just what people are sharing with with one coffee up which is the it's been winter it's still spring the frogs are quiet when it's cold and so even though we were seeing you know more than one a day certainly but we actually just received a call not too long ago from a resident along the eco gold shop the main portion of the goal to said that she started sleeping without your plugs in the first time in like three or four years or more in sleeping with earplugs around so that's pretty good sign even though it's been colder so and we've had some similar very encouraging stories from the public in a lot of compliments and awareness of increased activity around town because we have more people we have essentially doubled the size already so people are taking notice i think and one follow up the that i wanted to make with it was it was really good to have council member couch and the chair white at the haiku hill community meeting we really believe that that kind of community engagement and involvement is absolutely critical to our success we need to have their help and they were they were the first folks to organize and to say what can we do we want to help you know we want to go out and so with state funding that we have we're going to be purchasing some at least five sprayers that will be dedicated for approachable you folks i hope by the time we enter budget you can give us a better comment regarding the disposition of our twenty funds i'm not currently happy with the current status and i understand you have a challenge with the state a four way we do to a regular basis or it can appreciate your issue but stating that a couple of things i found interesting in your comments you see th is putting forth the biosecurity initiative i guess of some sort and yet you made a comment earlier to this committee that you don't think the speaker is going to actually do anything about the issue of immigration species that we should be looking at the sea for anything for leadership in addressing what component of your research is species yeah i did not mean to convey that concept i was speaking more specifically  hopefully the plan will have something more specific in terms of that and i was speaking more specifically to enter island movement of invasive species and there have been efforts in the past to have legislation that would that would address that more specifically that did not move forward i know that the department of agriculture is working on developing something that was similar to legislation that didn't move which would be a compliance plan approach so for so if you're if you're shipping i think the concept is if you're shipping from infested areas then you need to it's kind of it's basically best management practices so a similar kind of thing so i despair sometimes but i don't mean to convey that i don't think the state takes it seriously i do and i think i under especially under scott and rights leadership at the department of agriculture he's i think he gets it as an example the rapido here death recent quarantine rule that's the first time we've had something like that and they acted very quickly to address that and it kind of lightning speed from my perspective but i understand your comment about the permanent over a in your limited scope enforcement so appreciate that i don't know why we wouldn't look at as an option chairman because we talk about shipment we deal more we deal with t and public the offensive on this issue and i don't have a problem again maybe looking at what we can do to ordinance of what property owners should have some responsibility especially if they bring in certain types of  shipment basically for landscape requirements of buy and now i'm going to have to then i'll consider public money to take care of things that should never have been on our island in the first place i mean you know so i don't have a problem looking way i think you know we need to educate a part of a king is the responsibility of ownership and i don't have a problem with that one thing that i think is kind of interesting and i would ask you if you cannot answer it i understand saw that with the pineapple fields here tumbleweed if it's not if you don't if you're actively managing your lands you don't have tumbleweed and if you're not then it becomes established so it will become overgrown the other thing is that from  the controversial is burning is the frogs that get into those lands from the legal gulch we like burning from a cookie frog management perspective originally actually we actually explored that as a possibility in some if members of like to put through maybe possibly drafting a bill looks like for some private access on property so again thank you very much are i'm sorry members is my last our committee meeting you tell we get to get into budget so i'm trying to push things out that are that that are necessary before patches and this is one of them which is e r five the lowing communications as listed in your agenda i brought this matter forward of course to obtain information from the department of parks and recreation concerning the current core hora permit holders and preparation for like i said the budget session i'd like to ask our parks director to present his side of his data as requested in our letter to him gerr applicants you know as we've been mentioning throughout the past year now and even before my my tenure here is the number of duplicate permit holders that are on this list of directors to do the members have a copy of the it's ok to do they got yours at the march fifth document because there's another one requesting that hasn't been responded to yes it was the march third the march  years our feature has never changed in korea it was five hundred dollars for the first permit at one hundred dollars therefore for any other permit after that last year it did jump to a thousand and five hundred there after  if you look at the courage truck sure that was the point of the core application list it's we have multiple duplicate vendors that have somewhat taken over permits that are to even be permit in that beach when it could be used every day some of the opposite side effects of that is the current permit holder claims that they use that beach when the wind isn't down you know that again is a one day one week span compared to the year that it could be used for someone who is just looking for a strictly business that could be used so with that being said you know we are lucky to get to a program with these bodies assistance in our committee of an r p process type  to get to that point by this fiscal year budget probably won't be feasible but we will work on that but my suggestion is to the committee as we move forward in budget is again bringing up the fees on the permit holders which i feel if you bring it up to you know as i was proposing one point to be two thousand dollars or a generic number that stands for permit not just for the first two it's across the board no but if you have one or ten you're going to pay that same field across the board per permit and it will eliminate those permits that are really being used or not what i want to spend two thousand dollars for a permit that they're going to use possibly one day a year and for those who you know the fee is if you really see the program when you go out there to those pacific beaches that two thousand dollars we made in a day so the fee is not a selling point as to why the fee structure shouldn't be increased and again this is just a temporary fix in to we can get a true system with our people as the other counties in the world as a wall who is doing with their beach boys and other programs they have out there get that list to you folks you can see what i mean were saying certain vendors hold multiple permits and all kind of turn it over to weather permitting most say when sports are done out of you know that area but on the corner days now they'll head down south towards the hay area when i took quite less as majority of my lessons were up there but then on occasion we had to move down to key hate because that's the wind but same company you know rarely but at times you're not going to cut someone's tree and you know instructions because oh sure there's ways are the winners are in the south they're in the south end of key harry you know high enough so i get why people have multiple permits in different parts of our lives and there's good reason to keep their business flo so i don't know we'll see the sleep rate we now have an updated list and you know what what what is before us because i can't believe the last budget we were we i think we had an old version so now we're more more than the same point is public space access the public property that it ascends where they're not paying any kind of camera feeding those they are have their office outside of the site but for accessing our beach point you know that's where the money is  across to our beach guides and again there's a lot of illegals out there as well so with the fees that we can establish is it for stricker reinforcement realistically without hundred permits and just generically at two thousand dollars that's two hundred grand into the kora fine that would go in there numbers just to give you generic numbers from honolulu that we did research on the beach boys are paying minimum of twenty five thousand a month for a spot on waikiki again generic numbers of b is in the six digits per month for the section three point one point zero five zero of the code states that the chapter will expire in june thirtieth two thousand and sixteen unless reenacted by the council this meeting is not to consider any legislation but to prepare for the budget session i have asked the economic development director to provide us with the contracts which are in your binder and the progress reports of the graphic recipients of five or which are in your awards out of the million dollar fund we gave out nine hundred eighty thousand dollars and looking over all of the projects and where they are today we have already leveraged two million three hundred ninety thousand dollars in additional funds that those projects have put into the project so essentially for every dollar the county invested we have received two dollars and forty cents additional into our community and that does not count any multiplier effect so the five projects two of which you heard from today now innovation group was the first gentleman who spoke ned davis he had an award of a hundred the five thousand dollars he currently has a balance of fifteen thousand in his account he is currently preparing his final report the final report is due prior to the dispensing of the last draw he has added four and a half full time employees and his leveraged three hundred fifty thousand additional dollars to that  new photonics had an award of two hundred fifty thousand dollars they have zero balance they've drawn their entire project they hired five full time employees very high he only needed to stay in business up through the end of august but from his report we understand that basically that hundred five thousand dollars got him the p judgment that he needed which was to go on an on demand schedule amien so that he didn't have to go if he only had one passenger or something and so i would say that probably that hundred five thousand dollars saved the ferry from going into bankruptcy even though the amount wasn't as significant to his company but it swayed the p c to give him the schedule that he was asking for so i that that was actually very  significant the fourth one is uptown chevron as you know they're working on doing a cafe out of the out of their store there their word is for two hundred thousand dollars and they still have a balance of one hundred seventy thousand the reason for this is that they have been working on mechanical engineering drawings a landscape plan that needs to get through the m r a basically blueprints they've spent the money so far on architects i did check in with him and they are ready to put that project out to bid in about the next forty five days when he does he's expecting the whole project to cost approximately eight hundred fifty thousand which would be almost a four times leverage for his project and then lastly was my brain company they had an award of two hundred fifty thousand dollars their balance as of right now is fifty five thousand they have made excellent progress on adding their business has added ten employees over the last year and they will be leveraging that to the tune of eight hundred seventy three thousand additional dollars so that is the status they're all doing exactly what they were supposed to do and i think that we could call the project a real good success and we'll like to get all of them finished up and then we'll give you a final report consternation during this whole process in that this is supposed to be a revolving fund and hopefully some money would be coming back or there are these folks start other than c then you know what happened with ceiling but are these folks starting to see a return on their investment in or is this going to be another couple years before they move i would say they're all in various stages as you heard from each new their space they have nasa visiting their facility in june and so it's but also they said that nasa is opening up other avenues for them to have revenue sources that they might  to the space station so i would say that's all in progress they probably are not seeing a return on it yet because a lot of them are still in the middle of building you know finishing out their projects so have you back because it's not quite completed so we'll have you back for another progress report yes and we we really appreciate being able to roll this out and be the first time ever maui county has done this and  i think it's been you know a terrific for our business community and i would love to see it continue thank you so without any objections members out like that to for we are eleven thank you the last item is year forty nine that's the amending chapter twenty two point zero four of the maui county code who were agricultural part and this is i believe is  to go through the med met and pass out of their their committee so you may proceed so really think of this is this is kind of a clean up kind of ordinance where really it's a lot housekeeping type of things and we're trying to clean up the application process if there was a lot that opened up we change the quorum for the committees so it would be easier to get qu lowered the amount of committee members need and there are the cool ag park committee has worked on this for over two years and we finally got it out and it was just a case of you know it keep losing somebody on the committee and then somebody else would need to be updated and so forth and we take some responsibility for being slow at that but we really this is needed we work closely with corporation counsel they have helped us with language some of the things in the application in process we cleaned up that that were massey from previous applications and years ago there were some challenges to the applications and so they just kind of cleaned up the process so it was passed unanimously by the committee you have a recommendation letter there from dr james leary who is the chair of the cool ag park committee and so we're hoping that you would just approve this to go to the full council thank you for any questions from the members this by saying i don't have a question but i would like to say i'm very happy to see this before us you know when i first got on the council i was appointed to this committee of cool egg committee and i served several years there and some of these issues were already there so i'm really really happy to see this today and i urge the members to support it thank you so it's hard to see where the brackets haar unfortunately because they go on for a couple two or three pages so everything that is bracketed obviously comes out and that's why and then you know it's just the language is restated in the underlined area so i just wanted to say yes we got that i just want to make sure that i'm reading this right is that on page eleven at the very bottom it starts the bracket in the close of the bracket doesn't go into  seventeen that's the top i believe that's correct ok you know mr chair this is a lot of changes in here and i and i know the park folks have looked at this changes no leases ok this has no bearing at all on any current lessees this is really for governing the ag park for future applicants for future you know when we said that there would be a maximum of sixty acres allowed or up to five lots no current no current lessee would be affected by this so this is all to govern future applicants and is there a timeline on this is there a deadline that you want to get this done only because notice a lot of this is a lot of stuff to go over and just say ok we take your