good morning everyone will the meeting of the water resources committee please come to order five minutes after nine and today is wednesday march eighteenth i like to remind everyone who has a cell phone if you would please put it on the site so that we interrupted chair would really appreciate i'd like to introduce the members that are here this morning i'd like to introduce my vice chair of this committee mike  annual budget session is set to begin on march twenty seventh twenty fifteen each year for the past three years just before the budget session begins mr taylor has delivered a comprehensive presentation regarding the department's projected budgetary needs and we'll be doing that today mr taylor's presentation to be extremely helpful in preparing us to address the department during the budget session we very happy to welcome here today and thank him for doing this for us so members if there is no objection i would like to have the presentation to receive public to thank you very much we are going to go into recess and set up the big screen mr taylor thought it would work better than the little screen there so we're going to take a short recess well the meeting please come back to order members we all have copies of the slides if you want to follow otherwise it's on the screen mr taylor would you proceed thank you madam chair and thank you members members of the public to watch this picture so what we're going to try to do today is do a quick review of our system and the efforts to date this is these presentations you've seen before but i'm going to go through it kind of quickly because you've seen it before we're going to get into the highlights of the f y sixteen budget proposal so we can try to put them into context with the big picture we're going to focus on some cost implications with the rates and fees and then look at our big policy issues and look and talk about how they tie together so the efforts to date over the past four years we've come up with a long term plan we've started implementation had some different discussions and you can see it in the read doesn't come out very good on the screen but in red it says funding policy crossroads so the big issues this year maximum meter fees issue we talk about every year and drought tolerance verses water for new users especially about upcountry going to get back to these and these are the big issue system we've been through this before we've got a mix of ground water and surface water we cover these areas that i think everyone's familiar with at this point so what we've done is we've done a very detailed supply demand analysis for all the areas for central maui we use the general plan growth projections projected water demand out twenty years and the two blue lines are with a five percent and ten percent conservation we also looked at what projects we could actually build to add more reliable about and we put them in a supply demand form and we've been moving forward with this what you're going to see this year is a big thing in our budget is the treatment plant expansion which will make the green line which is supply go one and a half million gallons higher simultaneously what you won't see in the budget is in this cochran's committee we've just sent a well development deal which would add another five hundred thousand gallons approximately to the central valley system so just these two projects will raise the green line two million gallons this emphasizes how this plan we've been following the last few years is not just an academic exercise we've laid out our needs and we've very strategically taken specific actions to raise the green line and lower the red line last year we had a lot of talk about leak detection we're getting that program started try to lower the red line bottom line with a water utility we're trying to keep that gap between the green and the red as much as we can get it to be by either raising supply or lowering demand or both simultaneously so central maui although it looks kind of tight we can manage it over the next twenty years if we stay on track so again we've got some things coming up just this year in budget that are going to start making some headway there's always a lot of talk about  pumping limits versus the twelve month moving average so all of this is taken into account in the supply west now is a little tighter we've done again supply demand analysis here's the projections for twenty years here's what we could here's our plan of what we would build to increase reliable capacity and you put them on top of each other we're a little bit behind right now that became evident over christmas time when we had some facility failures and we've barely managed to keep we've got a half a million gallon improvement coming online relatively soon some treatment plan upgrades we've got a well that's in the testing phase unfortunately when we drilled  well it looks like we hit some sort of strange geologic formation that even the hydrologists are not really sure what it is and the yield of that is not what we expected we are doing some cost benefit analysis to decide whether  capacity we can develop to meet needs but in the short term it's going to be pretty tight for a few years to come so more to come as we see how this well turns out we did not do we do not have these for hannah and molokai because the growth projections in hama are not that great so basically we can eyeball it and know that as long as we keep doing what we're doing we can meet the general plan growth projections for the upcountry is a little more complicated why there's a little into so what you see here is this red is lower red line right around ten million gallons this is the general plan population projections for a country with five and ten percent  this upper line is the complete meter list and this middle line is half the meter so this is something again i'd like to point out that's vital is the general plan population projections and the meter list are completely incompatible so either we solve them either list in which case growth upcountry is much much more than the general plan calls for or we say look this is the growth we want to country and there's no point developing so much water because then al the growth plans and the need for other infrastructures schools and parks police fire isn't going to keep this ends up being a big issue that you know i'm sure is going to be talked about mark so we developed so cures the current meter list or the current giving out of meters is going to be a limit to about right here based on the system we have we've got some future plans we could do to develop more and when you put that on top of each other this is a plan that we could get to maybe half the meter list in a reasonable timeframe if funding is adequate we're going to look at that in just a little bit up countries really tough because of these issues it's very very expensive plus we've got these issues with the general plan and overall growth and other goodies that have to be ok so when we look at all of these all of these different plans i know you can't read this is about half of our twenty year plan there's a whole nother sheet it's about we've laid out over twenty years all the projects you just saw are in green the yellow projects that are scattered are the projects we have to do even if we don't grow th replacement of aging in person when you add all that up this is what our c h p projections look like over roughly the next twenty years about two hundred million for replacement and about two hundred million for growth rough numbers also i want to point out that we didn't upgrade these last time i gave this presentation was about a year ago we haven't updated any of these graphics or numbers since and they're still close enough although what you'll find is they're not all precisely on the same timeline there plus or minus a couple years but nothing major has changed with the plan maybe next year the year after will redo the whole effort to bring it all back in line but they're so close enough that it doesn't change our but so anyway long term twenty million in c a p a year i'm sorry about two hundred million c ip to do replacement of aging infrastructure and other two hundred million for growth that's the basis of that i think most of you know we don't have any cash reserves maybe a couple of million dollars the only way to pay for this is to borrow money s r f loans general currently our debt service payments per year are just about five million dollars so this blue portion down here that's decreasing this is what our annual debt pains mortgage payments however you want to look at it if we never borrowed any more money but if we follow this plan our annual debt payments are going to go up at this rate every year more and more right it's about five now it's going to get towards forty by two thousand and thirty four again because the rates the cash we're bringing in does not anywhere near cover this  construction so the only way to pay this off is to have some combination of rates start to get a little bit into r f i sixteen proposed budget you're going to see a total budget of ninety one point three million dollars the debt service is just under six million see ip electrical the normal stuff ok but think about this piece of pie and if we follow this plan you can see right now it's five point eight million as i showed you earlier that's going to raise more and more and more up past twenty and higher so just imagine this pipe every year where this piece goes from six up past twenty but the other sections don't shrink so the whole pie is going to get bigger so the only way to pay for this is to have rates and fees that cover it so we've previously shown you a rate the projection over that same time period that covers those costs and that shows rates going up at around five or eight percent a year with meter fees would have to go up to about twenty thousand dollars a metre right right now at the present time there are six thousand dollars this would generate enough revenue to pay for everything you saw this year we have a relatively small rate increase in the range of two to three percent because we had some carryover savings we had a savings of electricity we had one capital improvement project that we bumped so we're able to keep although this is still our rate long term project it's a little lower this year but the big issue is going to be these meter fees because that's where the bulk of the money for the growth projects the one shown in green is supposed to get back into that a little bit later ok so my big point every year is that these are not separate issues these projects this is the country plan we want to move this forward well what happens we move the funding forward we move it projects forward but we got increase the rate if we don't like these rates and we want to flatten these so we don't charge as much new comes down projects get cut funding gets cut and the stuff gets moved up countries especially important right now as we're as we speak the east now in stream flow standards hearings contested case hearings are happening so we're part of that so is h c n ass and some other entity there is a push from some of the entities representing cultural traditional practitioners in east maui to put more water in the streams that could take water away from the department of water supply if we lose surface water in east maui some of these projects for upcountry that were meant to increase capacity may have to be moved forward just to replace lost capacity now that's going to have to be absorbed by rate increases not by meter fees because there'd be no new new meters associated with it but that shows what a big deal the surface water is any smelly if we lose some of that we're going to have to make up also at the last water resources committee we had a brief discussion on the wellhead protection ordinance the purpose of the wellhead protection ordinance is to keep our existing sources from disappearing you can see in all of these graphics how tight we are between supply and demand we can't afford any of our existing store sources to be lost due to contamination or these future things that we're going to be for growth would have to be accelerated for replacement that's going to drive our costs up that's going to drive rates and so although we tend to look at projects differently than borrowing differently than rates and fees these are and like victory and i was laughing as if he's mr grammer anyway so so we so we took all these we took all of these costs and we also looked at them geographically was it how much does it cost to do these improvements for growth in each of the different areas this slide is the key to understanding why upcountry has always been a problem and why it's still a challenge central south to handle all the growth there it would cost about one hundred little over one hundred million dollars and these are rough numbers you look at how many meters that would be a five meter would have to be about nine thousand dollars to bring in that  that for upcountry we need almost about the same amount of infrastructure but it serves so few people that the cost is seventy five thousand these are not the rates were saying we should charge we're saying this is full cost recovery this is what it cost to provide  west maui don't need as much infrastructure because it's a tough it's a tighter area so it comes out about seventeen so you average all of this out which you can't do just from adding these numbers it gets into how many there are but it comes out to around two hundred fifty million of expenses where the average five meter for you would have to be about twenty thousand dollars that would pay for all of this ok so when you look at this you realize the only area above average is  up it's up country that's driving this twenty one thousand or twenty thousand dollars so if we don't have enough money and we say ok what can we do what do we have to cut the only thing you can cut is upcountry because everything else makes money and up country loses money this is the reason that country has been such a difficult thorn for decades because it's so much more per capita that it just becomes a becomes a revenue problem we can't cut the other areas and just do a country because the other areas are what pays for it all so so council really needs to update their software looks so this is key to understanding what the dilemma is and why the water system development fees are so critical to any future actions we take so again it's all tied together and you start seeing when you look at this all together why this pink line this water system development fee if we don't raise that we don't have enough money to do these projects and we look for something to cut the only thing there is to cut is the future of a country that's what we need the money we're going to come back to that in just a little bit ok so with that background of the big picture let's look specifically at some of the major issues that are going to be in the two thousand and sixteen budget that you mostly it's the normal budget here you personnel and replacements of vehicles in this normal c a p stuff so we just wanted to highlight some of the major things so you could talk about them perhaps today not in the middle of budget when it's so hectic ok we're going to be asking for a million dollars to start our billing system replacement project in  policy and intergovernmental affairs meeting a couple of months ago there was an item where with the honolulu board of water supply is contracted to our billing and we mentioned and we mentioned this project in that meeting currently honolulu board of water supply does our billing we have a lot we have a six year contract i think to continue that or a ten year contract and we expressed to you that we want to make our own system on a lot wants us to do the same we want to get started with that so we're asking for a million dollars for both consulting an outside consultant project implementation and we're also asking for five limited term appointment unfunded positions which we would pay for out of this million dollars the point of the limited term positions is that they're essentially temps because our staff is going to have to help build this news we want to bring in about five people to handle normal billing and customer service operations while our staff probably has to move out of the building you know we're think about maybe renting some space in one main plaza which is hooked up to the county computer so that they can build the system this is going to continue f y sixteen and seventeen at the time we get to f y eighteen we will no longer need the temps while the new system operational and we'll lose those l t s so we want to use these limited term appointment positions probably for two what we want to do is something similar to how some of the other floors look move the customer service area just to the front right in front of the elevators knock down some of the interior walls to grab all of that walkway space putting cubicles and fit some more room in for some more people we also are going to be asking for one expansion position permanent expansion position in our building permit section we've done a analysis of our building permi processing very similar to the water supply demand about what it takes to process building person some of you may remember a couple of years ago you change some legislation that building permits have to be processed within thirty days the first pass we have historically been had a difficult time meeting that we've done it and alice's of man hours per permit in this kind of thing even during the slow construction times we've barely been able to keep up and as things seem to be heating up there is no way we're going to be able to keep up with we have a reorganization in with h c h g a found the bottlenecks but we need one more body to make th efficient so that we can ramp up our production a little and not only clear the backlog but get ready for the increase in permits were about to see without that all i can tell you is without both of these things first we don't have any room for more people and once the billing system comes online we're probably going to need another couple of people because we won't be outsourcing that to honolulu between that and building permits where you need a little more room on our floor that's what this is for so it's sort of a long term internal inverter getting back on track with water system development fee is going to talk about that in a minute and the water shortage rates are going to talk about that in a minute the other really big thing in our budget this year is a fifteen million dollars capital improvement budget for the treatment plan yele treatment plant is just a stone's throw up the road from here take surface water from the navajo area this includes a replacement of the existing system that's about half the money which is at the end of its useful life plus an improvement of one point five million gallons per day of additional capacity that's where the fifteen million comes from this project really proud of this project because it shows how being a little patient and working on a long term plan works this was originally laid out in our long term plan a few years ago but it wasn't right for construction funding mostly because of the legal issues surrounding the contested case hearing because we had a positive settlement last year where the county was allocated at extra one and a half million gallons we are now ready to move to the next phase of this this is the kind of project what i've talked about before we can't just throw money at something before it's ready it would have just lapsed last year but now that we've got all the legal hurdles done there are other projects in the pipeline that that are similar so this is something i've mentioned a number of times sticking to the plan working on the pieces and then asking for the construction funding when we're ready is a way to make sure these projects move forward putting that construction money in early doesn't really help but it's almost for sure that that must so this project we hope will have your support on this directly addresses what we've heard from many members of the pub that the department doesn't build new source there's one and a half million gallons a day for central maui newsource combined with the well development deal that's in this concords committee that's two million gallons a day that's just under ten percent increase in the total source for central softly so we are moving forward with these according to this plan ok water system development fees we are proposing this year in budget the exact same proposal we made last year and that is fourteen thousand dollars for a five meter and the other fees with the same percentage increase i'm sure everyone will remember that two years ago we raised this fee from six thousand to twelve thousand our plan was to eventually get it to twenty as you've seen presented last year it was lowered by the council to six think we've shown earlier in this presentation how at six thousand dollars for these fees we will never generate enough revenue so this year the plan would have been to raise this to sixteen thousand we're not asking for that this is the exact proposal we made last year i believe to get them back on track essentially lose one year but get it back to fourteen we've also changed the water system develop in fees broken into three parts source transmission storage for most people they never see these internal numbers but there are some larger developers who might build either some source or transmission or storage so they don't pay all of this they just pay the portion that they didn't build and dedicate we have changed the percentages to match the twenty year plan we basically look forward in the twenty year plan everything we have to build which of those resources which are transmission which are storage we did the math and that's the new ratios to split these so these are done on a strict percentage increase from last year but the ratio between these three sections that's new and we feel that all of these rates and fees represent what it takes to move forward with the plan again that's  right now these are down at six thousand dollars if we cannot get these up to this level we're going to have to drastically cut growth portion of the capital improvement plan because there is just no way to pay  so i'm sure that's going to be one of the controversial issues this year i'm sure we're going to hear people come in and say look this is going to affect affordable housing and these other kind of things all i can say is if we don't generate enough revenue  expenses we will not be able to increase our ability to provide  so again any solution has to meet all of these things if we can't get these this revenue up we've got to cut projects and i've already said there's really only one place to cut projects that's one that cost more than  ok water shortage rates we've had a lot of discussion over this in the past couple of years council passed an ordinance that set up a three stages of water shortage rate stage one stage through stage three stage one is a projected shortage up to fifteen percent stage two is a projected shortage these are short term strict shortages you know several months something like that fifteen to thirty percent and stage three is thirty percent or more so the stage one is shortage rates what we're proposing is no increase in stage one so up to fifteen percent so these are actually the rates the general rates we're going to be proposing in the budget for all the different categories f single family for general and for ag and we're saying when it's a stage one water shortage we want to do that just with warnings and please conserve and that kind of thing so no increases for stage one for stage two what we're proposing is the first two tiers for each of the categories no changes we think this is much better than these general everyone needs to cut ten percent if you're down and you're using water if you're single family and you've been using water below fifteen thousand gallons a month we're saying hey we don't need you to cut it all you're already doing great we want to try to force all the conservation in the upper tiers so what we're proposing is a twenty five percent and fifty percent rate increase for the stage two and stage three shortage rates for all the categories over five eighth's inch and general for stage two and stage three i want to point out again as i've noted previous meetings we don't want the money we want to send a strong message please conserve there are not penalties they are strong conservation measures and i can also tell you that in the past decade or even longer there has never been a situation where the stage two or stage three would have been implemented there's never been more than a fifty so these are what i'd like to call just an emergency plan we want to have it ready we hope to never need it but it's better to have it and not need it but what you'll see in california right now is they are struggling to throw something like this together while they're in the middle of their drought because they didn't do it before hand and so we're seeing what's happening is they're not able to get their conservation down and they're under duress trying to force these systems we just want to have it ready the controversy that's going to happen in shortage rates are going to be these two numbers right here at the bottom ag rates we're proposing again this year one dollar per thousand for the stage one knowing crease for stage two and stage three recognizing that it's harder for ag to cut back but also recognizing that especially up country where we know the shortages happen if agast forty or fifty percent of the use if during a stage two or stage three when we are fifteen or thirty percent short of water they're going to have to cut back there's no other way to make it through so balancing those two instead of a twenty five and fifty percent increase we will be proposing a ten percent and twenty percent increase a couple of years ago when i when we went through our plan to address the upcountry meter this one of the keys was we looked at our supply is in yellow country water with surface water goes up and down the demand in red goes up and down it's just the short duration time periods where we can't make it that we said we want to limit the peaks this is always been our plan as part of upcountry meter issuance i think you all know upcountry meter issuance has started based on the capacity of the h vocal wells and some of the other system improvements but in order to keep that going we need to have the ability to make to limit these peaks and those regulations are these  shortage rates especially these two numbers just from a sort of math basis i can tell you that at this point if these aren't approved if we just say no you know if the people come in and we know what the ag community's going to say that they can't afford this if we leave these as one dollar one dollar no increase and we're basically saying about our how bad the drought gets ag does not have to cut this will never work and the only thing i can see to do in reaction to that is to stop meter issuance upcountry because it's only this ability to lower this in the short duration event that allows us to use to issue meters upcountry otherwise we're going to need to save the rest of the h b o capacity to get through this so i don't mean this as a threat but it's just a mathematical reality it's always been part of the problem if we're not willing to force cuts during these deep overlaps we should not continue issuance of meters up so that's going to be other controversy so the priority policy issues maximum meter fees you can see why that is key to the whole future of the program drought tolerance versus new users that this issue of the shortage rates i think i made clear you know there are cause and effects it's not just these numbers that we're going to vote on they have implications for the whole system so in today's presentation we looked at a quick review of the system the efforts to date hopefully put that into perspective the highlights from the f b i sixteen budget you can see how they meet those system requirements and plan requirements and why we're doing what would cost implications of rates and fees are the big issue and how they all tie together i think we've talked so with that will be more than happy to answer any questions and i hope this gives some big picture insight into what we're doing in budget this year and why again as we go on budget i'm sure will go line by line and we'll be ready to talk about that these are the big issues that are not normal that i think it's best to try to talk about a little talk about what we've seen the meeting is now in recess of the meeting please come back to order thank you very much mr taylor we are now members going to proceed with public testimony on the item on our agenda today if you wish to testify please sign up at the desk located in the being read if you are still talking at the four minute mark i will kindly ask you just stop when testifying please state your name and who you are representing and especially if you are representing a group we'd like to know that we have established a connection to the district offices and to be fair we will rotate through each of the sites mr brink if you could please check in with district offices yes thank you chair office are you good morning don office are you there excuse me good morning everybody while the concern is so huge and i sat here and listened in the folks who are who are they are and listening otherwise the whole presentation was about money i didn't hear a word about the health and well being of the people who are affected mail affected by what has happened with this water system i don't need a water meter but i just saw a third column in that presentation that said that some of the people whose me open on that water meter list forever just not going to get them going to cut the list  are not the country people part of the county maryland i mean look i not part of the county something is terribly wrong with that and i just wan say a good word about what's been happening at the mac over the weekend there was a wonderful person taishan and it was about soil and about how water whether or not it's coming from surface water or from bit it affects ripple effect out there what we can see and fail to see because the water isn't there and what's underground that is seeping out and causing all sorts of havoc huge health havoc so was great and there were some people from the county who were there i recognized that and last night in key hay which is not where i live there was a presentation from the key hay community association volunteers both the water director and i was there and neither of us said anything during that time but at the end i spoke with him afterwards before hearing this god awful presentation not that the presentation was bad but the you know and the fact that they would be clearing that up after the people who are the decision makers know will no longer be an office message there that's what i keep hearing and so i would like to just remind ourselves that in the history of the country water contamination including but not limited to the home of local wells back in the early two thousand the county hired an outfit called boyle engineering from florida to do the work that the county didn't feel they had the ability to do at the time those of us who served on that were volunteers we got a half a million dollars we were not a five zero one c three we gave that money and we didn't get it it was assigned to the county to administer the administration of that left all sorts of holes and one of the big things that was in there including in the executive summary is that chlorine and chloramine cannot be mixed without dire problems now we got on saturday when the offices were closed a letter in the mail i don't know if the rest of the county got this but a number of people from up country called and said what the heck is this it's saying that if you have any trouble with your health call your doctor if you're having any trouble with your bonds and we went through this in the early two thousand is where the koirala ended up lying on their sides ok huge this is a problem so here we are now more than a dozen years later facing some of these same issues and the idea of the well head thing that went on in two horse and four so huge huge concerns here and i'm just asking the people who are coming up with these presentations the only thing we can do there is a recommendation from concerned citizens and it says do it right respond to two of the concerns that the testifier brought up about water quality and public health i think she's right i didn't mention that and i probably should have i think even without going without saying the total mission of our department is to provide water that meets all federal and state public health requirements in the audience there are only four members of the department water supply  all the rest of them of the roughly two hundred people that work for us are out right now making sure that the water people are getting is safe and meet standards although the presentation was all about cost that cost is to make sure that happens although i did not mention explicitly i want to take this opportunity to say that is always the number one concern of everything we're doing provide the volume of water that's necessary and provide that quality that's necessary so although i never mention the word quality that is underlying in everything that was put on in that presentation so i appreciate the testifier bringing about up so i had the opportunity to add that thank you thank you very much mr taylor members i'm going to give me an opportunity to ask you questions and let's be aware that we're not making decisions today we're just trying to discuss thing clarifies and we'll be ready when we do get to budget and i'm going to start with my chair who of course is  have very serious you consider about the water situation because the people up country have waited for a very long time and we are very concerned about a floatable housing upcountry we're concerned about the legacy of passing on agricultural lands and a country a country and so you know i feel a tremendous responsibility and i can't tell you how scary it is this coming when we look at things like this because the facts are the facts you know we can't alter the facts that it is expensive to do what we want to do a country and it's going to take all of the people to support making that happen or it's just not going to happen so i would be quiet for no and as the members if they had their questions anything i have a couple of chairs sure go right ahead mr taylor thank you for your presentation and for being here you made mention that you know the return of the date will actually be taking water away from the department of water supply can you kind of elaborate more on that and how that identified as such there has been no decision made what there is is there is a what's called a contested case hearing in front of the state water commission about interim what's called in hearing is about whether that can continue whether there was diversions need to be lessened increased etc and who who has the most rights to that water so that process is going on now the contested gates hearing i have no idea how it was it could and i mean this is all public information because it's all been presented publicly some of the petitioners have asked for one hundred percent restoration of the streams zero diversions so we take on average let's say six million gallons a day from there it's about eighty percent of our water if that's ultimately how this is ruled and we have you know ten years to make that true will  develop six million gallons of alternative water source like right away if on the other hand the end of this result says we can keep our location then and everything we do if they become non economically viable even though we have allocations that water we need there ditch system to deliver that to us so this thing becomes very very complicated and there's too many permutations to go through what may or may not happen but the bottom line is we are reliant on the small we surface water a lot of it but not nearly as much as us and if our location or our ability to get that water is diminished there and our existing it could be the entire six million and it could be that we're left with all of it and we just went through a very similar process with the navajo for streams and we ended up getting one and a half million gallons more out of that so the same thing could happen here we could end up getting an extra million gallons which means we could expand surface water so it is far too is premature for me to try to guess what may happen what's most likely to happen is contested case hearing the commission will rule at some time in the next year or two no one's going to like their decision it will be appealed to the supreme court and years later it will come back to the commission and maybe that will happen again this is going to bounce back and forth between the commission in the supreme court most likely for many many years to come but how exactly it ends up i have no idea i know the navajo case took about ten years before it was finally resolved this is so much bigger and so much more complex our guess would be it's probably going to be ok if i just wanted to ask you because of your comments i just wanted to give you some some foresight and this is going on it's something beyond our control that could have great implications to our operation  are plans are actually well i guess i should just ask are you in the process is a department in the process looking for a well site or d you already have a well site that you're trying to develop new water resources and i did not get any as to who the party was in a conversation with our department of water supply so i guess it's just asking are you in that process we do not have a current site but we are working with state water  commission you know is in the audience a lot of the long range planning folks are here working with them to try to tie in the situation to the community plan that they're working on with some of these issues at the state water commission and trying to have reading this major interagency coordination to try to say that whatever we're doing is coordinated now includes actually the department of point home and we also have meetings with us so we don't have an actual site or project but we are trying to work out an overall scheme that meets everybody so are you looking for another well site at this time we would like to have a backup well what's most important l reservation of the groundwater that is currently not being utilized in the walkover that's really the key to everything what are the use that water whether or not we can use some of that water instead our existing wells capable already of topping or so if we have to go somewhere else that's a new well site if we can get some of that allocation well we can get that water without any  i think it's fair and very wonderful to be back on the water search resources committee and having here with director taylor once again and thank you for your presentation nice to be brought back up to speed on all this stuff to and thank you i think it your presentation this time either i've been hearing it so much that it's finally sinking in or you've made it a lot more clear to understand exactly what you're trying to portray to us and so for me i guess water but our white flume is probably getting wrapped up right now the projects being wrapped up it's actually fully functional from a water standpoint i think they're still building handrails and this other kind of stuff but it is my understanding is one hundred percent functional from a water capture standpoint ok and so i mean we have been and we've had a lot of money into that awesome job up there so that if one hundred percent stream restoration zero diversions is the decision of the commission that's ultimately upheld then yes there would be we would not be able to take any water into that flow or our to lower systems which also use surface water that's i don't find it very likely that's going to happen but i mean that is what a one hundred percent or zero percent diversion scenario would look like  and i believe it's highly unlikely that every single day ridge would be taken away but nevertheless it could be cut down and so in the meantime the department looked at two alternatives if i mean worst case scenario and we all got to think if that day does come and storage attachment you know all these other ways and you said wells perhaps but there's not much up in that highs versus the lows if there is zero diversions you can build all the reservoirs you want they will be empty so the only the only way to make up for lost diversion really is either large reservoirs that you can fill during the short high flow times or ground water wells so one of the reasons we we put together a long range plan in the format you see these sort of  steps is not to say this is exactly the year we're building them but to recognize the gap between supply and demand and say regardless of what affects that gap we just move the next project  so for up country for example i showed those steps out you know past the year two thousand and twenty additional source capacity we would have to move those projects up so it be the same project it would be wells somewhere in the east  region that would pump water up to the up country region but they might have to be done sooner rather than later and because those would be to replace existing source the water system development fees can't be used for that that would just  rate increases so we have contingency plans and we've got enough sort of identified projects in the queue that you could essentially double the population of maui and we know what we would have to do we would  move we just have move those projects up in a timeline so we've got enough projects lined up that we could meet almost any realistic demand fork out it's just a matter of when's the right time just you don't want to start them too early if you don't need them because then you've got to raise rates to pay for them and you also don't wait too so we've got a nuff ideas we've sorted out which are the the low hanging fruit in order and that's what those step graphs show you just comes down to when do you commit and across the board regardless if these diversions and the true infrastructure is built by e m i but here we are we're county and part of community you know fortunately we rely on their transmission to get us the water so  are a party we are one of the four parties in this case as we speak to have corporation councils attorneys are there right now i'm there whenever i'm basically not here we have consultants we've hired we've written extensive briefs and on the equipment has been purchased we have it and the manufacturers ready to train us the positions are being advertised for as we speak because it's slowed down a little bit because the way city county of honolulu does it is they have each ga white collar people we wanted that you know are blue collar pipefitter group so that when there's so they can turn valves and they have access to traffic control with cones and if there is not work for them to do th could be on a pipefitter crew so we had to create some new position description and job classification things from scratch that took a little longer than usual because we didn't follow the existing model city and county did so it took a little longer they are either being advertised now or we just closed them i remember a couple of weeks ago they were being advertised so we should have those filled relatively soon again we already have the equipment manufacturers ready to train us we'll be getting started with that relatively soon three reasons you may get those discrepancies are metering that's small errors in meters that add up people stealing water from fire hydrants and illegal connections or leaks we just don't have any way to quantify how much of those there are we're guessing between the numbers we've seen and the age of the system and the construction methods the old construction methods of some of the older portions that we would hope in each of the three systems there's at least a million gallons of leaks to be found and fixed i think that's a reasonable estimate i frankly it's one of the things i hope there to be more i hope there's lots of leaks that we can find i hope they're big leaks that means we can attack them if what we find is that each pipes usually come in twenty foot sections each one is just seeping a tiny little bit they're not fixable and there's nothing you can do about that so i'm hoping that what we find is large that we can start making you know big cuts very quickly so but we'll we'll know over the next you know six months to a year how that's going ok thank you and then i guess look you know up another case here  numbers that have come down and you stated positively for us the county we were given additional one point five we were allocated one point five we still have to get a water use permit for that but the location at that level was allocated to us so it's very likely now we'll get the actual water use permit there's a whole nother process going through the water commission for each of the individual people having to file water use permit but again the big push was to the leak detection you capture an additional one i guess that would be you know anyway so it's something that's tape taken but we're not utilizing it i'm just trying to add up all the numbers with the well i can have the numbers for you one point one point five from from the treatment plant another half a million from this well as to if we can get a million gallons from leaks repairers that's three we've got another water  well development agreement in the works that's going to be true and that would be five so essentially what we're looking at is we've got our eyes on five million gallons a day which is about twenty percent of the current usage of the central cell system even if eighty percent of that comes to pass you know we're looking at being able to manage the central south system for you know roughly a decade depending on growth rates and be able to meet that really our goal is to establish some breathing room while we're working on these bigger longer term things and that's what all of these projects although one point five sounds like a lot to me you know we can go through that in a few years so we're not just sort of claiming success and victory frame breathing room thing i'm considering that you know looking out twenty or thirty years i don't know what the needs are of this community are going to be i'm assuming that we're going to need another ten million gallons for something and so we're not saying that five million is going to meet us for you know the rest of everyone's lives so at some point we're going to have to do something bigger whether it's moving out to a different area or desalination or something like that there's going to be something more but again we probably won't need that something more for a decade this gives us time to work on these more complicated longer term thank you and lastly for wes my question in regards to the treatment you said you hit some hurdle or that's another big chunk of change that we do this on one of those actually number three meaning you know one is the one we're working on now mena two is one we're looking at siting right now and one of who is even further in the future and then there's the meaning  treatment plant the upgrades at the treatment plant to reduce the algae which is limiting the capacity of that plant we already have a construction contract for that that will be done soon hopefully that all works out and we have an extra half a million gallons a day that we can process from that plant hopefully that will be later this year you know one well which is up in the same region above there that's where drilling we hit some sort of unfor een local geology is what the hydrogen ologists think that is limiting the capacity of that of that well we are running some cost benefit numbers to say is it worth developing a slightly smaller developing it for seven hundred fifty thousand maybe the piping can be shared with the next well which means baby we should do it we've already drilled the hole we have more than a million dollars and case whole the question is over its thirty year over thirty year time period including electricity and all the other things is it worth developing a slightly smaller well or do you just call it a dud and throw your money into the next we need to do a very detailed cost benefit analysis of two different scenarios and we'll figure out which one  everyone a lot of times we say well what about the poor coming up with fourteen grand right now is hard enough with the projections that we've seen played you know what the additional charge for delivery it's not the fuel that we need to we need to start looking at other ways to do whether it's general fund money which is probably the only one that's really there or some other way to keep the meter within a reasonable rate if we really want to have equity for people  dollars for trying to build a home when you're starting a family is we need to think of people we need to think of the services that we can give them we have to use general funds we have to use general funds think that's exactly the kind of discussion we were hoping for today to have some some feedback from the council as far as the ideology of how to fund just one technical correction and i look back to my presentation this is my fault for not explaining it you see four numbers across the road that mr karr referred to the final one labelled fee is actually the total of the first three it's not in addition to the first i feel totally the first three the first three figures i don't have a problem that comes to a position pretty similar to what number carol was to you know i understand there is it is clear in our budget process we're going to have a very difficult bunch of decisions to make we need to decide we're going to have to do it rates we cannot kick the can down the road we saw the financial reality of it we've got to do it meter fees water development fees that's another thing you know we rolled them back we went from fourteen thousand dollars down to what is it a seventy six or something like that suits you know and we know we have to do with that we also dealt with water shortage and we passed the bill we kicked the can down the road as well we're going to talk about this when we get the budget well you know what the day has arrived we are going into budget and we're going to have to put some numbers in those because that we left and that is not going to be easy because you just got a sample of how we feel right here it's very difficult it's hard to ask people for more money and we all know that when we do the reaction we get is not good we've tried asking for pennies and we have a horrible time now we're not asking about pennies we asking about thousands and thousands and thousands so it's politically it's difficult emotionally it's difficult there's really big implications on both sides of decisions we make i kind of feel like mr carroll that because water is our number one issue that i would like to see more county resources put into the water department i just feel that we i'm sorry and i think everybody should help pay for it because if we don't have adequate water systems it affects everything it affects our ability to run this community to build housing to have businesses so that it affects economic development it affects all floatable housing and we're in a crisis right now with homelessness and people not being able to get homes and so to me what're is a good investment of tax money i'm sorry it's just the way i feel  and you know we're a council of nine members and we're all going to have ideas and we're going to have opinions and there will be a majority decision whatever it is we're going to live with it but i think reality has to set in and the public needs to understand that our water is cheap you know yesterday mr victory you know and i had an opportunity to attend a little meeting at college and with the folks that are here to talk about catchmen and the expert that was here made it very clear to us that we have the cheapest water he's ever seen and he thinks we're crazy for giving it away for what we do give it away and you know because we've always been here expects this and we don't think it's unusual of course i'm not speaking from where i understand things are different you know they don't have the opportunity to have the cheap water rates that we do they pay more but i think you know let's talk about basic math two into the do not mix six unfortunately water one is expensive developments expensive maintaining and growing our system is expensive and if the paper rate payers and the people who get the benefit don't feel that they want to pay whatever mr taylor needs to do his job we've got to get their money from somewhere and what are those the county get money the county gets money from taxes so i think decision time is right around the corner i'm really glad that we had the opportunity to listen to mr taylor today and see reality and so we are going to have to deal with this very soon and i'm hoping that people will watch this  replay of this meeting today and see what the reality is and come prepared when we do discuss the budget to talk about how they feel and to bring their suggestions to us it's a significant decision is going to take this whole community where we get the money who pays do we charge different rates in different areas do we stop the media serving the meter list these are big big decisions that are going to have to be made as chair of this committee i welcome comments and input from everybody because we want to make the best decision but again as far as i'm concerned having enough water is number one and we've got to do whatever we have to do in order to get this to victory up i sat there for six years and we tried in the last four and hit many brick walls mr taylor and that's not anyone's particular fault it is what the reality of politics is and i said let's put the first part of this on the table let's get the real crux of the matter and the political where all to do things is not just here in this chamber i go back to the days in the bottled water supply and your husband has told me stories of days even before i became active in two thousand and two i've been a part of this saying and you and i want to just one make one correction manager i am no expert i may have more knowledge than some people in this room but i'm not an expert there is maybe a husband might qualify in that respect but experts are really not to many of us because there's so many facets you cannot know all the nuances even mr taylor at times turns to his staff for information is that correct which that they are right yeah so i mean nobody's an expert so let me make that one clarification i may have more knowledge but that's not doesn't make me an expert but what is what is really hit the table yesterday when we were meeting with this gentleman he gave us some figures in san francisco they're paying six dollars and twenty cents a thousand gallons and it san juan where he comes up there was nine gallons ok just to give you some variables just to keep water systems existing and those who are in san juan it's catchment systems that they use up there they don't use county system the big island all of east and south of perth predominately south east is catchment and that is going back to the days when i was a kid there was never any horrible water it was all catchment this county has about two to three thousand catchment systems the vast majority of which are done for fire purposes for fire flow protection so and dollars a month for the next ten years as a special assessment to get our water systems caught up i don't think that would meet every one of your needs but i can tell you do that do the math and we get a lot closer a lot quicker but again all of us who's all of us there is hypothetical but there's been discussion right mr taylor we've discussed this back and forth back and so we're back to where we were not to use a few years ago and i understand it's our decision but somewhere along the line like you said we can't keep the can down the world it's got to come to a head and i would hope in all the years of being here and you and i have twenty one months more to get than this pay for this you know a lot of people intention why you want to pay more well you know they don't want to but we all understand we want county our taxation if we went in that respect we know what would happen there fees if we went in that respect we saw park fees yesterday what is generated by area and again somebody areas do well a lot more than others and yet you would have thought certain areas would have been higher again i'm going off track but really that really has relevance to what we're discussing here yes you know we work as a united county and work and fix the problems or else you know and i've missed the time out i'm watching it everything i watch it no problem i don't want to go any further i'm just saying we have arrived at this point and we're really going to have to make some hard decisions this year and this year for sure and i'm ready to stand ready to do it because you know let's get it let's get the job done so i'll let m madam chair and you know i know that in our presentations we've tried to give you options and i've been attacked a little bit for you know not trying to push in any particular direction in this case i'm going to push in a particular direction and  n to say that the administration has had these same debates internally and we believe that the best way to do this is through water rates and fees and let me just make a couple points of why we came to this  taking a lot of work to get the special funds to be self sufficient water sewer folks can look at solid waste to see what happens when i know mr richter you know you were on the integrated solid waste plan advisory committee or whatever that was called and there 's a plan that called for all these things to be done they called for moving to sell but you see what happens when that division is only fifty percent funded is nothing ever gets done because general fund is not flush so in the case of water it's important a couple numbers about eighty five percent of all the possible domestic water used in maui county comes from us and all fifteen percent comes from other private providers but just imagine fifteen percent of these users that the county has said you write your check to someone else and now you're going to add their fee onto their taxes but they're already paying their water fee to someone else and who i'm talking about is really in every one of your areas the people who are served by the honner ranch water system they write a check to the hot water system so you're going to raise their property taxes to pay for a water system that they don't even get access to  for something that not only do they never get access to and we're not talking about a park that i choose not to go to talk about water system that they never get access to and they're actually having to write a check to somebody else for that service we just think that that is so inherently unfair to charge property taxes two people that are already have to pay someone else for the service that there's already eighty five percent of the people who pay water bills that somehow they should pay for that water and again i'll just look at look at the general fund systems or the general fund departments that have these long term plans that sit on the shelf and they sit on the shelf because every year they come in and there's always a tax crunch and they never get funded water sewer power airports highways harbors these things have all been determined to have their own funding sources that don't go through the ups and downs of property taxes don't go through the ups and downs of income taxes because their long term infrastructure that they just can't be involved in the politics of how much money do we have this year for all of those reasons i can tell you the administration thinks it's taken a lot of work to get water and sewer to be special funds and to go backwards really just because it's sort of easier to hide increases in property taxes and it is in this smaller funds is a very very very bad idea so and my message thank you very much mr and they are drawing out of the same straws and shame aquifers and sometimes the same strain and sometimes the same sources because the delivery system is different they charge for their delivery right and th at's our hope predication delivery right but also they are taking away from water resources from the general public they are part of this whole community and i'll make the sales right here and saying that without water what did they have it we have it all nobody has it you don't have life you're famous scene water is life right that's right gentlemen ok well i know fine i'll say this you know again it's a philosophical difference what i'm saying that there comes a day in the special feel i was referring to covers everybody so water would become more available for everybody i don't know i don't know the answers and i'm not getting into any really really sure and i don't want to get  stop here and say just differences of philosophical needs in the unity well i think it's important that we've had you know the conversation we've had because we need to get ready the decisions are going to have to be made and we will need good justification so it's good to hear both sides but of course we're not going to make any decisions today but i'm more than happy to put it on the table misc revelant thank you chair thank you to my colleagues victory now and carol for their most eloquent  presentations and i applaud their presentation i have some i have a question and are trying to understand with a country you said a country  cost and it's difficult to provide for a country and you know you're concerned about the future of a country as far as providing the water resources my question for understanding is i don't i don't know how far back the community plan goes in that particular region but i'm sure as we get out into the regions of the districts  from the community some sort of determination will be based on the water man so in two days two days scenario what is the supply capacity for a country in regards to surface water and groundwater on an annual basis about eighty percent of the water comes from surface water and about twenty percent from ground on any given day that can be different depending on the conditions but those are annual average so so do you have like what capacity is actually on the average available for you to make that determination is it based on the existing come in a plan or is it based on some general plan because i would is one of the most difficult issues i think this council has to deal with from our standpoint it's just standard operations we know how much water we can prove and we don't look at the general plan to know that we don't look at the general plan to decide whether or not to give me our infrastructure and our analysis of our infrastructure and operations determines how much water we can get and the upcountry meter issuance ordinance says when we have capacity we make those offers if through his body we get the resources to develop more water about city we're going to keep doing my point is that i tried to make bring in the general plan we use the general plan to do population projections and especially i want to point out i'm glad somebody the long range planning folks are here everybody on the up contributor list doesn't need any entitle they already have all their entitlements they need no actions from the council no actions from the planning committee they just need water and they can go get their building permits and stuff so there's no more subjective actions so as soon as there is enough water something all those houses are going to get built i bring in the general plan to say that because that the meter list is so much more than the general plan growth requirement and all the other infrastructure groups whether it's department of education or police and fire parks or whatever they all look at the general plan to say ok what should we be ready for i'm just concerned that if we fund all this water improvements upcountry no one will ever come to this council and ask oh you know should we grow more that growth is just going to happen and none of the other infrastructure groups are being told to prepare for it because a general plan has this low growth rate but the meter list has this high growth rate and i'm just worried not for water but for the other infrastructure groups who are sort of being told to follow the general plan but in this whole other conversation we're saying hey let's follow the meter list and i'm just for seeing problems in all of the other infrastructure groups when all the sudden we solve water and there's not enough school capacity or parks or you know the sewage becomes too d know i don't molly there's there's been a lot of hard hard work for the general plan and then everyone's waiting to start their district plans i certainly hope that the department of water supply will incredibly good working relationship with the planning department in fact our next head of our water resources planning division is now the head of long range planning so she knows all this and we always consider ourselves and i've said before just the plumbers we follow that lead we tell them here's what we can do here's what it's going to cost but we don't have our own department ideology about growth or lack of growth so we look to the general plan we want to be part of it to give our input before it's done i was certainly willing to implement whatever it calls for and thank you missed those are very very good remarks and we'll make sure that we watch the development of the  community and make sure that they can into consideration this cochran thank you chair and i think it's already been happening with the a community plan in regards to water although it's not county related but so i'm trying to look at this mountain of service in your slide on page ten and in the following slides if we do get up to that twenty thousand dollars meter fee affected it doesn't decrease the debt it allows us to pay the debt i mean the analogy would be if you want to put more on your credit card and your monthly payments higher but you get a second job doesn't increase your monthly payment but now you have a way to cover those monthly payments so that's essentially what this is it's a way to continue using borrowed money as a methodology but some plan that we have enough revenue coming in that when the bills come we can pay the other way it could be done if you could avoid that mountain of debt by raising cash now by raising rates shift more of our capital improvement to cash versus general bonds but you need a revenue coming in that's high enough to qualify for those and they also have slightly higher so it's really just a financing mechanism you can either pay earlier with cash or pay later with cash and use that in order to put out the meters that's increasing it costs us so we're trying to retrieve the money to pay offset the costs that's correct yes so the debt i mean if all right and then some of the revenue that you just mentioned in these type of supplies or whatever how do we reach that quota i mean could we get to that level or is that just not even a really good option to turn to i remember we looked at it a few years ago and there are some rules i'm sure the budget director understands as much better than i do because he's explained it to me your ratio of revenue to debt has to be high enough to qualify and i seem to remember that ours isn't and also the interest rates are higher so if you so it doesn't change anything from the sense that you do x or influence first because they're cheapest then general because you're next and then if you have to you can go to revenue bonds but they're even more expensive so if you don't have to why would you want to so but they are an option to even more separate the department of water supply from the county from a financial standpoint have us do revenue bonds that's going to drive rates up even faster and if we can still borrow general obligation bonds why would we want to but again city county want to they i believe just do revenue bonds because they're of this community water police fire you know all these services that we expect in a in a you know well run government entity you know community and so i understand the subsidy the reasoning for it and would like to figure out a way that yes is somehow fairly distributed around but i understand your point where your private and your source in all this but then mr victor you know made a good point that the source is a public trust and everyone taps into it somewhere somehow and how you get it is the differences in transmission or what have you and so like myself i'm not tied to any county service and i would be pain for other peoples and depending on the price i could be ok with that because i believe in quality of life for all and it's one of those things you know i take from this source and rain and everything else to make my world go around and i think everyone else deserves that also but as you say the day has come and we will be dealing with this in the next floor we all know that we need to take care of water and mr taylor has worked very hard at giving us the information we need to make the decisions but like he says you're the policymakers and so we can't  it's going to be sitting right here and we're going to have to deal with it so i was hoping that you know we'd be able to look at this today i want to thank mr turner for bringing all the information to us and doing a presentation you know and thank the members that are here today because you know we've talked about important things to help us when we get to that moment of decision and one think the public you know for for being a part of it i know that mr taylor and the department staff will be ready to help us with any additional information we need and i know that the budget staff will definitely be here to help us with during budget as we try to make decisions but again this is a community decision that has to be made we have to listen to everybody but everybody needs to have information in order to make good decisions and i like the discussion i think it's healthy when we have different viewpoints because it helps us learn and understand and change our thinking and be receptive to well this is probably the best thing for us to do and you know we're going to as a counselor i know try to make the very best decision for everybody but i'm going to say it again chair and i just wanted to thank you and the members for this opportunity today most of the departments i don't think get this opportunity right before budget to have this sort of philosophical discussion we get in the budget and we start in to you xerox machines and trucks and this kind of stuff and i hope i know this discussion was helpful for me and i hope it was hope for you so we get into budget and we get to dragged into that that thing we do we're going t line you realize that there's really just these couple of numbers that are key to everything this year and we tend to get to those last at eleven thirty at night on the last day and i hope that all the members will remember this discussion during budget and if we start getting sucked into too much of the detail to realize that we've got some really big decisions my staff will be here to go through either a little details or big picture stuff i think this was really helpful i think to me and hopefully to yourselves in the community about what the real core issues are this year and budget and hopefully we can we can deal with those while everyone's fresh and not at you know friday night at eleven thirty or not so i really appreciate  this is the year we need to implement whatever and i think that's exactly what you're saying mr taylor implement the implementation starts this year or else we'll never get caught up am i correct in my  your assistance and thank you did public and i'd like to thank the water department staff thank you for the hard work that you guys have put into getting this stuff together today and without any further need to prolong the meeting the meeting