Six years after the current county administration came to office, also six years after Kaua’i County adopted its Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan, a year and a half after the Wall Street Journal in a front page article called Kaua’i
Six years after the current county administration came to office, also six years after Kaua’i County adopted its Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan, a year and a half after the Wall Street Journal in a front page article called Kaua’i the Garbage Island, two years after the administrative assistant announced at the County Council that a junk car processing facility would be ready in “two weeks,” the whole junk car scene seems to be getting murkier and murkier.
To begin with, nobody seems to know how much it costs the county to process and barge a junk car off the island, for the simple reason that the administration has never revealed any meaningful figures.
From what numbers I have been able to glean, I made the estimate that it cost between $300 and $500. The mayor in her radio show disputed this range, saying it only costs $200 per junk car. Now she says to The Garden Island (Nov.
23, “Kusaka: $7 fee not enough to rid island of junk cars”) that the range is from $125 to $140. Not long ago, her solid-waste consultant estimated the cost to be $168.
All these numbers have surfaced in the wake of the Ccuncil’s proposed bill to raise the so-called annual highway beautification fee from $2 to $5. The extra $3 from each of 54,000 cars on this island would yield $162,000 a year, which the mayor says is not enough.
Before discussing ways to increase the revenue beyond this level, we should first ask a more fundamental question: Why does it cost our county at this time so much to get rid of junk cars when no other county in the state comes even close to our claimed cost?
It would seem that any reasonably intelligent person would look into how the other counties do it. Being reasonably intelligent, I did in fact look, by going to the Big Island. I came home with their junk car budget document, which is surprisingly simple to follow. There are two major items of expense: A single junk car coordinator at $26,880 (note: this person does not get a county-supplied $25,000 truck to get around in as is being done on Kaua’i) and a single contractor at $318,000 a year to process (meaning cleaning the cars of fluids, removing the tires, puncturing the gas tank, and crushing the car) and barge to Honolulu all junk cars as well as tires, batteries, refrigerators and stoves (so-called white goods).
The only capital investment is a $65,000 tow truck (with bed and wheel lift) operated by county workers to bring the junk cars to the point where the single contractor takes over. The total annual expense for the entire program is $430,000. This is covered by a $4 annual fee on each of about 110,000 registered cars on the Big Island. Sounds amazingly simple? Yes, because it is not a complicated program.
You ask, how can this contractor do it for that price? To begin with, when he hauls the junk cars to the final destination in Honolulu, at one of the two car-shredding facilities, he is paid $25 a ton for what he brings in. A crushed and stripped car weighs a ton or more. So when he takes around 10,000 Big Island junk cars a year to get shredded, he gets paid $250,000. His costs are primarily in transportation – running his own trucks on the Big Island and in Honolulu, and paying for the barge.
So his total revenue of $568,000 a year turns out a pretty good profit. John Barretto ran the same kind of operation on Kauai through the 1970s and ’80s; but he shipped the cars all the way to Tacoma, Wash. (there was no shredder in Hawai’i then) and still made money charging the county of Kaua’i $25 a car.
If we look at the bottom line, what we see is that the Big Island today pays around $40 a car and Kaua’i County, using the lowest number we have been given by the administration so far, pays $125.
A quick look at how this county deals with junk cars at this time will readily show that this $125 figure is totally unrealistic. Let’s say you spot an abandoned car parked near Kalihiwai for a week or two and then it’s not there any more. Where is it? In Hanalei. But the Puhi Metals Recycling Center is in Puhi, you say. Right, so it will take two tows (by contracted commercial haulers) to get that junk to Puhi. I’m told the average tow charge is $80; so we’ve already spent $160.
At Puhi, the car goes to one contractor to get cleaned out, then to another contractor to get crushed and deposited in that big fenced yard with the fancy name – Puhi Metals Recycling Center. Where does the bill stand now? What about shipping cost to Honolulu? Who gets the $25 per ton at the crusher? (Here is a simple question to the administration: Kaua’i shipped out 1,700 junk cars and 900 tons of scrap to Honolulu a couple of weeks ago. Who got paid how much for that one operation?) It is time this administration comes out with some meaningful explanation about this whole solid-waste mess. Stop passing the buck, blaming everybody else for the failings of the administration itself. The most recent example of buck-passing being the mayor’s blaming “transients” for causing the junk car problem! Just who are the transients? If transients are tourists, they are not likely to abandon rental cars. If the mayor means by transients the dreadlocks crowd, there are not enough of them owning cars to abandon 2,000 of them a year on the streets.
And, responding to the serious concern of Councilman Gary Hooser with a “Hello. This is a user fee, not a tax” (TGI, Nov 23) is not worthy of the office she holds.
But I do see a glimmer of hope, perhaps. I went on a tour of recycling operations in Honolulu, sponsored by the Partnership for the Environment – a coalition of businesses coordinated by the city and county of Honolulu. What impressed me was not only the progress in recycling Honolulu has attained in recent years, but how enthused and energetic the industry is in pursuing its mission. The industry is profitable and growing. Nobody is moaning and complaining. Coming from Kaua’i, that was an invigorating experience that gives one hope.
I noticed that Kauai County’s solid-waste specialist and newly hired recycling coordinator were there, too, in their official capacities, I trust. If they learned a small fraction of what I learned, and carried home a fraction of the hope and enthusiasm I took with me, Kaua’i might see some progress yet in its long-stalled solid-waste management operation.
From the taxpayers’ standpoint, sending the solid-waste specialist to the tour would seem like a much better deal than sending him to college for an MBA.
Raymond L. Chuan, Hanalei
