Council Meeting - Regular Meeting

We'll be right back. you

Good afternoon. Will the Committee on Energy, Environment, and Sustainability please come to order? I'd like to welcome Committee Vice Chair Dos Santos Tam and Council Members Tova and Tupola to the chamber. Pursuant to section 92-3.7, Hawaii Revised Statutes, this meeting will be conducted as a remote meeting by interactive conference technology with the following procedures in effect. Members of the public will be allowed to provide oral testimony on all items on the agenda in two ways, remotely and in-person in the council chamber. Remote and in-person oral testimony will be allowed when the agenda item is taken up. As both English and Hawaiian are official languages of the State of Hawaii, pursuant to Article 15, Section 4 of the State Constitution and Section 1-13 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, members of the public may testify in either language. For oral testimonies offered in , additional time as may be necessary will be allowed for the testifier to provide an English translation of their testimony if they so wish. Before testifying, each person shall state their name and each speaker may not have anyone else read their statement and is limited to a one minute presentation on each item. All persons who have registered to testify remotely by video conference or phone will be called upon first. When your name is called, please monitor your screen and activate your audio feed when prompted. I will then give persons who have not registered an opportunity to offer testimony. Please utilize the raise hand feature in Zoom to be called upon first. For those who are joining us by telephone only, please press star nine to indicate your desire to speak. I'll identify you by the last three digits of your phone number. When your phone number is called, press star six to unmute yourself when prompted. Some friendly reminders and tips, video conference from a quiet location if possible. If you're also watching the proceeding on Alilo, please mute your television at the time you're called to testify. And when the timer on the screen reaches zero, please conclude your remarks promptly. Once the remote test fires have testified, I'll proceed to in-person testimony in the council chamber. Persons who have not registered will be given an opportunity to speak following the oral testimonies of the registered speakers. HRS section 92-3.7 requires all votes at remote meetings to be conducted by roll call. I don't believe we have any votes today. And I also don't believe we have any council members appearing from outside the chamber as well. written test mode is included in the test fires address, email address, and phone number will be available to the public as described on the posted agenda. As a courtesy, please turn off all cell phones. And then that brings us to agenda item number one, informational briefing, an update on test pool conversion, planning and strategy, Joining us in the chamber is Dr. Kealoha Fox, Executive Director of the Office of Climate Change Sustainability and Resiliency, who will be providing a brief presentation, which is available online, is Mayor's Message 84-2026. I'll go ahead and turn it over to you, Dr. Fox. Mahalo again for being here today.

Thank you, Chair Weyer and Vice Chair and members of the committee, council members DeSantos-Tam and Tova and Tupola. So good to see you all today. I'm going to just pivot really quick so I can get the slide screen going and then we'll go ahead and take it over with the slideshow.

Perfect, appreciate that. I'll also just acknowledge the presence of Director Babcock as well from Environmental Services who will be ready and available to answer any questions. And also Director Yamamoto from Hawaii Green Growth. Appreciate you being here as well. Were you here to provide testimony or were you presenting just to support? Okay, perfect.

I think with your permission, Chair, I'll go ahead and provide the presentation, and then we can open it up to any discussion and questions you folks might have, and then I can make sure I defer to Gwen Yamamoto-Lau on behalf of the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority, or of course, my companion here, Dr. Babcock for ENV, if that helps.

Perfect. Wonderful. We'll do that. So we'll go with what you said first. We can start the presentation and then go into that.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Mahalo. So today's presentation is just to provide a basic update of where we're at with some of the city's efforts around cesspool conversion. And so we wanted to start with the update here. You know what, I'm gonna actually move this over to make sure we can see it. I wanted to just provide an update on some of the numbers and the statistics of where we're at. So, Hawaii has approximately 88,000 residential cesspools that collectively discharge an estimated 50 million gallons of untreated sewage into groundwater and surface water every single day. And about 8,000 of those cesspools are located here on the island of Oahu. This poses significant threats to our human health, our drinking water sources, and of course our near shore ecosystems. And this is an area that CCSR has been worried about and documenting through our early beginnings, starting even with our OLA resilience strategy. This is an urgent issue that is not only affected by CCSR and our agencies here in the city, but the Hawaii State Legislature in 2017 enacted Act 125, and that requires the conversion of all cesspools statewide by the year 2050. But despite this mandate, the high upfront costs of conversions continue to remain a significant barrier, especially for households, homeowners, property managers, and particularly individuals and households that fall into the low and moderate income LMI households, if you will. So the statewide cesspool conversion pilot grant program was authorized in 2022 under Act 153 and administered by the Hawaii State Department of Health to try to overcome some of those barriers and to make some of those gains towards 2050. This Act 153 helped to assist qualified property owners in the form of reimbursable grants to convert or upgrade over 200 cesspools. In the program's 2023 report to the Hawaii State Legislature, it notes, and I quote, many grantees still faced a financial burden as they had to pay outstanding costs between $10,000 to $30,000 out of pocket even without grant awards. Additional funding would benefit grantees and make the program more accessible for low-income homeowners. One of the agencies that's been leading this charge here within the city is our very own Department of Environmental Services, and they have been conducting activities such as studying sewer expansion in areas on Oahu, and they've identified multiple areas to the existing sewer basins where sewer system expansion may occur in the future and where residents may be required to finance lateral connections into the new sewers. And through this work, the city is able to identify properties for which acceptable and onsite wastewater systems will be necessary so that they're identified where sewer expansion is not planned and considered highly unlikely. I'll speed up a little bit and bring us to where we've been connecting at that intersect with ENV around the city and county of Honolulu's newly established Climate Resiliency Fund. And thanks to your support council members and the adoption of Bill 15 in 2025, we're now able to provide finance preventative, ameliorative, and educational measures related to a number of effects of climate change. And so per our ROH, we're able to look at one of the areas today that you folks have authorized the special fund usage, and that's to include cesspool conversions and installations for sewer lateral connections for unsewered properties. And so with the first adoption with your passing, of the appropriation in Resolution 25-204, Council helped us allocate $625,000 from the Climate Resiliency Fund in fiscal year 26, the current fiscal year now, to provide financial assistance to households to accelerate cesspool conversions for the island of Oahu. And for us, that helps us to move forward some of our climate adaptation actions and strategies, including in our Climate Ready Oahu adopted plan in Actions 5.3 and Actions 9.4. Oh, you're already on. Thank you so much for your help. It's here. Wonderful. So again, with Bill 15, your support via council for our ordinance that establishes the Climate Resiliency Fund. Grants from this program may not exceed $50,000 and may only be awarded to households with a total household income under $100,000. Within our Climate Resiliency Fund, there are five purpose areas. And so they're listed here with the complete verbiage within our ordinance. But we're financing preventative, ameliorative, and educational measures. We're safeguarding city residents, the economy, and natural environment. We're educating city residents about climate impacts. We're enhancing the city's resilience to climate change impacts. And we're mitigating experienced and potential flood impacts. The City's new accessible conversion planning and activities fall squarely within multiple categories in our CRF purpose areas, but they especially link directly to purpose areas one and four. So we thank Council for your support for the appropriations of the CRF in FY26, and of course for your ongoing support right now as we go through the budget process for FY27. For the FY26 allocation, again, the resolution 25-204 approved the transfer of funds of 625,000 from the Climate Resiliency Fund to the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency to support our cesspool conversion work pursuant to the ordinance. We have worked with a number of agencies and done our intergovernmental coordination since the time that the resolution was passed. This includes liaising with the State Department of Health, the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority, our own Department of Environmental Services, subject matter experts in the field, and of course subject matter experts that work here in the city to help design and scope the CRF cesspool conversion program for this year that we're looking to launch. This table provides a comparison and review of our program delivery approaches. So just a quick overview of the orientation for you council members. From left to right, you're able to see the city administered program with the Hawaii State Department of Health efforts that we pursued. In the middle is our programmatic work in alignment with the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority, HGIA, and then opportunities that could have led to a city-led program. What we did was we made sure that our planning activities and research was conducted across all of these areas to see what was the best course of action for this initial appropriation of the 625,000 and then where do we go from here because as stated in Bill 15 there is a real call to effort around cesspool conversions. And so based off of our analysis and design I want to bring us to the work here squarely in the middle and that's our ability to initiate this MOA, our memorandum of agreement through an intergovernmental agreement with HGIA, and the Executive Director, Gwen Yamamoto-Lau, is here with us in chambers today to share more about how we might be able to create this cesspool conversion loan program together. It's the first mechanism of its kind, and we've been working in collaboration throughout the state legislative session to see the positive transmission of HB 1618, HD1, SD1, CD1 that's sitting right now with the governor waiting to be signed. That establishes the very first ever cesspool conversion revolving loan program to be administered by HGIA and provide that direct financial assistance, including low interest and forgivable loans to eligible homeowners so that they can participate in the upgrade and conversion and connection to the cesspool process. I wanted to start with the middle and the success because we found through our activities, our research, our engagement, our due diligence, that the two, the left and the right approaches within the table here just weren't gonna work. On the right side, we just weren't going to be able to create and administer immediately a city-led program with the 625,000 appropriated by U.S. Council. It was just going to take too much time. It wasn't going to be nearly enough resources. And the staff weren't going to be attached to this right pillar in the column for the mechanism. And so we know that this is not a pathway forward for us to pursue right now. Consequently, we weren't able to continue our efforts with the Hawaii State Department of Health either. We had multiple meetings and engagements with them. And unfortunately, the program that I had mentioned that they had administered and they did have some success with a couple of years ago is no longer active. It no longer has either legislative operational funds nor legislatively funded positions. And so that didn't seem to be a viable alternative for us to be able to utilize that 625,000 by the end of our fiscal year either. Again, I bring us back to the success here in the middle and I want to really thank all of the counterparts that we were able to liaise with. I think we've found a very successful pathway for all of us and this proposed partnership structure based on the analysis mentioned, It starts with this MOA. We have this agreement. It's been fully signed, authorized, and executed as of yesterday, so we're in a perfect position. The funds have been encumbered by the end of our budget and fiscal services timeline and deadlines for this And so we're exactly where we need to be to make sure that we can work clearly with HGIA to help to administer and implement the financial assistance for eligible Oahu households so that they can find success of their own to upgrade and convert cesspools. to approved wastewater onsite treatment systems or connect to city sewer infrastructure as appropriate. And so I just wanted to highlight here four of the key objectives that we have outlined in our MOA with HGIA. The first is that we want to allow for flexible financing methods. This is exactly why we want to work with HGIA and their expertise. They have a number of mechanisms that they're working through as Hawaii's own green bank. They're just stellar in this area and this is up perfect partnership between the county and state level for us to be able to leverage our resources and move forward quickly to help our residents here on our island. We're working together to prioritize those low and moderate income households with income less than $100,000 per year and prioritizing priority one cesspools out of that 8,000 data number that I had given you earlier. Third, we're requiring the deployment of planning and reporting so that we're building this program together and we're finding ways to navigate the newness of this so that we can hopefully expand, replicate our efforts, and we hope other counties will actually join us so that we can not only tackle the 8,000 that I had mentioned, but the greater number of the 88,000 that we need to be moving towards by 2050. And that leverage, I think, is going to really hold a strong promise of how we can start to work together, use our funding wisely, and all contribute to some of the positive gains that we know you share in our passion as well. So here's just a quick visualization of that timeline that I just mentioned to you at a glance. In May, council, you helped to approve Bill 15. We've been moving through the HB 1618 process throughout the legislative session. It's now sitting with the governor. And then as I mentioned, as of yesterday, we do have that fully executed MOA and it's been delivered back to CCSR. from CORE. I'll go ahead and just provide this table timeline as well so folks can see where we're at now and how we're immediately ready to close this fiscal year on June 30th, implementing that $625,000 right away. And then as we continue to work with you, Council, on the FY27 appropriations of the Climate Resiliency Fund, we have another appropriation request in there that then would be added to this MOA with HGIA, and we can spread our efforts further. And so we'd be ready to do that immediately after July 1st and upon Governor's signing of the bill. I'll go ahead and just pause here. I want to thank the team. Committee Chair Weyer, with your permission, I just want to thank and recognize Alex and Crystal who are here with us in chambers, Haley who's not able to be with us today. The strength of our CCSR team has really brought their creativity, the innovation. Thinking outside of the box when I tell you that we met many nos and many no cans throughout this process after Bill 15 was passed and they have worked very hard to find alternative solutions and pathways and these are the exact kind of people we want to have not only working here in the city but leading efforts that we can make we can make this work and sometimes it seems impossible but i really want to thank alex and crystal and haley for their efforts i want to thank dr babcock and env dr babcock has really been educating and informing us this is definitely much more in his wheelhouse than mine The city has been really looking at these assessments and research and reviews for quite a long time now, and it has to do with so much integrated planning and so many interconnected systems, and we see this as just one way that CCSR and the Climate Resiliency Fund can help. Of course thank you folks as council and thank Gwen Yamamoto Lau and the staff and the people of the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority for also trying something new and creating the first mechanism ever that will create this new cesspool revolving loan fund for the people of Hawaii and the people of our island and your constituents to be able to benefit from hopefully sometime soon here in the future. Chair, happy to open it up to any questions. Thank you for allowing us to share just some of where we've been over the last year or so with you folks and a peek into where we'll be in the coming year of the important work ahead.

Appreciate that, I love it. A lot of work that went into it and so grateful. I wanted to open it up for any questions from the committee, Council Member Tupola.

Thank you. I actually had a question for Director Babcock, and then I'll go to Gwen Yamamoto-Lau. Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Hi. Aloha, Director. I had a question because we did discuss a few years back about us doing the special sewer district in Ewa, and that was actually a fully financed one, so homeowners didn't have to pay. Is that number already off of the 8,000, or will it take a thousand homes off of the 8,000. Where does the EVA number fall?

Yeah, so the EVA number is part of the 8,000.

Okay, so where are we at with that particular sewer, I guess, cesspool conversion project?

Yeah, thanks for asking. So it was in 2023 when we presented that project for approval. I don't remember if it was this committee or a previous committee with a different name. But anyway, we proposed that. And that was the first time that council had heard about it. and the community had not heard about it yet. And that's because that's kind of the way the flow chart works of sewer improvement district projects. So first we get essentially approval from council to plan and then we do some planning and then we're supposed to go out to the public and come back. So the request was made then at that time for us to go ahead and do the outreach first before coming to Council. So we took some time to do that. We worked with Council Member Toba, and we actually just recently finally got a bunch of information together, got it out to the public, and held a public meeting. And this occurred just on June 9th. And so with Councilmember's help, we got the word out. And with his staff, there was posters, and there was outreach, and there was over 120 people showed up at a meeting. It was packed, yeah, Kaimiloa Elementary. And so we presented the project. We had a PowerPoint, and we presented the scope of the project, the costs, and what the city was going to do. The city is going to do everything. That's what we told them. So what happened is there was no support for moving this project.

Did you just say there was no support?

There was no support, yeah. No one was willing to raise their hand in support of moving forward with this project. Instead, there was a lot of concerns from the public about the project. Because in the end they will have to they would have to pay a sewer fee You know going going forward basically have a sewer bill. Yeah, we get a sewer bill Yeah, once the projects completed because they'd all be connected to the sewer I think you know there's a sense the the concerns are that it's a it's a big project it will tear up all the streets for you know, extended period of time, also connect onto people's property. So kind of a lot of disruption that seemed to be part of it. There was a concern about whether their properties would be fully restored, you know, at city expense, you know, whether they were going to incur, you know, some expenses associated with that. So there's some kind of some kind of uncertainty about how we would actually connect. There was And in addition, I think concern that whether the project is really needed, whether their cesspools are actually causing a problem. And then also a sense that in the future, that the mandate is still quite a ways into the future, 2050. So it doesn't seem like there's an urgency to the folks there. At this point, we are not planning to bring this back to Council for approval at this time. There's a lot of planning and work that was done, and someday this project and similar projects likely will go forward. But I think right now it is... It's far enough into the future, and they have been told by some other politicians in the state legislature that this law maybe would be changed or... or repealed or something else might happen. And so it doesn't seem like at this point there would be any point of bringing it back to council and seeking approval when the feedback we've gotten is large and it's, no, don't do this project. So I think you would have probably a hard time supporting it.

Yeah, thank you, Committee Chair, for allowing me to entertain this question. I asked because it's 976 homes that are on cesspools. So I do know that when you proposed it, it was kind of one of those, like, you know, it could be a win for almost 1,000 of the 8,000 homes. That's big. Last question, and then I'll let Council Member Tobo go so we can stay on this topic. How much money was expended in this particular proposal and how much was proposed to be expended? So did you guys spend money on this of a... I guess the planning for it, even though we're not moving forward.

Yes, and I have to get to that number. Most of that work was done a few years in the past, so it has been fully designed. Three different alternatives were evaluated, gravity sewers, low-pressure sewer system, and a combination, a hybrid system. So the lowest cost was a gravity system. Then we later added in adding all the laterals. What we had in the budget... which was approved the last council was, let me just check. It is $83 million for construction in 2029. That's in the six-year CIP, right? So it shows up there. So that's what was budgeted for the construction and inspection in the future. We also do have though, that is not our only cesspool conversion sewer improvement district project. In the six-year CIP, there are 15 total projects or 14 other ones in addition to that one, which still have funding in some way to do planning generally. Some of them have some construction money.

Thank you for the update. When you emailed me in 2024 about this project, it was at 62 million projected, so the 83 is much higher. If it's okay, Chair, I think Council Member Tova, on the same subject, thank you so much.

Yeah, no, no, that's perfect. And I'll say, if you have extra sewer, the District 2 will be happy to take it. Council Member Tova.

Thank you, Chair. Yeah, coming off of, so I was gonna kinda explain that we did this outreach, sent out 900 flyers, did a lot of social media, and Kaimiloa had a lot of people. So we know that some people raised their hand. So out of transparency, can an individual, because majority of the community don't want it, can they use this fund to help you know, take out their cesspool. So I guess that question would be towards, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is yes, if they qualify. Okay. Based on income, and yeah.

Because I almost feel like there were some people at our town hall that maybe would consider, I mean, some actually walked out when they realized that was getting kind of, heat it up, but because we have this opportunity, maybe that's another way we can reach out to the community members that might wanna take advantage of getting their stuff upgraded. Because a lot has to do with wanting to do upgrades in the future of their homes. So I feel like if they have that opportunity, maybe we can pursue that.

Yep, so a voluntary program. Yes. Yep. Okay.

Appreciate that. Did you have more questions or, yeah?

For Gwen Yamamoto-Lau, please. Thank you so much, director. Hello, how are you?

I'm good, thank you.

So good to see you. So I have two separate questions. I'll go with my first one. It says the key objective for the MOA includes prioritizing LMI households. Is it low, medium income households? The moderate income households. So my question is, how are you guys going to, I guess, target that? Do you guys already have a list you're working on? Go ahead.

Good question. First of all, I just wanted to applaud the City Council for what you're doing because you are leading the state. We're hoping that the other counties will follow in what you're doing in setting aside funds for this really important issue. I'm going to answer your question, but I want to give some facts. Out of all of the counties, there's 88,000 statewide. Honolulu has the least amount at 8,000, which is still a big number, but 8,000, right? If you go an average of 40,000 per conversion, that's $320 million that needs to be dedicated or invested by the homeowner or whoever into converting their cesspools into a Department of Health accepted system or hooking up to the sewer system. Not all of them are going to need financing, but if you use the Federal Reserve Bank's underbank or unbanked metric of 25%, so if we say 25% maybe cannot get financing or don't have the cash, we're talking about $80 million that are still needed for your residents or your citizens in City and County of Honolulu. So it's a lot of money that needs to be invested by your constituents. So again, applaud you for what you're doing. So we typically will follow, so like the Federal Reserve metrics, we use existing metrics like HUD. So for the area median income, low and moderate income, we use the HUD area median income metrics. They determine whether they're low income, which is less than 80%, or moderate income, which is less than 140%. when Council Member Tubal was asking about can the funds be used for Ewa Beach, whatever. So really, let me go into the design of the financing program and how it will differ a little bit for the City and County of Honolulu, because you're putting in your money. So the state passed this financing conversion program. It's being seed funded with $2 million of green fees. So we got $2 million of green fees that's going to go in this year in addition to the $625,000 from the city and county. I will be convening a working group and I'm calling it the design working group because while we have the financing done, there might be things that we want to incorporate into the design of the financing program and make it public. For example, Dr. Babcock said, yeah, 2050, that's a long time away. Most people are going, well, why would I do it now? So perhaps based on the input of the design group, which will have every county, represented as well as wastewater stakeholders in that maybe we might want to use the funds to somehow provide incentives for those who lean in early. I'll just give an example because we haven't met yet. Perhaps if Honolulu says, yeah, that's what we want to do, maybe we buy down the interest rate. If you go now between now to 2030, I'm making it up, now to 2030, zero percent interest. 2031 to 2035, five percentages. And get a little bit more higher as the year, as it gets more urgent because now everybody has to do it. So how might we use the funds and the financing to incent the behavior that we're trying to incent? The other thing is for the state program, it's gonna be designed for the state, all the counties, right? But maybe for Honolulu, because they have their own pot of funds, it will be designed, the funds that we use for Honolulu will be how Honolulu wants to use it. So it might be priority one, it might be only low income, it might be those who wanna convert in EVA or, Anywhere, so however the priorities of the City and County of Honolulu will be incorporated into the funds that is provided for Honolulu citizens by the City and County.

That's great. So when will we know when the completed design and loan program will be in specificity?

Yeah, that's a good question. So Governor Green is also very anxious because we're using green fee money. So I am committed to launching this before the end of the year. We're going to start meeting. I'm just waiting for one more county to give me their representative. That's what's kind of holding it up. But I'm going to start convening the design group in July to September, get their feedback. Hope to launch it in October, November at the latest.

Thank you. Then separately, we discussed CPACE some time ago. Does that help? Is that involved? What are your thoughts on maybe how that can integrate to what we're trying to do?

That is a great question. Actually, when we introduced the CPACE bill, well, the PACE bill back in 2022, if you read the preamble, it was all about cesspools. It was to help with cesspool remediation. The challenge, though, is when we were going through the legislature, we had a lot of opposition from the banking community. So we had to take out residential, and it's only commercial. So it can help commercial large capacity cesspools, but it cannot help residential.

What is the number of commercial large capacity cesspools?

not very much because EPA has already outlawed it. So if there is a large capacity cesspool and there are a few handful there, EPA is already fining them and that's the incentive for them to convert.

And then as far as the list that we have for the 8,000, are you working off of a list and then are you guys going to be soliciting, you know, individuals through a mailer or how will you be contacting potential cesspool conversion owners?

So that is all to be determined. What I think it's the University of Hawaii has done is they have identified priority one, two, and three cesspools. And so I'm guessing, and again, the working group will decide, but I'm guessing that priorities will be priority one, right? And so those cesspools, those locations like the North Shore has already been identified, right? So we know who they are. Once it's finalized, then we can start doing outreach to the areas, unless there are other areas, maybe of a beach or whatever, that Honolulu also wants to assist.

So after you guys come up with the details, then we'll have to look towards the priorities, and then you guys will proceed forward? Correct.

And I will also be asking all of you for help in outreach in your communities too.

Okay, sounds great. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

Of course, I think Council Member Santos had some questions.

Thank you, Chair. If we could have Director Babcock come back up here. I know that we have identified various cesspools in terms of three different types of priorities. And obviously the priority ones, due to their proximity to the ocean and other sort of sensitive things, that makes sense. But for the priority two and threes, Do we give any weight to whether these cesspools are near an existing city sewer project that's upcoming? Is there any possibility, for example, we've talked a little bit about Papakolea, where if there's an incoming sewer project, can't we just take care of it in that area rather than wait till later on or put the burden on the private homeowners entirely later on?

Yeah, so the prioritization is, there's a cesspool prioritization tool that is, that's on the state, done by the state, specifically done by the University of Hawaii. The criteria for priority one and priority two are health risk-based, as opposed to having anything to do with whether there would be a sewer, possibly, in the future. Tool has recently been updated to include information about proposed, I guess approved and proposed sewer projects. So that gives more information to homeowners who can go on the site and see what their priority ranking is of their own cesspool, and then also see whether there's a plan for a sewer project in the future. And it also has dates, estimated dates of when those projects might happen. So that helps them make a decision about whether they should go ahead and upgrade themselves or wait for the sewer project. And, you know, just so you know, if they did already upgrade or they do decide to upgrade now because of some uncertainty or it's unclear whether there'd be a sewer project, ordinance does have a provision so that if you have upgraded already to a septic tank or other approved system with Department of Health and taken out of service your cesspool, and then a sewer project does happen in the future, you will be required to connect to the sewer and close your on-site system. However, there's a provision that once you do that connection that your sewer phase would be waived for 25 years to sort of partially at least make you whole on the project that you, the expenditure that you made to upgrade your system. But there is no option to keep that forever and not connect to the sewer. Ordinance also says if there's a sewer, you must connect.

hopefully that kind of answers your question that sheds a little bit of light um are there any triggers when a property is sold a property that either has accessible or perhaps the previous owners upgraded to a septic that upon sale you know there's a certain time window for the new owners to do these sorts of upgrades yeah that's a good question and i think uh glenn might have um

good information as well on this, but various things like that have been proposed through the last few legislative sessions. And to my knowledge, none of them have made it to the finish line. So that has been thought of. Lots of different things have been tried, but so far that has not, legislation like that has not passed.

Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. Is that yours, the little red dots over there?

No, the red dots in town are closer to lower Makiki. The areas that I'm talking about are that orange right next to the big red cluster in the heart of town.

Appreciate the questions and all the work that's going into it. This is extremely exciting. I might ask Director Yamamoto Lau to come up, because I think they may be within her purview. And mahalo again for this amazing work. I think this whole team over here is the A team, and I'm so grateful you're all working together. Just to kind of go off what Council Member Tupolo was asking, just to quickly wrap up the PACE-CPACE discussion. So was, I know when we discussed it a couple years ago, I thought that multifamily still was eligible for the commercial. Is that still the case?

Yeah, multifamily, five or more units. Five or more? Apartment buildings, right.

Okay. Okay, so it wouldn't necessarily be like a couple duplexes, something like that. I'm wondering, is that the same number that you mentioned earlier, like those are no longer allowed under EPA requirements, or is that different from the standard commercial?

You know, I'm not sure if that's considered a residential cesspool or a large capacity cesspool. So it just depends on the... amount of usage again. Of course. Yeah.

Okay. I was just curious in terms of accessibility. So the AMI, it's $100,000 or is it actually an AMI?

Yeah. Likely for the state, it will be less than 140 because that's low and moderate income. However, with the statute for your resiliency fund, that limited to 100,000. So let's say, I'm making it up again, right? Let's say Honolulu says, you know, with the 625,000 seed money, we want to use it for incentives. And so if we are going to do that, but it's not going to cover the entire 40,000 Maybe it's, I don't know, $10,000, $20,000, right? Even if I can do a loan, I might be able to do a loan for someone at 120%, they might not be eligible for the additional incentives from the resiliency fund. It has to meet. So with Honolulu projects, it's going to have to meet two thresholds in order to have additional incentives or interest rate buy-downs or whatever whatever the city decides to do with the funds that they provide for their constituents.

Appreciate that. I'm curious, so how much of our $600,000 plus is going directly towards families versus covering some of the operating costs?

So I'm not taking any operating... She's a really good negotiator, man.

Oh, wow. I appreciate that.

Yeah, we're not taking any operating costs off of this.

That's amazing. So the seed money that the state put in would cover all your operations. Awesome. Maybe Dr. Fox has something to add to as well. And just that throughout, I actually really love the idea of the incentivized interest rate to try to bring people in because I think especially when we're looking at LMI households, a grant type system which was closer to the 0% is ideal. But yeah, Dr. Fox.

Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to offer two further points of interest. I think this is exactly why we need this partnership and this intergovernmental agreement is because this is novel and we've not done this before. While Bill 15 is specific, and I want to thank Committee Chair Weyer, your staff for helping us work with the Office of Council Services that Right now, Section 6-5 does state that the grants from this program may not exceed $50,000 and may only be awarded to households with a total income under $100,000. This is absolutely data that we're going to be tracking and we're going to be learning about. And with Council's support, we're really hoping that in our FY27 appropriations request to you in our Executive Operating Budget, we want to turn right around in FY27 we would put in another $950,000 to make the immediate investment of $1.575 million. And then we can come and bring this data, bring these lessons learned through our partnership, and then we can see what would that annual appropriation through the Climate Resiliency Fund look like to start building this up even more. And I think it would provide you folks as the committee to come to council if we need to revisit and have further conversations around Section 6-5. So I just wanted to be able to offer that to help support what Gwen is sharing in the early discussions and the pre-work around what the planning will come.

Yeah, I appreciate that and completely supportive. I know initially I think BFS doesn't like the AMI in legislation just because it changes every year, but I would support adjusting it. So definitely look forward to that data and hopefully we can have a good conversation as a committee. Uh, any other questions? I'll go ahead and take quick testimony. We'll come back to discussion. Okay. So proceeding to remote testimony, I don't believe we have any registered remote testifiers and I don't see anyone online as well. So we'll go to in person testimony. I don't believe we have registered in person. Um, I do see Ms. Melody Young. So if you want to go ahead and proceed and then anyone else in chamber wanting to testify after can make their way up to the podium. Please proceed when you're ready, mahalo.

Aloha, Angela Melody Young testifying on behalf of CARES. So environmental concerns in this modern generation is real. We ain't getting any younger. But we have a bright future ahead with technology advancements in modernizing sewer infrastructure and 2050 is kind of close. So as a concerned citizen with the federal pressure and of course the environmental advocacy in the state, I think the mandate that we're talking about is from 2017 enacted with Surfrider and Governor Ige signed it. But yeah, so I think there can be solutions focused on working with Speed, the permitting task force, they're already debating with the other counties and nonprofit stakeholders and housing projects about cesspool conversion policies across the state. And I think we talked about this in this last half a year or so about affordable housing projects implementing gray water systems. So that can also help with modernizing sewer infrastructure. So tapping into these groups and industries and stakeholders can really help with a funding plan. So also this is a question I have and a concern. Does the department and the council have a plan of action to work on a strategy to focus on funding above and beyond the state, federal, and county dollars for investment? Because nonprofits can access EPA grants. And if nonprofits really cares about its citizens, they can provide funding to help with your infrastructure sewer mandate concerns.

Thank you so much for your testimony. I see no questions for the testifier and no other testimony. We'll go ahead and close public testimony. And so we'll be looking for, so July you said is the design group coming together and then there'll be a relaunch October and November timeframe. And so of course we're all excited and looking forward to that. Seeing no further discussion, members or questions, we'll go ahead and adjourn today's meeting. Mahalo.