Hawaiʻi County Mayor Mitch Roth outlined his budget following his State of the County address earlier this month. It included a possible rate cut for real property taxes to help Big Island families thrive.
Speaking to The Conversation, Roth stressed the need to repair wastewater and recreational facilities before they become a bigger problem for future generations.
The county has also made headway with the housing backlog of building permits. Roth said there are now 8,000 housing units in the pipeline where there used to be just a thousand.
HAWAI'I COUNTY MAYOR MITCH ROTH: So we're gonna look at what our budget is, and see how much we can bring it down. The idea may sound counterproductive to do that. But if people are paying less, they're able to do other things, they're able to take vacations, they're able to spend more, but you know, just make it by. We still have a high number of people who are living in ALICE — asset-limited, income-constrained and employed — and so basically, those people are living paycheck to paycheck. If we can make that a little bit less of a burden on our community, that'd be a good thing. And hopefully, you know, for landlords who own those homes that are doing the long-term rentals, they can pass those savings on to their tenants.
CATHERINE CRUZ, HOST: That is a big issue here, you know, the housing situation for our local people. What's the snapshot for you as far as housing?
ROTH: We came in, there was a study that said we needed about 10,000 additional units by 2025. Our pipeline, we had about 1,243, I think was the number. And as of this last week, we were at 8,100 in our pipeline. And, you know, the way we've done that is we've been trying to work with people and to facilitate versus regulate. I heard Mayor Blangiardi said something very similar to that — we need to help people thrive and succeed and that's really the goal of our county is helping people not just get by, but to thrive, and making sure that our kids are able to raise their kids here, and that we're, you know, planting the seeds so that they can thrive in the future. And their families, their kids can thrive here in Hawaiʻi.
CRUZ: There are a couple of bills that have caught people's eyes that would increase density on what we know as single-family lots. What's the county's position on that?
ROTH: We're in favor of it. But it really is not as big of an issue on Hawaiʻi Island as it is in Honolulu and other places.
CRUZ: Do you see any areas where it could be tightened up?
ROTH: Yeah, so we like it, the ability to put more houses on single lots. The thing that will dictate how many of the houses that people will be able to have are two things: one is going to be water, and the other is going to be what they do with their septic or their wastewater.
CRUZ: Yes, and you have lots of cesspools.
ROTH: We have lots of cesspools. And we're working very diligently to get people ready, even though it's, I think, 2045, 2050 that we need to convert over. We're working on that now because we have about 48,000 known cesspools and probably about another 10,000 that aren't on the books.
CRUZ: We know there's a concerted effort to try and build our workforce to do that work.
ROTH: I know we're working on it. It's going to be mostly done by private agencies versus the government. So I know that the unions are working on getting more people to do a lot more of the construction work, but the digging of septic tanks is going to mostly fall to private industry versus the government, you know, building those. There are different areas where we're working on, you know, sewer lines. We're actually working on a sewer line right now for one of our housing complexes, and that, you know, went out to private contractors to do the work as well. So, as far as building county employees to do that, that's not really there. But we are supporting different groups in the building industry to get people in there. And it's the jobs of the future for some of our kids. We focus on STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics — but there's another side, the building trades is another part of that where we know there's good paying jobs, and they're jobs that are gonna be here for a long time.
CRUZ: Everybody is looking at what's happening at the Legislature with Maui's recovery as a priority. Is there anything you want to say about what you need for your county this session?
ROTH: One of the things that we're working on, going back to wastewater, it's not just cesspools, but we have our wastewater facilities that are just in dire need of repairs. And so, you know, we always ask for monies for some of those things. One is the Hilo wastewater facility, which we're in plans — hopefully it will go out to bid next month. But that's a potential Red Hill situation, and we can't just sit by and kick the can down the road any longer. It's going to be expensive, but it has to be fixed because, you know, something happens, you could have millions of gallons of raw sewage going out into the ocean. And that would not be good. Our community deserves better than that. And the community that it's in, Keaukaha, deserves better than that. We request every year, we've also taken out bonds. But, you know, we're looking at different ways to finance it. But it's something that we know has to get done. We knew it had to get done, probably 20 years ago, and it just hasn't got done. We focused a lot on fixing versus rebuilding things.
That goes for our parks. Our parks facilities, we're getting by. Our 302 facilities are getting by on about $450,000 a year for maintenance and repair. I mean, that's not enough to take care of very much, much less 302 facilities. We were able to raise that to $4 million, and we're looking at raising it another million in the coming year. And still, you know, it's not going to be enough. But, you know, one of the things that you learn as a mayor is that you're given a pizza, a budget — you think of a budget kind of like being a pizza. You get 12 slices with 1,000 mouths you gotta feed and so you got to, you got to prioritize, and you know that 60% of that pizza's gonna go to salary and wages and different things on the personnel. So it doesn't leave a lot of money to do a lot of things you need to do. But this is something that we need to really invest in.
CRUZ: I know Honolulu is talking about a stormwater authority, and possibly a fee to help finance what it needs to do with its systems as well, with the infrastructure.
ROTH: Honolulu is a lot different. Most of the people in Honolulu are on the wastewater system. And so having a fee makes a lot of sense there. Most of the people on Hawaiʻi Island are not on a system. You know, 48,000 homes that are not hooked up, that's really problematic. And you want to charge people a fee to run the wastewater facilities that they're not even benefiting from.
CRUZ: I know that you were, I think, one of the first counties to try hydrogen buses.
ROTH: We continue working on hydrogen and other green energy. We'll have a RFP going out in the next month or so asking for different ways of creating green energy on our island. We have some ideas. Even our wastewater, you know, one of the things that we talked about — our solid waste to turn that into an ammonia which can be turned into electricity and hydrogen. We see that hydrogen really has a possibility of changing the way energy is looked at in the future. And we know it's not quite here yet. But we're getting a lot closer to a very affordable hydrogen. The U.S. government alone, I think, put in $8 billion to different grants around the United States. There's other countries that are putting in a lot of money to the research and development. In talks that I've had with people at NELHA, they believe that the price of hydrogen in the next couple of years could come down from $10 a kilogram to $2 a kilogram, which would be pretty amazing to have vehicles that could go further and at the same time, not pollute our environment.
CRUZ: Each island is very different. And your county has certainly done some novel things or has been out at the forefront. You know, I'd say, just with dealing with the housing problem, the homeless problem. You were moving pretty fast with the tiny homes and some novel homeless programs, you know, with the churches for say, parking lots, those kinds of things. Anything else that you see happening to deal with the homeless situation there?
ROTH: In the last couple of years, we've given about $19 million to programs and organizations addressing homelessness. So there's a couple of things that, you know, there's not a single silver bullet for homelessness. Some of it is the services. Some of it's the housing. If you take housing and add that in, we added I think another $19 million to help build affordable housing and housing that will take care of people in the future. We're trying to hit all different sides. The problem is, at the current time, we just don't have enough to house people. But with Kona, we'll have Kukuiola, which should be coming up in the next year, I think, kind of like 18 housing units at the beginning, 46 safe parking spots for homeless individuals who are living in their vehicles. And then on the Hilo side, I think, we have over $16 million from our federal delegation to combine with other county and state funds to help us develop the old Hilo Memorial Hospital, actually to renovate that. And then there's about 10 acres behind there for permanent housing we're going to be working on — as well as working on a state Department of Health facility, which should work on mental health. We're also looking at an old bank in Hilo and turning that into a mental health crisis clinic.
CRUZ: Yes, because that appears to be at the root of a lot of our crime. And so if we can get those people the help that they need, then hopefully we can reduce those cases and help our officers out as they go out to deal with these 911 calls that they respond to.
ROTH: I think a lot of these problems are here because we really haven't paid attention to them in the past. We've paid a lot of attention to getting the new and shiny things versus thinking about the future of our community. And so, no one gets excited when you build a wastewater facility or replace a wastewater facility. But when you have like a Red Hill incident, and you could have done it, kicked the can down the road for so many years, then it becomes an issue — and we can't continue to kick the can down the road for so many things. Our park facilities, we've had buildings that were so termite-eaten that the buildings are only being held up by termites holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." We can do a lot better in being preventative and thinking about what we pass on. Rather than just, you know, working on building new stuff — if can't take care of it, it really doesn't matter for the future.
Read the full State of County address here.
This story aired on The Conversation on March 26, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
