Good afternoon.

Will the committee on energy environment and sustainability please come to order.

Like to welcome committee vice chair Los Santos Tem and Council members Tolva and Tupola to the chamber.

Pursuant to section ninety-two dash three point seven Hawaii revised statutes.

This meeting will be conducted as a remote meeting by interactive conference technology with the following procedures in effect.

Remotely and in person in the council chamber.

As both English and Hawaiian are official languages of the state of Hawaii, pursuant to Article 15, section four of the state constitution and section one-thirteen of the Hawaii revised statutes.

Members of the public may testify in either language.

When your name is called, please monitor your screen and activate your audio feed when prompted.

Once the remote testifiers 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 of remote meetings to be conducted by roll call.

Um, 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.

Um Britain testimonies including the testifier's 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 agenda item number one, informational briefing, an update on cesspool conversion planning and strategy.

Joining us in the chamber is Dr.

Kia Loa 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 Moholo again for being here today.

Uh thank you, Chair Wire and Vice Chair and members of the committee, um, council members to Santos Tem, Ventova, 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.

Um, and also Director Yamomoto from uh Hawaii Green Growth.

Appreciate you being here as well.

Were you here to provide testimony?

Or were you present 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, any discussion and questions you folks might have, and then uh I can make sure I defer to Gwen Yamamoto Lao on behalf of the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority, or of course uh my companion here, Dr.

Babcock for ENV, if that helps.

Perfect.

We'll do that.

So we'll go with um which 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.

Wanted to just provide an update um 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, um, starting even with our OLA resiliency.

Um, 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 dollars out of pocket without e 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 this 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, hola 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 on-site on site 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 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.