This combined Public Works & Veterans Services and Public Safety & Human Services Committee meeting on February 19, 2025, focused on a detailed briefing on the Kekaha Landfill's capacity, expansion plans, and waste diversion strategies. Council members heard from county staff, Zero Waste Kauai, and numerous community members, discussing short-term and long-term solutions including composting, a materials recovery facility (MRF), curbside recycling, and alternative technologies. No binding votes were taken on the substantive issues, but the council expressed strong support for immediate action and increased funding.
You guys ready. Morning, everyone, welcome to the committee meetings. So today's February 19th. We'll start off with our public works and veteran services committee. Mr. Palala. I would like to call to order our public works committee. Let the record reflect the members are present except our of course Councilmember Cooley, who is out sick today. So let's think so. So Clerk, could you please read the first item of our agenda? PWVS 2025-02 communication from Council Chair Rapposal requesting the presence of county engineer and environmental services manager to provide a briefing regarding the landfill and status of the request for proposal for alternatives and diversion plans. Move to receive. Second by Council Holland. Members, again, this is a briefing on the regarding our landfill and the status and requests for proposal, RFP. So at this time, I'd like to call our public works team. Alison to come up and give us a briefing, and we'll take it from there. Very important discussion today. Thank you, Allison. Good morning, Council members. Thank you. For the record, Alison Fraley solid waste chief. I have a presentation for you today. So we're gonna be talking about the landfill status. We have a thank you, hopefully, of course. So the current status of Kajaha landfill is that last fiscal year we accepted around 90,000 tons of waste, and that's pretty normal over the course of the last 10 or 10 or so years. That's about the waste disposal rate. We do have capacity with the current permits through November of 2027. We're working on getting a vertical expansion, which I'll talk about in the next slide. So because of the short life, we're pursuing both short and long-term solutions to increase landfill capacity. So for the vertical expansion, um, we are going to increase the height of phase two, um, which is the um Malka side of the landfill by 50 feet. And we have put in a proposed uh draft environmental assessment, we've published the final EA, and um we've found no significant impacts, also known as a Fonzi. Right now, the State Department of Health is um reviewing the permit, and that that will provide capacity for an additional three years. So we're looking at the end of 2030 is when the landfill is scheduled to be closed at that area. So here's a picture of what that vertical expansion would look like. So to the left is the phase one landfill, which is the unlined portion of the landfill, and phase two is the line portion. In the middle of those is where we're actively filling the landfill at this time, but um that permit will allow us to go up vertically 50 feet to get another three years. So we do need landfill space, we're working on an expansion over phase one. We have um approval of a time extension for our conservation district use permit from BLNR to expand that area, which I'm just gonna shuffle back on the slide, the area to the left. Right now it's uh about 50 feet in height. We'd be able to go up to 85 feet if we got um all of if everything falls into place. So we're working with our consultant TetraTech. Um they've assessed that proposed height as well as others to determine capacity and also we're looking at the permitting pathways to do that because um we do need to get um land use permits and DOH approval and things like that. Um at that, at the 85 foot height that's permitted. We could get um about 16 years of landfill life if we're successfully to do that expansion. And what the what this would entail is a construction process where we open the cover to the landfill and we reconsolidate the waste so that it slopes toward the leachate collection, the leachate collection sumps to allow collection and recovery of any leech aid, and we would install an overliner because it is unlined. So this whole process would take about four years to implement. So we're well within the limit that DLNR gave us to start to open that phase or to complete construction, and that would be 2031. And so we can make that deadline. So another way that we're looking to be able to extend the life of any landfill is to assess the feasibility of having a technology for long-term management, an alternative technology for long-term management of MSW. And so we've been working working with our consultant HDR, who actually published a study which is on our website about different technologies that are out there that could potentially do this process.