Mayor vows to stick
with recycling plan

A City Council proviso
requires that city officials
try to open more centers

Mayor Mufi Hannemann said his administration will make curbside recycling work.

"Recycling is a major issue, and the longer we delay sort of doing forms of recycling throughout the island, we're just hurting ourselves. So I saw curbside recycling as an integral part of it. That's why I was committed," Hannemann said.

Hannemann's comments came as the City Council backed down from a budget restriction to block city funding until the city carries out an arrangement with nonprofit organizations to increase the number of recycling centers. The Council later changed it to require the administration to make the effort.

Hannemann said his administration will look at expanding community recycling programs.

The proviso came about as a result of concerns raised by Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi and other Council members who did not want to see curbside recycling competing against schools with recycling bins or community groups raising funds through the 5-cent deposit refund from beverage container redemption programs.

"We're already raising their fees and taxes. We did not also want to take their recycling money, especially from teens and nonprofit groups and schools," Kobayashi said.

She and other members also noted that curbside recycling is already in limbo and could be delayed for months because of two protests filed in the awarding of a city contract to process recyclable items collected from island homes.

Four members of the Council, however, were opposed to the language because they believed that the proviso would have further delayed or potentially killed the start of islandwide curbside recycling.

"If it's going to jeopardize the amount of money we need to do islandwide curbside recycling, then we shouldn't do that," Councilman Gary Okino said.

The administration has $4 million set aside for curbside recycling for the next fiscal year, and officials voiced concern about possibly having to use part of that money for enhancing alternative recycling programs under the original proposed mandate.

The Council then voted to discuss behind closed doors with its attorney the proposed budget restriction and its impact on the pending protests -- a move that a Star-Bulletin reporter questioned as improper under the state open-meetings law.

The Council came out of the closed-door session with the new proposal.

"Because some question came up about us going into executive session on this, I do want to state that the reason that we went in there was to deal with some of the impacts that the original proviso language might have had on the recycling program, and specifically the challenges to the procurement process, and so that was a lot of what drove revising the language," Councilman Todd Apo said.

Environmental Services Director Eric Takamura said the administration would be able to proceed with rolling out the curbside recycling program based on the new language of the proviso.