Panel kills waste-to-energy plant
HILO » The Hawaii County Council rejected yesterday a $125 million waste-to-energy plant, leaving the county with no plan for dealing with Hilo-area trash after 2012.
Meeting in Kona, the Council voted 5-4 against the Wheelabrator Technologies Inc. project, despite a new offer by Mayor Harry Kim to shorten the time for preliminary planning to five months from six.
Current councilmembers could still have rejected the project at the end of the planning by Wheelabrator without cost to the county, Kim said.
Kim also tried to sweeten the deal by offering a watchdog committee consisting of environmental and recycling groups, plus people from the two Department of Hawaiian Home Lands communities closest to the site where the plant would be built, Keaukaha and Panaewa.
In the end, the proposal was deemed just too expensive.
"How low can Wheelabrator come down from $125 million?" Hamakua Councilman Dominic Yagong asked in an emotional speech. He would accept the project only if the price were cut in half, and he quoted several estimates saying that would be impossible.
The project was killed by unrealistic expectations created by a 2002 cost estimate of $25 million for a generic waste-to-electricity plant. An updated generic estimate of $40 million was still floating around last year, said Bobby Jean Leithead-Todd, head of the county Department of Environmental Management.
When Wheelabrator's $125 million estimate came in, it was a shock even to the company, Leithead-Todd said. They were unaware of the high cost of doing business in Hawaii, where the cost of labor and materials can be two or three times as much as mainland prices, she said.
Council Chairman Pete Hoffmann was among the minority trying to save the project.
"This technology works. I've seen it in action. I've lived with it," he said.
"The cost of the alternatives we're looking at is very high. I have a gut feeling this is not a costly, or the most costly, alternative," he said.
With 300 tons of waste daily now building a small mountain where there once was a hole in the ground, nothing more can be packed onto the mountain at the Hilo landfill after 2012, Leithead-Todd has said.
Some concepts for alternatives exists, but none have been studied in detail.
Opponents called for more recycling, but the county is already doing that and the Wheelabrator proposal would have recycled about 70 tons per day.
With 125 inches of rain in Hilo per year, current laws require all of the water draining through acres of new landfill to be captured and treated, meaning building a new water treatment plant.
Kona residents have said they do not want Hilo trash trucked to the modern West Hawaii landfill, but Leithead-Todd has said that might be the only alternative. And the high price of gasoline would make trucking increasingly expensive.
Another alternative is shipping trash to the mainland, certain to be even more expensive.