New landfill site must make the grade

In 2003, a blue ribbon panel charged with recommending a site for a new landfill on Oahu worked from a list of what it said were 45 potential parcels of land that had been drawn up decades before.

As a new advisory committee works to determine the best site for the city’s next landfill, the list is essentially the same one.

So as the committee attempts to pare down that list to make its recommendation, it also is seeking more information to determine whether other parcels of land not previously considered might be the best possible site for a new solid-waste landfill.

"We want to make sure that all of the sites that could possibly be on the list get put on the list," said Tesha Malama, the Kalaeloa director of the Hawaii Community Development Authority and one of the nine members on the 2011 Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Landfill Site Selection.

The city has asked its consultants to check with the Board of Water Supply and other entities to ask about possibly adding previously disqualified parcels of land to the list of 47 already being considered, and report back to the committee by its next meeting on Aug. 16.

The new landfill would replace or supplement the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill, which on July 31, 2012, is scheduled to stop receiving municipal solid waste and only accept ash from the HPOWER waste-to-energy plant. The city has appealed the deadline and asked that the landfill be allowed to continue accepting solid waste for at least 15 years.

Committee members are tasked with recommending to the mayor a new or supplemental solid-waste landfill site, with the understanding that the Waimanalo Gulch site is off the table under all circumstances.

The August meeting is when committee members are expected to begin weighing what criteria they consider to be the most and least important for the new landfill site.

Through previous meetings, the committee has established a set of 20 criteria, such as landfill capacity; proximity to schools, health care facilities and parks; impact on residential, tourist and commercial facilities; effect on public view planes and local roads; and location relative to wind direction, among others.

Committee members will rank each criterion with a score of 20 given to the most important feature all the way to a score of 1 for least important. The ranking will be applied to the list of sites to mathematically determine the highest-rated parcels for recommendation.

"Everybody has a different point of view, so for each of the 20 criterion, people think differently," said committee member David Arakawa, executive director of the Land Use Research Foundation. He said the foundation’s main concerns focused on the impact the landfill would have on residential and visitor areas as well as agricultural lands.

"From our standpoint, (what’s important) is the effect on people every day — where they live and where they work," he said.

Malama added that access to the site would be an important factor for her to consider.

"It’s really looking at alternative access in and out of a particular community and how does that have an impact," she said.