Question: I took the state vehicle assigned to our office to get gas at the DAGS (Department of Accounting and General Services) garage off Punchbowl Street. The vehicle ahead of me had regular license plates — not the plates that state vehicles have. In the past, I’ve also seen privately owned cars up on the lifts being serviced. Is this permitted? It seems like a misuse of state resources.
Answer: State-owned vehicles with “regular” license plates are used by certain employees, such as undercover narcotics officers and state marshals.
A DAGS official confirmed that the vehicle shown in the photo you provided is owned by the state.
“We do not allow personal vehicles of anyone to just come in and gas up,” he said, explaining that authorized state employees are issued ID cards and have clearance to use the DAGS facility.
“These people are known by the motor pool staff,” he said. “That’s all checked out.”
Auwe
To the city. The Aina Haina Elementary School recycling bin is gone. The only one in East Honolulu is at Kahala Elementary. This is a travesty on the part of the city. There are many condo dwellers in East Honolulu who can’t participate in the city’s recycling program because we don’t have curbside bins. I feel they are encouraging us to throw everything in the regular trash. I grew up in New Zealand, and recycling is part of my DNA. Oahu is smaller than New Zealand, and we should be way more progressive about this. — Frustrated Recycler
Ask your condo association or property manager to contact the city. Call 768-3200 or visit opala.org.
For condominium complexes where the city does not provide trash/recycling collection, it offers help to set up a recycling program, said Suzanne Jones, chief of the Department of Environmental Service’s Recycling Branch.
In addition to technical assistance in program design and contracting, the city will provide up to $2,000 in reimbursement for startup costs for equipment and tenant education.
Meanwhile, Jones said the city no longer is involved with the community recycling bins “because this type of collection system has shown to be woefully inadequate to further increasing recycling rates for Oahu.”
She said recovery rates in those bins “was stagnant” even before the city began its curbside recycling program, and “no amount of financial incentives to the schools was motivating more participation from the community.”
With curbside recycling, public use of the bins dropped 70 percent and began costing taxpayers $400 per ton, or $1.5 million a year, “to collect relatively small quantities of materials,” Jones said.
That compares with curbside recycling generating about $70 per ton in city revenues, she said.
Diminishing Bin Sites
Since the city stopped subsidizing the community recycling program, the number of bin sites has dropped from more than 100 to about 35.
That’s down from 49 in August, when Greg Apa, senior vice president of Honolulu Disposal Service, explained the company would continue to offer the service, but only if it could break even on costs. See is.gd/9FB0hC.
Since then some schools requested that the bins be removed because they no longer were receiving any monetary reimbursement, while others “said it was just becoming more of a headache” in terms of maintenance, he said.
On the company’s end, prices of commodities dropped “dramatically” the past two months, Apa said. That meant some sites weren’t generating enough volume to make it feasible to continue operating.
“We’re trying to use what we’re getting on the pricing to subsidize everything,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, on an island, that recycling just doesn’t pay for itself.”
———
Write to “Kokua Line” at Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 7 Waterfront Plaza, Suite 210, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Honolulu 96813; call 529-4773; fax 529-4750; or email kokualine@staradvertiser.com.
