Right people can get us out of garbage mess

When I was invited by my two friends, Dr. Raymond Chuan and Carol Bain, to view

the Kekaha landfill, I anticipated seeing a huge hole in which our trash and

garbage were dumped. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see this

state-of-the-art site that takes care of most of our solid waste — an

operation that is very complex and very expensive to run.

The area of the

landfill not used for dumping was irrigated and had green grass growing and no

paper or trash was in sight — very impressive when compared to the unsightly

condition of our county-run Kapa’a transfer station.

Jeffrey Kaohi (a young

man employed by Sanafill of Hawai’i) showed us the inner workings of this

facility and he was extremely polite, intelligent and cooperative, answering

all of our questions. By engineered methods, the life of this landfill has been

extended, but its usefulness is quickly running out and we must do more than

talk and form task forces to solve our solid-waste problem.

And no, Mayor

Kusaka, sending Troy Tanigawa (our solid-waste specialist) to school for 18

months to get his MBA and learn his trade is not the solution. I do compliment

you for hiring Jean Camp, though, as she is definitely a breath of fresh air in

this mess, and had she been on board from the start and was able to call the

shots, I believe that we would have been much farther on the way to solving

this huge problem. In fact, had we kept John Harder and Dale Burton as

solid-waste experts back in 1994, there wouldn’t be this problem today.

So,

what is the answer? Hire the right person or people to back up Camp and let

them make the decisions. Keep the unknowledgeable people out of the mix.

We are fighting the clock with our landfill topping out, and we need

expert leadership to find a solution. Will hiring the “right” people cost

money? Sure it will, but not nearly as much as barging our waste to Honolulu or

whatever the next alternative might be.

GLENN MICKENS

Kapa’a