With the prospect of more federal money becoming available for infrastructure funding, the county Water Board recently approved $75,000 to hire a consultant to go after some of it.
“We’ve all heard abut the potential federal funding that’s coming down the pipeline,” Manager-Chief Engineer Keith Okamoto said Tuesday.
Okamoto said he feared the department missed some opportunities to claim some previous infrastructure funding because it couldn’t move quickly enough with the current staff to get grant applications in.
He said he recently met with U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele, a Democrat representing Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district, as well as U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed by President Biden in November, for example, includes more than $200 million for water infrastructure, among the billions slated for Hawaii, according to a news release from Schatz.
Other promising news, Okamoto said, is that Congress seems to be returning to the old system of earmarks, now known as “congressional directed spending,” that could help the department improve its water infrastructure. Funds might also be available from the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Water Act, he said.
“We just want to make sure we are able to position ourselves to take advantage of these funding opportunities,” Okamoto said.
Water Board members asked questions about the details of selecting a consultant and the scope of work before voting 6-0 to approve the request. Okamoto said he’d go through professional procurement procedures and update the board once an agreement has been reached.
“We know there is a pot of money out there,” said board member Steve Hirakami. “There’s a lot of people in Hawaii who don’t know about the opportunities for federal grants.”
As principal of Hawaii Academy of Arts &Science charter school, Hirakami is familiar with grants and in fact has a resource developer on staff.
Several board members questioned whether an on-staff grant writer would make more sens than hiring a consultant. But Okamoto said a $75,000 salary could quickly escalate into an almost $200,000 operations hit to the department, once fringe benefits are added into it.
“We’re still trying to operate lean,” Okamoto said.
It makes more sense to hire a consultant to investigate opportunities,write the proposals and then do the record-keeping and report-writing required by the grant, he said. The department could learn from that process and get some examples to follow, he said.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Okamoto said.
