A series of disputes have caused the latest snag in the city's plan to have a private company ship a portion of O'ahu's trash to the Mainland from as early as today.

While Mayor Mufi Hannemann and members of the City Council say they want trash shipped to the Mainland as a temporary solution, they differ greatly on how that is to be done.

The council's Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee is slated to take up the issue of waste-shipping to the Mainland at its 1 p.m. meeting today.

The snag with the Mainland shipping contract comes as the Hannemann administration is seeking to expand and extend the life of the only municipal landfill on the island, Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill.

In a related matter, Hannemann yesterday unveiled a plan to reduce the amount of the island's waste stream going into the landfill from 41 percent to 20 percent by 2012.

The city last week told Seattle-based Hawaiian Waste Systems LLC it was not going to be awarded the contract for hauling O'ahu trash to the Mainland despite its low bid.

The city said Hawaiian Waste Systems did not get the contract because the company was "non-responsive" to a number of conditions necessary under city procurement law, including failure to submit required documents in a timely fashion.

PROTEST FILED

Hawaiian Waste Systems yesterday filed a protest of the city's decision, stating "the determination makes a mockery of the one-year process HWS has endured since submitting its bid on June 18, 2008."

The company offered the lowest price among three bids announced in June 2008, proposing to charge the city $99 per ton. The second and third bids were for $184 and $204, respectively.

At a news conference yesterday afternoon, Hannemann said he had no influence on the decision made by the chief procurement officer, city Budget Director Rix Mauer III, and that his administration is trying to move forward on plans to ship trash to the Mainland.

"Just because we have a situation now where our city officials ... have deemed this particular bidder to be unresponsive, doesn't mean that we are not in favor of shipping," Hannemann said.

Jim Hodge, the company's chief executive officer, told The Advertiser that his company has invested $10 million to construct a processing facility at Campbell Industrial Park.

Hannemann said one of the problems the city has with the Hawaiian Waste Systems' plan is that it has installed its own scale at the facility when the city had insisted from the beginning that it needs to be in charge of the weighing to control the flow of trash leaving the island.

H-POWER EXPANSION

"We have to maintain flow control," Hannemann said, stressing that the city is spending about $302 million to expand the H-Power plant — which burns trash to create electricity — by putting in a third boiler. "We need that opala because we want to convert it to energy."

City procurement officers had hoped to begin talks with the second and third bidders but that situation has been complicated by Hawaiian Waste System's protest, Hannemann said.

Hannemann said he could not determine how much longer it will take for shipping to the Mainland to begin.

Hodge said that regardless of his company's situation with the city, it is ready to begin operations and hopes to purchase trash from private haulers it can ship abroad.

The Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee today is expected to take up the Mainland shipping issue, including a resolution introduced by Council Chairman Todd Apo that would allow a private hauler to ship up to 150,000 tons out of state without any challenges from the city.

'A BAD IDEA'

Hannemann called allowing a company to operate a Mainland shipping operation "a bad idea" when H-Power's third boiler is completed in late 2011 or early 2012.

Apo, however, said the resolution makes clear that the Mainland shipping would be limited to 150,000 tons during a five-year period, as well as other limitations.

Councilman Charles Djou, chairman of the executive matters committee, said he supports the free-market concept of allowing private companies to ship trash to the Mainland, even if it takes trash away from H-Power and, as a consequence, revenues from the city.

As for what happened with Hawaiian Waste Resources' bid, "the concerns that were raised strike me as extraordinarily technical, and to go to the point of yanking the contract I think was overkill."

Hannemann announced initiatives aimed at reducing the waste stream going into the landfill.

The city will seek proposals aimed at finding purveyors who could recycle food and green waste as well as sewage sludge, demonstration technologies and handling ash and residue left over from H-Power, he said.

For the foreseeable future, he said, reducing the amount going into the landfill to 20 percent is a reasonable goal.

Apo and Djou both said they applaud Hannemann's plan to cut down the landfill stream.