Currently the Hawaii County budget is in bad shape and a lot of sacrifices are being asked of county employees. Property tax collections are down and despite a salary freeze since 2009 expenses are too high in comparison to tax revenue. According to the Hawaii Tribune Herald:
Yagong identified 86 positions, comprising elected officials, department heads and their deputies, and submitted a spreadsheet with the proposed salary cuts. If approved, the mayor, who is paid $109,152, would have his salary reduced to somewhere between $99,110.02 and $96,053.76.
In all, Yagong identified savings of between $705,420.40 and $920,113.56.
“The recommended reduction in salary does not suggest that our salaried employees are not doing a good job for the people of the County of Hawaii,” Yagong said in his March 13 letter. “The recommendation reflects the continuing trend of reduced revenues in real property taxes collected. These employees represent the higher paid tier of non-union county workers. These salary reductions would be a first step of many that needs to be taken as we continue to deal with the tough economic times ahead.”
Crawford asked the commission to retain salaries at current levels.
“Most employees have seen their pay held at the same level for four years,” she said in a March 14 letter to the commission. “Their pay is further reduced by the one-day-per-month furlough that is in effect (through June 30, 2013).”
But while county employees are being asked to endure the pain of budget cuts, it turns out that instead of saving money, the County has been spending it lavishly in other areas according to this commentary:
Take, for example the recent proud purchase of five Chevy Volt cars for the County of Hawaii by Mayor Billy Kenoi. A recent Tribune-Herald news article shows him standing like a proud papa next to the shiny cars at the formal display ceremony, during which he proclaimed, “It couldn’t come at a better time, when we look at rising fuel prices … . Hopefully we can grow the electric fleet and have it be the county fleet.”
These plug-in electric/gas hybrids cost us $47,000 each, or a total of $235,000 for five. They can go about 30 miles on electric power alone, then need recharging. When the gas engine kicks in, they get about 37 mpg and require premium gas. Recharging the 16-kilowatt battery daily at our highest-in-the-nation electric rates — about 40 cents per kilowatt hour — costs about $6.40 a day.
For less than half the purchase price ($21,000), a comparable sized and powered Chevy Cruze uses regular gas and gets about 30 mpg. Let’s take an extreme case, and say gas is $5 per gallon. That means that the Volt costs $1.40 per day more than the Cruze to drive 30 miles, and costs twice as much to buy. For the same cost we could have had 11 Chevy Cruzes and saved on operating costs as well.
Supposedly the intent behind this purchase was to save money on fuel according to this article:
Kurohara said this was part of a broader push by the Billy Kenoi administration to invest in the vehicles and “being a leader by example.”
This is part of the larger effort “to look at how we can be more efficient, how we can save money on fuel,” Kurohara said.
A little math tells us that Hawaii County is paying $26,000 ($47,000 – $21,000) more for what is essentially the same car. The only difference being that it can go 30 miles before needing to use gas or to be recharged.
Even if the County is saving a few pennies on gas, it is losing $26,000 on the purchase price of a single car. How can this be justified in a time when belts need to be tightened and salaries need to be cut?
What is worse, is that these cars may not even be saving money on fuel costs either. If they aren’t using gas, they are using electricity and that electricity costs money. You might say, well this energy will come from solar panels so its not costing anything. But the solar panels cost money and if they weren’t being used to charge the cars they could feed the grid and be earning money at roughly $0.40/kwh.
So no matter how you slice it, roughly $130,000 extra was spent on a fleet of cars, whose fuel costs are actually higher than a comparable alternative.