Fellows mentioned in this story: Kerrie Urosevich

From Civil Beat:

Miloliʻi, on Hawaiʻi island’s leeward coast, is renowned for its dedication to traditional fishing practices, but the rural village has no municipal sewer system, leaving the 500 residents in and around that area to rely mostly on cesspools they can’t afford to replace.

“Most of my ʻohana, my family, we’ve been there for many generations,” Miloliʻi native Kaimi Kaupiko said. Typically, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to convert a cesspool to septic or some other treatment system.

“We don’t have those types of funds,” Kaimi said, “to upgrade systems or find a better solution.”

All property owners in Hawaiʻi have until 2050 to get rid of their cesspools under state law. But daunting cost challenges such as those seen in Miloliʻi have left 83,000 cesspools intact across the island state, with only a few hundred getting removed annually.

This year, key lawmakers and clean-water advocates hope to ramp up progress with a low-interest loan program for the cesspools’ removal. It would be run by the state’s Green Infrastructure Authority, which typically helps finance solar and clean-energy projects.

Continue reading at civilbeat.org.