The city’s solid waste removal contract with waste removal solutions for households expires at the end of this year. This contract has been in place since about 1992. Now, if you’re just an average person, you might think that the city had plenty of time to start the process of rebidding this contract. After all, they knew when it was due to expire, and they know how long it takes to negotiate contracts such as these, so logically they should have been able to work backwards from the deadline to determine a time line for the rebidding process.
But they didn’t do that. No, here it is June 2009, six months before the end of the contract, and they’re just starting the year-long process. Naturally, they are requesting an extension to the existing contract that has been in place for 17 years already to allow them extra time to negotiate a new contract. That request was on last week’s (June 23) agenda, but was deferred for a month.
Meanwhile, they managed to engage a consultant to get some advice on rebidding the contract. I don’t know exactly how city departments are allowed to spend their budget, but it seems to me that every other consultant that has been hired by the city had to be approved by the council; this consultant contract never came before the council. However, it must be no big deal because the council didn’t seem to care.
The consultant made a bunch of recommendations on how the city can lower the cost of waste removal. Of course, all those suggestions mean worse service for residents. For instance, they’re recommending that everyone be provided a 90-gallon tote, and that all other garbage containers be outlawed. You wouldn’t be able to buy your own tote, of course — you’d have to essentially rent it from the disposal company. And they want to do away with alley collection of garbage, even though that’s one of the reasons alleys exist, and many older neighborhoods were designed for garbage collection from the alleys, not from the curb.
To their credit, the city council has so far been pretty adamant about keeping the alley collection of garbage, but city staff is trying to convince them to change their minds. They want to big the contract with all-curbside pickup as an option so the council can see how must more expensive it is to include alley collection. There’s only one reason for splitting out these costs: to try to persuade change. One wonders why it’s more expensive to run a truck down an alley rather than a parallel street 130 feet away. Waste Management says their trucks are too big for our alleys (solution: use smaller trucks). City staff says the heavy trucks damage the alley surfaces (question: wouldn’t moving the trucks to the streets just move the damage to the streets as well? Or is this an admission that alleys are poorly maintained in the city?).
The consultant is also suggesting that the city limit or do away with picking up anything that doesn’t fit inside one of the recommended 90-gallon totes. So, whereas now you can throw away that old couch or cabinet (what they call “bulky waste”) — the consultant says that should stop, be reduced to just once or twice a year, or charged an extra fee, such as $10 or $15 per item.
The biggest issue, however, is going to be how to include universal recycling. There is a lot of popular support for alleyside/curbside recycling as part of the base contract. Currently, anyone who wants to recycle has to pay extra and are billed directly by the hauler. That means that a household like mine that recycles pays three times for garbage service: once on our property taxes, once on our water bill, and once directly to Waste Management. Most households are not willing to pay three times for garbage hauling, so they just throw all their recyclables away in the regular trash. In other words, our current system incentivizes people not to recycle. That needs to be changed.
However, that will cost more money. So the question becomes how to pay for such service. One idea is to do the opposite of what we’re doing now: make recycling pickup free, but charge a fee for regular garbage. The way they do this in Morton is by selling trash stickers. However, in a more urban area, there is concern that this might lead to more illegal dumping or other unsanitary conditions as some people attempt to avoid the fee. So another idea is to make all collections every-other week. Regular garbage would be picked up on odd weeks, and recycling would be picked up on even weeks, for instance.
One other change that has been recommended in order to save money is switching to a sticker system for yard waste. Right now, unlimited yard waste disposal is included in the base contract. The cost of that service could be offset or possibly covered completely by charging residents a fee per bag of yard waste. On the other hand, this would be yet another reduction in services city residents already enjoy and for which they already pay twice.
Who would have thought garbage could be so complicated?
Kinseth Hospitality Memo and Report