Second resignation protests trash contract

 

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

A second founding member of the Key West Sustainability Advisory Board has resigned over city commissioners’ decision to double residential trash pick-up from once to twice a week.

 

Ross Williams’s resignation on Monday, May 26, follows by three weeks the resignation of fellow Sustainability Advisory Board member David Lybrand, who left the environmental committee the day after commissioners voted 4-3 to award the city’s new trash hauling contract to Waste Management. Wanting to keep the incumbent hauler in place, commissioners chose the most expensive of four bid options submitted by Waste Management and competitor Advanced Disposal Services.

 

While Advanced was the low bidder on the option that would have kept the once a week collection schedule in place, Waste Management was the low bidder on the most expensive of the four options, which called for the twice a week residential pick-up and taking over management of the city’s trash transfer station.

 

In his resignation letter to Mayor Craig Cates, Williams said the commissioners’ vote “demonstrates a very low level of environmental consciousness.”

 

“The commission is dragging us backwards to a more wasteful time and has certainly set back our efforts by many years,” Williams said in his resignation letter.

 

He also pointed out that no one at the packed May 6 commissioners’ meeting when the trash contract was awarded complained about last summer’s move to once a week collection as a way to encourage recycling. The city also changed its recycling containers at that time from 18-gallon bins to 64-gallon carts. Between the two measures, residential recycling tripled from approximately 7 percent to 22 percent within a matter of months.

 

At the May 6 meeting, Commissioner Mark Rossi said that many of his constituents had complained to him about the once a week schedule. Several of them are fishermen, Rossi said, and fish detritus needs to be picked up more than once a week in order not to smell. However, city officials said they had not received one complaint since the once-a-week schedule went into effect.

 

Winning bidder Waste Management, which has been the city’s trash hauler for the past 14 years, won the seven-year, $53 million contract over vigorous objections from Commissioner Teri Johnston, who worried about the $14 million increase over the life of the contract plus the addition of another weekly trash pick-up. But Waste Management Regional Director Greg Sullivan said this week that his company is committed to helping the city boost its recycling rates. Waste Management has a staff member from its corporate sustainability group that meets with customers to help them determine better ways to recycle.

 

“We’ll visit each one individually and see what their waste is and guide them through. We’ll give them options on how to decrease waste and increase recycling,” he said, adding that Waste Management’s efforts will be concentrated on business customers, who, unlike residential customers, are not required by city ordinance to recycle.

 

Sullivan also pointed out that the new contract has commercial recycling performance goals his company must meet. Those goals include increasing business recycling rates each year, starting at a 30 percent rate by 2017 and rising to 45 percent by 2020, or face penalties ranging from $5,000 to $20,000, according to city Utilities Manager Jay Gewin.

 

“The most significant one is that after the seventh year [2021] the contract will not be renewed unless they have produced at least 50 percent single stream recycling for businesses,” Gewin said, adding that the city is calculating the current commercial recycling rate in order to provide a benchmark when the new contract begins on Jan. 1. State law requires all Florida communities to achieve a 75 percent recycling rate by 2020.

 

Sullivan discounted concerns that returning to twice a week trash pick-up will dampen residential recycling growth.

 

“I’m puzzled why they think it’s going to reduce recycling. If you’re lazy, you’re lazy,” he said, referring to residents who put their recyclables in the regular trash can. “You either want to recycle or you don’t.”

 

 

 

 

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