It's nine o'clock, so let's start the February 11th, 2019 Public Utilities Board meeting.
The first item on the agenda is a work session to receive a report on solid waste department's
residential and commercial recycling. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Ethan Cox.
I'm the Director for Solid Waste for the City of Denton. It's my pleasure to bring this to you
this morning. This is one in a series of business case analyses as we turn them, where we look at
all the operations out at solid waste and kind of give you an update on how they're performing and
take any direction or feedback in terms of program improvements. This is kind of a dense
presentation this morning, so I'm going to try to go through it fairly quickly. If you need me to
slow down and kind of dive a little bit deeper into something, let me know. I'm happy to do that. I do
have a couple of folks with me this morning I want to introduce you to. Eugene McKinney is our new
Operations and Collections Manager. He comes to us by way of Alabama, spent some time on the
East Coast. He's been doing an excellent job helping us improve the efficiency and effectiveness
of our collection programs. We also have Brandy Neal. She's our Commercial Accounts Coordinator.
So we're going to talk a lot about commercial recycling today. We're going to talk about
contamination, trying to improve the adoption of recycling citywide. She's playing a pivotal role
in that. So before we dive into the presentation, I'll just say recycling's obviously been in the
headlines quite a bit over the last year with China pulling out of the market. So we are going
to be talking a bit about the market impacts from the China green sword. We'll also be talking
quite a bit about contamination and how that's impacting our program. And then lastly, we'll
spend some time talking about how do we increase adoption among commercial and multifamily accounts.
As we've gone through these BCAs, one of the things we try to do is give you an update on what are the
objectives and the purpose of the programs. Our departmental objective is we are a growing
community. We want to try to reduce the per capita waste that goes into the landfill as our
community grows. And recycling certainly fits that mold. It helps you reduce waste into the
landfills. It also has a number of other environmental benefits, most notably preserving
natural resources and saving energy and preventing pollution for the sourcing of raw materials to
create new products. The participants in our program from a customer standpoint, we're going to be
talking about residential and commercial collections. We also have some drop-off sites that we
manage. And from an operations perspective, we've got our collections team obviously involved. We
also have our recovery facility. You're going to hear me call that a MRF as we go through the
presentation. And you obviously have the landfill. In terms of scope, we're not going to be looking
at any of our other ancillary collection programs. We're really going to be focused just on
recyclables and our drop-off locations. Definitions are pretty straightforward, but a couple of things
I do want to hit on here. Talking about the recovery facility, this is a key partner for you.
Again, I'll call it the MRF. This is the facility that is responsible for basically sorting all your
recyclable materials. We run a single source program, which means everyone puts all the
recyclables in the blue bin. The MRF is there to make sure that it's sorted out and transported
to the proper facility. Contamination is another definition I want to make sure we're all clear on.
Contamination happens when one of two things occurs. A non-recyclable material is put into a
recycling can. You can also call it a non-program material. Not all programs can collect all kinds
of recyclables. You also have dirty recyclable items. The dirty peanut butter jar or the pizza
box that has some grease on it, that's also contamination. So we'll dive into that in a bit
as well. So whenever we talk about the disruption in the recycling industry, one of the things that
makes us a little bit insulated to some of the chaos that's happened in the market is we do have
a contract with an on-site material recovery facility. Our partner in this is Pratt Industries.
We've been in contract with them for both a lease as well as processing agreements since 2012.
That doesn't expire until 2027. So while we've seen a lot of disruption in the market, we have
been fairly sheltered relatively speaking. That helps us in a couple of different ways, not just
from a revenue standpoint, but also from a program material standpoint. As you read the news clippings,
you'll see a lot of programs are having to dial back the number of materials that their program
accepts. And a lot of that is just because it's really difficult to move it in the market right
now. So for us, we still have these as our program materials. We also have a contamination
provision within the contract that states that Pratt may reject any load with greater than 15%
contamination by weight. They've been a good partner with us. They're typically not doing that
unless it's a really heavily contaminated load. Lastly, councils ask a lot of questions about
outside waste. And so we do have, Pratt does have the ability to accept non-dent recyclables,
but they pay us a fee of $5 per ton for each load that they accept.
I'm going to go through kind of a high level process overview just to kind of give you an
idea of how the recycling process works. And also I think this will be useful as we talk about the
effect that the China decision has made, not just domestically, but how it ripples back to the local
impact. So over here on the left, starting left to right, you have our collection operations. So
you've got residential, commercial, and our recycling drop-offs. All of our trucks transport
to Pratt Industries. Again, that's our on-site MRF. Pratt basically goes through, sorts that,
loads of materials up into various trucks, and they transport that to market. One of the things
that's unique about Pratt is they own their own paper mill. So for all of the paper and cardboard
that we collect in our program, it goes straight to their own mill. So they too are somewhat
insulated to some of the fluctuations in the market. That paper mill is located in Louisiana,
and so one of the things we tell folks on our tour is it's not unusual for us to collect a
piece of cardboard and it to be back in the DFW area on a shelf in two weeks. That's how efficient
they are at turning that back around. Unlike the paper and cardboard, Pratt does have to get
exposed to the market on plastics, glass, and metals. They deal with a variety of third-party
recyclers, and that's where they've seen some challenges on their end is we've had periods of
time where they couldn't move loads of glass or plastic because some of the processors were going
out of business or they were placing a hold on material acceptance. As we talk about commodities,
it's also important to know that as these third-party recyclers are dealing with
exposure to the markets, they are blacklisting some haulers and MRFs that are bringing them
heavily contaminated loads, and so really makes it incumbent on the MRF to make sure that they're
doing an effective job sorting materials. The last thing that can happen through the sorting
process is that contamination that we talk about. That actually goes straight into our landfill,
and so right now our contamination rate ranges typically from about 30 to 40 percent on a tonnage
basis. So in terms of the global ban by China, so that happened in January 2018. China has such
a big footprint in the recycling industry when they put in their ban, and essentially what they
did is they said, look, anything less than 0.5 contamination is going to be rejected, or anything
more than 0.5 percent. So, for all intents and purposes, it's an outright ban, and so as soon as
that happened, the demand for recyclable material globally dropped about 40 percent. There's been
some other countries that have picked up the slack, Vietnam, some other countries in that region.
However, those are short-term contracts that they're going to be expiring in the next one to
two years, and so from a global scale, folks are kind of scrambling to say, well, where are we going
to move our material to? And that really puts pressure on us to have a domestic market that gets
firmed up. So supply and demand, simple law, supply and demand says excess materials without
a demand there means low commodity prices, and commodity prices kind of shot through the floor.
Over here on the right-hand side, you can kind of see the effect that we saw on mixed paper and
cardboard. You go from $56 a ton down to $750. Actually, that's pretty good from a Texas standpoint.
On the East Coast, they were basically paying $5 a ton to move paper at one point. So the market's
seen some stabilization since then. The low commodity prices, how does that ripple effect
come back to us? Well, the low prices, like I mentioned, is the processors, their revenues
have gone through the floor, and so either they cut expense or they go out of business, and so the
thing that they can afford to do is spend a lot of money and time cleaning and excessive sorting.
So what they do is they place a ban on contaminated materials coming from haulers in the Murphs.
And for that, that affects Pratt, and Pratt in turn tells us we're going to start deducting more
contamination until you clean up your act. We're not alone in this. This is all across the country
right now, and it's really kind of the kind of the dirty secret of the recycling industry is we
haven't been taking as good a care of our own behaviors as we should have, and this kind of
pulled the veil back on that a little bit. A couple of things I'll say on this, too. So we
talked about the mixed paper and cardboard. Our single stream, as part of our contract, Pratt pays us
$15 per ton for single stream, and that's the contracted rate. So again, we're fairly insulated
from the market fluctuations. If we were to go out and try to bid this contract right now in Texas,
we'd probably be paying our Murph $25 to $90 per ton to move the recyclable materials. A source of
revenue turns to a pretty large expense category. Fortunately, we're not there. We have about nine
years to go on this contract, so our hope is that the market firms up domestically and we're not
having to face that decision. In terms of the financial overview from a commodity revenue
standpoint, we've seen about $170,000 step down year over year, '16-'17 to '17-'18. Essentially,
we've been able to cover that just by reducing operating expenditures. Again, if we were looking
at what some cities are faced with of having to pay $25 to $90 a ton, what you typically see is
we'd have to start charging a processing fee to each resident and commercial entity that's in the
recycling program. For us right now, over here on the right-hand side is the standard residential
bill. So our residents right now with a large cart pay $7.20 a month for residential collection
for recycling. They also pay a similar fee for refuse collection. The thing that's always made
recycling a good deal is they're not having to pay this disposal fee right here, and that's for
transporting and taking the waste to the landfill and actually processing it. If the markets don't
turn around, then that's the type of fee that we probably see added to the bill. And that's what a
lot of cities are starting to take a look at is the cost-benefit balance has kind of changed a
little bit for recycling. So their residents, their commercial businesses are having to take on
additional expense, and then they're also seeing that the number of materials being accepted is
starting to drop as well. So that kind of mutes the environmental benefits that you're seeing with
the program. Again, we're not in a great position, but we're in a great position relative to what
others are experiencing in the market. When you look at recycling there's a number of environmental
considerations, and I'm going to blow through these pretty quick, but it's essentially, you know,
kind of trade-offs. And so you look at it and say, well, what's my net benefit from an environmental
perspective? So when we talk about preserving natural resources and saving energy, like I said
earlier, we're not using raw materials or energy for new products, but what we are using raw materials
for is our collection trucks, our containers, the rolling stock that we put out there on the road.
You also have the energy used for equipment to collect, sort, and transport that material,
so you want to keep that in mind. Pollution prevention and reducing waste sent to the landfill,
you do have the pollution associated with sourcing and transporting raw materials, that's gone,
but you also have the methane output from decomposition of paper and cardboard.
And so for us, we do run a modern landfill, so we can kind of mute the effect that that has
environmentally, but that's still there. And then for last year, we saved about 16,000 cubic yards
of landfill airspace by diverting and recycling this material. The trade-off that you have there
is you have the emissions from our solid waste fleet, as well as the emissions for anything
associated with the MRF and the transportation of materials to market. So a lot to take in,
but what you do with all that information is there's a waste reduction model that the EPA
publishes. You can go in and plug in all these variables, take a look at the specifics for our
landfill, the specifics of our recycling program, and it kind of gives you an idea of what do we do
from an environmental and emissions standpoint. Our program for '17-'18, we removed essentially
about 4,700 passenger vehicles from the road in terms of emissions. And then from an energy usage,
we removed the annual energy usage of about 874 homes. So we are having a net positive environmental
impact. A few other ways that we look at the program performance, I'll walk through these
kind of one by one. So you have your customer classes here, residential and commercial.
One of the things we look at is adoption, and our definition of adoption is you have a City of Denton
recycling container. If you have one, you've adopted the program. We're at 100% for residential
because it's a bundled rate. All of our residences have a recycling cart, whether they wish to use
it or not. From a commercial standpoint, it's a voluntary program. The other thing I'll note
on a commercial is it is an open market to recycling, meaning you can choose to recycle,
but you may not be doing it with us. You may be doing it with another hauler. We're also seeing
more and more businesses kind of have this closed loop system of, you know, I take in the cardboard
from the supplier, and then when they come up with my next delivery, I hand the cardboard back to them,
and they take care of it for me. Amazon's a really good example of that. They have kind of a circular
economy for their cardboard. Participation, kind of building off of adoption, participation is
I have a container, and I'm actively setting it out, and so we do route audits every year.
Residentially, we see about 67% of the folks with the container set out. Keep in mind that only about
82% of folks with a refuse container are setting that out, so you may have a container, but you're
not always using it. A commercial, those containers are always out, available to lift. It doesn't mean
they're always full, though, and that's kind of the trick with commercial containers.
Contamination, we've talked about. This is on average what we're looking at in each of the
customer classes, so contamination of about 33% for residential and closer to 40% for our commercial
customers, and then your diversion is essentially just the weight of recyclables that we diverted
away from the landfill relative to the total waste output for residential and commercial.
Sir, I don't understand the 100% participation. So commercial containers essentially are your
dumpsters and your big boxes. Those go on a regular schedule, much like residential. You're
not rolling them out to the curb, so when we look at participation, because we can't really say that
container was a third full or a half full, it's available for pickup, and we're actively lifting
it, so we're saying that they're getting 100% participation. Okay. Although only 27% have
adopted recycling. Yes. It doesn't mean that... It's probably the more important figure in this.
I think the way I would probably say that, Mr. Sheik, is participation may not be efficient
participation, meaning that container may be almost empty when we lift it,
but it's available for collection when we swing by. Do you have any way of finding out what
commercial entities are contracting with other sources? Not currently. That's hard to find out,
I'm sure. You know, we'll talk a little bit about mandatory recycling ordinance here in a little
bit, and that's a factor for someone like Austin who's pushing that out of Dallas, is you really
have a full compliance arm that is you have to register as a hauler. You have to basically tell
us all of your customers. It's a pretty involved process to get that type of information. It's not
impossible, but there's some work that has to be done to get it. Since you have the figures for
contamination of commercial containers, do you have a calculation of how much you're collecting
from commercial recycling? In terms of tonnage? Yeah, I mean, because that percentage is based
on that, isn't that right? We do. So the percentages are a little different here because
this is relative to all of our waste accepted at our facility. So from a commercial standpoint,
you've got commercial recycling about 2,800 tons. This is fiscal year '17-'18.
There's residential recycling at about 5,800. Okay. Thank you. You bet.
So the biggest challenge facing our program right now is the contamination figures that you see
right here. That mutes the environmental impact that we have. An otherwise clean load with one
bad actor can throw something wrong in their container and ruin almost a whole truckload,
depending on the conditions. So I want to talk a little bit about what contamination is,
what are we seeing, and then what we're doing to try to address it. On the left-hand side here,
this is the wrong/non-program materials that we talked about. A couple things I'll point out
that are common mistakes is you see some plastics in here. You've got laundry containers. You've got
a water jug. Those are all plastic materials, but they're not program materials. Hardshell plastics
like your Fisher-Prest playgrounds and things like that, those are common things that folks
will throw in there and say, "Well, it's plastic. It'll go." Not so much. So some of those can be
recycled, just not through our program. So we need to do a better job of getting education out to
folks saying, "Here's where you can take that to recycle it." Obviously, we prefer reuse on that
type of stuff as opposed to recycling, if possible. Some other things in here, you've got some
electrical cables, cords, Christmas lights, or the bane of any Murph, because it gets tangled into
some of the machinery in there. We took a council member on a tour the other day.
Christmas lights were tangled on the bottom. They were down for two hours. And so it adds to expense.
And then also, you also have that stuff that just can't be recycled in our program. You've got
textiles, furniture, wood. Things like that are common to see in here. Hangers. Those are all
things that folks think, "Well, it's metal. It's aluminum. It ought to go." And it doesn't.
On the other hand, you also have dirty materials. And these are more of what I associate with.
This is not wish-cycling. This is someone was a bad actor and did something irresponsible.
So this was an otherwise clean load. We do certain routes for commercial that are just cardboard.
Someone threw a bag of food waste in there. All of our trucks compress. And when that happens,
it blows all over the place. They empty the load, and it's basically written off as 100% contamination.
This is the stuff that we've got to do a better job of stopping when we can. Education and outreach
can affect this. This is typically more of an abuse of the process. One of the things we're
trying to do is kind of triangulate where our issues are or where they're the highest in terms
of contamination. So we've partnered with tech services to give us kind of a GIS map, if you will,
of where, on average, which routes are performing well, which ones are not performing well.
You'll notice there's not a lot of green in this map because it's not there. On average, our routes
are above 15% contamination. We do have a few routes, residentially, on the outskirts of town
that are doing pretty well from a contamination standpoint. But, by and large, most of them are
in this 30 to 45% range. It doesn't mean that there's not folks doing it right. It means that
they are getting mixed in with some of the folks that aren't doing it as well, maybe.
We also have some hot spots where it's 45% and above. You see those highlighted here,
residentially. In commercial, it's a little spread out. So what we're doing with this information,
this is where Brandy's spending a lot of her time, is doing targeted commercial audits,
is we're going out to those routes and essentially lifting the lid to see what are we seeing in here.
Is this someone that needs a little bit of education? Are they a bad actor? Are they doing
a really nice job? And so what Brandy does, she does the targeted audit. About 50% of the time,
a little bit less than 50% of the time, we're seeing less than 10% contamination.
For the loads where there is higher than 10% contamination, Brandy and the public outreach
office are performing what we call an educational intervention. We basically go into their office,
show them the pictures. Hey, this material doesn't go in there or if you continue to do this,
it's going to cause problems. Deliver them some educational material. For businesses,
it's usually just going direct to the owner or the manager. For multifamily establishments,
it's also trying to help them establish education for their tenants. And so that can be a little bit
more involved. Of the 54 that we tried to do an intervention on, only about half of those were
receptive, meaning we got a call back and they were like, okay, we'll hear you out. And then on
those, it's kind of been 50/50 on that is I think we've got some properties that are really trying
hard to turn this around and their tenants aren't being cooperative. And I'll show you kind of some
successes and some challenges here and then I'll share some thoughts on where we are. So this is a
shared container on the square. This was in November 2018. This is what we got before. This is
a cardboard only container, if I'm not mistaken. And so you can see bags and bags and bags of
food waste. Obviously that's going to be 100% contaminated. Brandy went out there and twisted
their arm and went back a couple of weeks later and this is what we saw. So a pretty dramatic
turnaround. Mr. Chigas, I mentioned earlier, this is the type of load that we would want to adjust
the collection frequency because it's not efficient for us to go collect, you know, a third or half
full loads. But this is what I see. This means the education and intervention is working.
Likewise, with multifamily, I'm sorry. On the commercial though, they're getting charged
every time you come out and pick that up, right? Our rate schedule scales to the frequency of
pickups so there is a financial benefit to them not being collected as frequently. Right. So
again, education, no business wants to pay for something that is inefficient. And that's a lot
of times what our sales pitch is on the recycling is look, we can cut down your frequency and save
you a little bit of money to boot. Some cases that's true, some cases it's not. It just depends on
the waste profile and what they're generating. Thank you. Multifamily, these are some properties
that are really doing it well. I think these are off of Bell. So here, breaking down boxes,
cleaning out. I mean, I think you've got a honey jar somewhere in here that got cleaned out, which
is really impressive. That's hard to do. You've got a salsa jar cleaned out. I mean, this is ideal
what you would want to see when you lift a recycling container. This is another good load,
although this one would probably be over your 15% contamination because you have the hard shell
plastic back here. But all in all, this is a really nice load, just a little bit of education.
This one doesn't have the boxes broken down. It's got a plastic bag in there. But all in all,
a pretty clean load, all things considered. Multifamily is particularly some of our more
challenging areas just because you're not just educating that one person. You're trying to
educate 300 or 400 people. This load over here, obviously you've got plastics, plastic bags,
which are a big no-no in the recycling program. The other thing that's problematic here is you've
got water in the floor of this container. Someone left the lid open when it was raining. Now any
cardboard that contacts that has not had the ability to be recycled. And so that's, again,
part of the education campaign there. This is a problematic property because they're basically
just treating their recycling bin as another waste dumpster. You've got folks throwing ashes in there.
You've got electronics, styrofoam, yard waste. And so some of this is education. Some of it is
just a bad act or not doing their part and actually causing problems in the program.
So one of the things that we want to propose and try to get a recommendation out of the PV on is
how can we go beyond just the education piece. Understand that from a commercial standpoint,
we can do the targeted audits. We have, you know, a couple thousand commercial properties.
When you switch it over to residential, you're dealing with about 40,000 cans out there in the
field. And so no matter how hard we try, we're not going to be able to hit all those. Our goal
really is for the person that is obviously a bad actor and is blatant abuse is we want to have some
type of kind of compliance, if you will, to where we're not harming the program and they get the
message. So Chapter 24 of our ordinance says it's unlawful for any person to place any non-recyclable
waste into a recycling receptacle. Now, that gives us the authority to write fines and penalties and
all that. Our stance on this from a department is that's not necessarily effective because that
fine is going to come 30 or 45 days after you did what you did and you may not even recognize it.
What we prefer to do is whenever we run across a container like this, this is a pic from one of our
drivers, is we put a contamination notice on it, tell them to clean it up, put it in the right
container, and we'll be back next week. That's not going to be a very popular decision for some
of these folks, but that's the most efficient way that we found in the industry to really affect
change here. Folks will only have that happen to them once or twice and then they'll get tired
of cleaning up their own mess. The alternative is we clean it up for them in the field or we lift it,
contaminate the load, and then allow the MRF to try to sort it out. So to me, if you make the mess,
you clean up the mess. Have a statistic of how often that happens? Not residentially. I mean,
from a commercial standpoint, like I said, it's about 50/50 and we wouldn't be tagging 50 percent
of the commercial loads. It's really just that blatant, I mean, it would be something like this
right here that we would tag and step. We probably wouldn't notice this because we're not going to be
getting out and lifting every container or opening every container. That will probably end up going
in the truck. This would not. This right here, unless the container lid is flipped open, we
wouldn't notice it. And so that's why I think commercially the targeted audits need to continue.
Residentially, I think this is probably the most efficient way to approach it.
Last thing I want to touch on, and then I'll do wrap up and take any recommendations you have,
is so one of the key components is kind of expanding the reach of recycling and trying
to get adoption out there in the commercial and multifamily areas. So right now we've broken this
apart here. Commercials at about 25 percent. Like I said earlier, they may be recycling using other
means or another provider. Multifamily are at about 35 percent. One of the ways we've been trying to
affect change in this area is we're doing direct marketing efforts, essentially targeting properties
where we think their waste profile would make a good case. Performing cold calls and site visits,
and then hopefully getting them to adopt. Over the last three to four months, we've had 57 accounts
we've targeted. Nine of those were converted into recycling adoption. Another nine were actually
using some other means. And so when you combine those together, it's about 33 percent success rate.
That's how we'd look at that. We certainly want to continue this effort. One of the things that we
talked to the committee on the environment about is some cities are doing mandatory recycling
ordinances. If we want to pursue that, what we would recommend from the staff level is let's do
a case analysis on that on its own. The reason why is it is kind of a delicate balance in terms
of cost benefit, especially with where the industry is right now. We'd have to look at
the environmental benefits versus the truck emissions. You also have your investments in
terms of containers and trucks that you'd have to put out there. The contamination, the recycling
market are all factors. One of the other things that I'd put out there is that we do have some
space for additional containers. We're struggling right now with some of the containers in the
right-of-way trying to make sure that we have enough space for one container. We may be creating
an issue where now we're having to find space for two. Some of the other considerations you'll
hear from customers is additional costs and responsibilities. I know as Brandy has offered
this up to some folks voluntarily, this is kind of the deal killer for them is I don't want the
additional cost or having to deal with it. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just some of
the stuff that I think we'll have to take into account. With that, I'm going to wrap up. In terms
of cost containment, I know one of the things when our consultant was here last year, they recommended
bi-weekly collection. Based on what we've seen from our route audits, we don't think that's a
good idea. We want to maintain weekly collection, but we do need to resize our collection routes to
make them more efficient, make sure we're not emptying half empty or half full containers.
In terms of contamination, we do want to continue our audits and education campaigns. We want to
recognize the institutions that are doing it right on social media, on the website. We do have a
number of businesses and citizens that are going to great lengths to do this correctly, and we want
to make sure they get some recognition for their efforts. Lastly, we do want to recommend the
compliance and enforcement. If it's contaminated, we're not lifting it. And I think for the PB,
the council, you will get some pushback and some complaints about that, I would anticipate.
But our goal is long-term success of the program, and it may mean some folks have to clean up their
act a little bit in the interim. In terms of increasing adoption and participation, we do
want to continue with the direct marketing efforts, educate new and existing participants,
celebrate the successes when they occur. And like I said, if we want to pursue the recycling
ordinance, we'd recommend that we circle back with this body as well as the council
to give you kind of a fuller, deeper dive into that. We met with the committee on the environment.
There's a few additional things that they recommended. From a contamination standpoint,
looking at replacing containers in parks and public areas. We're looking at the square. Some
of the parks are already purchasing new containers. And so that's something that
just by the container selection, you can restrict contamination in some cases.
They did recommend evaluating the mandatory recycling ordinance. And they also had some
additional recommendations in terms of education, outreach, and right sizing all of our containers
proactively. With that, I will be happy to stand for any questions and take any recommendations
that you have. >> I was just wondering if you're prepared to coordinate with code enforcement if
you stop picking up trash. Because judging from Austin, for instance, people will just leave it
out there. >> Right. We haven't talked about it, but we will follow up with code enforcement.
>> I'll have community improvement services. >> Yes.
>> Thank you. Yes. Community improvement services. Thank you for the reaction.
>> They always change the names. >> You know, one of the things that we've
talked a little bit about in I don't think we're going to load it into this year's budget. We're
just not ready yet. But an environmental compliance officer, if you will, not just for some of our
issues, but some other issues in the community that kind of more proactively go out there and
address this. Brandy is kind of a one man army right now. One woman army, I'm sorry.
Basically tackling all these issues. And I think we want to see how this starts to kind of turn
with us not lifting the contaminated loads. If it continues to be a problem, that may be something
we circle back to the PB and the council on is we need a little bit more horsepower to affect the
change that we need. And I think to that end, we can certainly have that person or persons coordinate
with community improvement. It's a good suggestion. >> Could you pull up that map again about
contamination? >> Mm-hm. >> So is most of this residential or a combination of residential
and commercial? >> Commercial is more contaminated than residential is right now.
>> Okay. >> I think the type of contamination you're seeing, it really varies. I think on
the commercial side, when you're dealing with restaurants, automotive places, that's where
we're seeing dirty material in there. Some of that is like a pencil can. We really can't take
that in a recycling program. That needs to be treated differently. That's kind of hazardous
waste. On the residential side, I think you get more what we call wish cycling is it looks like
it's about right. So I'm going to throw it in there and take a chance. There are a couple areas
in town, and our drivers will probably tell you the neighborhood. I'm not going to shame anyone
here today. But they will tell you that every can they go down that street is contaminated.
And it's not because they don't know how. It's because they have so much waste and they don't
want to pay for an extra container. It overflows. >> Sure. >> And so I think those are going to be
the areas where this effort in terms of compliance really has the biggest impact. I think the one
thing that will be a bit of a challenge there is we are not removing containers. And that's
something that we probably kind of plan to see and say, is that something we need to think about?
I know we want to have mandatory recycling, but if it's someone that is truly abusing the program,
do we continue to keep them on board? And that's a question I think we just kind of leave open to
the PAB and the council. >> Yeah, it's a tough balance between mandatory and, yeah, that's
lived through that before. That's tough. >> It is tough. >> Ethan, I've heard through
the great plan, obviously, that you've changed the way you're recycling your paving products.
So how's that happening now? What are you doing about your concrete and your asphalt and the
steel that comes in concrete? >> Billy, you need your mic. >> I got you. >> You got me. >> So
asking about recycling concrete and such is really there is a small use for concrete and asphalt
millings and stuff like that on site. You know, metal products we're separating out. We have a
public disposal area where once that hits the ground for our small contractors and stuff,
our staff is pulling that aside. For concrete, what we're trying to do is limit the amount of
stuff that's coming across the scales. Right now we have probably five years worth of stockpiles.
It's highly contaminated and it's really basically a burden for us and we're running the risk of that
actually eating up landfill airspace as opposed to saving it. So kind of the rule of thumb that
we've used is we divert 100% of the material we don't accept. So for that piece, we're only
accepting what we think we can use on site. For our city operations, we will accept it but we did
put in contamination standards on it. It is basically anything more than 5% contaminated.
We're not going to accept it. If we do, we're going to treat it as wasted and we'll be billed as such.
And so I think it's probably going to be three or four years before we look at really diving back
into that. And then I think at that point it's going to be a matter of are we better off just
purchasing, you know, the millings for the use in our internal roads and tipping pads or should we
look at recycling ourselves? In the meantime, we have about five years worth of kind of metered out
processing that we're going to have to do to burn through the stockpiles that we have because we've
got to move it out of the way. So now you're charging the other departments to take that
material. I don't think you were before, correct? We were charging but it was a very low rate and
we still accept it at a discounted rate but it's got to meet those contamination standards.
Less than 5% contaminated. The other thing too is there are other processors out there in the market.
May not be quite as convenient as us but there are processors out there that take it free of charge if
it meets their contamination standards. I think there's a couple in Louisville. I'd have to take
a look but we have a list typically that we provide to folks crossing the scales that says
here's where you can go if you don't want to pay this rate. So we're still taking rumble?
We do from city departments if it's under a certain contamination limit. We want clean product that's
easy to because what we're having to do, Brendan, is we're having to not just pay the process that
we're having to pay to resort it and we'd prefer that folks perform a field sort before bringing
it to us. Just try not to take on the other problems. Can you go to the financial overview
slide for me? Sure. I think you were talking about this as I strolled in five to ten minutes late.
Sorry. Is this a recycling cart that we're covering or just generally what is the 3120? Is that for a
large recycling cart? It's your bundled service. If you get the large cart bundle this is your cost
of service and what we've done here in this pie charter we've broken it out for all the components
that go into that rate in essence. So out of that 3120 it's about seven dollars and 20 cents for
recycling collection. Seven dollars and 16 cents for refuse. You've got your yard waste service,
your disposal fees, and then you got some smaller ancillary services like HCC, bulky items,
and then you have your overhead which is your franchise fees, your transfers to other departments,
things of that nature.
Okay. I guess I'm still a little bit confused. I kind of thought that they were built separately,
a trash cart and the recycling cart because you can have a small recycling cart and a big
so they're not broken up separately. We have bundles and so you have the larger bundle,
the mid-size, and the small and this is just one of those. This is a large bundle,
large recycling, large refuse. Okay, okay. The cameras on the collection vehicles,
are they suitable for assessing whether or not the cart is contaminated when you dump it? They can.
Now Eugene, correct me if I'm wrong, we don't, not all of our vehicles are outfitted with cameras
that will be. So I think that's something that we're going to be taking a look as we spec out our
vehicles is route optimization as well as the cameras aren't just there for contamination and
kind of taking a picture of the evidence if you will. They're also there for safety features and
things like that. So that is something that we're going to probably be looking into moving forward.
It seemed like this group had approved a suite of software and hardware that the trucks were
supposed to be outfitted with that would help them understand things about the address as well
as cameras that were supposed to be. There was a pilot project that went for about 60 days on that.
Now we've placed that on hold for a couple of reasons. Number one is the essentially the
software that that would be dependent on. We have had a number of audits and we're finding that
software incredibly lacking and so we're going to and the reason why that's important is we would
have to upgrade that software in order for that new system to work and so we've put the camera
system on hold while we evaluate this other system and once we get a final system in place that we're
comfortable with that provides everything we need then we'll reevaluate that piece. Does that make
sense? What I was leading up to and like Susan pointed out is people are motivated not just
commercial entities but individuals are motivated with dollars and if you could actually somehow
demonstrate that people were recycling well and reward them somehow by charging less to collect their
less contaminated recyclables then you might be able to work something out like that. The other
thing it seems like you could do that nobody really has brought up is maybe a tertiary
collection bin that is your maybe partner with residences where a residence contacts the solid
waste and says I want to recycle I'm going to do it right and then that way those colored bins you
know they have five percent collection you can sit a different vehicle like you do for the for the
bulky items or the yard waste because they the yard waste vehicle it just kind of drives around
and looks for weight yard waste drive that's something we're going to be talking about in a
month or so I mean it does it just drives it looks for you know so if you had bins that you knew were
people that partnered with the city to do proper recycling I don't know and then the other thing
that I wanted to mention I've been to the recite I've toured the recycling facility about four times
and each time the educator at the time said if in doubt recycle and that's just wrong right I mean
that's wrong now I mean if in doubt you should throw it in the trash I think that was probably
a holdover from where the industry was sure absolutely and a half ago absolutely and somehow
we got to beat something new into everybody's head so because if in doubt it should go in the trash
right yeah I think we started out with everyone separating at home to just throw it in the bin
and we'll sort it out to now we're kind of having to pay for that mentality and for wishful recycling
yeah and I think there are yeah I think there are some entities out there that are really going back
to source separating a lot of this now and that's we're not there don't worry but you know that that
is one of those things is kind of being kicked around out there is if we can't get rid of
contamination in single source do we need to evaluate another model and we're not going to
step out on a ledge on that we'll let the industry decide which way we need to go and decide if we
want to jump so I really appreciate this because I had I think three or three questions for you and
you seem to combine them all into one presentation so I appreciate that so thank you we'll be
bringing this to council tomorrow is there any other recommendations that puv you would like to
add beyond what we've put up well I think some efforts need to be made in community education
you know educating everybody but I would support an ordinance telling people they had to do it
okay personally I would
so with us basically telling or asking us here to come back with an analysis is that what you'd like
to see first or do you support it without that I would do analysis first but I don't know what
Brendan's thinking I've lived through it and I already do it was doing it before y'all did it
you know so I don't really have that big of a problem with it so you know you told no you've
already been doing what recycling yeah I just you know yeah yeah my house was that way too yeah
how many customers do you have for residential we're 40 000 commercial brandy help me out
3000 so when you're talking mandatory you're going to start with mandatory residential
residential yeah that's really right now it's already mandatory already mandatory
and so really what you're looking at is commercial and multifamily and when we talk to the committee
on the environment we ask them we can separate these out and do mandatory for one or the other
and I think they want the analysis for both commercial and multifamily it's mandatory with
punitive any kind of recourse if they don't do it properly I think that's something that you've
got to start taking into consideration you know there's been some discussion about the
development code and putting it in there and really for us we you really have to craft an
ordinance and that ordinance is going to have to have some provisions in there we talked earlier
about someone that's recycling with another entity we're going to have to have some provisions on how
do we find that out how do we make sure that they're registered on a regular basis you you
run into some cities where they're doing token efforts by that I mean it's a 500 unit apartment
complex and they have one cart not dumpster they have one cart to say we're recycling
and so there's there's some loopholes and some things that we can learn from other cities if we
go down that path I think Austin and a few others that have been fairly successful with that they
phase in over you know six or seven years it's not a we decided we're going to do it because you do
have some of those issues that you've got to work through like your space considerations
new properties it's a little bit easier but for your grandfather doing properties you're
going to have some challenges that you're going to have to work through on how they get that
get that done so Austin has mandatory recycling they do they're they're probably out of the folks
in the state as my understanding they're they're about as far along as anyone okay I think they've
recently added composting to their collection as well yeah I mean I'm down there when I'm moving
my daughter in and out of college and they could really improve improve their solid waste it's you
can't drive down some streets when you've got all those kids you know discarding the stuff that they
don't want to move right college move in and move out through yeah challenge a challenge
and these are you know these are bright-eyed bushy-tailed
young college students who are all into low impact lifestyles you know they're still trashing the
streets so yeah if it's not easy to do sometimes people just don't do it yeah right well while
we're on the topic we didn't really cover it but but we have talked about it in the past I'm going
to bring it up the areas where we provide containers for people to bring their cars
and recycle stuff I wonder if as an example perhaps the city could manage those areas better
so we could take pride in our recycling situation they're often like that you know and I believe
one of the reasons why and you didn't grab a picture of it I have one on my phone of the pole
where the cameras used to be that has the sign that says they're monitored by cameras right well
it did take an idiot to realize there aren't any cameras there anymore because they're gone
we actually had a camera at this location yeah was monitoring it and it didn't stop folks
yeah so much and so this is one of the things that well you have to look at the footage
you have to be able to get you know tag numbers and you actually have to have a
budget for somebody to follow up on those tag numbers and sure find them and things like that
so I was actually going to bring this up with our budget presentation as we get into those is
so this is the recycling drop-off at North Lakes several months ago we talked to you all about
here's what we're seeing at the drop-off site at the landfill we moved to monitored access behind
the scales and this is your before and after so to your point after we removed that most of the
illegal dumping shifted to this site and between our staff and parks it's an ongoing battle you've
got windblown litter the fences aren't doing much to knock it down when it when it's at this scale
this site's going to have to move because the tennis centers are going to be constructed here
and so as part of our budget one of the supplemental packages will be
to locate this at a different property and then build it to where it can kind of knock down some
of the issues we're seeing here on the low end you know you can instruct enclosures lock it up
after hours put cameras on it and then prosecute if someone's illegal dumping the next step beyond
that is having a manned station and it's not cheap you know the one thing that I would say on this
is it's not necessarily providing access to folks that don't have recycling everyone has
access to recycling it's just driving out here and utilizing that facility and so it's a convenience
factor and you know I think that's something that we'd want the PV and the council to weigh on
weigh in on as we look at our budget that will be part of the supplementals.
One more question on going mandatory for multifamily and commercial have you talked to
landlords and commercial businesses to get there? I believe our public outreach group I know Brandy
you've talked to a few folks have you broached the subject with them on mandatory at all?
I think that's something we'd probably need if we get serious about this especially if we're
going to be doing a case analysis that'll be a step that we take as we survey them and it's
not just would you support this or not it's what would you have to do to support this is really
what we're going to be interested in because a lot of times when we do site visits on this
it's trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in terms of space in terms of accessibility
things of that nature I'm not saying it can't be done but that's that's where we probably want
to get their opinion. Commercial might be easier than multifamily. Thank you. Thank you.
Any other questions? All right our next item is to hold a discussion
on reducing or eliminating utility poles along Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane.
Good morning everyone George Morrow DME General Manager I have the have the easy job this morning
I'm going to introduce our guest speaker Jerry Fielder is with us Jerry's our manager of
distribution engineering he came to DME about six years ago where he headed up engineering for
co-serve so he's been in the neighborhood a while and knows his his business we had a request from a
council request to look at the what I would call pole blight the aesthetics of the power poles
and the telephone poles in the vicinity of Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane so Jerry and his folks did
that for for us we made a presentation on this last week in response to that inquiry to the council
and wanted to keep you in the loop so this is the kind of information that we provided to the council
on this item and Jerry will let you know kind of where we ended up and see what your thoughts are
about this so okay.
Good morning. Good morning. So we'll get right into the slide basically the background associated
with this investigation that we did was that the council had approved some money for a median park
at the intersection of Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane and what they had asked us to do is look into
the possibility of reducing the number of poles along in that median park and because some other
conversations that we had with the investigation had extended itself up to Smith Drive down to
I-35 access road along Dallas Drive and then a little bit north of Teasley
north on Teasley and then south of Teasley to the apartment complex entrance.
So to kind of fill you in a little bit on what's been done so far on January 4th 2019 DME
representatives had met with representatives of Frontier and Charter and at this meeting we
discussed two different options. Number one was transferring all of their existing overhead plant
that they have currently on the topped off poles to the DME poles and number two was converting
the overhead plant to underground their overhead plant to underground. So as an outcome of this
just at the request of DME Charter has already transferred their assets off the top left poles
along Dallas Drive which has allowed us to remove five poles thus far. DME has removed those five poles.
This is the study area that we are we're going to talk about. We've got Dallas Drives from Smith
Street southeast to the I-35 entrance ramp and we have Teasley Lane just south of the Woodhill
Camino Del Sol apartment entrance northeast to about 200 feet from Duncan Road. In this area DME has
double circuit main feeders along the northeast side of Dallas Drive from Smith Street to Teasley
Lane. We have a single circuit main feeder along the southwest side of Dallas Drive from Smith
Street to Teasley and we have single circuit main feeders on the northeast and southwest side of
Dallas Drive from Teasley Lane to I-35 access. We have a double circuit main feeder along the
northwest side of Teasley Lane from the Woodhill apartments to Duncan Street and there are a number
of topped off poles in the study area with communications conductors on them and again
charter has already transferred their equipment over to DME poles which has allowed us to remove
five poles. So to do the study we separated this area into seven different segments and we'll talk
about each one of these segments. Segment one is the segment that's probably the most interesting
because it is in the immediate vicinity of the median part that they have. The other six segments
that we'll talk about are kind of spread out along this entire study area. So to let you know the
current conditions that you can see out there there's a lot of stub poles. You see stub
poles directly adjacent to DME poles. You see stub poles about 50-60 feet off of DME's main line
so the area does have a lot of stub poles and DME poles. So the option one that we talked to them
about was to remove the stub poles. Again we worked with Verizon and Charter, Frontier and Charter
to move their stuff over. This was the first conversation we have and as a result of that
Charter moved their stuff over and it has allowed us to remove five poles. So this is a little graphic
that we've put together for you guys to kind of show an idea of what this option looks like. If
you get rid of the stub poles, these are the stub poles that I'm talking about. You see them here,
you see them here. So if we, this is the before, get rid of stub poles and everything moves over,
this is the after. I'll do that one more time because kind of see the the differences that we
have in there. So that was option one. Now we did talk to Frontier and Charter about this and
Frontier has indicated that the feasibility for them to eliminate or to move over would only
eliminate two stub poles because they have cable slack and splice box issues and their cost to
underground the remainder would be significantly expensive quote unquote. And again Charter has
moved over so they're already accommodating things out there. To kind of give you an idea of the
projected cost for this option one, you see the seven different segments. DME's cost is minimal.
Usually DME will just remove the pole. Whether we own the pole or not, if it's been cleared off of,
DME removes the pole. Charter and Verizon have not been able to provide us yet a full cost of
doing the work for this option one. Option two was to underground this entire section so we'll
talk about each one of these segments separately. The first to kind of let you know a little bit
about this area, as I've mentioned there's a lot of feeders, a lot of main feeders in this area and
this is a major switching junction for DME's reliability. There are a number of switches
in this that let us make the load flow in different directions. So it times two substations,
several substation transformers and several different feeders together in this area. So
it's a major area of switching for us. Segment option one, segment option two, segment one,
which is the area just adjacent to the park would have cost, it will cost about 1.2 million dollars
to put that all in underground. On the right hand side is a little bit of list of everything that
DME will have to do to accommodate that. I'm not going to go through each one of those steps,
but to let you show a little bit about the complexity of what it takes to do this for us.
So segment one, which is the park area, is 1.2 million dollars. Again we have some visuals here
to kind of show you the benefit of what that might look like. So this is the before. If you take out
all the DME poles and the parks department helped us by adding the park in there, so we'll kind of
go back and forth a couple of times on this one. A different view of the same area and then this
final one is kind of will be up Dallas Drive. We actually cannot just do everything immediately
next to the park because we had to have land area for us to actually come up and put down guys in.
So we actually have to go up near the tire shop before we can actually pop our utilities back up.
But this is what that area would look like.
All right, so now we're just going to go through the other segments and step through them. So
to do option two, segment two would cost an additional 1.89 million dollars.
Segment three is additional 1.1 million dollars. Segment four, which is the area of Teasley Drive,
would cost an additional $222,000 for us to put that in underground. Segment five, which is going
down Dallas Drive towards the I-35 to Hopkins. That's a $570,000 project for us. To take that
from Hopkins all the way to 35 would add another 1.9 million dollars to the cost of the project.
And then to take it down Teasley to the apartments is about 1 million dollars extra.
So this is the cost associated with all of that. To put this entire area underground would cost
about 7.8 million dollars and we still don't know if there would be any costs associated with
charter and Verizon doing that also. So this is the summary. This gives you option one and option
two put together so you can kind of see some of the costs and some of the poles and top-top poles
that would be removed from this standpoint. Again, the option one is a minimal cost to DME, to the
city, and option two underground is about a 7.8 million dollar project. The key points that we'd
like to bring to this is DME has initiated conversations already with Verizon and charter
to eliminate the top-top poles and five poles have been removed. The projected cost for DME
just to remove and put our facilities in underground at the park is 1.2 million dollars, projected to be
1.2 million dollars, and to convert the entire area of our overhead plant underground for all
seven segments is a 7.8 million dollars. Again, we don't know anything about potential costs
from charter or Verizon associated with that. So the options that we brought to the city council,
we asked if option one, just removing the step holes is chosen, DME will continue to work with
the telecommunication providers to scope the project in further detail and implement this as
practical. If the council told us option two, the underground chosen, then phase one would involve
the detailed engineering and cost estimation for segment one, the Dallas Drive, Teasley Park,
and further work with telecommunication providers to get their participation and potential cost,
and then if that is successful, we would continue with additional phases
to be considered after the completion of phase one. Now the council direction to us at the time
was to continue working with telecommunication providers who have cables on step poles and
try to persuade them to move over to DME's poles, allowing DME to remove the step
poles along Dallas Drive and Teasley in the area study. That was their final recommendation to us.
So with that, that's the last slide. Any questions?
So what's the life left in the existing poles that are there right now?
The line out there has been built within the past six years, so it's only about a fifth
depreciated right now, and so yes, they still have several years left in them. They all, the
poles are all in fairly good shape. Creosote's good on them. We don't see any issues with
deterioration right now in those poles. And next question, remember years ago,
you had, or DME had a lot of problems with some of the underground lines around town.
Is this different technology that we're talking about than the stuff like that was at Forest Ridge?
Well, I'm making an assumption here, Forest Ridge is probably what we call aging deteriorated. The
cables have been underground for an extended period of time, and so they just start to fail.
And we already have an active program that we try to identify before that fails, and we try to
replace that in the deal. I think we've done about five or six different areas within Denton right
now. So now when you replace those, you go in with, you don't do direct burial, right?
No, no. This would all be in a duct bank conduit system, so this is, you know, for four con,
for four feeders would be a 16 conduit, six inch type, or it'd be eight, eight, six inches
in concrete in case, so it's a fairly major structure that has to be put in underground.
But this is the cheaper solution that the council told you to do?
Yes. The council didn't show any interest at this time to follow up with any underground,
and they just said we'll continue working with Telecom to get them to move over and remove the
stub poles in the area. Okay, good.
Jerry, if you go back to your option one slide and look at that.
The stub poles in the immediate area of the park.
This one? Yeah, yes. Okay.
Right in the immediate area of where they want the park, how many of those did Frontier say they
cannot move off of? Frontier said that they could only see that two of them they could move off of,
and so the rest of them would have to stay because they say that the way their facilities are built,
and I don't mean to be speaking for them, but my understanding is the way their facilities are built,
they can't physically move over to our poles, and so underground would be the only option they had,
and that would be quote "significantly expensive."
So I'm kind of having a stumbling block with the park. I mean I know that's not really what
we're talking about, but it's not really a pedestrian area. Is it just a green space,
or is it really a park? There's not even crosswalks at the Teasley Lane,
Dallas Drive intersection there. I was just, can anybody speak to that? Why they wanted to,
I mean I could see putting grass there because it's a where our old recycling place was, so but.
It was a, if I may, based on the information that we've been given, it was it was a request from
City Council to clean up that area and look at some options, or they're looking at that location
and the location in downtown area, and so Parks Department came in with some cost estimates on how
to how to make that improvement, just just again to clean up the area and just just make it nicer.
Okay. Green space. Green space. Yeah. Does anybody know when we're going to widen
Dallas Drive to three lanes on both sides there? I spoke with uh Text Dot, it is a Text Dot road,
they say it's not in any immediate plans for them, so there's not, it's going to be a while
before Text Dot actually does anything. So I'd talk to the street department if I was you,
because I think they had some other plans. Oh okay, well he may know something more.
But currently, tied us to City Engineer, currently that segment that we're talking about on
Dallas Drive is not planned to go to six lanes. We don't have a projection for that. Where we're
working with Text Dot currently is to turn that facility over to the city, it'd be a four lane
divided thoroughfare as it is, but we will be anticipating putting in medians down the middle
so that we can start to control some of the access on both sides. Okay.
Any other questions?
Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
All right. The next item is consent agenda. We have only one item, item A.
And I'm not going to read the whole thing. Anybody wish to pull it?
Hearing none. Do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda? I'll recommend approval.
I'll second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Carries. All right. Next item is approval of the
public utility board's minute, meeting minutes of January 28th. Do we have any changes or corrections?
Hearing none. We'll approve as presented. And then items for individual consideration. Consider
recommending an adoption of an ordinance to the city of Denton, a Texas home rule
for the eighth amendment to professional service agreement between the city of Denton and Fries and
Nichols. Good morning. My name is Lee Perry. I'm in the engineering group in charge of capital
project delivery. I'm here today to talk about PEC 4 drainage project phase one and two, specifically
amendment eight to the design contract. So just an overview of the project. So in red on this map
is the PEC 4 phases one and two drainage improvement locations. The area in blue are
utility replacements or relocations for Elm and Locust, which was a separate project,
but it relates to one of the amendments in this contract.
So this contract was awarded in 2009 to Fries and Nichols. This is probably
our oldest design contract of almost $303,000 was the original amount.
Amendments one through five occurred between June of '09 and August 2015
for approximately $100,000. These were amendments that these were related to survey and design
additions. These were before me, but I can get y'all some information if I can on these.
So amendment six was approved in November 2017 for $62,000 and this was to finalize Elm and
Locust utility plans, add in fiber conduit design and facilities to along Elm and Locust
and combine this with the drainage project. The Elm and Locust utility project was originally
being designed in-house and we had our consultant finalize the design and then combine it with the
drainage project. Amendment number seven was approved in April 2018 for $19,000.
So at the beginning of last year we did an update to our drainage criteria manual
and we asked our consultant on this project to go back and do some modeling and look at the box,
the underground drainage box size that we had designed on this and as it turned out we needed
to upsize slightly the design of the box in phase two. So that's what that amendment was for.
So the current amendment, amendment eight, back in October we bid this project and we only received
one bid and it was higher than our estimate so we came back in December and had the bid.
The bid was approved to reject and so now we're currently rebidding the project and so this
amendment is for, we had our consultant go back and do some initial analysis and put in some
alternate construction methods to try to generate some interest, some more interest in the contracting
community to get some more bids on the project, help out with the cost and also we have services
in here for, during the bid project, the bid process, sorry, and then we've also added in
construction phase services so the original contract it only had limited involvement from
the consultant so we have added in construction phase services mainly to include additional site
visits because this project is going to take two years to build. I think the original contract only
had four site visits from the consultant which is once every six months. That's not a lot of
involvement from your consultant so we've added in some services for them to be out there
at least two or three times a month to stay involved in the project. So we're recommending
approval of the of this amendment for $182,315 to freezing nickels.
And if you have any questions? Questions?
I have one. Okay. It's not a criticism. It's a 10-year contract. At what point do we just
close that out and start all over again? Well the project, this project is very far along in
design. Okay so you don't really want to bring anybody else in. I mean we're remitting the project
now for construction if we, yeah we wouldn't want to start over so yes. Just have to ask.
And you only got one bidder anyway right? Well on the original bid, we had one bid. Yeah.
So yeah so we've it's currently rebidding. I think the bid opens February 19th. Okay.
How many contracts do we have with freezing nickels? Their name comes up quite a bit.
A fair amount. Yes ma'am. That's the official number. Hopefully we won't have to come back.
Terribly unusual. Hopefully we won't have to come back for amendment 9. Yeah okay. Any other questions?
Do we have a motion to approve?
Move. Second. Okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay motion carries.
ACM update. Yes good morning madam chairman and members of the board. In your packet you have a
number of items. One of those is the pay as you go, the prepaid utilities public launch. It's a
program that we've been working on with a number of months now. Really excited about getting that
going. If you all have any questions about that program Tiffany Thompson is here to answer
any specific any specifics you may have but we're very excited about offering this
program to our citizens so that they can establish service and get in a timely fashion.
The other is just a application status on the indirect reuse permit.
I won't be able to answer specific questions but we do have folks here that can and then the last
item is a geo-funded projects. We had presented this information at the last board meeting. I
actually handed it out and so just wanted to put it in the packet so it's there in the historical
record and going forward then the next bond oversight committee is on February the 20th
and the thought would be is to bring that same report to the PUB the following meeting. So that
would be I believe 26 so that way keep you apprised right after those after that committee is is
briefed on on that information. Outside of that I'm happy to answer any questions or have staff
answer questions specifically to these items. I was curious about what other programs there
are for low-income users of the utilities. The pay as you go seems aimed at people who have trouble
paying their bills. Good morning Tiffany Thompson director of customer service. So in addition to
the prepay program just a little bit information on that it isn't just for customers that may be
experiencing challenges with finances it's also for those customers who want to get more insight
and visibility to their accounts because they can get real-time consumption usage and so initially
we did kind of target it during the pilot for those people that were struggling with it and
have seen great results as the report has indicated but we do anticipate some people getting on board
too they just want to have additional again oversight over their account. The other programs
that we have for people struggling to pay for their utilities is our plus one program which
is prevent loss of utility services. We have a contract with interfaith ministries. We give
about $125,000 a year to them where families can go and seek assistance for utilities and so we did
change some of the parameters about a year ago for that program so they have that program with us as
well. But the prepay program again just to really excited about it but this prevents late fees,
disconnection charges, deposits on accounts so we're finding it to be a great solution
for those families that may be struggling. Is the additional overview over your usage available to
regular customers or just pay as you go customers? Are we going to be offering that to everyone?
Should be. My usage? Yes well no we're not we're actually not going to offer it right now but we
I wanted to clarify that with Rita real fast. Rita Herrera is our system ops administrator. I'd be
remiss not to you know highlight her and Kimberly Heston our billing supervisor who's been working
so diligently on this program so thank you for clarifying that. So initially it is just going
to be for our prepay customers with that but we hope to add that to anybody even on post-pay to
be able to get that. The only thing they would have to have is electric on their account because
that's the trigger for them to to do that so once we start getting adoption and getting we want to
make sure that everything's working appropriately and as of right now it is with that so we hope to
additionally add that with that but we'll keep you posted as those things progress with the program.
That technology is tied to the smart meter too though correct? Yes absolutely it has to have electric and a smart meter correct.
Can you remind me again how many customers did we have in the pilot? We have 50 in the pilot. Okay thank you.
Any other questions? Any other? Thank you.
All right concluding items are there any items that one of the members would like
to be placed on the agenda in the future?
Hearing none do we have a motion to adjourn?
We're adjourned.
It didn't take long.