We do have a quorum, and it is six o'clock.
It's time to call the Public Utilities Board meeting of May 20th to order.
First, and Alan called me at four o'clock.
He had a family emergency come up.
That's why he's not present today.
The first item is receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding
the Denton Energy Center external sound level study.
Chris.
Yes, ma'am.
Can't see these days, so.
Yeah.
Well, good evening, PUB members.
Have a presentation here for you and kind of give you some, it's kind of an atypical
presentation so that the basis for this presentation is a sound issue that was brought to our attention
by an adjacent landowner or adjacent resident, homeowner, adjacent to the Denton Energy's
property.
I want to kind of preface this as I've worked my way through it and I get in here and I
use the word complaint.
Complaint probably isn't the proper word.
So as you know, most of you have been here through the construction of the deck, a very
large project, so he was a neighbor for about 18 months to the city's largest construction
project and we never heard a word out of him.
So in meeting him and talking to him, he thinks the project is a good project and he's on
board with it.
There's just some issues, which I use that word a lot, issue that he has with it that
he would like resolved.
So I use the word complaint in my presentation, but as I thought about it, I didn't think
it was justified because the gentleman has been very professional, very courteous and
he just wants the issue resolved.
So as the title says, we're here to talk about external sound level study.
So background, so to get started on this, DME received an issue by the homeowner that's
immediately adjacent to the Denton Energy Center in November 2018.
So his property is just northwest, he abuts up to the plant's property right off of Jim
Crystal.
So I'll back up a little bit and give you the basis of his issue and I have to back
up a couple more years.
So prior, during the planning stages of the Denton Energy Center, some DME staff approached
the landowner and ensured him that the plant would not be a noise nuisance or any kind
of nuisance to him.
So as I look back in that, the DME staff at that point, the plan was to only have six
engines at that site on Jim Crystal and six engines would be located north.
So at that point, there would be half the sound there is now, half the light there is
now, half the footprint there is now.
So an oversight on the DME staff as it went through the approval process and the city
council ultimately elected to put all 12 engines at the site of Jim Crystal, then the repercussions
of that or any noise level increase, light level increase, that information was not taken
back to the homeowner.
So that's the basis of his issue is he feels he was misled.
So going back to the current day, his particular issue is when he's at home and the deck is
operating in the evening or in the early morning, he can hear the plant running in his house
and he feels that he was misled because that was not going to be the case.
So the noise he's hearing is if anybody's been on a cruise ship, it's just that rhythmic
thumping that you hear on a cruise ship.
So if you're on a cruise ship, more than likely that was a Wartzilla engine powering that
ship.
We have 12 of them.
So that is the noise that he was reporting.
So I contacted the homeowner to hear what his issues were.
His main issue was the noise and the rest of the presentation will talk about how we're
dealing with the noise issue.
A secondary issue he had was the light.
So he said, man, your engineers are good because there's a light that shines from there that
goes right through the trees right into my bedroom.
Is there anything you can do about that?
So I was like, sure, sure.
So I got with the substation manager and we thought about it.
Normally we leave the lights on in the substation for safety sake.
You want to deter people from entering the substation at night, especially on remote
sites that there's not a lot of people around.
Well, it just so happens that there's a power plant next door that has a lot of lights on
the building.
So I got with the substation manager and he said, hey, you know what?
We can turn all the lights in the substation off as our normal operating procedure.
And if the workers need to enter in the evening time or anything like that, we would turn
them on for safety.
But our normal operating procedure would be that the substation would be dark.
So it was a Friday.
We had all the lights turned off, called the homeowner.
I said, hey, we're going to try something, see if it's better.
So he called me that Monday and said, hey, man, that's great.
So I wish the sound issue was as simple as flipping a switch, but it wasn't.
So I promised him that we would take some steps.
We would try to identify the source of the noise, the type of noise, and see what we
could do about it.
So again, he was very appreciative of our efforts.
So starting in November, we'll go forward with the actions that we've taken.
So I brought the issue to the DME management, then we went, saw the city manager, and it
was decided that we would install some sound monitors.
So what is being heard?
What is the frequency?
What is the intensity of the sound?
So we decided on two monitors.
One would be located just outside the power plants, north wall.
So just north of the north engine hall is the gas skid.
So that's where the big regulator is that drops the pressure that goes into the plant.
It's pretty noisy itself.
So to be fair for this study, we picked the noisiest spot we could find at the plant.
We put the first monitor there.
And the second monitor is best to be located as close to the gentleman's house as possible.
So he was very gracious, and he gave us the authority to come on his property.
And we placed the second monitor just adjacent to his backyard.
So if you picture his house, his house setting, there's a pool to the south in his backyard,
and then that falls off on down to the plant.
So we put the sound monitor, and I have some pictures, kind of put this in spatial context.
Put the second monitor on his property, and they're logging 24 hours a day.
They're remote.
They upload their data via cell connection, and we could actually access this online.
So every morning I could log in and see what was going on.
So as we went through this, we elected to keep the monitors out there for about four
weeks.
So as you know, the weather is very difficult to predict in Texas.
And if we go back to where the issue arise was in November of 2018, if you remember back,
there was a very atypical cold spell in North Texas.
We had high temperatures in the low 40s and the freezing temperatures were dropping down
in the 20s.
So at that point, the deck was running, I wouldn't say, in its normal operating curve
there.
So it was running early in the morning as people get up and turn their heaters on and
running late in the evening.
So that's kind of the time period that initiated this.
So we wanted to capture the deck running at these different atmospheric temperatures.
So as you know, the colder it is, the better sound travels.
So if there's a really stiff north wind, then the plant's not audible.
If there's a really strong south wind, maybe it's a little more audible.
So we wanted to catch these different atmospheric conditions, and we also wanted to give the
plant a chance to run.
So as you know, you're familiar with how the deck operates, ERCOT market dictates when
it runs and when it doesn't.
So to be fair to the study, be fair to the homeowner, we wanted the plant running at
these different conditions.
So we selected about a four-week window.
About three-quarters of the way through the monitoring phase, the homeowner called me
and said, "Hey, Chris, would you come to my house for coffee at 6 p.m. so you can hear
this thing running?"
And he was very sincere about it.
He didn't want to just, you know, be maybe a citizen that's just complaining to complain.
He really has an issue, and he wanted us to come.
So I invited Jason Brown, and we invited the deck plant.
We got on the Outlook scheduler thing.
It's hard to get that plant at a meeting.
So but we were able to do that.
Jason was able to schedule with ERCOT a forced run for 6 p.m.
So that would give us the ability to meet the gentleman, fire up the plant, and so we
could have it running.
We could change the output, and we could see what he's experiencing.
So Jason and I leave the plant, and we're driving over to his house, and we're at his
gate, and Jason has a radio, and the control room comes on and says, "ERCOT just dispatched
the plant."
So as we're setting at the gate, we hear the plant start.
So that's kind of how the meeting started.
So we went on into his property.
He met us.
We walked around the back area of his house, which is a pool, and the plant is audible.
You can hear it.
So he invited us inside for coffee.
So on this house, the two southern rooms of his house which face the plant, one is a bedroom,
one is a sitting room.
So we're in the sitting room, having conversation.
You cannot hear the plant.
And I don't have very good hearing to begin with, but you can't hear it.
So once you get quiet and you kind of tune your ears to it, you can hear it.
So and then once you hear it, I mean, it kind of sticks with you.
So I can imagine him, you know, in his bedroom late at night, it's quiet.
He can hear the plant.
So we wrapped up our meeting, finished our coffee, and we left.
And then the next phase was to try to figure out where this sound is coming from.
So when we constructed the plant, we upgraded the walls of the plant.
They're metal walls.
They have sound-absorbing material in them.
And the roof has quite a bit of insulation in it, which is just kind of at a loss of
where this noise is coming from.
So initially, we thought it was the outside fans, intake fans.
That theory was wrong.
So we asked ENC, that's environmental noise control, could they provide modeling, predictive
modeling for the plant.
So the technicians had to come back and pick up the monitoring devices.
They sent out an acoustic tech with a handheld device.
We spent the morning gathering data both at the residence house and at the plant.
So we went around every noise-generating fan, outside the doors, pretty exhaustive survey.
And we had a DME and their transmission bucket truck there.
So we actually put the acoustic tech in the bucket, raised him up to 50 foot, took levels,
raised him up to 100 foot, took levels.
And then they actually rotated him over the roof, and they put him over by the ridge vent.
And he took some samples.
So hang on to that concept of ridge vent, because we're going to revisit it.
So he took the data back, and they generated a report.
We got it on about March the 19th.
And again, the residence has been very patient, as this took a couple of months.
And so we got the results of the report, and we shared them with the homeowner as promised.
So here's an area map to kind of summarize or kind of give some spatial context of what
was going on.
So this is Jim Crystal Road here, along the north part of the picture.
The red square here is the homeowner's residence.
He accesses off of Jim Crystal.
This spot right here was where we put the sound monitoring device on his property.
As you can see from this edge of his kind of backyard family area there to the edge
of the north engine hall is about 2,250 feet.
As you can see, there's nothing in between here.
And another thing I should say is when Jason and I were at his house standing on his deck,
his house is considerably higher than the power plant, which driving in there every
day for a year, I never would have thought that.
But when you're on his back pool, you're looking down at an angle at the deck.
So I think that's playing a part in some of the issue we're having.
And as you'll see here, here's the north engine hall, and the monitor was placed just outside
of that, inside the gate.
So a sound reference chart.
So the rest of this presentation will be talking about decibels.
Brent knows a whole lot about DBA and DBB.
But this chart kind of gives you some indoor and outdoor levels to kind of reference.
So sound is a tricky thing to talk about because it's how people perceive it.
So DBA is actually a measure of intensity or pressure.
And so we'll start up here, our engines are off the chart.
So our engines are putting out about 125 dB at about 10 feet away from them.
So it's not cumulative.
So in our engine halls, it's not 750 dB.
It's about 130 dB.
So this first line you see here drawn at 70 dB.
That's the sound level of the plant at that monitoring station just north of the plant
at full plant output.
So as you see, our building is attenuating a large majority of the sound.
The second line you see here, that's the model sound level at the residence.
That's 57.6 dB.
So that's what the model says after gathering all this data, the plant's running at its
full output.
That's how loud it would be at the residence.
This bottom line here is set in at about 45 dB.
That's the average sound at his residence when the plant is not running.
So we had a month of data.
It's somewhere between quiet urban daytime and quiet urban nighttime.
There's a lot of noise out there.
And I'll have a graph here later to kind of show you where we think that's coming from.
But again, it is about a 10 dB increase is what the model predicts at his house.
So here's some quick data.
So this is from the actual, from the ENC server.
So this is the data that the, those two data devices are logging.
On January 28th, the plant on your left is from the plant.
So this first box over here to the left, I call this the planes, trains, and automobile
box.
So one of the features of this, of this, of these devices are they're logging this, this
sound levels continuously, but we were able to set a trigger.
So we could set a trigger, say, I think for the, for the plant, we ended up putting it
about 60 dB.
If the sound goes over 60 dB, the device records the next 10 seconds.
So you can see what's, what's the source of the sound.
And then it takes about a 20, 20 second shutoff.
And so it doesn't, there's not enough bandwidth to record all of this.
So these certain events you can capture.
So the planes, trains, and automobiles, we could hear jets flying over, landing the DFW,
small plane traffic at flying into Denton regional, truck traffic on 380, trains on 35.
So these anomalies you see over here, they're not associated with the plant because the
plant was not running.
This box right here, you can clearly see the plant ramp up to 70 dB.
So this is the plant coming online very quickly and hanging out right at about 7, 70 dB.
On the right is the same time period from the other monitor at the residence.
Again, you can see these unidentified noise spikes, the planes, trains, automobiles, and
then you can see when the plant kicks on this day was right at about 5 a.m.
You can see his background level, the plant actually brings that up.
So that's very indicative of what the model shows.
The values you see here, I mean, it's hard to find a line in there, but the model and
the data we gathered, they tended to correlate.
So we got to go back to the ridge vents.
So the noise source is the modeling is going on and walking around and you're in the engine
halls and a lot of you have been out there, I mean, it's very quiet.
Man, where's the noise coming from?
So you walk around and you look up and you can see the sun coming through the roof.
So the ridge vents, and I have a picture here, they're closed when you're not operating,
but when the intake fans come on, the ridge vents have to open.
So the engines are kept very warm all the time.
So the engine hall environment is typically pretty toasty.
And so to make that a workable environment for Jason's guys and for additional cooling
of the engines, when the engines start, these 12 fans come on and they bring in a massive
amount of air and all the air from the outside comes in, has to go out the roof.
So that's the purpose of the ridge vents.
So they have to be there.
And as we note, as you look around, the ridge vents are the only portion of the engine hall
shale that don't have sound absorbing properties.
My next slide here is to kind of show you what the ridge vents are.
They're 160 foot long, they're 10 foot wide, conveniently they sit on the ridge.
I don't know where they got their name, but I'll take a guess here.
And on this Instagram worthy picture here of our engines, if you look up, you can see
the sun shining through on the girder.
So the kind of the story where I left off with the guy in the bucket, yeah, when he
got up there and he got down, he's like, "I know what your problem is."
And so it is the ridge vents.
So you take an electrical engineer, so now we know the source of the noise.
So how do you fix it?
So you take electrical engineer, I was like, "Oh, that's easy, we'll just build a berm."
So my idea was to build a berm 1,200 foot long and about 15 foot high.
So my thought is, is the deck's going to be there for a long time?
Let's put this house into a like a sound shadow.
It'll provide some visual screening between him.
I thought it was a good idea.
So we sent it off, we asked the acoustical engineer to model this to see if it was going
to work before we proceeded with it.
So as I said, he actually modeled it 16 foot high and it ran about 1,200 foot long.
The estimated cost was $500,000.
So that's the import of the soil and it's a substantial amount of soil and the shaping
and compacting of the berm.
And as you see, it was not a good idea, as the berm would provide 0.2 dBs of noise reduction.
So here I am, I think I have good ideas every now and then.
Obviously this wasn't one, but basically what it was is the house is high and the noise
source is high and you put the berm in the valley, the sound's just going over the berm.
So now we'll go with the experts, his options.
So again, I should have said mitigation in this case is just sound reducing options.
So the acoustic engineer at ENC came back with the idea of a silencer.
So the silencers would set on top of the existing ridge vent.
Here's actually a picture of one over here.
So basically these modules would be stacked on the ridge vent.
They allow the air to escape and kind of trap the noise, kind of like a muffler does on
your car, very similar.
So our exhaust has mufflers on it.
This would be muffling the exhaust air coming out.
They're heavy, they do add some load to the building.
So we did some reach out to the building manufacturer and the structural engineer's initial calculations
are the building can withstand the additional weight.
We didn't go into great depth with that engineering study, but he said it is possible.
And the budgetary estimate for these devices on both engine halls is right at about $380,000.
And the bottom line is you'll see that it provides approximately 8.7 dB of noise reduction
at the residence.
So I'll come back to that to kind of put that in context, just kind of throwing that number
out there.
But I'll put that in context.
Do you need more detail on the silencers to show us what it entails?
No sir.
This is all I have for the - it would be a custom-made product that they'll have to manufacture.
So we kind of -
Are there any mechanics inside?
No sir.
They're totally passive.
So basically, in concept, you have some angled planes in there so sound can be reflected.
So that's what they are.
They're a set of angled planes.
They don't add too much head pressure to your air escaping, but they try to reflect the
sound back down into the building.
So they're passive so there is no - there's nothing in it.
It's a baffle.
Sound baffle.
Yes sir.
This is exactly what it is.
They're used a lot extensively.
Turbines are very, very loud.
Maybe those are inducted out the side of the building through a set of these silencers
baffles.
They just weren't included in our plan.
Option three, if you read through the report, was just a combination of option one and two.
It was very expensive at about $900,000 and it didn't provide any additional - again,
my bad idea is showing up in there.
So here's a color representation of the model.
So I think this is important to kind of show you what's going on here.
Simplified sound is kind of like throwing a pebble into a pond and then the ring spread
out from there.
As you can see that sound acts in a - sound waves act in a similar fashion.
So you can see the red where he took his samples on the - up on the ridge vents and the red
over on the - underneath the radiators.
That sound there, that's not what we're hearing.
A lot of that was the wind blowing.
So they're downdraft.
They were moving so much air that I think that skewed those readings there.
But definitely you can see the effect of the - of the noise coming out of the ridge vents
and up here at receptor one, that is the monitor at the resident's house.
So this is the predictive value.
I guess I got off a little bit, 56.1.
And then you can see how the sound radiates out.
So unmitigated would be if Jason started the plant tomorrow, this is kind of what the model
said it would sound like.
This is mitigated.
So this is what the silencers install.
So you can see the drastic reduction.
This noise level out here in the blue is 40 to 45.
That would be there if the deck wasn't there at all.
That's just the ambient background noise at this part of town.
The gray would be - at the house would be at about 47.4 dB.
So his background levels are about 45.
The model says you install the baffle or baffles silencers and you bring that down about 8.7.
It gets it very close to background noise.
So a thing I'll say here and the same thing I've told the homeowner, we can't make this
a stealthy plant.
It's never going to be zero.
We can't reduce the noise totally.
That's just not financially feasible and probably not even an engineering feat we could do.
So the benefit of this that I see is going from this.
If you think of this as the sound footprint of the deck with the silencers on is bringing
this - these yellow values out here that are at the residence solely within the perimeter
of the security walls of Jim Crystal and the Denton Energy Center.
So again, this is today and this is the predictive values with the silencers installed.
So in summary, berm option one, not a very good idea.
That's about $500,000.
Option two is the silencers installed on the roof at about 378,000 and about 8.7 dB.
So I said I would get back to it.
So basically this is the same chart that I've shown before.
So here's the modeled sound, unmitigated sound at the residence.
So you're looking to installing the silencers on the ridge vents would bring this red line
down almost to where it is when the plant's not running.
So that's about the equivalent of your 8.7 dB.
So staff recommendation is kind of two-fold is to prepare an RFP for design, supply and
installation of the ridge vent silencers.
It is an expensive apparatus.
As you know, the deck came in under budget.
Some of those funds we've transferred among other projects but we've kept back money because
we knew this issue was coming.
So there's funds available in the original funds to fund this.
So it's two-folded.
At this point, I feel that the silencers would alleviate the sound issue that the existing
resident has.
And then going forward, you know, we haven't even got to the first birthday yet of the
deck.
So it has many more years to come.
The airport is the boundary, you know, there's not going to be any development to the east.
The residence to the west.
There's a lot of undeveloped area to the west and to the south of the Denton Energy Center.
So basically, two-fold.
So it could solve the problem we have today and alleviate the sound issue at the residence
house.
And also going forward, it drastically shrinks that sound footprint of the deck so that it
doesn't impact any future development, be it residential or commercial in this area.
And alternate options are, as I researched in there, there's the military, if you have
your Bose noise-canceling headphones.
They're basically doing that to buildings these days.
There's lots of technology out there that, you know, could be as advanced as that or
it could be, you know, sound-absorbing materials or just maybe issues out there that we don't
know.
So it's not about an RFI to say, "Hey, does anybody have a solution to this issue?"
A concern with this option is the timetable of getting that done.
So that could be a lengthy process.
And then finally, there's always the option that we take no further action on the sound
mitigation at the deck.
I had to throw it out there.
So anyway, I thank you for your time.
I know that's kind of a long-winded presentation, but now open for any questions.
Questions?
I have a few.
Yes, sir.
So in your presentation, you mentioned that some staff went out to speak to them prior
to the deck even being constructed.
Is that what you were saying?
Yes, sir.
And that the original concept was for six engines, and then we ended up putting 12 there.
We actually had either part of the job of consultants that we had already hired or consultants
that were hired for this separately.
Somebody did some extrapolated data about noise way back then.
So was it just a casual thing of we're guessing?
It was we paid somebody to tell us how loud the sound was going to be at different points.
I'm not familiar with that study or that report.
I reached out to Burns and McDonald, which was a design engineer for this project.
So they've done, as we've talked about before, the Red Gate plant down in McAllen is out
in the country.
There is no sound absorbing walls in that point.
So their engineering opinion, and again, I'm not aware of a study that was done, was that
the decibel level would be below 65 dB at the property line.
That's why we did all of the sound absorbing in the building.
I tried to find it.
I wasn't able to find it.
Yes, sir.
I'm not able to.
I don't have a well organized enough library to contain all the documents that I've gotten
from you guys.
So we did do a study.
And another thing that kept being brought up, and again, I know this was different leadership,
but we still have to work with it, was that everybody was 500 feet away, right?
That people were so far back that it might not even matter.
And can you speak to that?
What are the legislative requirements?
What are the statutes that we have to follow rather than, I mean, I think it's fine that
we've gotten this mention of the noise and that we're responding to it.
And I believe that's perfect.
But before we take any action, it seems like we should understand what we're required to
do by law so that as you say, when all these infill people start coming in, if we've demonstrated
that we're going to respond to somebody saying they're not comfortable hanging out on their
back deck anymore, then we're going to get a bunch of calls about people not being comfortable
hanging out on their back deck.
And so what are our requirements?
What decibel requirements do we have or are there any?
I looked through that, so interesting to see that I could not find in the development code
like an industrial limit or a specific limit.
What I could find is people have to come in front of the City Council to get, what would
it be, like for a concert, a jazz festival has to apply for a variance to have noise
levels greater than 65 dB.
Industry standard from what I see is in that 60 to 65 dB would be considered acceptable.
Okay.
Just a couple more things on the slide.
And if you can find the study, I can look some more, as you kind of know the history,
there is a gap in the record, so when I took over the project, we didn't have full access
to, of course, the personnel that probably did that, so there is kind of a knowledge
gap there.
In fact, it was kind of done in a, hey, they're all over 500 feet anyway, so it doesn't really
matter kind of vein, so I didn't, you know, but we paid for it, so.
In one of these slides here, there's this, there's these things in parenthesis, sound
absorbing walls were originally installed.
Yes.
What does that mean?
That's the, I'll let you answer, Chris.
Yeah, if you, if you were to turn the deck, so our construction is, we have a steel building.
That's two, two back.
Right there.
Sounds a little more.
See, because it makes it sound like there was something that was absorbing sound near
or on the ridge vents that are not there anymore.
Is that what that says?
No, sir, that's, that's probably not worded well.
So what we have in there, so our construction, there was, there was an upgrade.
So say you're, if you were to visit Red Gate, down in McAllen, they're, they're 25 miles
out in the country.
So their construction method is just a steel building that's insulated, and that's it.
So we knew that, that noise was going to be an issue, or, or the, the planners of this
knew noise was going to be an issue.
So we have a building upgrade from SWOBE.
So if you walk out and look at the deck, it has sound absorbing material.
So it has steel, insulation, wool, to absorb the sound, and then the wall is perforated.
So there's perforated panels all along the wall.
So that's what absorbs the material.
So that was a, an upgrade that DME purchased.
I get it, I get it.
The wording.
Yes, sir, I, I apologize.
I get it.
Yes, sir.
Okay, so one more question.
Yes, sir.
The, the engines, as you guys have pointed out several times, they're highly technical
devices.
They're not just lawnmower engines.
So somebody knows how loud they're supposed to be, what kind of vibrations they're supposed
to give off.
Are they performing like they're supposed to perform?
Yes, sir.
So, well, I could let Jason speak to that, but we had a sound guarantee in the contract.
So the, the sound guarantee is 125 dB at 3 meters from the engine.
So we, so when they, the, the testing facility was in Italy when the engines were test run,
they provided us documentation and our engines were coming in like at 118, 119 dB.
So that they met the, the noise requirement per the contract.
As far as vibrations, you're exactly right.
If you could go out there and, and Jason wouldn't want to show you, those engines aren't bolted
down.
They, they rest on, on 70 spring packs.
So that, that, that was one concern there was what it was vibration, because there are
issues where they've had some plant vibrations traveling in the earth and there's nothing
you can do about it.
So the engines are resting on spring packs.
So I would say similar to your, to your other plant, we don't think it's a vibration issue
at all.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
Yes, sir.
Any other questions?
Mr. cheek.
So I haven't been back in the beauty very long, much longer, closer to the mic, please.
Yeah.
Okay.
Haven't been back here very much longer.
So has this the, this issue come through pub before any other, the sound issue?
Yes.
About this gentleman.
No, sir.
It has not.
So we, we met with the city manager.
Again, he was patient.
So we, we wanted to get some answers before we brought it forward.
So the time for the study and that sort of thing, and then getting, getting it on the
agenda.
So this is the first, the first that you've heard about it.
Okay.
All right.
That makes the next questions pertinent.
So you started up the plant to test the noise at 6pm.
And I don't know at what capacity you run the DEC.
So I don't know if that's a normal operation for you.
I would assume that six o'clock in the evenings, probably not a typical time to start the plan
up.
It was that day.
I mean, so Jason, would you join him at the podium, please?
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
Yeah, we do start pretty regular around six o'clock, five o'clock in that time frame.
Yeah.
For the peak.
Typically hours of people getting home.
It shifts a little bit.
Typically it's during the morning, morning periods, a little bit before seven o'clock
and then we'll run for a couple hours and then we'll hit another one in the afternoon,
late afternoon.
Just to follow the water demand, basically.
Just a point of clarification, you were dispatched by ERCOT.
Yeah.
We didn't just turn it on.
Okay.
I misunderstood that then.
Yeah.
We were dispatched.
What I understood was you requested to start up at six o'clock and then ERCOT dispatched
you in accordance with your request.
That is correct.
Okay.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
So it wasn't, they needed us dispatched.
No, no.
They started and we took over.
Yes.
I'll file for a must run is what it's technically called with ERCOT if you're not dispatched
and you need to start, you need to test, you need to do that kind of stuff.
You file for a must run.
It was approved, but then we got dispatched.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Right there at the same time period.
Thank you.
Did anybody keep track of the cost of this entire study?
That's you.
Yeah, you're out, Jason.
If you allow me to give you a ballpark answer, I can give that to you.
It's about $21,000.
Okay.
All right.
Give or take $1,000.
That's not a lot of money in the budget of DME, but it is a lot of money.
Yes, sir.
We justified it because of the ramifications that you brought up.
There's other secret slides here.
I know these colors are hard to see, but this is something we brought forward to Todd.
I have the values written down, but if you can kind of see the bullseye there is those
are radiuses away from the plant.
This is at the center of the plant.
There's one residence that's within 2,465 feet.
That's the residence we've been talking about today.
There's two residences within, so these are distances between, so two residences between
2,465 and basically 2,700.
Between 2,700 and 3,200, there's only one and about 3,680, so between that gap there's
three residences.
There's a total of six houses.
That gets back to Brendan's question of how many people could come forward and if we're
addressing it at the home that's closest to us, that should be mitigating any of those
issues.
Correct.
If you follow that, then the levels, they shouldn't be able to hear it.
They were there before us.
Yes.
All of these are existing homes.
Some plant construction experience I have are Thomas Egan, very vocal neighbors, so
I had the opportunity to converse with them by email about once a week.
So it is my opinion, if they heard it, then they would have said something.
So kind of on that, we met with some, we had our plant open house where we invited all
the residents of Denton and especially out in this area to come visit us.
There were some of Jason Lee's neighbors on this side, so they actually came over and
I asked them, they said they haven't heard anything.
They rode their skateboards over towards you?
No, no.
I didn't say they liked him, but they were just his neighbors.
We haven't had any additional feedback.
Some of these houses are over here to the east.
When the plant's running, there's a lot of vegetation here.
I can't hear it at all.
But that is a concern.
And so as you see the staff recommendation, I was trying to be clear that it is to address
this issue we have with this resident, but it's also to bring that sound footprint into
an area that the deck and Jim Crystal, that's about 18 acres, is trying to keep that level.
If you look back at that model, you're talking about nothing leaving the deck modeled at
about 60 dB.
As far as setbacks go, Mr. Carroll, I'm not aware of any that you have to be away from
the facility.
We're nowhere near the lot lines and with the closest resident being almost half a mile
away, maybe that was the justification.
And isn't 500 feet, is that the feet requirement for a public hearing?
That was just stuff they were throwing around at the time, you know, because the plant was
at the center of the piece of property and I always say, well, how about we notify neighbors
who are close to the property line rather than, oh, it's all inside here on this bit.
But you know, that's my opinion.
This just sounds like a conversation on their front porch.
It doesn't really sound like there's nothing in writing with this resident at all.
No, sir.
It's just a conversation they had and I kind of, I got the residents his version of it
and that's.
Oh, no, it sounds like, I'm not accusing them of anything at all.
Can somebody just eyeball what property in the bull's eye part and the middle circle
is property that could become residences?
Because if this property is the closest property that we'll ever see, mitigating it down to
10 decibels, right, down to and be at the residence, 47, 47, 47.
So if he's the closest one that's ever going to be there, then we know we're hitting a
mark that's reasonable.
But if somebody is going to be able to be at a thousand feet and make this same complaint
and we're going to have to respond to it, then what are we going to do then?
I guess I, do you say, yes, sir, I do.
And that was my, and using this slide, that was my justification.
Because these areas out here, it's never going to be silent.
It's never going to be.
Of course not.
So you're looking at here.
So this is a flood plain over here.
These are your TMPA and encore transmission easements are extending out in this area.
I do know that the, so if you can see my mouse here, this is the property line for the city.
This track down here is not owned by the city.
So it could be developed.
So we're looking at it in that thousand feet or something, 50 degree, yes sir, 50 decibels
at the boundary of the plant as it is now.
This is the airport over here.
The city, I can probably get you back, sorry, jumping around here.
The city owns this track, if you kind of follow my mouth.
Basically the hay field out here that Jason gets to mow is the acreage that the city owns.
And the airport is?
Yes ma'am.
The airport is right here.
There she is and there's going to be another runway.
Yeah, there are additional runways over here.
Some of the city's land, this section here was actually given over to the airport.
So the development to that side is locked.
This creek area, so we have encore station here, an old DME station here that eventually
will be decommissioned and removed.
This is a flood zone here.
So there will not be development in this area here.
The gentleman who's, this is a gas lot here.
So his property, he's at like 42 acres is his chunk and it's kind of an L-shaped.
So this area here, I would say, has the potential to be developed and you would be at a noise
level.
So that would be the area of greatest concern.
Yes sir.
It looked like half of it might end up being higher than the level that we're mitigating
it with or that we're trying to do with the baffles.
Correct, correct.
Yes sir.
If you're living there and we came in, that's different than we're there and you move in,
right?
Sure.
Of course.
But that doesn't often stop people from telling people how they feel about something.
True.
Yes.
Do we have any idea what the noise levels are from the airport?
Because that other, that potentially developable area is closer to the airport.
Those spikes look a little bit bigger.
This is the airport and I brought that up with the resident and his, not justification
but his explanation is that noise is passing.
So an airplane flies over you and it's gone and it doesn't have the annoyance factor that
a steady, constant noise source has.
Yeah, he's been driven nuts by some rhythmic low thing that he can't.
Right.
Where is that coming from?
Yes.
Yeah, I think it's a valid point with the, whoever develops this property, they're going
to know that that plan is there.
So the city would have some input into that.
We'd provide these maps.
One issue we've talked about is that this is all theoretical.
So this is model data here.
After we install the silencers, they may work better, they may work not as well.
So we would do this again and this would be, you're right, it's the money.
So this part right here was $12,000.
So would it be worth it for us to do this after we're done and then have information
to provide residents that anybody that comes out there saying, hey, here's what you should
expect if you develop this.
Sure.
I think we'd want to know.
We always need to be upfront with where we spend our money.
Yes.
Transparency is a big deal right now.
Exactly.
Okay.
It is.
And you're fairly confident there's not any legislative requirements.
There's no statutes.
I couldn't find any.
State of Texas doesn't say, hey, that just seems odd to me.
They regulated every other aspect of it.
TCEQ may even have some things out there.
I couldn't.
Well, no offense to you, but it may be something that may be a lawyer or, you know, like, because
if we're going to do a contract with somebody, you would have it reviewed by somebody who
could actually say, oh, those are found here.
I think we'd have to ask Larry.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
Deputy.
Yeah.
We've got a permit that's issued.
Right.
We had, there was a permit.
Yeah.
Ordinance doesn't cover that particular issue.
Okay.
So our operating permit is what we're governed by as far as the state goes.
And even if our noise ordinances were in conflict with the, the state license is, I would want
to look at that closely, because this issue was never really discussed on the plan, from
what I recall, when that was going down.
I mean, the issue, I don't think it really ever came up on the table.
Okay.
So we would need.
I'm sorry, Larry.
Go ahead.
No, we'd need to look at that.
I know we've got a permit that addresses a lot of the issues that we'd pull in to look
at if the noise level was part of it.
Okay.
And our air permit is not.
Yeah.
And so I'd be, you know, we're, we're left with our noise ordinance.
We're not, you know, you're within the city limits, you're not in the county.
So okay.
Okay.
The noise ordinance is going to look at that.
So we might have to take steps as just trying to be the best neighbor we can be rather than
using.
Right?
Correct.
That's kind of what we're doing here.
We're not following rules necessarily.
We're trying our best.
We're being a good neighbor.
Right.
Well, they've got the right of what's called quiet enjoyment of their property.
It gets back to what you were talking about earlier, just this incessant droning.
Okay.
But that's all in the ear of the beholder.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
So you need direction.
I have one more.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I think it may be a side issue, but you know, airports try and implement a lot of zoning
around our runways to prevent building of things which may interfere with the flight
path or may be in a hazard zone off the end of the runways.
And I don't know if that's something that we may want to look at for that little piece
of property down there.
Oh, to the south of the energy center?
Yes, sir.
Because even though this noise may be more consistent that we're producing, the airport
noise apparently is much louder.
Yeah.
And so we had some sidebars about noise and sleep and how I like a constant noise.
Yeah.
The spiking would bother me more than the constant noise.
I sleep well on the ship.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
One other thing to bring up here is as you may know, if you've seen the mobility plan
for the city of Denton, Loop 288 is going to be right at 400 feet off of the wall.
So it kind of cuts through these two gas wells.
So additional runway, a larger runway if I understand it.
There's going to be some larger planes coming in there.
This area, I mean, he has a very nice piece of property.
It's very nice.
But the industrial part is growing out.
Yeah.
Tyson Foods right down the road.
It's coming in that direction.
I see a lot of oil field.
Gas wells.
Yes, sir.
Pretty apparent as well.
Yes, sir.
And they're very loud too.
We had to watch that, try to define the frequency they're at so the gas wells, we caught their
sound quite a bit as well.
Right.
And he didn't hold us to that.
He understood that.
Sure.
One more question.
Yes, sir.
Would Atmos have done this study if they were operating that plant?
That's a good question.
I think that they would.
I think they would find their lawyers and find out whatever that DB limit was going to
be acceptable at the property line and that they would stick with that.
Yeah.
I don't think they would.
It's kind of a facetious question, but I mean, that's the beauty of public power too.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
The beauty of public power is we care about our neighbors.
Absolutely.
Because they own us.
That's right.
And again, I have to finish here with the homeowner.
He's been very courteous.
He understands that.
He has an interest in Denton and that's what he wants.
So he really appreciates our effort.
He knows we've spent some money.
I've showed him that $378,000 and he's like, wow, that's a lot of money.
So he just wants Larry's--
It's not lost, Donald.
Yeah.
I just wanted to make sure I wasn't beating you guys up.
No, no, no.
Exactly.
I just wanted to make sure it was clear on how this happened.
Exactly.
No, sir.
I didn't take it personally.
I don't take anything personal with his debt.
Okay.
Except I had hair when we started this and now it's gone.
Full head of curly hair.
Yes, ma'am.
On this occasion, I'm inclined to support putting the baffles in.
Absolutely.
It doesn't really make sense to do the birming like you're saying.
No, no.
It can end up being a good idea but I think we should spend some money putting something
in the events there.
Okay.
I agree.
We need to be a good neighbor.
Okay.
Anybody?
I'm in favor of putting the baffles in.
I just want to have some further explanation for the public as far as why we didn't have
this to begin with.
I know you weren't in control of that, Chris, I'm just saying that we need to have further
explanation of why we need to have these baffles out there and why they weren't put in in the
first place.
Okay.
If there could at least be some explanation of that.
I'll see what I can do on that.
Your questioning went way towards that.
Yeah.
I think it may have been kind of the perspective of the, like the approach of the project at
the time.
I say that people were saying, well, the plan is at the middle of this piece of property
so nobody's even within 200 feet to get a notification.
Well, you and me aren't experts at that.
We can say that all day long.
You know, I'm just saying that that kind of got brought up over and over again but well,
here it is.
Yes, sir.
We've got to deal with it, regardless of what happened in the past.
Yes, sir.
Do you have what you need?
Yes, ma'am, I do.
All right.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you, Chris.
All right.
Next item, receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding solid waste
department's home chemical collection, yard waste and brush collection and bulk waste
collection services.
Mr. Cox.
Good evening, Chair, members of the board.
Pleasure to be with you this evening.
My name is Ethan Cox.
I'm the director of public works for the city.
I have a fairly dense presentation for you this evening so I'm going to try to go through
it very fast.
We've got basically four or five different services that we're going to be looking at
this evening.
Kind of take you back a year in the time machine.
Last summer we had Blue Ridge Services come out and provide essentially a high level overview
of all of our operations of solid waste.
They had a number of recommendations that they made.
Whenever we presented this to council, they wanted us to kind of do a deeper dive on these
programs and so this is almost a year later.
We're finally finishing this up and so our goal would be to try to get through these
last four programs tonight.
We feel like these go well together because they are all what we would call additional
residential services, above and beyond your typical refuse and recycling.
Some of the things we try to do with this, number one, I'll say this at the very front
is these are all programs that are very near and dear to a number of our residents' hearts.
The participation isn't always there but it's one of those things that you don't know that
you would miss it until it's gone so we are not advocating removing any of these programs.
What we really try to do is take a novel approach and say are there other options, are there
service delivery methods that we could do here.
To that end, we do have a few challenges that we've identified.
We've benchmarked with a number of cities so I'll kind of give you an overview of that.
And then in terms of our recommendations, really what we try to do is if we want to
provide options or alternatives, we want to make sure that those maintain a high level
of service, that we're improving our efficiency or equity, and also that we're maintaining
our commitment to encouraging residents to reduce and reuse as well as recycle.
We have some definitions here, I'm not really going to go through those but we may refer
back to it if you have a question.
So again, these are the operations we're taking a look at.
In terms of objectives, I think the objective for all these operations or all these services
is really to ensure the proper handling, diversion and disposal of some of our harder to handle
items.
Compliance certainly comes into play here as well as making sure that we're being effective
and handling these things efficiently.
We talk about efficiency, it's not just dollars and cents, it's a number of impacts that we're
having on the community which I'll dive into in just a moment.
The purposes for some of these programs vary.
Home chemical collections, for instance, that's actually a federal storm water permit requirement
so we must have a program of some sort.
The service must be delivered in some manner but ultimately that also not only diverts
hazardous materials away from the waterways but also the landfill.
Electronics and appliances, those too can contain some hazardous components so we want
to make sure those are recycled and handled properly when they're disposed.
Bulky items, typically those are items that are too big to fit in your residential trash
cart and so what most communities find if you don't provide for a service on that it
ends up on the side of the road somewhere, illegally dumped and so it's a critical service
that we provide.
And then yard waste and brush, we divert all of that waste out of the landfill that actually
serves as feedstock for our dino-dirt products which is a great program.
In terms of residential collections, we do run collections Monday through Thursday.
Essentially the city is divided up into quadrants so this little red section here to the northwest
of town, that's our Monday segment, Tuesday is down to the south, Wednesday and then Thursday.
Whenever we deploy to a segment of town we basically run in tow with about 29 vehicles,
25 of which are heavy pieces of equipment and then 39 pieces of personnel, not pieces
of personnel, people, 39 people.
They're all whole, they're not pieces.
And so whenever we do deploy and we wanted to try to put this in a perspective is, so
we used to live in Denton, my son always, it was a treat to see the trash man coming
down the street so he'd go out there and greet them, in some cases he's out there greeting
multiple times and so kind of the street side view is you can see up to nine vehicles coming
down your street on any given day.
So when we talk about efficiencies on programs it's not just the cost of providing that service,
it's also wear and tear on the roads, wear and tear on the equipment as well as the emissions
of all these vehicles.
So your standard refuse truck that most everyone's accustomed to seeing, that's your automated
side load, that's your refuse and your recycling.
For bulk items we use two apparatuses, one is a rear load truck right here, the other
one is a claw truck or known as a knuckle boom.
We use the same type of equipment for yard waste and brush.
You also have your home chemical collections, electronics, appliances, we use a stake bed
truck for that.
For car delivery we use a box truck and then for supervisors and crew leaders we're using
pickup trucks and so nine trucks and all is typically what you would see go up and down
every street.
In terms of participation we don't see everyone using these programs to the fullest extent.
That's a concern or at least something that we want to investigate because everyone does
pay for at least a portion of these programs, essentially it's being subsidized through
the residential rate set.
In terms of average daily participation for '17-'18 we have about 8,300 homes that we
can service on any given day.
Of that you see varying levels of participation.
Waste and recycling, those are 82% participation and 67% respectively, we have pretty high
participation rates there.
Yard waste is about 7% participation, one of the things on note here is that tonnage
is very high though.
You may have a smaller subset of folks participating but that's dense material and the folks that
use the program use it to a great extent.
You get down to the bulky items, ACC and electronics and appliances you're looking at, about less
than 1% participation on each of those on a daily basis.
So we feel like there are some opportunities for some consolidation here as well as maybe
some novel approaches to how we provide these services.
Over here is the tonnages for '17-'18 as well as the net cost and as we go through
the presentation we'll cut the net cost by participation to kind of give you a better
sense of what it costs per user.
In terms of opportunities for improvement we mentioned the collection efficiency, I'm
not going to belabor that.
In terms of improving equity because these are basically shared rates, subsidized rates,
we do have heavy users versus the low to no users and so in other words some folks are
paying for these programs and not using them at all.
For some of the folks it is high cost and low participation that means even if there's
a fee being assessed the remainder is being assessed via the residential rates.
As for lawn service, tree trimmers, we do see some commercial entities taking advantage
of us, our rates are lower than they are so they'll go in, trim up a tree and encourage
the resident hey you can pay for this via curbside collection versus us charging you
a little bit extra and so that's something that we just need to be cognizant of when
we set our rates and look at how we structure our program.
There are some safety and environmental concerns that we also want to put out there, chemicals
right now doing a curbside collection, those are exposed to the elements as well as members
of the public, spray paint is particularly troublesome for some of the customers of our
program, they don't feel comfortable setting that out on the stoop.
We do have some injury risk for our staff members, particularly for our yard waste crews,
it's very manual in nature, it's about a 20% injury incident rate on an annual basis
for them doing a lot of heavy lifting and then we have some plastic bags associated
with our yard waste too.
So a few things, we'll just kind of give you some visuals of these, again chemicals
and appliances, very few users, smaller volumes, we do want to have volume restrictions here
to prevent abuses by commercial entities, we're not licensed to accept commercial chemicals,
we can only accept residential chemicals.
Aren't chemicals supposed to be in a box?
We would certainly prefer that.
I thought it was a requirement but okay.
We would certainly prefer that, so like in this picture right here you have some light
bulbs, all this is in the storm water area so if it starts raining someone runs over
those bulbs, now we've basically defeated one of the biggest purposes of the program
and so ideally what we would have is some way of containerizing this which we encourage
folks to do but it's not uncommon for us to drive up and see them in this state.
In terms of the electronics and appliances, one of the things, one of the reasons why
we may be seeing low participation is there are a lot of retail take back options now,
recycling options, you buy a new refrigerator, Lowe's delivers the new one to your house,
they take the old one away for you and so this service may not be as critical as it
was five or ten years ago but again we still see about eight or ten folks per day use that.
One of the things, if this was a working microwave we would obviously want someone to try to
reuse that if they can.
In addition, in terms of providing the collection service, I think really what we would encourage
folks to do is bring that out to us and drop it off if you can and our rate structure should
reflect that is really you're paying for the convenience of us coming by your house to
pick it up and so I think there's some opportunities there too.
Collection frequency, again this is Monday through Thursday, every day of the week.
These are scheduled collections so we are going to point to point with a purpose there.
Here's our restrictions.
In terms of fees and rate impact, HCC is bundled in with the monthly bill.
The cost per collection runs about $254.
This is one of our more expensive programs, less utilization.
Because it's bundled with the monthly bill that means every customer, every residential
customer pays just under $2 a month for the service.
Over here we have our benchmark.
Essentially what we wanted to benchmark against is again the frequency of service, how the
rates are structured and then we have some notes in terms of differences and how these
programs are carried out.
Where you see red font that just means that that city is doing it a little bit different
than us.
Usually about 50/50 most folks are doing either drop-off centers and/or drop-off events as
opposed to curbside collection.
For those that are doing curbside collection, most of these are bundled services with a
third-party hauler.
In terms of rate structure, there are some that assess a fee but there are also others
that bundle that in as a service as well.
Electronics and appliances, we do have a fee that we charge for this.
It's a $20 fee for collection.
The cost to deliver the service is actually $40.
So this is one of those instances where our rate is just under recovering.
So the subsidization on the monthly bill is about $0.16 per month for a resident.
In terms of frequency, most of these services here, you'll notice in the notes column,
most of them are not providing electronics collection.
Two reasons that we can surmise on that, number one electronics nowadays, you can carry it
on your own.
It maybe fits in the back of a pickup truck, a car, so it's not as challenging as maybe
a large appliance.
But then also you have that retail take-back option.
In terms of frequency, what we're looking at here is mostly appliances.
You have some monthly and semi-monthly but you also have a fair amount of weekly collections.
And then we do have a few cities that are bundling this as opposed to that per item
charge.
Moving on to some of the challenges we're seeing with bulk waste, the biggest challenge
we have is the definitions that we have for bulk waste are very vague and it leads to
what you see in these pictures here.
One of the things that we often get questions on is, well, is a door bulk waste?
Well, technically that's construction and demolition, but we can handle one door.
We can't handle 16 doors.
So there are some nuances here.
What you see in these photos here, obviously you have fence panels and a large amount of
construction debris.
We would much prefer that to be either delivered to us or us at a roll-off container to deal
with that.
Wood waste is one thing, but we also see folks set out tile, granite, things like that that
can actually damage our equipment when we try to lift it.
And so we do feel like there needs to be a distinction in our ordinance about what is
bulk and what is not.
We also have confusing volume restrictions.
It's based on a cubic yard basis and so I would ask you what your definition of a cubic
yard is, but I know we'll get seven different answers or five different answers.
We have this little graphic back here is we can either give you the dimensions and have
you do the math yourself or we can tell you it's about the size of a washing machine.
And that's worked for a little while.
I was actually looking at a website earlier today and they said, "Well, we'll allow up
to the size of a Volkswagen bug," is what one of the programs describes.
So I don't know if we're that generous.
I haven't done a measurement on a Volkswagen bug in a while.
So there are confusing volume restrictions that we think we could get a little bit easier
to explain, a little bit more precise.
We again have heavy users versus low users.
And also when it comes to some of this kind of stuff, there's also reuse opportunities.
We much prefer to direct these citizens to Goodwill, Salvation Army, some of those places.
This is good usable furniture here and so in terms of benchmark, we are fairly similar
to most of the other programs over here.
I think frequency is where you see the biggest difference.
We talked about our restrictions in terms of cost.
The cost per collection is about $58 per collection, which is about a dollar per month.
But we do feel like this is a critical program that we would not want to start changing with
too much simply because of that illegal dumping component.
In terms of the restrictions, one city that we really like how they do their restrictions
is Frisco.
Instead of the cubic yards, they do it based on an item limit.
It's much easier to explain, much easier to understand.
I'm not saying there won't be confusion there.
I think one of the points the COE brought up is, well, do you count the drawers in the
chest of drawers as one item or six or seven items?
Oh, just put the drawers back in there.
Just put the drawers back in.
It's one item.
We're fine.
Same thing you run into at the grocery store.
Is that 15 items or is that 10 items?
Cram them all in there, you know, that's what we recommend.
So yard waste and brush is probably our most inefficient collection operation that we run.
The biggest reason why is we run up and down every street, bird dogging, yard waste and
a bulk brush collection.
The way I explained it to the COE is it's like going into Walmart knowing you need three
items and going up and down every aisle looking at every shelf.
You'll still get your items at the end of the day, but you probably spend about three
hours as opposed to the 15 minutes that if you went in with a purpose.
That being said, we understand that any change to this program is going to affect some folks
in our community that they're going to be pretty passionate about.
We also have the heavy users versus low users.
This has a cubic yardage limit.
So we provide four cubic yards for free, $7 per cubic yard over that.
So about half of this right here in these bags would meet the limit.
It would be $7 times four for the rest of that, so about a $28 collection above and
beyond standard collection here.
We talked about the plastic bags not being environmentally friendly.
They also mask what is in that bag, so our guys go to tear it open, and not often, but
sometimes there are surprises in there.
They do get puncture wounds sometimes from the limbs.
We talked about the abuse by commercial landscapers and tree trimmers.
This picture here actually has a story with it.
This is an elderly lady that she paid a commercial tree trimmer to come in and trim her trees.
They got to the end of the job and she said, "Okay, well, I thought you were going to haul
it off."
And they said, "Well, don't worry about it.
The city provides that service.
It's in your collection day."
She took them at their word.
Our staff comes out using these restrictions right here in this fee, $7 per cubic yard
in excess.
Her bill, Tina, correct me on this, was it $600 or closer to $900?
It was going to be close to $900.
And so that's Exhibit A for how broken our rate structure is, and also how some folks
are getting caught with this whenever they're not paying attention to what they're actually
paying for.
So we feel like that needs to be corrected.
Ultimately, I think we had three or four guys go up there and clean it up in about an hour
and got it taken care of for it.
But again, when we talk about a rate structure or restrictions that aren't working, I think
this is Exhibit A.
So again, unscheduled is the biggest inefficiency that we have here.
The restrictions we talked about, this is bundled with the monthly bill.
Cost is about $20 per collection, but this is right there on par with what you would
pay for refuse from recycling service.
So when we say that there's some opportunities for efficiency here, we do think we can be
a bit more equitable about how we structure our rate and also be a bit more purposeful
in terms of how we run the routes.
Now, when you have an electrical item, because we haven't done it for a couple years now,
we call you and tell you that I have this item that I need you to pick up.
Correct.
Can we do that with yard waste?
Yard waste, what you see over here, and this is not brush, I have a few notes on brush
over here.
For brush, the answer is absolutely that's what we would recommend is brush is an infrequent
thing.
If you're generating brush every week, something's wrong, at least high volumes of brush like
you're seeing here.
Yard waste, especially during growing season, you see a more regular accumulation of that.
To that end, you see most of these cities are doing this weekly.
I think Dallas is the one difference here with monthly, but the difference is in terms
of how they're meeting that out.
For yard clippings and leaves, these with the asterisk here, they are not allowing plastic
bags.
One of the reasons is you don't know what's in there, plus the bag is not compostable
itself.
If we want to compost this, we're adding an extra step in the process that's unnecessary.
Fort Worth is actually using a combination of trash bags, or not trash bags, craft bags
and carts.
On Blue Ridge Services, that's what they recommended when they came in last time.
They're from California.
They're all using carts out there.
There are some capacity concerns with that, but it does make the process much more automated.
It does knock down on your worker injuries as well.
In terms of brush, we see a wide array of what folks are doing differently here.
Austin is only providing semiannual brush collection.
Dallas does on demand, but they basically charge it by the job.
They do cost plus in terms of setting their rates.
The two that we liked in terms of benchmark is Flower Mound does large volumes.
Those are billed at an hourly rate.
The elderly lady that we went out to help, if our hourly rate was $40 times three guys
on the job, $120, and that's probably about what she would pay a commercial tree trimmer
to collect.
I think we did a benchmark for tree trimmers in the area.
Tina, do you recall kind of where their rates were?
Right around $40, $45 for the labor.
The other one, Plano is doing something similar.
If the collection takes longer than 15 minutes, then they charge an hourly rate.
Can I ask you a quick question?
This particular collection has to do with our Dino Dirt project as well.
Does it still cost us $20 per collection, even though we're turning it into a commodity
and then selling it?
My understanding on the Dino Dirt is that they're breaking even.
They do not incur all the cost associated with the collection.
Do we get revenue sharing out of that program, Tina?
We get a reimbursement for the administrative fee for causing the scales, so the transaction
will be for that.
There's two different pieces to this.
What we're talking about today is a collections piece.
That's about a third of the feedstock for the Dino Dirt operation.
The other two-thirds is actually commercial operations crossing the scales.
What Tina's talking about is $6 per trip across the scales is our revenue share on
that.
So what you're seeing here is the burden for the rate payer that's actually putting
that feedstock into that program.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
I bet some people, myself included, would appreciate that being clearer somehow, since
you were paying to have something taken away that then maybe it's not solid waste, but
the city then is selling.
So it seems like it would be nice to see, like, are we paying less than other communities
who don't turn it into Dino Dirt?
Are we paying more than other communities, you see what I'm saying?
In general, some communities don't provide this type of service, but in general, I think
our residential rates are higher because the levels of service that we provide are greater.
We have a long-term goal, or a lot of other places don't, our long-term goal is to save
space in our landfills, so therefore we are paying for that somewhat.
Right.
One of the things that we are working on, to council's request, is a commercial food
diversion program, that that definitely pulls in all of this in terms of the analysis, and
so we've already had some discussions internally about just kind of vetting out the full system
economics of, okay, how's Dino Dirt working, how's our collection working, who's paying
for what, and kind of taking another look at this.
Kind of anecdotally, my understanding is that they don't have enough feedstock, i.e., brush
and yard waste, to deal with everything they're trying to compost over there from a biosolids
standpoint, and so with that being the case, we would actually need to be selling more
product and pushing it out the door in order for this to come down.
Something we can take a look at and bring back to you when we do that next analysis.
So what we have here is basically a table of, you know, we looked at the challenges,
we looked at some novel approaches to this, and so kind of the same way we ran the benchmark,
I'll kind of go through these one by one.
The red font is basically if we wanted to make a change or approach an alternative service
delivery option, this is what we as staff would recommend.
Understand that there's nothing pressing us to make a change to the programs.
We wanted to have this discussion with PB and council, number one, to close the loop
on Blue Ridge's recommendations, but also it is budget time, so if we're going to make
changes to these programs, we'd definitely like to incorporate that into our budget and
our rate structure for next year.
As for home chemical collection, the service model that most others are using is drop-off
service and collection events.
If we were to approach something like that, we would recommend remaining as a bundled
service in the rate structure.
That would allow us, how we would basically push that out is having weekly or monthly
collection events.
We could bundle that with other services, such as recycling and other types of collections,
appliances, electronics.
One of the things that we look at in our home chemical collection, we do a drop-off service
there now, but we're open Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 p.m.
It's convenient for our staff, it's not convenient when you're cleaning out your garage.
So if we do move to that model, we would recommend changing for weekend hours to really target
the folks when they're cleaning out their garage and moving out.
We could also expand the program to accept regional waste.
That would introduce a revenue stream into the program, help offset some of those costs.
We've talked about that before.
We're just now getting to a point in our operation where we feel like we could support that.
What does regional waste mean?
So in terms of home chemical collections, we could accept waste from others in Denton
County.
We do get approached by a number of cities, residents from those cities that basically
come up and, "Hey, I got a can of paint, will you guys take it?"
Well, the answer right now is no, because we really don't have a fee to recover the
cost for them bringing it to us.
So the regional program, we would partner with those cities and/or run a cash collection
operation for the acceptance of that waste.
It would still just be residential?
Correct.
We cannot take commercial.
We cannot take commercial, and that's why for programs like this, you do have some limitations
or some volume limits.
If not, you definitely want to check residents' driver's license, where are you coming from,
and we log that to make sure you're not coming by every day kind of metering out your commercial
waste.
In terms of electronic appliances, what we're seeing with others is really discontinuing
the collection, especially for electronics.
If we don't want to do that, if we want to keep that here, you also have the option of
increasing the fee to fully cost recover.
This is a small subsidy on the residential bill, but it is one that may be unnecessary
if we take one of those two steps there.
Either way, we do want to continue to promote donation centers and retail take back programs.
We prefer to be the recycler of last resort and not incur those costs if we could.
Bulk waste, we really don't recommend many changes here.
Again, we feel that that's a critical service.
One of the things that we have had a request for is to introduce commercial bulk collection
to help knock down some of the illegal dumping our businesses are seeing.
So we can certainly build that into the rate structure.
Like I mentioned earlier, we would do want to revise the restrictions, make it a per
item versus a per cubic yard basis, simplify that.
In terms of brush, the recommendation we have here is do get that to a scheduled service
so that we are being more purposeful and more efficient, as well as revising those restrictions
in the rate structure.
The last one we have here is probably the most radical option or recommendation.
Yard waste versus going up and down every street, we would make that a subscription
service.
And I think the knee-jerk reaction when we introduce this to COE is, well, folks will
just put it in the trash.
And I understand that thought process.
I think for where we are coming from on this, it doesn't have to be a big fee.
The fee is beside the point, it's opting in and opting out.
The program is really what we are looking for.
What that allows us to do is put a pin in a map and say we are going here today versus
we are driving up and down these six streets trying to find that point.
It also allows folks to opt in and out on a seasonal basis.
So if you are not going to use it in the non-growing season, then save yourself a dollar, opt out,
and our route just got that much more efficient.
A couple of different ways we could approach that, and this can be bundled with it.
It can be mutually exclusive of it.
If we want to get away from the plastic bags, we would recommend either doing carts and/or
craft bags.
A combination of both is fine.
If we do move to carts, one of the things we have heard, again, as kind of a policy
priority is food waste diversion.
In our current composting program, we can accept pre-consumer vegetative food waste.
That's the stalk of celery you thought you would eat, but you decided you didn't really
want to.
The banana peels.
You can put that in your yard waste cart, and we can accept that in our current composting
program.
I actually like that a lot.
We think there are some benefits here, but this is going to require some behavior change
that I think we are going to get some community pushback on, and it's going to require an
education effort on our part to get folks on board.
We do think that solves multiple challenges and also opens up some doors for some other
things that we could do as well.
We took it to COE.
They did buy into a few of these.
It's probably about 50/50.
One of the things they recommended that wasn't on here is for these service requests, it
really needs to be electronic, able to do it on the website, able to do it on your mobile
app.
We agree.
We do have a new system coming online, hopefully in the next couple of years that we'll meet
that need.
The things that the COE recommended supporting is introducing the commercial bulk waste, converting
to schedule service for brush.
They also recommended adding a commercial brush collection as an option into that service
model as well.
We haven't had a chance to look at that, but certainly if that's the direction the board
and the council want to go, we'll certainly vet that out.
In terms of next steps, recommending changes to the rates, we want to build that into fiscal
year '19-'20.
We do want to revise our Chapter 24 ordinance.
That's basically the solid waste ordinance, has not been updated since 2005.
It needs some touching up.
Then in terms of implementation, whatever we decide, we do feel like we can implement
all those recommendations by October 1.
That would include procurement of route optimization services, redesigning our service models and
getting a communication and marketing plan together.
So with that, I'll circle back to this and see what the PUB's feelings are on the options
on the table.
I have a question for you about how you calculated the costs of home chemical collection at $254
per collection.
Is that what that meant?
Yes.
Help me understand that because I want that job because if I'm only doing it 14 times
in a day, and I'm going to make $254 per, I mean, that doesn't make any sense at all
to me.
This is a truck driving around town, right?
It is.
Now, we have made this a bit more efficient.
You have basically home chemical collection electronics and appliances all being collected
via one truck.
You essentially have this cost, this is the cost for the home chemical collection, divided
by the number of participants on a yearly basis.
So you take this and multiply it by about how many operating days, Tina, 207 operating
days.
So as your numerator, that becomes your denominator and you get about $200-some-odd per collection.
And so even greater usage wouldn't reduce that cost is what you're saying.
I think what you've got to look at with home chemical collection, we've talked a little
bit about this, is we need to introduce revenue into the program, i.e. the regional revenue
stream, but then we also look at is portside collection the most efficient way to do this.
You do get some cost savings by having it run as events or as a drop-off instead of
dispatching a unit out and trying to collect it on the curb every day.
And just can you tell me what all is wrapped into that $762,000?
A lot of fixed costs, when I say fixed cost, is personnel and equipment.
We do have some variable costs for processing the chemicals, the electronics, the appliances,
but those are very minor in nature compared to the personnel, the facilities, the equipment.
Again, this is a soup to nuts.
So it's not just the collection on the front end.
We are managing this hazardous waste on the back end.
So once it enters our facility, we may be dealing with a flammable bulk weight.
And as a result, instead of the $10 it costs you to buy in loads, it may cost us $500, $700,
$800.
This has got your utilities overhead.
Exactly.
And disposal and everything else.
Got it.
Okay.
Thank you.
Other questions?
Yeah, I had a question about the electronics and appliances.
Can you go back to that other slide about what we were going to do with it?
This one?
Yeah, I'm like, okay, so you're proposing that we discontinue collection or increase
the fee?
We can do either/or and we can certainly stay the same.
I think what we've seen a lot of other communities do is they discontinue collection of electronics.
They continue to offer the appliances and they continue to offer the appliances for
a fee if they're diverting it.
There's many different flavors of chocolate in terms of how -- or not chocolate, ice cream.
There's many different flavors of ice cream in terms of how these services get doled out.
And so in terms of diverting this and ensuring it gets recycled, that means that it has to
be a separate collection.
That's where usually you see the fees associated with this.
For the communities that collect this as bulk waste and it goes to the landfill, they usually
just bundle that into the bulk waste collection.
Okay.
All right.
It's because I've got a TV that I need to get rid of.
We haven't changed anything yet.
Hurry up and put it on the curb.
No, so what I'm trying to do -- because I mean, I think this happens to a lot of families,
you know, you've got the big TV, all right, and then you want a bigger TV.
So the old TV goes to one of the kids' bedrooms, right?
And then it keeps going on down the line, and then at the -- and then when that TV finally
breaks, there's not a -- you don't want to take it to the charities and dump it there.
Right.
Or a lot of them won't take them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And then the retail take-back programs.
I mean, you know, it's been 20 years and you forgot, you know, the retail outlet may
not even be available anymore.
So then you're kind of stuck with, what do I do with this?
Some of them will take it whether or not you bought another TV there or not.
I will say this.
Really?
Yes.
See, that's not well-known.
Our current price point -- so Best Buy probably runs the biggest electronics recycling operation
in our area.
Our price point at $20 per collection is exactly the same as theirs, and they'll do the same
thing as we do -- come out to your curb, pick it up.
In some cases, they'll actually give you a discount if you're buying another one to replace
it.
And so we do try to direct folks there, but it's not a one-size-fits-all, and maybe that's
the case for a television, but they won't offer the same service for, say, a microwave
oven or something like that.
So I think trying to find our place in that is really maybe the question.
I mean, because ultimately you don't want to have, again, appliances dropped off in
the middle of nowhere, you know, because they can't figure out what to do with it.
One of the things we've kicked around internally -- so there's two different cost components
to dealing with this, and I think Brian illustrated it with what he said -- there's the collection
piece, which is really the convenience piece in a lot of cases, and then there's the actual
handling and processing piece to recycle it or dispose of it.
We have fees for both.
So if we feel like for electronics versus appliances -- because, again, I think electronics
are some cases easier to handle -- we could look at discounting our landfill rate for that,
maybe even providing that service at no cost in order to recycle that, and then just look
at discontinuing the collection side of things.
But I think that's really what we'd be recommending, is when you look at the fee, we want to cost
recover on us running that truck out there.
Right.
I totally get that.
I totally understand that.
I'm just -- like I said, then you've got that other problem of you don't want to see
TVs, you know, start to come up on the prairie.
I think the notes comment there, the promotion of donation centers and retail take-back programs,
I think that that concept can be used in the solid waste, in the recycling area, quite
a bit, and in this area quite a bit as well.
I mean, almost every single household appliance the recycling centers will take here.
You might have to put it in your truck or ask somebody to take it, but they'll take
a plastic dishwasher and they break it down and take the pieces off and turn it into something.
You know, places like Fry's, they don't want electronics, but other places will actually
take electronics, too, but it does take some research to do it, and perhaps if the city
had some kind of central place that, you know, that you could go to on the web and see, pow,
oh, I could take it here, take it here, you know, it might facilitate that, and then this
wouldn't become an issue at all.
We were actually talking about that today, looking at our website, is we need to be a
better resource.
It's not just our services.
We need to be like Macy's and Miracle at 34th Street.
We can get out of the street and do that here, too, and so.
And you know, and as people see that you're -- sometimes when information is just coming
from you guys, you know, well, sometimes it enhances the information if they're getting
information from many different resources and they're getting the same answer, you know,
so.
Right.
I'd agree with that.
Yeah.
I'm inclined to follow the COE's recommendations.
I like them.
Can I go back to the -- but they didn't want to change yard waste.
Is that correct?
Did I understand that?
No, that's correct.
That's correct.
They wanted to maintain the existing model.
Yeah, and I would want to change the existing model, but I don't use yard waste.
I have somebody who does that for me, and it's not my husband.
So, Susan, you liked the idea of the cart with the food, also with the food waste.
Yes.
But I'm good with this, too.
I think that's a direction we could probably go.
Has anybody ever watched them pick up 20 leaf bags?
It's pretty ridiculous.
They open each one, they dump it in the thing, they bag up the bag.
It's a ridiculous process and horribly inefficient.
So carts and bags is a great idea, but I don't really like the subscription fee.
I kind of think it should be, hey, my cart's out there, there's something in it, you know.
We have a lot of garden beds, so we eat almost daily, and so we've got stuff daily, almost.
So you like the cart, but not the $1.
Yeah, yeah, essentially.
I just don't like changing it, because then you have to do something.
Somebody has to do something, and then you have to educate them that they have to do
that.
That if they don't do that, they wonder why their collection isn't being made.
Why did it get changed?
They don't have all that stuff sitting out there in front of their house all the time.
I've tried various things with the people that come by and clean up my, you know, waste,
and I've found that if I leave the bag untied, they'll pour the waste in the back of the
truck and put the bag back there right there on the ground.
Now, if the bag's tied, they rip it open and take it.
I've tried putting it in a trash can, and a couple of times they've taken it, and other
times they just leave it there, you know, so, which would be kind of like a cart, so.
So the customers would have to buy a cart.
I'm experienced.
Yeah, yeah, you're industrious.
Yeah.
You spend a lot of time on this.
So the people would have to buy a cart up front.
There's different approaches to that.
I mean, the cart cost for us is about $40.
I think it would be a very small capital, I wouldn't even call it a capital investment.
I think whenever Fort Worth rolled this out, they didn't do the subscription fee.
They basically said buy the cart, and then it's yours forever, and so there's different
approaches that we could take to this.
Again, I think the biggest gain for us on the subscription fee is it's a pen and a map,
and we know exactly where we're going.
You don't have to go up and down every street looking for it.
Exactly right.
I guess my problem with that, as you mentioned earlier, that you had a shortage of this type
of stuff, that we don't have enough solid matter to introduce into our bio waste to do
this.
So, and if you put obstacles, you're going to get less, you're not going to get more.
I don't see it as an obstacle.
I see it as wanting to improve it.
Well, to subscribe is an obstacle of sorts.
I got you there.
Okay.
And I think the COE made that point as well, is we want to make it easy for folks.
And again, I think it depends on which policy objective carries the bigger weight for us.
So direction?
Follow COE?
And just for, this was their recommendation here.
Were they opposed to the cart, or they just didn't really touch on it?
They just didn't want the subscription?
We had two COE members there in probably the heaviest wooded areas of the city.
And so I think, you know, the cart is significant.
And so I think some of the concerns that they had is the cart is not going to be enough.
And I'm going to fill up a lot of those crap bags.
And I think, you know, it's, I think the thing that we had said to that is we appreciate
that.
We also have to look at the citizens in town that have a smaller lot.
It's small trees, they're not using the brush.
And I think that's really the question that we have here is, you know, we can, we certainly
want to support the program whichever way we do.
Is there a way to make it more equitable for every resident that we have in the system?
Yeah.
But ultimately, this is where they landed.
I have one more thing just before we wrap this up.
Go ahead.
So on your next steps, you mentioned revising the solid waste ordinance.
Yes.
And in that ordinance, regarding trash collection and solid waste or and recycling, there are,
there's some pretty specific things about not putting non recyclables into the recycle
bin.
There doesn't seem to be anything about putting recyclables into the trash.
And I know some people might be going, well, why would we want to do that?
That seems like oppressive.
But are there municipalities that say, hey, you've got to recycle, and it's the law?
There are.
And I'm not sure how many you see in Texas, but that's very prevalent in California and
some states like that, where they'll actually go out and cite you if they find a recyclable
in the wrong bin.
And so there is precedent for that.
We started out doing it that way.
There wasn't one that didn't start recycling.
It was a big deal.
I got written up, but it started out doing it that way.
You got red tag, did you?
I think it would cost more to enforce than it did to just, I'll just take it.
In those revisions, do you foresee us doing anything along those lines, making it stricter?
I think for staff's perspective, we want to bring the ordinance up to date, number one,
and then we'll bring it to the PB and the council for policy direction.
We don't presume to have the answers on what we want to set as policy, but we can certainly
look.
Here are some options that you might consider.
I know mandatory commercial recycling is something we've heard a lot about, and so that's an
option that we want to put in there, kind of benchmark with some cities to see how they're
handling those types of programs, if that's the direction we want to go.
This would probably follow kind of that direction as well, is here's two or three options that
you can consider.
I will say that certainly from a recycling contamination standpoint, that's going to
be a key point of emphasis for us, kind of trying to tighten that up and see if we're
making good progress or not, but we can certainly take that the other direction too.
Okay.
I wouldn't want to see us do away with our recycling program, though, or--
Absolutely not.
Oh, absolutely not.
It may get worse than what it is.
Yeah.
I mean, not that it's worse right now, but--
We'll get to that in a minute.
So--
Yeah.
So what I've heard--
So the consensus, why didn't you say what you heard?
Thank you.
So what I've heard, at least from Mr. Carroll, is we go with the Committee on the Environment
recommendations, are there any deviations from what they're recommending here that we'd
get some consensus on?
I like the idea of a cart, only because it also facilitates what you call the pre-consumer--
Vegetative.
Vegetative waste.
Food waste.
Yeah.
I've already bought it, so it's not pre-consumer, in my opinion, so I guess it's pre-consumption.
Consumption.
I'll change that.
Thank you.
The thing that kind of bothers me, though, is that you were talking about how there would
be some citizens who don't have much in the-- they don't trees, they don't have a garden,
they don't have, you know, much of a lot line at all, and that they're paying for, you know,
those of us who do--
You need to get closer to your mic.
--and that they're paying for those of us who do, but at the same time--
Is it on?
Okay.
All right.
The thing that bothers me or that worries me is that, you know, the people who have
trees and who have gardens and whatnot, that that's-- ultimately, that's a good thing for
our community.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And so we don't want to discourage people from, you know, cutting down their trees because
they don't want to have to pay for the waste that comes from having a tree in your backyard.
Right.
That's the thing that worries me about only having people who use the yard waste because
then I just feel like that increases the cost for the people who do have trees and whatnot.
But the brush is going to be separate from the yard waste, is that--
That's correct.
--correct?
The yard waste is grass clippings, basically.
And leaves occasionally.
And leaves.
Oh, and leaves.
Yeah.
They blow away.
This is Texas.
Not in my yard.
I mean, I have like a bajillion bags of trees.
Sorry.
Okay.
My yard.
And I live in a very, you know, yeah, there's a lot of trees in our neighborhood.
Are you distinguishing the brush that ends up going into the same yard waste truck than
brush that gets picked up by the claw truck?
Yeah.
So I think typically for brush, whenever we dispatch, we will typically, right now, we'll
need to take a look at this, is anything that's under four foot and less than 50 pounds, we
can collect by hand.
If it's more than that, that's when we would dispatch the claw truck to come collect it.
Okay.
But that's all still called brush?
Right now, some of it may go into the yard waste truck.
It's not real.
Whenever we look at these volumes up here, it's all basically into one pot, one pool.
So that's brush and yard waste.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
Just one more question.
And what was Blue Ridge's recommendation on the yard waste?
Usually their findings were that it was highly inefficient, less than safe.
Their recommendation was move to carts, move brush to schedule services.
I do think going strictly to carts is going to be problematic because of the volume limits,
certainly.
One of the things I will say is these things don't have to go together.
We can introduce carts without changing how we run the collection of yard waste.
Could you make that an opt-in?
Not that they have to pay one, but they ask requests for a cart because someone liked it?
I really think you're going to get people in on the vegetative food waste.
Oh, yeah.
And then that's going to increase your, maybe not hugely, the volume that you're getting.
And then that actually might be something that supports the idea of the subscription
fee.
Because then if you know they have that type of waste, you actually want to come and collect
it frequently.
You don't want it to get all funky.
In my last place where I lived, all my vegetative food waste got composted.
So would it be possible to turn this into sort of a two-year plan and think about introducing
the carts and the subscription next year?
I mean, right now, I'm not sure that Denton is ready for carts and subscriptions.
No.
I think you're right.
And it might need to-- you might need to plow the street a little bit first with some education
or something.
Can we put a little bit of food waste in the plastic bag?
We prefer not.
They're kind of going right now.
They're not ready for this.
I mean, maybe set that up, tee that up for next year.
That's a good idea.
With some education.
Yeah.
Now.
I think there needs to be some education on that.
Okay.
All right.
I mean, right now, I just-- I compost my own pre-consumer vegetative food waste, you know.
So it would be-- it would be an adjustment for quite a few people.
Sure.
I did that too.
I'm not allowed anymore in my neighborhood.
Oh.
Well, I think I've got enough input that I can put together a slide for tomorrow.
We knew this was going to be a shotgun approach.
So I think it gives us enough direction that we can put another slide together.
Hopefully the gist of it is going to be follow these recommendations with the thought that
we could introduce the carts alone as kind of an opt-in, not the subscription fee, and
then we circle back next year and see what the temperature is.
Any other thoughts on the rest of these?
All right.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Now, the next item, I think, is going to take a bit.
So why don't we take a five-minute environmental break?
Okay, it's about 747 and we're back.
This item is receive a report and hold a discussion and give staff direction regarding the solid
waste department's recycling program.
Well, good evening again.
My name is Ethan Cox.
I'm the director of public works for the city.
So this evening we have an update on our recycling program for the public utilities board.
You'll recall we came back before the board, I think it was January, February time frame
and just kind of did a full-on business case analysis.
Well, since that time we've gotten some less than ideal news on where we are with the market
and how it's impacting our program.
There was an informal staff report that was sent to city council on May the 10th.
It was also circulated via the newspaper.
I'm not sure if we've shared that with the PV yet.
If not, we will certainly get that out to you as part of an ACM update.
But I am going to give you the gist of that report and kind of what it was and how we
got here and then what our next steps are.
So to kind of cut to the chase, on March 26th staff learned that Pratt Industries, our materials
recycling facility, our on-site MRF, was land filling essentially glass and plastics three
through seven.
The reason why this happened is the buyers that were participating, there's very few
in the region for those two particular types of materials, they had enacted some quality
standards and started refusing loads.
Needless to say, we were just concerned about this.
We went through and initiated a contract review.
That took a better part of about 30 days and ultimately what we found is we felt like aside
from the lack of notification, Pratt Industries was acting in accordance with the contract.
I'll get to kind of the contract provisions that allow that in just a moment.
Real quickly in terms of the rest of the timeline, April 24th, while we were doing the contract
review, Pratt was able to locate a buyer for plastics three through seven.
I'll give an example of what those types of plastics are in just a moment.
They resumed shipments to that recycler and those have continued from that date to now.
On April 29th, we issued a written request for notification to Pratt, also asked for
some commitments from them in terms of improved communication.
Really we feel like the biggest breakdown here was we weren't allowed to get out in
front of the message, inform this board, inform the council, inform our citizens that this
was happening and what they needed to know about it.
Pratt responded with the written request as well as some commitments to improve communication
as well as updates on those various materials and then on the 14th, which was last week,
Pratt received a verbal commitment from a glass recycler in Houston to start accepting
loads.
First load went today.
They've got two additional loads going out this week and so it does look like unfortunately
this happened but it does look like we're starting to get that stuff back in the commodities
market.
In terms of the agreement that we have with Pratt Industries, it's both a land lease
as well as a processing agreement.
We were locked into that agreement until 2027.
We do have some options for renewal but I would expect those to come with some renegotiation
of the terms.
It would be basically Pratt's decision and our decision as to whether to renew.
The program materials are outlined here.
Again, the ones we're talking about are plastics three through seven and glass.
The few sections of contract that we felt like were key to this discussion, number one
is ownership of the materials.
Understand that within the contract, Pratt has, basically we have the obligation to deliver
every recyclable we collect via our collection program to Pratt.
Once we deliver that to the facility, they pay us for the material and ownership immediately
transfers to Pratt Industries.
Pratt is solely responsible for the marketing and sale of that material.
They have accepted some of our requests and recommendations from time to time but ultimately
it's their responsibility to move the material.
Additionally, in addition to paying for the materials up front, if there's disposal required
for any of the materials that are unable to sell, they also pay us the landfill tipping
fee for the disposal of those materials.
So ultimately when we did our review of the contract, we felt like these sections really
provide for them to do exactly what was happening.
In terms of impact on the landfill operation, that was one of the things that we also kind
of took a look at and say, okay, well, what's happening because of this decision?
So a few things that I've put up here on this slide.
Number one is a regional waste composition.
The source of this is the North Central Texas Council of Governments.
This is a standard household's generation of waste.
This includes both waste and recyclables.
So glass accounts for about 7% of our waste composition.
Plastic is about 16%, but keep in mind, 3 through 7 is a subset of plastics.
We use this information as well as what we knew about what we were shipping out of the
Pratt facility.
And our estimates are that glass accounts for about 50 to 100 tons of what we recycle
each month.
That's much less than 7%, but not everybody recycles the way they should.
And then plastics 3 through 7 is about 10 to 20 tons per month.
So all told, the impact is about 120 tons per month, to put that into perspective, the
landfill handles just under 24,000 tons of materials on a monthly basis.
One of the other things that we looked at is, okay, well, have we seen an uptick in
stuff being disposed at the landfill from Pratt Industries?
Why did we not catch this before?
Well, the reason why is we haven't seen an uptick in waste disposed from them.
What Pratt Industries has done in reaction to the market turbulence that we're seeing
with recycling, they've started reducing the amount of materials they accept coming into
their facility.
They are a regional facility, they don't just accept our recyclables, they accept it from
a number of surrounding communities.
So over the last 12 to 18 months, they've stopped accepting materials from a lot of other
single stream recyclers.
When I say single stream, that's everything's commingled in a blue bin.
We're pretty much it in terms of what they accept on a single stream.
Right now, they do continue to accept some source separated cardboard from a few communities.
So what you've seen is their volumes have gone down on the front door, but what's coming
out the back door for waste has remained relatively static, so we really haven't seen an impact
on the landfill in terms of volume.
I gave this flowchart back in January, February timeline.
I think it's important to revisit it, though, because it shows you exactly how this came
about.
So going from left to right, these are our collection operations over here.
So after you put something in the blue bin, this is where the process flow kicks in.
Once we collect that stuff, we take it to Pratt Industries, where they sort and transport
that to the next leg in the processing chain.
For cardboard and paper, like we mentioned back then, Pratt owns their own paper mill.
So one of the things we're relatively assured of is if we're giving them clean paper and
cardboard, it's going to get recycled.
Those are kind of exposed to the market if they don't own their own paper mills.
For plastics, glass, and metals, they do have to partner with third-party recyclers, and
that's really where the breakdown occurred here.
The commodities markets here, when you really think about recycling, who purchases commodities
on the market?
Well, it's manufacturing.
So as China pulled out of the commodities market, there's a lot more supply in the system,
but the demand hasn't really gone up.
Manufacturers aren't saying, "Well, I need all that stuff that was going to China."
And so what's happened is quality controls have gotten much tighter to control the supply
coming into the commodities market.
As a result, a lot of third-party recyclers here are trying to reduce the amount of stuff
coming in their doors.
They implement quality restrictions just like China did.
In the case of glass, it was, "If you have a certain amount of contamination, we don't
want to receive your product anymore," which was a challenge for Pratt because...
What is contamination of glass?
Food particles?
It can be food particles.
It can also be, so glass basically is broken down into small pieces called cullet.
Our facility produces 2-inch cullets, has for years and years and years been perfectly
acceptable by the processors.
What they found in ours wasn't just the food particles, it was shredded paper.
There's a high incidence of shredded paper in here.
We don't want to pay to sort it or clean it, and so that was one of the things that became
unacceptable.
Again, our process, Pratt's process, didn't change, the quality standard changed.
I'm sorry, you probably were going to get there, I don't want to jump ahead of you anymore.
So again, this is where the breakdown happened.
What we've done, or what Pratt's done, is they've partied with a new glass recycler
out of Houston.
This is an option that wouldn't have been there for us a year ago.
Strategic Materials is really the biggest glass processor in the United States.
They're located in Midlothian, been our partner for a number of years, and they're the ones
that basically said we can't accept it anymore.
A couple of things, just kind of nuanced differences about what makes these so challenging to recycle.
So plastics 3 through 7, these are all sold in mixed bales.
So plastics 1 and 2 are typically your water bottles, plastics like this.
The market for those is fairly stable, doesn't pay a great deal, but there's steady supply
and demand domestically for this.
Plastics 3 through 7 are the stuff that it's more of a niche market.
So you have fewer buyers.
These are sold in mixed bales, and whenever these bales are bought, there's not a guarantee
that all of this is going to get recycled.
A lot of these recyclers are picking and choosing the material in there that they need.
So aside from 1 and 2s, which is down here kind of in this graphic, number 5s are typically
what you are seeing in other programs.
As programs change, the market dynamics you're seeing, a lot of programs drop 3, 4, 6, and
7.
When it comes to buyers on the plastics, what that indicates is the type of polymer that's
in that material, which is basically a flag to the manufacturer, is if I'm going to make
a plastic, number 1, I need a certain type of polymer out of that recyclable.
Some of the ones that are more difficult, it's more about not just the supply and demand,
it's about the material itself.
If it's rigid, if it's brittle, it doesn't handle well when it goes through the process,
and that's one of the reasons why that's a little bit difficult.
There's two buyers in this market here, only one of which is interested in doing business
with new suppliers, that's who Pratt secured the agreement with and started moving materials.
One thing real quick on this is we're doing multiple sorts, not we, Pratt is doing multiple
sorts on this for that supplier.
So we ship them a bail on this, they're giving us feedback, we have to re-sort it, Pratt has
to re-sort it multiple times to meet their spec, but that's kind of the process that's
going through right now.
In terms of glass, we talked about cullet, so again, there's a few regional buyers.
I'll show you the price that it pays to, or the price you have to pay to recycle glass
now.
The economics is really a big deterrent to this.
Glass, in terms of the process to recycle those, it's a little bit more labor intensive,
requires two different sorts.
So in a single stream recycling program like ours, the first sort is to separate the glass
from the other recyclables, the contamination.
Once it's received at a facility like Strategic Materials, it goes through a second sort where
all these little fine cullets get separated by color.
They do that using optical sorters.
The process is somewhat automated, but it can be costly if there's a lot of contamination
in there.
And so that's where you're seeing those quality standards come in.
In terms of current status, like we said in the program, we do have a buyer in Louisiana
for Plastics 337, and we also have that verbal commitment looking like we'll have a solution
there in Houston as well.
In terms of outlook on those, I think it's anybody's guess.
This is something that we want to pay close attention to.
These are two volatile markets.
I was talking to someone earlier today is glass, depending on where you are and the
processors and manufacturing you have in your region, it can be very expensive to transport.
And so it's really about who you know in close proximity in the industry in terms of how
effective you can be at recycling glass, which is really unfortunate because glass is very
easy to recycle once you get it clean and into the system.
But we will monitor those.
In terms of market updates, we've been kind of providing this price per ton outlook on
this each time we met.
So the first time we discussed recycling was September 2017, and the results kind of vary.
There is some volatility here.
Plastics remain fairly low, but it's still moving.
Aluminum is probably the most stable.
Glass, you actually have to pay on a per ton basis for a facility to accept it.
Right now, the market's trading.
You basically pay $32.50 for a ton.
Perhaps most recent agreement, they were paying $40 a ton just to have strategic accept it.
And that's in addition to your hauling costs and logistics that go along with it.
Mixed paper's fairly low, cardboard's fairly low, but again, we're somewhat insulated because
Pratt runs their own paper mill.
So we are fortunate in that regard.
The market update, it's not all doom and gloom, but there are some headwinds out there that
we need to pay attention to.
From a foreign market standpoint, India followed suit with China.
They banned imported plastics.
Southeast Asia is the remaining backstop out there after China backed out.
I don't know how long that's going to last.
If you're curious, I would Google Malaysia and recycling, and it's pretty shocking what's
happened there in about a year time frame.
So I do think it's going to become more and more dependent on the domestic market to find
a solution here.
The good news is not only do we have investments coming in domestically, we do have Chinese
firms that are investing here.
They still need the feedstock, they're in manufacturing, so they need the plastics.
So there is foreign investment coming into the U.S. for the system as well.
Not only that, you also have the federal government as well as state governments proposing bills
to try to incentivize manufacturers to utilize recycling feedstock for their processes.
So I think it's not going to be fixed overnight, but we are seeing some promising signs in
terms of hopefully shoring up the market.
A couple of things I will say that we feel pretty confident about is the market's going
to be volatile for a period of time moving forward.
Again, we are somewhat insulated.
Despite the breakdown in communication, our contract is very favorable in terms of materials
and the basically financials of it.
We have looked at a number of other cities that are basically negotiating contracts right
now.
We get about $15 a ton in revenue, plus a pretty wide array of program materials.
Cities that have much more bargaining power than we do are getting contracts that are
much, much less favorable than what we are, and I put a few of these up here on the board.
If we were to secure a deal like Savannah, Georgia, who their loan bidder was Pratt,
they're paying $95 a ton to move the materials in their program.
That's about a million and a half dollar swing if we were to go in that direction.
And so it's not ideal.
We prefer better communication.
I will say that Pratt's been a good partner with us, they've been very communicative,
so I'm fortunate with this breakdown, but they are working diligently to help turn this
back around for us.
We do expect low prices and high quality standards to continue even if the domestic market firms
up.
One thing's for certain that there's never going to be a market for bad material, dirty
material.
So that's why our continued approach to contamination is so critical.
There may be a market for recyclables, but just not for us to offload trash to those
facilities.
So to that end, we want to continue recycling all of our program materials in a responsible
manner.
For residents and businesses, continue the responsible behaviors.
Utilize your blue bin as you have.
If you're not sure, then check it out, and one of the things that we're going to be trying
to do over the next 12 to 18 months is improve our education efforts.
We have a robust education program now, but as we mentioned in the earlier presentation,
our website -- some of the portals that we can provide in terms of information could
be better, and we're going to be working on that.
Pratt, in terms of commitments on their side, they have committed to providing any type
of change in the program, gets a 48-hour advance notice before anything's enacted.
We're also going to be meeting with them monthly to get market and program updates.
We meet with them regularly right now.
However, for some reason, this didn't come through those communications, and that's what
troubled us about it.
In terms of solid waste, we are basically in trust and verify mode, is the way we would
put it.
In terms of inbound, we do random inspections, what we call basically contamination calibrations.
Whenever a load hits the floor out there, they give an assessment of this percent contaminated
by weight.
We want to make sure we're seeing that exactly the way Pratt's seeing it, and if there's
differences in opinion, we kind of meet that out with them.
Also to that end, we are going to be basically inspecting at least one load per week of anything
that's going through the landfill from Pratt.
This is an example of that.
We'll dump that out, fan it out, and take a look and see if there's materials that could
be recycled that are in there in big quantities, and if it is, then we're going to have them
answer the question for what happened here.
So that's pretty much the high-level presentation.
I'm happy to stand for any questions, concerns that you might have.
Who wants to go first?
Well, I guess I would just encourage you guys to try to stay as keenly aware of what's going
on as possible so that we don't have this kind of thing happen again.
We should really know what's coming and going from our landfill pretty well.
And then I have a question about the picture on page slide six, the bale of plastic.
Is that our bale?
Yes, it is.
It's filled with film, which is not allowed in recycling.
Film can be recycled.
Now, on some of this, we don't want to encourage folks putting film in there.
The biggest reason is what they call a tangler, and so it gets into the gears and the machinery
and tangles it up.
So whenever you look at -- I forget which one film is.
It's one of these in here.
It is capable of being recycled.
We would much prefer folks to source-separate that and take, let's say, a grocery sack,
take that back to the grocery store.
They typically recycle that on their own.
The problem isn't that it can't be recycled.
It's the challenges it presents in the processing equipment.
But officially, we don't accept that in our curbside recycling program.
Per contract, we do, however, we discourage folks to put it into the single stream container.
Okay.
Well, we'll take all of your old grocery bags and stuff.
Yeah.
Well -- oh, are you done?
I'm sorry.
No, I just have one more question.
Okay.
On the pie chart on slide four --
Yes.
-- 44 percent organics, how much -- what percentage of organics do you think we're
collecting and disposing of properly?
And if they were --
Just generally --
-- put in the yard waste --
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of why I'm bringing it up, because I kind of -- I was like, oh,
look at that.
How much did we redo?
Almost half of what anybody's collecting could actually be diverted --
And I think yard waste is built into this.
I'll have to go back to that study, but I think yard waste is part of your organics.
It's part of that mix.
Okay.
One of the things I will say that we have not done as a city -- this is kind of a regional
waste characterization study.
We have not done --
A waste sort?
-- a waste characterization study just on Denton.
Right.
So that's something we could consider doing and taking a look at.
From us, what we've done to date is basically broken out -- and this is not by material,
but it basically kind of shows you a source of the things that we're disposing and diverting.
So obviously refuse -- that contains a lot of different things up here, but for organics,
we do have commercial organics, which is small volume, but then your yard waste is a significant
amount of that.
So I think in that regional characterization, they do include both food waste along with
other organic products.
Okay.
In that --
So if -- oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I just had a quick question.
In that same pie chart, what is C and D, 1%?
Construction and demolition.
And that's generally small.
This is a residential waste characterization that's relatively small because most of that's
commercial in nature.
Yeah.
Do you have any construction waste in mind?
We hope not.
So food waste is most likely ending up in residential refuse if they don't have another
place to put it.
Yes.
Okay.
That or is put down the disposal drain and then it becomes a biosolid and then it goes
into our composting program.
I just have to say I was very disappointed to read that article because I asked for it
in January.
I thought we were getting ahead of this, the whole China market, and then you read in the
newspaper that they've been putting it in the landfill, the timing was horrible.
We just started telling people we're going to look in your garbage can.
Just -- I know you're the messenger.
Take it with --
We share that with you.
Yeah.
Wow.
I think their timing couldn't have been worse.
Agreed.
Yeah.
So in essence, they're saying that it's -- I mean, it kind of sounds like they're saying
that it's our fault that all that we were giving them was contaminated.
I don't think so.
I think it's changing the quality standard is what it's -- it's a moving target right
now with contamination.
So what was perfectly acceptable in the recycling stream two years ago is suddenly no good,
and I think that's --
We're going to have to start changing that as far as, you know, making sure that, yeah,
that what we do put into recyclables is cleaner than what we've been doing because of that.
I think that's -- that's the general direction we want to give the public is be mindful,
you know, clean out the peanut butter jar.
Don't put stuff in there that doesn't belong.
If there's a question, verify it.
That being said, you know, in talking to Pratt, they don't want folks changing their behaviors.
The last thing we want is for someone to say, "Well, it's going to the landfill anyway,
so I'm just going to put it in the trash container."
They don't want that.
We don't want that.
That was my fear.
And --
And unfortunately, I think some of that is happening.
So we need to --
I understand that.
-- get back out and educate.
I think folks get frustrated any time they see news like this, and that's understandable.
And I think that was really the context in most of the discussions that we've had with
Pratt is, you know, we don't want folks changing their behavior, but that's ultimately up to
the citizen to decide, not for us to decide based on not informing them.
And so I think it's one of those things that we've got to trust our citizens with bad news
that they're going to do the responsible thing, which is recycle the right way and continue
to stay dedicated to the program.
Because ultimately, really, it's -- you know, once we turn that stuff over to them, they
can do whatever they want with it.
It's theirs, contractually.
Yeah.
It's theirs.
And so, I mean, moving forward -- and I know it's 2027 when their contract is up.
Is that something that can be stipulated in a new contract?
Are other municipalities doing that, where they say, you know, well, you can take our
recyclables, but they have to go to recycling?
They can't be put in any landfill.
I think the challenge with that is there's no guarantees in any commodity market, any
market for that matter, is at a certain point, if you can't move the material and you can't
landfill it, then stockpiling is the option.
And from a regulatory standpoint, you really can't stockpile.
Some facilities took to that after this hit, saying we'll hold out until the market turns
around.
Well, we're almost two years -- or a year and a half in.
The market hasn't turned, and what ended up happening, I think, was the FCC facility in
Dallas actually caught on fire with huge amounts of stockpiles.
And so, you do have to provide some consideration for them that if it's not movable in the market,
then we may need to allow that to happen.
The biggest change is --
They get up and they walk out, and you're stuck with the whole thing sitting right there.
Yeah, you don't want to run one of these folks out of business.
I think the difference with us and Pratt -- understand that Pratt's not like Republic or Waste Management
or Waste Connections.
They don't own landfills.
So, we get a heightened sense of visibility to what they're doing that maybe someone that
has a Republic or someone servicing them, they just don't get to see it.
So, we get to see it, you know, good, bad, and ugly sometimes, and again, I think the
biggest thing here, Ms. Bynum, is that they should have told us, "Hey, this was going
to happen."
I agree.
And I think if that had happened --
That's the biggest issue was communication, because then you could have gotten ahead of
it and --
And I think that message has been delivered time and time again, and I think they definitely
understand that, and they're definitely making adjustments in accordance with it.
Am I right in remembering that originally you contracted with Trinity Industries, and
they used their own trucks for recycling?
For the collection side of things.
That's correct.
Is that right, Tina?
Trinity?
But they didn't do the actual selling to the commodity market?
No.
Pratt's been our material recovery facility.
Okay.
I was just remembering the Trinity trucks.
And I have read other articles where -- I mean, this is happening in a lot of communities.
There's one that has a waste energy facility.
I came from a waste energy facility.
They're starting to burn the paper and the cardboard, because that's the most economical
least damage that they can do, so it happens.
It's just the communication.
The one thing I'll say, and I try not to read the press clippings too often, but there was
an article in the newspaper, I think it was an opinion piece a couple days ago, that said,
you know, we're at a crossroads, we're in dire straits, and that's really not our assessment
in terms of where we are with our program.
Could things be better?
Absolutely.
But I think all things considered, we've weathered most of what we've seen thus far fairly well
relative to others like Philadelphia and other programs that are having to step away from
their programs entirely.
Part of that is our contract with Pratt.
Part of it's where we are from a location standpoint.
Part of this, we have a pretty decent program, all things considered.
We just need to clean up our contamination a little bit, and I think we'll be positioned
well now, as well as what's coming to us down the road.
Are you going to be sending out another flyer or informational flyer that doesn't have a
typo on it?
We're planning on it.
Certainly.
Sorry to bring that up.
We want to get through these presentations first, we want to make sure that we're all
in alignment.
Again, our approach to this is we keep the program materials the same, we move forward
with education, and then we'll start getting a lot of that stuff out there to the community
again.
I think education is going to be pretty central.
I'm sorry, I have a couple more things.
Oh, go ahead.
Well, you kind of brought it up about burning the waste.
How would you respond to somebody in the community as a solid waste professional?
How would you respond to them saying or suggesting that recycling is a waste of effort, a waste
of money, a waste of resources, and that, in fact, it would be cheaper and better just
to landfill all of this stuff?
I think it goes back to the, I think I have it here, let me see, I don't have it here,
but essentially whenever you look at recycling, it's not just an economics decision.
I think we are getting to a point where the financial realities of recycling is going
to kind of come home.
We have to start paying for recycling much like we do for waste disposal.
We're insulated from that right now because of our contract, but it is coming.
Most communities are dealing with that right now.
So really, it comes down to value proposition or kind of, I guess, an individual approach
to things is there are people in our community that do a tremendous amount of work to recycle
the right way.
I think there's also folks in our community that look at it and say, "I prefer not to."
We've been in customer service for a number of years, we heard those sentiments firsthand.
I think it's really about what is important to you, what's your value system individually.
We certainly feel like, as an organization, that this is important.
Obviously, we own our own landfills, so we want to keep stuff out of there as much as
we can.
But we also know that we can't make those decisions in a vacuum when everyone gets a
say at it.
And so there's the sustainability piece, there's the environmental piece, which is the reduction
of raw materials, the emissions, all that that goes into it.
I think when we visited about this last time, our recycling program takes the equivalent
of about 4,000 cars off the road every year.
So I think-
And that's huge.
It is big.
And greenhouse gas emissions, not just from what happens at the landfill, but the sourcing
of these materials, not everyone's going to look at that the same way.
So our approach is we definitely want folks to do this responsibly, but if they're not
into the program, don't abuse it and don't take advantage of it towards the efforts of
others.
Right.
Within the industry, has anybody done a significant study that suggests that, using an example
you gave, that if everybody washes out their peanut butter jar with hot water and a rag
and then recycles it, and then that we're still beating the environmental edge there,
we've used hot water, we've washed the rag, we're using soap, I mean, has anybody really
done something to say that, "Hey, we're still beating the curve on this environmental thing,"
because all of those are things that are being used to get that recyclable product back into
that commodity market.
I can't cite a specific study, Brian.
Do you have one in mind?
I mean, I apologize, but to me, that's a reality.
If everybody's working at home to take the labels off their glass and clean out the peanut,
you ever clean out a peanut butter jar?
Yes.
It's not easy.
It's not easy, and again, it's a moving target because the way we heated water 10 years ago
is a lot more inefficient and a lot more environmentally unfriendly than how we do it today with whatever
method you're using.
So again, there's a lot of things that are moving.
At the end of the day, though, it goes back to what Ethan was saying, it's about resource
management.
And again, if we can provide an opportunity to create an area where we have resources
available as opposed to raw material, then by all means, let's do that.
We're saving it from an environmental standpoint, and if you do a full cost accounting at the
end of the day, I think recycling will still be a net benefit to the environment even after
going through all these steps.
Okay.
Brian.
Well, I'm a strong proponent of recycling.
Of course you are.
I just, you know, these things, as I'm sitting there trying to clean out my peanut butter
jar.
Is this clean enough?
Right.
Well, the one thing I will say to that, not necessarily to the system that you were mentioning,
but we also don't need to lose sight of the reduce and reuse side of this thing, is recycling
is the end of the life cycle.
It's a fork in the road for a product that either gets disposed or recycled, and in some
cases, like with plastics, it can only be recycled a few times effectively.
And so I think that's something else that we want to talk about, especially when you
look at a lot of the plastics that are in the system.
We can have an exceptional recycling program, but there's still going to be waste coming
out of it.
And so I think something else for us to keep in mind.
Yep.
Reduce, reuse, then recycle.
In that order, yes.
Thanks.
Yep.
Don't create in the first place.
Yeah.
Other questions?
Get what you need.
Appreciate the time.
Thank you.
Just for the PB's benefit, all of these three work session items will be presented tomorrow
at council.
Okay.
Oh.
So just, we wanted to come to you all first and then go to council.
Thank you.
Work session begins at 11.30 a.m.
Okay.
All right.
Items for individual consideration, the public utility minutes.
Did anyone have any changes or corrections?
Okay.
Having none, they'll stand approved as presented.
The next item is consider recommending approval of a resolution appointing a member of the,
to the board of directors of the Texas Municipal Power Agency, a joint powers agency representing
the city of Denton, Texas, and declaring effective date.
PB members, my name is Tony Buent, I'm the chief financial officer for the city.
This item is to appoint a member for a two, for a new two year term.
The current appointee is Mayor Chris Watts.
The mayor has stated that he was, he'd be willing to continue to serve for an additional
two years.
There is no requirement that that appointee be a elected official of the city.
We do have a second appointee and they're, they serve staggered terms, so the other appointee
is Mr. Bill Cheek.
So the TNPA board is made up of eight board members, two from each of the participating
municipalities.
The mayor's current term expires on July 18th.
We are here to, to one, see if, what the PB's recommendation is regarding the mayor's appointment.
So I'd be clear too that, that is, you know, that is the mayor wanting to be, or asking
to be reappointed, you know, but certainly if there are other recommendations, we're
open to hear that as well from the, from the board today.
How many terms has he served already?
He's, he's been on the board since 2009.
And is, are there expiry to those, I mean, can he continue to serve?
Correct.
There's no term limits on that.
There's no term limits.
Well, and I, I know that he's most qualified and he got us through some very difficult
times.
So I'm inclined to support that resolution.
So we need a motion.
Yep.
We're trying to get this thing rolling.
Oh, did you say motion?
No, I need a motion.
Oh, so moved.
Second.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
That carries.
Okay.
Consider recommending an approval of a resolution appointing Frank Pugsley as the city's representative
to serve as a member of the Board of Directors of the Upper Trinity Regional Water District
and providing an effective date.
Evening board members.
Give me a second to pull this presentation up.
So just say a quick background on this particular item, the city of Denton is a member of the
Upper Trinity Regional Water District.
They're a state charter district that is authorized to provide water, wastewater services, also
provide a little bit of stormwater and watershed protection as well.
The Board of Directors is a decision making body.
They're responsible for developing funding and implementing regional water and wastewater
systems and they have board members that are representative of the member cities that exist
within the area served by Upper Trinity Regional Water District.
So Mr. Tim Fisher, who was our former director of water, has recently retired and had actually
served on Denton's as Denton's board representative since 2001.
So we're in the shopping around for a new representative on the board, Mr. Pugsley drew
the short straw and is now the has indicated a desire and allegedly an interest to fill
the position.
So upon the appointment, he will be able to fulfill the remainder of Mr. Fisher's term.
That term will end on May 31st of 2021 and he'll be eligible at that point to be reappointed
for another four year term with a resolution.
We have traditionally done these through a resolution that is brought before the board
and then is taken to the council for final approval.
Once that resolution is completed, it will be provided to the secretary of the Upper
Trinity Board and then they will vote to appoint Mr. Pugsley upon receipt of that or at their
next available meeting.
So that's all I have, I'd be glad to answer any questions that you might have.
Questions?
All right.
Do we have a motion?
So moved.
Second.
All in favor say aye.
Aye.
That one carries.
ACM update.
Yes, Madam Chair, members of the board, real quick update, in your packet you have a memorandum
to the board regarding some questions that were brought up at your last meeting about
attendance policy and talking with the city secretary, like this, I think strange, the
microphone is, and talking with the city secretary, that request stemmed from a request from city
council on attendance of not only the council but of their boards and commissions and Rosa
Rios as our new city secretary has been on the job about just under two months and so
she's going through a comprehensive review of our boards and commissions manual along
with just all the policies and procedures as any good new manager would do just to make
sure that everything's running appropriately and smoothly and so just looking through the
policies and procedures for the boards and commissions noted that the attendance should
be reported to council on a quarterly basis and it had been reported on a yearly basis
so what she's doing is just making sure that we're following the policies that have been
in place for the last number of years so it's just really more house cleaning housekeeping
kind of things and so that's why that was passed on to to the board members and committees
across the organization.
It's a policy we should be following it.
We need to come up with our own procedure for collecting that information and reporting
it or no sir I believe Kim Makin a recording secretary keeps track of attendance and so
that'll be reported to to the city secretary's office and and then reported to council as
needed she does a very good job of that again a couple of things you've got your future
agenda list a lot of budget items that you'll be hearing over the next number of weeks as
you as you conduct your meetings over the next throughout the summer the new business
matrix again we covered the item about the question the attendance policy I know there's
an item there about future PUB meetings we're bringing that to you all in an upcoming meeting
to discuss and see what options you all would like to consider and then the last thing is
not on your agenda and I don't know how many folks on the board are aware but George Morrow
our general manager for DME he announced his retirement earlier this month believe effective
June 1st of this year so just wanted you to be made aware of that that's why you saw Tony
Puente up at the podium to discuss the appointment for the TMPA board member actually Tony will
be the interim general manager until we go and recruit a successor to Mr. Morrow so just
wanted to pass that information on to you so you were aware thank you thank you just
go back to the attendance thing so we need to tell Kim if we're going to be absent or
we tell you ideally it would be great because I know Kim sends out the agendas ahead of
time once it's posted so it'd be best to send it to Kim and the only reason why I say
that is excuse me if you by chance copy the entire board just because it's what you do
you could be violating the Texas Open Meetings Act especially someone replies all so it'd
just be best just to email Kim you're certainly welcome to email me if you'd like and we'll
make note of that and quite honestly it's really just to make sure we have a quorum
yeah I was gonna say then she'll know if we have a quorum and then but now now there's
a category of excused or unexcused it's always been there yeah but we just have never paid
attention to it right somebody's gonna need to determine you're always in the hospital
or something like it's been determined it has been determined in the in the policy yeah
no I know it's always been there yeah nobody's made the determination actually made the determination
against the gray area of politics okay on to concluding items is there any items that
a board member would like to be put on a future agenda or any comments yeah Lily and I were
given a tour of the facilities on Friday absolutely delightful and we just wanted to go on record
as thanking the staff so I have the business cards I just like to read the names into the
record sure so Vanessa Ellison actually drove us around she's the sustainability coordinator
Brian Barner rusty Willard Frank Pugsley deputy director of wastewater Hector Ortiz and David
Hunter he gives a really good tour of the sewage plant by the way we haven't done that
recently we wanted to thank them for the time that they took out of their usual work and
their enthusiasm for their jobs yeah wanted that to go into the record I just wanted to
add that everything that that you said but also to include that it really I haven't toured
for about 20 years that was the last time I toured and it was just it was delightful
to see how innovative and forward-thinking our process is here in Denton and it's it
was yeah it was really I left there going oh this is wonderful and so everyone should
go on these tours I took my daughter who's a sustainability major at UT yeah she's gonna
be taking all that stuff back to Austin and comparing their solid waste I feel sorry for
them well I'm sorry I couldn't go I was supposed to go but something came up with another volunteer
opportunity that I have that I had to handle so all right any other items motion to adjourn