AI-generated transcript of City Council Committee of the Whole 02-15-23

[Zac Bears]: 23-032 committee the whole meeting notice Wednesday, February 15 2023 at 6pm. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Vice President Harris.

[Zac Bears]: Present. Five present, two absent. The meeting is called to order. There will be a meeting of the Medford City Council, Committee of the Whole on Wednesday, February 15th, 2023 at 6 p.m. in the Medford City Council Chamber on the second floor of Medford City Hall and via Zoom. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the draft waste removal contract request for proposals, paper 23-032. Committee has invited dpw Commissioner Tim McGivern, Alicia hunt director of planning development and sustainability and any additional representatives of the Office of Planning Development and Sustainability or the dpw to attend this meeting for further information aids and accommodations, please contact the city clerk at 781-393-2425 sincerely yours, Nicole morale Council President. So with that, we have a draft of the RFP for the new trash contract for the context for folks the limited context that I have on it is the city currently contracts out trash services our current vendor is I believe waste management that contract is up. And we are discussing the RFP to vendors for waste removal. Well, the citywide collection disposal and processing of solid waste and recyclables for the new contract and we have a draft RFP before us, put together by our procurement officer to director McGovern or Commissioner McGovern director hunt for our review. At this point, I will happily turn it over to one or both of you to give a presentation, and then we can move to questions from the council. I'll recognize Director Hunt.

[Alicia Hunt]: Mr. President, we are... Do we refer to you as Mr. President since you're chairing the meeting?

[Zac Bears]: Call me whatever you want.

[Alicia Hunt]: Mr. Vice President. Sorry. If you don't mind, I'm going to share screen.

[Zac Bears]: Absolutely.

[Alicia Hunt]: Prepare some slides. So we are actually going to split this between us. And I'm Alicia Hunt, Director of Planning, Development and Sustainability. There we go. And I will start the presentation. So first I did just want to acknowledge the Solid Waste Citizen Task Force that worked with us on this. Some of the members are here with us in the audience, and as well as several of the members are online as well. This evening, we wanted to actually recognize that Steve Dutero was a member of this task force. He was very active and extremely helpful. And Steve unfortunately passed away this fall during the course of our work. And so we just did want to acknowledge that this evening. So the task force, we were also supported by Strategy Zero Waste Solutions, Jeremy Drake and Gary Liss. And Jeremy is on the Zoom as well, if there are questions best answered by him. So the task force met during the fall, they met very frequently. They volunteered to meet more often than we asked of them because there was enough work that we needed them to. And then they felt called to do that. They helped with the survey. They did outreach themselves, staffing tables, going out on their own, talking to people. They reviewed the results with us. They made process recommendations. They made recommendations of what you'll see in this RFP, and they helped us vet assumptions that we were making. So today we're gonna go through, I'm just gonna quickly on the background of what's going on today. what the process has been, our timeline, and then I'm gonna hand it over to Tim to talk about the RFP, the goals, our evaluation criteria, and discussion with you all. So just so that everybody is aware, I know the Councilors know this, but we did have, in 2010, we signed a contract with Waste Management In 2021 we selected garbage to garden as a recommended curbside composting. We did this year extend the contract with waste management one year, because we have been advised that if any contractor is selected and even if it was to be waste management and they were to change their services in any manner. They would need a year to ramp up in order to have proper staffing to acquire new vehicles, et cetera. We've been advised that even waste management told us that they would want a year between the old contract before, between the signing of the contract and starting a new contract with us, in addition to any other vendor wanting that time. This year we also selected a preferred mattress hauler. Mattresses are no longer legally allowed to be disposed of in trash, which is what had been occurring in Medford. And we brought on HelpSee as a textile collection hauler. You know most of this, but this is what our current waste services are. A gallon, sorry, we do a trash toter, a recycling toter every other week. Yard waste is 15 weeks a year. Best practice according to DEP is to do at least 20 weeks a year of yard waste. You can get your white goods picked up for $26 for a curbside fee. We allow three bulk items per household to be picked up every other week. And I have to let you know that that costs the city $25 for every item, whether or not the item is picked up. There's about a 10 to 15% rate of scheduled pickups that the person doesn't put the item out and the city pays that $25 item. Anyhow, we're currently paying $400,000 a year for those items. Um, and there's a recycling overflow compactor at the city yard. Currently, everybody knows that we pick up single family homes. We're picking up all one to three family homes, municipal buildings, obviously. We're also picking up all the schools, including the Catholic schools. Most houses of worship in Medford get some level of service. The five business districts all get trash and recycling, although not all businesses are aware that they have recycling available to them. There are scattered businesses throughout the entire city that are on the city's waste pickup. There are at least 25 condominium buildings, and there are four housing authority sites that are currently being picked up by the city's contract. This is how much by pound. It's kind of interesting. This goes back to 2007. And you can see between 2007 and 2011, there was a reduction. 2011 is when we moved to single stream recycling. and our waste amount from then plateaued for quite a while, our recycling completely plateaued, and that's when it went up to then and then it plateaued, and then there's the yard waste is that tiny little thing. Interestingly, during the pandemic, waste poundage went up noticeably, you can see that bump there, but not recycling or yard waste. So far with the RFP process, We did a community-wide survey in four languages. We had over 750 responses. We tabled at more than 10 community events and in public spaces. We hosted public meetings. We've been participating in the New England Regional Working Group. So this is a working group of communities in New England that are looking to get a new waste contract in the next year or two so that we meet regularly and compare notes. And then the consultants have spoken with 10 regional haulers, I mean, including waste management, but 10 of them, and all the major players have expressed interest in proposing for our contract. And then we've been strategizing on RFP approaches and options. Oh, sorry. So I realized that people were probably going to want to know what we learned from that survey. The biggest thing that people really pushed was that they wanted more education and clarity on waste. That was really the biggest thing we heard from them. People wanted more recycling, they wanted more yard waste pickup, they wanted more composting organics pickup. And they wanted more options for how to dispose of different types of waste. And there was concern about rodents. I'll just touch on rodents to say that our health department is very supportive of composting because it's commercial composting in these containers that have locked lids. And our garbage cans and our dumpsters do not have locked lids, but the compost bins do. So they're actually very supportive of this. In response to this desire for increased recycling, The DPW has actually been working on putting together a hazardous waste disposal day. I don't know if you want to get this in while I keep talking. So it's this Saturday, it's Saturday, April 8th, and there's a flyer for that. This flyer is going in all the water bills of the city in the first week of April. The graph sort of indicates how, sorry, it's not, it's really hard to read, but it's about what different kinds of things people want to dispose of, how satisfied they are with the current process and what different processes they want. It's not really, we could go into it if there's interest. So this is actually, I should ask Tim to hand those out, because looking ahead, what's next? And this is our process moving forward. Tim, do you want to just use my computer to show the graphs there?

[Tim McGivern]: Sure. Okay. All right. My name is Tim McGibbon, Commissioner of Public Works. Thank you for hearing us and having this discussion tonight. So what's next? So this is a timeline that we have in front of us. So the key step here is reviewing the RFP and having pre-proposal meetings with haulers. That's really what's happening right now. That's taking us into March. we're gonna receive proposals back in June 2023, and then awarding a contract in beginning of July 2023. And then 12 months later, July 1st, 2024, the new operations begin. Okay, so just, I'm not gonna read all these goals, you can get into the details, but out of all that work that Alicia just talked about, we came out at this point in the process with some goals, controlling the cost, fairness, transparency, expanding the recycling and composting programs and service, taking a step towards zero waste, and also decreasing multiple haulers in our business districts, and if we can capture that in the process as well. So procurement notes, just so everybody understands, is a process that we're following, but it doesn't fall under typical public procurement law. So we're exempt from a lot of the laws. However, it's very important to understand that we want a very competitive process. We are doing an RFP process, so we're going to be reviewing proposals that different haulers give us, and then we're going to evaluate those proposals and look at the prices that they're offering associated with those services and choose based off of specific evaluation criteria that is defined in the RFP. So this allows, obviously a competitive marketplace, it allows us to compare prices for services proposed by different companies. And it also allows us to negotiate that service and price when we enter a contract with whoever wins that contest effectively. And one of the ways we'd like to partner with city council is we'd like to enter a contract that's longer than three years with options for extensions as well. So moving forward, especially when we get into the contract stage, but likely before that, obviously, coordinating that with you all. So the way that the RFP is structured is, you know, as you can imagine, there's a lot of services kind of within the realm of solid waste services. So we have broken this down, obviously with our consultant, to a few different scopes that bidders can bid on. They can bid on all three, I'm sorry, the language I'm using, it's not a bid, they can respond with a proposal to all three or just one. So as you can see, scope A is the major scope, that's our trash, that's our yard trimmings, that's our recyclables, white goods, so the bulk of the products that we dispose of. Scope B is organics, so that's your curbside compost pickup. And then scope C, bulky items. part of what we're trying to do here, because we have these three different scopes and we know that we're setting this up so we can evaluate it. Based off of those scopes, we'd like to participate in a preferred hauler program with this new contract. So basically the winner of scope A also becomes preferred hauler. In order to do that, we would need to continue our partnership with city council to have a ordinance in place that would that we're going to be able to tie together recyclables and trash disposal from our haulers that enter the city and do service here. So Councilor Collins, I know, has been working on that. We've been in communication. The team that's working on this at City Hall as well as the City Council subcommittee that's working on this. So we'll continue to march down that road. Basically, this is a way to create efficiency, minimize the number of trucks. So in other words, the preferred hauler that is solicited from a large office building or something like that, they can work their route for those private services with the city route, create efficiencies, and we charge a user fee that captures the fuel costs and the disposal costs of that waste that then gets put into an enterprise account that feeds back into the system to help us pay the processing fees. So we have a lot of detail on that and we can certainly answer questions tonight, but we're going to have more time to answer those questions and get to the bottom of it. Scope A, so who are we talking about, who are we servicing? The goal here really is to not really, we're mimicking what we do now and we're trying to improve it, so that's really the key here. But we'll also try to add transparency and some sort of clarity on how the process works. So residential dwelling units that are between one and four units, commercial buildings that are relatively small, up to 25, 100 square feet. Business districts have services now that we're trying to mimic moving forward, houses of worship K 12 schools, so as you can see the list is very similar to the list that Alicia presented on what we're doing now, probably the biggest difference is those condominium buildings are no longer included. So that's one of the bigger takeaways here. And that's really to level the playing field and to get us on track with what is best practices out there. And one of the ideas that I think a lot of people have in their mind is these rows of carts that are serviced and picked up. That's not ideal. So we would like to move to more of a container system and a preferred hauler with a lower rate that is negotiated. So that's really the direction we're trying to hit. So the scope of services, the change here that we're exploring is moving from every week trash pickup to bi-weekly trash pickup, but that goes right alongside compost pickup. Compost is the dirty, smelly, wet, heavy stuff. Trash is the drier, not as smelly, not that big of a deal to have sitting around a little bit longer. in your garage type situation. So we're looking at changing trash every other week with the 64 gallon container, and then keeping the recycling the way it is, that really wouldn't change much for the average user. And then that every other week trash and weekly compost, like I said, go together. So what today is compost and trash is separated in the future. So you're taking, you know, 25 to 30% of your, whatever the number is, 50% of your trash, putting it into the compost bin with a lockable, a sealable lid and putting your trash into another bin that is getting collected every other week. Knowing that that is relatively new, cutting edge, it's the direction we'd like to head in. We're also getting prices in this process so we can understand what weekly trash pickup looks like as well. But I will say we're looking at balancing costs and controlling costs here too. So obviously we are looking at what happens when we increase costs for compost pickup. We have to find some place to decrease costs to stay within a reasonable budget. So that's the game that we're playing and we'll have a lot more pieces to play that game with once we get responses back from the RFP. evaluation criteria. This is where City Council could certainly help us. This is something that will be some work, and it's evaluating what comes back in this proposal. It's obviously, if not the city's biggest contract, one of the city's biggest contracts. So what we'd like to evaluate it based on is experience of the haulers, references those haulers have, key personnel qualifications. We anticipate working directly with somebody as a liaison from one of these companies directly with the city. Transition and implementation plan, which is going to be critical in my mind because I'd like to iron out every possible wrinkle of operation before we implement. Plan of services, what exactly are they doing, how are they doing it, and what can the resident and other expect. Financial responsibility of the company. customer service, outreach and education. That's a huge piece. As Alicia mentioned, that is going to be something that we're going to be exploring, getting some help on understanding exactly what the city is going to need to do from an outreach and education standpoint, environmental benefits, value added offerings and anything else. I also say the outreach and education. We're also asking, as you noticed in the RFP, we're asking the respondents to help us out considerably in that arena as well. So that would be part of the expectation. They're just not going to let us hang while we try to transition to potentially a new set of operations. All right, well, thank you very much. And the rest of the time is we could take the discussion where you'd like to take it. We have our consultants on board, and we're happy to answer questions and take it wherever you'd like.

[Zac Bears]: So if you could, just on the timeline that's up on the screen, is that ideal or are we going to have to get there by, you know, is that June, July, 2023? And sorry, maybe the transcript is covering what I can see here. Okay. Start services, July 1, 2024. So that's why we're awarding because we've won a year.

[Tim McGivern]: It's short.

[Zac Bears]: It's short. Yeah. Great. Thank you.

[Tim McGivern]: I'm going to go to councilor Caraviello.

[Richard Caraviello]: So you talked about the condos. Are we no longer going to be doing the condos? because I know we're gonna be getting the calls saying I pay the same tax as everybody else.

[Tim McGivern]: Sure, so the preferred hauling system is a solution to that, to try to get lower rates, treat condominium buildings, kind of like they're not at a best practice, how they should be treated, but we understand that there's a certain service that they get now, but not all condominiums buildings in the city get that services.

[Richard Caraviello]: I know a lot of them.

[Tim McGivern]: So we're trying to level the playing field,

[Richard Caraviello]: We understand that there may be some hits and some issues, but that's why we're trying to... Would there be negotiation with the condos to maybe go with the preferred hauler to take their waste also? Yes.

[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So the idea is that the preferred hauler will give us a price list. Right now, if you are an entity in Medford and you need waste service, You call up the different vendors, you have to figure out who the haulers are, and they give you different pricing. And sometimes they give you different pricing based on what you need, but sometimes they give you different pricing based on the day of the week. And so the idea would be that there would be a price list and they would know, and that everybody who wants a 12 yard dumpster would get charged in Medford the same rate for the 12 yard dumpster. And in theory, that's gonna be a lower rate under this contract than it would be today, because we would be recommending them as the Medford hauler. So they will give us lower rates for our resident, our community, because we're recommending them as the preferred hauler. So it'll be easy for these condos. There will be a list, a price list. They'll see what the price list is. They'll have somebody from waste management come out and say, how much waste are you generating? How many units in your building? Here's the size that you need. This is what you should have. And here's the price. So in theory, this is going to lower the rates. I mean, I can't promise any rates until we get our proposals.

[Richard Caraviello]: So the condo will have the opportunity to get the city negotiated price?

[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, absolutely.

[Richard Caraviello]: I am in favor of the extra yard waste because I know myself. Everybody's doing their own yard work. I am in favor of that. What is the feeling on the bulk items if people would have to pay for them?

[Alicia Hunt]: So the best practice for MassDEP is that you charge at least $5 an item. Right now we're paying $25 an item. We want to see what sort of proposal they're giving the different vendors are giving us. We do want to charge back to residents, at least the $5 an item. Part of the best practice system for the state is the more boxes you can check on their best practice list, the larger an annual grant that they will give you automatically. So it'll get us more points. So a larger grant for the city. We also hope that if people are charged some nominal amount, five or $10, they will put the item out. They won't forget to put it out because they actually paid for this service. It'll also help offset the cost to the city.

[Richard Caraviello]: Did the survey reflect people paying some type of nominal fee for the bulk items? Was that asked in the survey?

[Alicia Hunt]: So we did ask about that. So Madeline is here as a graduate student who worked with us on it. I actually wanted to acknowledge her. She had class, so had to come over late. And she really dug deep into the results of the survey. And we asked about that in the survey.

[Katherine Buckingham]: Yeah, I think, to be honest, if people would be willing to pay more.

[Alicia Hunt]: Can you just, then they can hear you on the Zoom. You don't have to bend over. Yeah.

[Katherine Buckingham]: We asked people if they would be willing to pay more for their trash collection services, and people mostly said they would need to have more information about that. They didn't say no, but they said maybe.

[Richard Caraviello]: I mean, if they pay maybe 50% or something. Or maybe we, what do we get? Two a year or four a year for the bulk items? bulk items? The ones that we pay for. Three every two weeks, I think.

[Alicia Hunt]: Three every two weeks.

[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, so maybe if we cut that down also. I mean, how many bulk items do they get a week?

[Tim McGivern]: Oh, I think we're up to like 17,000 or something for the year, but I don't know. It's a massive number, $400,000 worth, $25 per item. And also, we did talk about this at the workshop with the public as well, and I do recall feedback being uh, that five to $10 range is small enough to a lot of people that have a little bit of skin in the game. So they're going to be held responsible, you know, um, because we get about 10 to 15% of no-shows like Alicia was saying. So it's a pretty frustrating that we're paying for that. So, uh, just a little bit of money. So if the city's paying some percentage of that, uh, you know, just looking to the resident to have a little skin in the game, make sure that, you know, that they get the product out on the street in time for pickup and go from there and see how that takes.

[Richard Caraviello]: Is that number going up?

[Zac Bears]: If you take the number, it's about 615 bulk items every two weeks.

[Richard Caraviello]: That's a lot.

[Zac Bears]: Like I said, I think we're at like 17,000.

[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, I did 400,000 divided by 20. Yeah, I mean, maybe you can look at maybe less of that. Have you noticed an increase in the bulk items? Is that trending up?

[Tim McGivern]: Yes, in general, it's standing up, I would say.

[Richard Caraviello]: So, someone like the biweekly for the proteins, would the smaller receptacle handle two weeks? Same size receptacle, so the same size... I mean, keeping what we have, would that handle two weeks worth of rubbish?

[Tim McGivern]: For everybody, no. I think there's different levels of rubbish, but that's, I think, once you remove that compostable items and those go in the 13-gallon bin, The idea is that the 64-gallon bin will be enough for the two weeks. But, you know, if there's overflow situations, we're going to have accommodations for that as well.

[Richard Caraviello]: So we'll continue, still continue buying the bags?

[Tim McGivern]: Buying bags, yeah. And we're going to look at what the haulers propose, too, because we brainstormed what's feasible, but we're letting the haulers tell us what will work for them.

[Richard Caraviello]: Because I think they're currently at like $5 a bag now, right?

[Tim McGivern]: I think so.

[Richard Caraviello]: Yeah, because my wife buys them. Maybe we can work on a better cost for that.

[Tim McGivern]: The big thing to remember, though, is the stinky, heavy stuff is removed from that product.

[Richard Caraviello]: How much demand is there for composting now?

[Alicia Hunt]: So as of the end of January, there are 770 people in Medford who are paying for the garbage to garden service. And there are approximately, last summer, we last checked with Black Earth, there were about 500 people paying for that service.

[Zac Bears]: So that's- By people, you mean households?

[Alicia Hunt]: Households, sorry. So about 1,200, yeah. 1,200 households are currently in Medford paying for this service. And so we do believe there is significantly more demand from people who either don't know it's an option or aren't willing to just pay.

[Richard Caraviello]: Will they continue to pay or will the city pay?

[Alicia Hunt]: The idea would be that we would pay and they would not have to pay any more.

[Richard Caraviello]: What do you think would the estimated cost of that be?

[Alicia Hunt]: We actually don't know what a citywide compost pick up.

[Richard Caraviello]: What are they paying per household now?

[Alicia Hunt]: So I'll tell you, they're paying $100 a household a year, but that's not going to go, it's going to be dramatically lower than that because that cost for a truck that's stopping maybe once or twice on this street, once or twice on that street, there'll be dramatic efficiencies.

[Richard Caraviello]: So would there be an appetite to lower the rate and have them continue to pay?

[Alicia Hunt]: So when we did do this, we did, when we put out the garbage to garden, we got the lower rate. And so I guess if you're asking us if through this, we would ask residents to pay, then it would become an opt-in service. Because we obviously, we can't require people to pay, that would be a tax. Or if required.

[Richard Caraviello]: If they're paying now, if you're able to get the number down to a lower amount, maybe $50, $75, they would still be saving. Do we always do Medford Housing Authority?

[Alicia Hunt]: So yeah, Medford Housing.

[Richard Caraviello]: Because I remember seeing like commercial regular trucks going in there, picking up, that's why I didn't.

[Alicia Hunt]: So when the city rolled out, I can't speak before 2010, but when the city rolled out the TOTA program in 2010, those four sites that we listed, it's the two family sites, don't make me say them right now. And then Walkling Court and the Fellsway Apartments have been on the toter bin system since 2010. The other facilities that the Housing Authority have are not. They're on a private contract that the Housing Authority pays for. But they would very much like to take part in a preferred hauler. They have been hoping for a while that they could, quote, piggyback on our waste contract. It's something we actually spoke with Jeffrey Driscoll, the executive director, last week about it.

[Richard Caraviello]: And last, I'm finishing up with the commercial stuff. I mean, one of my peeves is driving through the square and seeing rubbish all over the place. We don't we would like to stop it. I mean, can. How do we, what is the plan, so the business district.

[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, so one of those solutions that we're exploring and heading in the direction of is working with businesses with limited space especially in the business districts for container disposal. Sounds great, but it's a very challenging thing just thinking about it, which put the container. Yep, ready for the container the city would have to help, I think, with some of the potentially our public space. So there's some work to do there for sure. So because what we don't want to continue is black trash bags in our squares once a week, is, is the option of.

[Richard Caraviello]: picking them up in the evening, like some cities do. Not gonna rule it out. Huh? Not gonna rule it out. No, I guess, hey, let them put it out and then they'll come by like at midnight. Because I mean, most of these companies are 24-hour companies anyways. Yeah. And they would pick it up, rather than leaving it out. And that's, I think we've all gone through the screen, we've seen rubbish blowing all over the place. Another thing is, I noticed certain businesses are overloaded with cardboard. I mean, is there some kind of fee that they should be paying for the businesses that, let's say I drive by certain ones and they got mounds and mounds of cardboard there, which is beyond normal. In a dumpster? Well, they just put them out on the street and we take them. Okay. Like if you drive by a lake on Salem Street, where that imaginary restaurant is, you go by there and he's got probably hundreds of cottons of thing there. The pack show up in the hillside, you go by- You're talking about Tacuba? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there's these places that they do over and above what, I mean, maybe they should be limited to, let them take it down to the city yard and do it themselves.

[Zac Bears]: I mean, I just interject. I used to work at what used to be Rosa's near Salvatore's and I did not put up the trash. Yeah, I mean, yeah.

[Richard Caraviello]: And it's like tons of boxes. I mean, there's normal trash, but they put on it, some places put on inordinate amounts.

[Tim McGivern]: They should have a container that's appropriately sized in a right spot. Maybe they share it with someone in the future. And they have a preferred hauler agreement with our- I know like years in the past,

[Richard Caraviello]: We tried to work with the Chamber to find somewhere to put a dumpster where people can – where the businesses can do it. I mean, there's not many places in the squares.

[Tim McGivern]: We're trying to keep all options at the table. Almost like we're trying to set up a framework so we can work with the hauler to really focus in on some of those solutions. Because right now, I think you're highlighting it. It's very challenging. Yeah.

[Richard Caraviello]: So yeah, like I said, that's always been a peep of mine living on. Yeah, that'd be something I'd like to see if they can get it at Nike.

[Tim McGivern]: We keep that on the table, and I think that there's more to do there is really taking a close look at how we do the areas of limited space, commercial entities that want service. I think we're stepping in the right direction, having a preferred hauler, having it set up so we can assist with trying to figure out the best way to haul stuff out of our squares. The way that it's happening now, there's so much room for improvement.

[Richard Caraviello]: Do we pay for the container down at the city with the cardboard? Yes. We pay for the hallway, so we own the- We own the thing. How much are we spending right now on- I don't know off the top of my head, as far as hauling the- Well, yeah, I mean, with the advent of Amazon, you buy something this big and they send you a box that big. Sure, sure. Have we seen an increase in how many times they're emptying that out over the last few years with all these home deliveries?

[Alicia Hunt]: So that was something that I took a lot of complaints about in addition to DPW and it used to be a dumpster and it was people had to know when it was getting emptied in order to get their stuff in there because it was filling so fast. And about two years ago in the middle of the pandemic, we actually got a grant and replaced the dumpster with a compactor. And so now that gets picked up once a week. And I don't, I've not heard about it being over full. Like, we know, I no longer get complaints to my office.

[Richard Caraviello]: No, no, I'm just saying, I mean, I mean, have we seen an increase in the amount of time that is being emptied in the advent of Amazon and all this stuff, people getting limited house now, you know, with the amount of cardboard. I mean, I know when I get some, I can't fit it in. You know, I don't want to take up all the space in my second, so I'll bring it down there myself. Are we seeing that being filled up more than we have in the past?

[Tim McGivern]: I don't think we've asked for it to be hauled away more than usual. But that doesn't mean much of anything. I'll have to get back to you.

[Richard Caraviello]: One last suggestion that I have for people. The haulers do not take any kind of wood or anything from on you from your part. So maybe if there could be some kind of dumpster at the city yard that would be monitored when people bring like, you know, like maybe small amounts of like wood and things, you know, maybe they, like I say, you can't, the haulers won't take them at all. And he goes, if you put it in, they'll just take it out and they'll just leave it on the ground there. So maybe a dumpster or something for these, and only open during hours. so you don't get construction guys, but for the guy that's got maybe a few pieces of wood or something, and they can bring it down and get rid of it.

[Tim McGivern]: Hard to monitor in a forest, but.

[Richard Caraviello]: Well, I mean, the other stuff is fine, but.

[Tim McGivern]: I think there's some of that that might happen already a little bit. We do have a dumpster we pick up. We don't advertise it. We use it for people who dump, clean that up, people who leave. when they're on the streets. Yeah, so every now and then, I think.

[Richard Caraviello]: they wouldn't take them.

[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, yeah. We would need a sort of another arm of operations, I think, to do that. But it's worth keeping on the table when we're talking about that.

[Richard Caraviello]: That's about it for me.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Caraviello. Commissioner McGibbon, you just advertised it. Yeah, but no one heard that. Nobody heard that. I literally just got a phone call about this meeting. I'm going to go actually to President Morell on Zoom, and then I'll come to you, Councilor Caraviello.

[Nicole Morell]: Thank you, Vice President Bears. Thank you, Commissioner McGivern, Director Hunt, and all the members of the Solid Waste Task Force. From my work, I have just a little bit of insight about how much work goes into process of choosing new waste haulers, so I really appreciate all the work everyone's done and for the presentation tonight. Just a few quick questions. I know I've already raised this to you, Tim, but I just want to raise again just with the Increasing the number of yard waste pickups, that's great, but just thinking about when, if it's possible to shift that. I understand, as you've said in the past, trying to avoid that first snow. And I know it's going to take some years before we see a pattern, but I think we're having people doing yard work later and later into the year compared to past years with a warming climate. I just kind of want to throw that out there for one consideration because I know I did have a number of folks reaching out saying I'm just breaking my yard now and I've missed the window for yard waste pickup for this season so. Don't have to respond, but I just wanted to flag that one. I'm really happy to see that there's a focus on or a desire for education. To that end, are you seeking or do you know if any of these haulers will be providing data back? So you might be able to tailor that education as far as contamination or issues like that, that we can better communicate to the community where we're seeing challenges as far as like what's actually being able to be processed and getting to the right streams.

[Tim McGivern]: The short answer is yes. So one of the things we'll be evaluating is what they can offer for technology. We're already seeing the technology change as far as data collection goes and enforcement goes. So we expect more of that. And we do expect that the responses will have information on how, you know, what they can collect your data and how the city might be able to use that, especially when it comes to making things more efficient. So I hope to see some of that.

[Nicole Morell]: Great, thank you. And then with regards to composting, I know there's a few different services and we're already in some sort of discount program with Garbage to Garden. Is there consideration for what type of processing that composting would have, whether it's like I don't think it's biofuel is the right term but you know there's the organic things like that that go to actual composting for your garden and then there's generating fuel from it. Is there consideration for that or is that like very into the weeds?

[Tim McGivern]: Yes, so that would fall under the category of the end disposal site. So where is the compost going? Where is the trash going? Where are the recyclables going? So they do have to respond to that, and we are considering it as part of the criteria. There's a couple of different common ways that you can deal with compost waste. One of them is similar to what a waste water plant does. It has bacteria do a lot of the work. And then another one is just sort of the farm way to do it. You mix in the browns and the greens and take care of it that way. So two very different processes, two different results, two different end games for compost. So I think we look at a little bit more favorable to do it the farm way, but that has challenges associated with it. So there are benefits to doing it the way the anaerobic or wastewater style way as well. So both options on the table, and we're going to be interested in what the haulers have to say.

[Nicole Morell]: Great. Thank you. And last question for me for now. You were talking about the option of taking trash to biweekly. You said 64 gallon bins. Is that the size of bins we have now?

[Zac Bears]: Yes.

[Nicole Morell]: Thank you. Okay. That's all I have for right now. Thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, President Morell. And I'm gonna go to Councilor Collins, but just depending on how long the rest of the questions take, around 6.55, 7, I'm gonna ask my colleague's deference for me to ask my question since I have to leave at 7.30, but go to you, Councilor Collins.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you, President Bears. And I actually just have one. It was my privilege to serve on the Solid Waste Task Force and all the work that's gone into this request for proposal. So thank you so much for presenting it to us here formally. And of course, thanks to my fellow task force members. I was just curious, kind of in terms of the regional sphere of waste haulers that exist, how many responses you were expecting to get from the RFPs, how many waste haulers you're expecting to reach out to, just how many different scenarios do you think we can expect to reconsider?

[Alicia Hunt]: Do you want to see if Jeremy wants to answer that?

[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, maybe we can see if my consultant can answer that question.

[Alicia Hunt]: So our consultants actually spoke to a number. We got a large list of potential haulers. Jeremy, are you prepared to respond to that question?

[Zac Bears]: I recognize Jeremy. Jeremy, if you could just give us your name and address for the record, please.

[Jeremy Drake]: Sure thing. Jeremy Drake, 2 Briarwood Lane, Missoula, Montana, 59803. Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you for council members for the opportunity to speak to you tonight. In terms of the hollers that we determined are interested in the Medford RFP. We conducted interviews with 10 different service providers in the area. seven of which are what we consider potential primes. The potential primes would be the haulers that would take on scope A, that's trash, recycling, yard, white goods, that kind of big chunk of the work. And they included major players in the area, including Casella, Waste Management, Republic, And several others that I don't have off the top of my head, but we asked it a pointed question. Are you interested in this RFP? And all of them responded, yes, they are. One of the key pieces there was that they picked up on the preferred hauler piece, which is really a way to create a more efficient solid waste and recycling system for the entire city, which creates efficiencies and incentives for more businesses to get on board with the preferred hauler. As the preferred hauler gets more businesses, we're going to be asking in the proposal for rate reduction tiers. So what we spoke with the haulers about was this assumption that If they get more businesses, which means denser collection routes, their costs will go down. And so we're going to ask them, what are the tiers at which you can guarantee rate reductions for everyone in the city that's paying for your services? Is it for every 100 new businesses that you sign up, you can drop a certain amount? Every 200 businesses, you can drop a certain amount? And that's the kind of incentive that's going to build up this preferred hauler system. And so the haulers we spoke to all caught on to that and said, oh, so if we don't respond to this, we're basically giving up our future in Medford. They understand that this is an opportunity for them to compete for the future of doing business in Medford. It's not that they'll be excluded from doing business in Medford. It's just that the market is going to create the conditions to support that preferred hauler system. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Zac Bears]: Great, thanks, Jeremy. Are you good, Councilor Collins? Great, thanks, Councilor Collins. I'll go to Councilor Saint.

[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. One of the things that you've mentioned and that Councilor Morell has noted was the point about education. And I was wondering what, in terms of education, we can do from the city when it comes to trash and communicating that message to our residents. There's a lot of work to do there, I think.

[Tim McGivern]: We have options. So Alicia mentioned a grant from DEP, so there's some potential revenue, if we do this right, that we could look at having some help, some funded help. There's taking advantage of the hauler and what they propose. So they'll have a key personnel, staff. What are they offering and how does that work? then we may have existing staff work on certain things, like you've seen a flyer tonight, things like that. So I think that there's a lot of prongs on that fork, and we don't know exactly how they all align at the moment, but we know that we have a lot of options on the table, and if we do this right, we should get some funding to help with it. What's really important in my mind is the fact that any change that we make to anybody's sort of daily or weekly routine, we're gonna have to drum it into them to help change it. And there are a number of ways to do that. And I think Alicia's office is really good at that. My office and offices are not as good at that. So we're open to continue that sort of collaboration, obviously with the mayor's office as well and anything the city council can offer. And we'll just kind of attack it the best that we can with a strategy.

[Alicia Hunt]: I think that a number of people have asked about stickers on the containers. It says what goes in them. In this day and age, that's like a no brainer. In my mind, people have said, why don't we do it this year? And I suddenly picture who is gonna put 18,000 stickers because that's how many toters that we have out there for recycling right now. But if we had a new hauler, then that's part of a new contract, would in fact perhaps be putting stickers, right? If it's somebody other than waste management, they wanna cover the waste management on there. If it is waste management, then they can take the time to go out and put, these stickers informational. I mean, that's just one little thing, but that's sort of where we've been trying to think is like, how do you really get this into people? And we will be needing to think about, there are the people who actually want more information, and we're trying to push out more information about what you can recycle and what you can't. The state's been working on standardizing it to make it easier for everybody. And then there are the people who just want us to take their waste away, and they don't actually care. And so how do you communicate to them? So that'd be different strategies, right?

[Justin Tseng]: That's I think that last group is particularly like a challenge that will, you know, with any changes that we make in the system, we'll face but um, I really appreciate what you guys have to say about putting it in context with RFP and putting with with that as well. Um, with With the survey itself that you guys fielded, I heard that it was a great success, even from people outside the department and outside the task force. Could you guys speak a little bit to what the demographics of the survey looked like and if you saw anything significant between maybe neighborhoods or different types of users and just different demographic groups?

[Katherine Buckingham]: Yeah, hi again. We had pretty good response rate, but we did not ask like demographic information beyond the size of household that people lived in to get a sense of their waste needs. So we did get a pretty good distribution of one person to five or more person households, but it was more heavily weighted towards people who lived in like single family homes. But I think that also just reflects Medford as city having more single family homes.

[Justin Tseng]: Thank you. You can make this super quick, and I know you've already spoken to a bit of this, but I remember we talked about this once back, and you were particularly excited to talk about, to me, to explain why increased investment in composting could, at the end of the day, lower costs for a city. And I think it would be really great if you could just reiterate and explain that really quickly once more.

[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And so some of it has to do with the weight of trash. So we pay both per pickup and we pay for weight. And so there is some amount of the wet, the gross stuff weighs more. And so the tonnage would go way down on that. And it's less to dispose of compost than it is to dispose of the solid waste trash. And right now we're paying for it as solid waste trash. Some of the costs though, we realize there's a lot of money wrapped up in the number of trucks and the prevailing wages and the drivers. And so unless you reduce the number of trucks running around the city, it's really hard to reduce costs because that is a fixed cost regardless of how much people put into trash recycling and composting. And I'm afraid I'm not doing it as good a justice as I was the other week. I apologize.

[Justin Tseng]: No, that's all good. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you to the Solid Waste Task Force for all the work that you guys have been doing. A lot of my questions have already been asked today, or we've already talked about them, so I feel pretty good about where we are.

[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you, Councilor Tseng. President Morell, are you raising your hand again or hold hand?

[Nicole Morell]: Still up, that's, sorry, people do that to me all the time.

[Zac Bears]: Great, well then I get to my questions. I have a few, gonna start with more of the service provision questions, and then a lot of my questions are on cost and cost mitigation. First question is the phone call I got, and I'm guessing most of the feedback that I'm gonna get based on this meeting is deep concern about shifting from weekly to biweekly trash pickup. And I think the second concern I'm gonna get is you're trying to make me compost. Now, I understand that that's an educational thing, and that there's gonna be a lot of work there. I understand that there could be cost benefits that could be in fact a cost mitigation piece, not just environmental and cost mitigation also cost mitigation I think that's really important, but I just want to flag that and I'm sure that the task force acknowledge that that and that you've talked about it tonight. That's going to be the feedback when this goes public and I just think we're going to be need to be really consistent and clear about what that means and a lot of my later questions are going to come back to, you know, we're all we're gaining all the options we're going to have the prices that the RFP is really well structured so that we can go to residents and say, if you want weekly, here's what it's going to cost. And then we have to talk about the trade offs of that cost right. So, but that's just my first flag and I know we're all on the same page on it but I just wanted to really put it out there because I literally someone called me twice this meeting and then left me a voicemail that I listened to. And I was like, yeah, there's a lot of people who weekly right now, they're already filling up the bin on a weekly basis, buying overflow bags, et cetera. And I understand that the goal here is cost mitigation and reducing waste, but that there's also the balance of resident experience and potential negative consequences of people who don't want to change behavior and instead just try to find alternate ways to dispose of waste in an even worse way than we're doing now, right? At least it's going into a bin right now. And so I just want to put that out there. If you want to comment on that, that's fine.

[Alicia Hunt]: Just very briefly, I want to make sure that people know that even today, if you want another, if you fill up two toters of trash regularly, or more than one, you can pay an annual fee to get a second toter for trash. And they put a second sticker on there, making it clear that you've paid for that. So it is an option for people who who just produce more. Some of this is the best practice of there's a certain amount that you get for free, and if you're making a household choice to have that much waste, then you can pay for it, or you can think about where is this all coming from.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I hear that. Second is on the compost bin. You know where I live. I got 25 stairs up to my house. If I fill up a 13 gallon compost, you know, I don't, you know, if I keep the compost bin down at street level, I'm not going to use it. If I bring it up to the house level, I then have to carry a 13 gallon bin down every week with compost, full of compost, or maybe not me, maybe my, my, you know, everyone in the city at this point knows I love my family, right? Maybe it's my, my mom or my dad who, you know, or maybe it's an elderly person or whatever. I just think there may be some access issues and around that, that I don't know that you can mitigate if we go in that direction but I just think we need to be cognizant of it and try to, you know, think about how it would work. I don't know. It sounds like you have a comment on what I'm saying, but I'm interested.

[Tim McGivern]: My only comment really was, well, what happens to it today? It probably goes in the waste stream.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, it does.

[Tim McGivern]: In a hypothetical situation, you would take that garbage down to whatever that street level, right? Yeah. So those stairs. So you're probably doing that however many times per week, and then it gets taken away once a week. So that movement or that process wouldn't necessarily need to change. It just would be for soggy wet trash all the time instead of all the trash.

[Zac Bears]: Heavy, soggy wet equals heavy.

[Tim McGivern]: Heavy, soggy wet trash. And then you're keeping your soggy wet trash in probably the same place that you kept your trash. Yeah. Most likely. And that might be down near the street. So instead of pulling out the 64 gallon bin, you're pulling out your 13 every week and your 64 every other consecutive week. But I also want to tack on what Alicia said. We're trying to change the base level of service, but we're not trying to create a situation where people can't get their garbage taken away. So those options will still be on the table, whether it's an extra bin, overflow bags, whatever. We're lowering the bar a little bit. We, as a society, need to head towards consuming or producing less waste. And one of the really low-hanging fruits here as a society is taking things out that can be composted and putting what should be in a landfill in a landfill and what can be made back into soil, made back into soil.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and again, I just think the reason I say it is it speaks back to the education piece. I think maybe even being specific on the access piece, you know, and I'm saying access piece because it's a very specific situation that I have, you know, that I experience. We use very small trash bags is why.

[Tim McGivern]: We expect completely that there are going to be wrinkles and issues, things that we didn't think of. So we look forward to those challenges.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and yeah, and I know I appreciate that and it's just on a specific one like absolutely how to use compost, you know, we would never carry the 64 gallon thing up the stairs and down the stairs every week but we may do it with the compost I think just kind of trying to make sure that there's some something there where people you know, it may be people will feel like maybe a burden is being added. And, you know, trying to communicate why, at the very least, why that's happening. And for the reasons that you just outlined, both, it's better for the world, and it's better for the city in terms of what we can afford, I should say. Yeah.

[Alicia Hunt]: I was going to say that we do have an example of those 13 gallon toters in the hallway in the third floor of City Hall. If anybody wanted to see what that looks like, you may also just notice them around the city. Um, so you can see what it kind of looks like. It's, um, I will tell you that in my household, now that we put the compost out, um, that kind of goes out just about every day, depending what's in there. You know, if it's just coffee grinds, I don't take it out every night. Um, but the track, the garbage and the trash in the kitchen, I take it out once a week because there's nothing gross and smelly in it. To be clear, all the bones, all the grease, everything. can go in the compost bin. So it actually, like, it reduces us needing to take the trash out every day. We don't do it anymore.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and exactly, and that kind of, you know, pictures, images. I mean, if we get to that point, on-site demonstrations. But, you know, that kind of thing. Thank you for that. Going into the budget. I did this because I don't think it exists anywhere else, but I have a, I've run an inflation-adjusted budget of the city back to 1980, not exactly all the way back to 1980, but I have 1980 and 1993 and trash costs are a huge driver of, you know, it's a huge cost increase. Since 1980, FY80, we're paying 330% more for the trash contract. That's after you adjust for inflation. And since FY93, it's about 25% more. So obviously there's a big jump in there and some of that has to do with actually inflation itself. In any case, it's a huge cost driver. It's $7.5 million this year, I believe, around there in the DPW budget for this contract. What is the budget? You mentioned we want to stay within budget. Do we have an estimated budget?

[Tim McGivern]: If you don't want to say it here because it could affect bidding, I would understand that, but... Well, we have our actuals that you've been referencing, and we have a number in there for this. But we really need to see... Well, we've tried to... form the RFP in a way that we believe we're going to get fiscally responsible numbers back that make sense and are going to be fit within the framework of the budget that we have to work with. With that said, that is going to be part of the budgeting process and what gets allocated for that line for sure because we're talking about services for the residents. I had mentioned before that we're trying to mimic existing services with some improvements to meet with the time, stay cutting edge, do what we believe is best for the city when it comes to grants from DEP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So knowing all that, we've designed the RFP to be able to put together multiple options. budgetary standpoint. We're very much hopeful and we believe, based off our professional consultants review as well, that moving to every other week and reducing that number of truck movements is going to be significant. Processing compost is cheaper, as Alicia was saying, so the savings there. Less weight of trash for processing, so the savings there. So, but we also want to understand what the costs would be for every week trash. So same scenario, but every week trash and understanding that. That's in the RFP. Exactly. And that's how the RFP is designed. So we can lay all this information out from the responses and, you know, work with the mayor to say, well, you know, what's, what does the budget need to be for these services? If we need to add, if you want to add this service, what do we need to add to the budget? So being able to do that work intelligently is really going to drive the need to have an RFP that's framed in such a way so the information we get back, we can put together basically like a puzzle of services that we can present in budget form.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no that's helpful. I guess my question is, is there going to be a goal in there to keep the escalator, or if there is an escalator every year under two and a half percent, which as you know is our statutory requirement can only raise taxes two and a half percent a year.

[Tim McGivern]: Yes, so we are proposing a cap as far as I think we've There's a cap built in there for increasing fees.

[Zac Bears]: And so basically the issue would just be what's the gap between what we're paying now at 7.5% and then what the new initial price is. But once we have the new initial price, we won't have it crowding out other expenses because we're trying to keep the cost below 2.5% growth per year. Yeah. And the reason I say all of that is, again, the more we spend on trash, absent the ability to raise additional revenue, the less we spend on everything else that we do. And we already don't spend enough on everything else that we do.

[Tim McGivern]: That's right. Yeah. So I'm sure that kind of gives you an idea where we're at and kind of our guardrails and our compass on this, which is why we're approaching it the way we are. Yeah. To make sure that we have not quite a la carte, but we have responses for different scopes of work, handling different groups of scope in different ways, and we have to work with the proposers, figuring out exactly what is best. So RFP processes come with a technical proposal that goes over how they're going to satisfy all those requirements, and a cost proposal that gets opened after the review, so the cost is to be considered.

[Zac Bears]: Are we thinking, and again, if you feel like you don't wanna say it because we're talking about potential bidding on a contract, are we thinking that the jump between this year or next, you know, whatever, between the two contracts is gonna be significant, like 10%, 20%, a million dollars, a million five? I don't think we know. Okay, all right. What's the percentage of the total cost of our trash contract that we currently get covered by the DEP grant? or the number, the flat number?

[Alicia Hunt]: Essentially zero.

[Zac Bears]: Okay, what's the max we could get?

[Alicia Hunt]: I will tell you that we had, it's not that significant. So we had been getting nothing from the regular grants because we didn't meet enough of those minimum, those criteria to get a grant back from them. They changed up the process and we got 14,000 this year under the new formulas.

[Unidentified]: 14,000 over seven and a half million, yeah.

[Alicia Hunt]: Uh-huh, right, which is why I say it's essentially, it's nothing, but that is real money for us to do outreach and education, but it's not an impact on there.

[Zac Bears]: What could we get up to if we were meeting on the baseline?

[Alicia Hunt]: I wanna say the numbers could come up to 100,000.

[Tim McGivern]: Right. It's a six-figure number sticking out my head.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. Yeah. Substantial, but again... Yeah, but in the less than 14 and a half, you know, whatever one-seventh is. I can't do that in my head, but yeah.

[Tim McGivern]: Those types of revenues will really help us with the education outreach piece.

[Zac Bears]: Yep, yep. Understood. Is it possible, and I would guess probably not given the nature of this, Is it possible that we could, well, I guess a few questions, and these are pretty specific, and if you guys don't have the answers, that's fine. I guess my question is, say, you know, we get the prices back, and it's eight million for biweekly, you know, the biweekly trash, and 11 million for the weekly trash, and a lot of people in the community, you know, have an uproar, they want the weekly trash. Is it possible to have a contract where we could make where we could have an option that we could exercise either to increase the frequency of service or reduce the scope of services. And the reason I say that is like, could we potentially say, create a revolving fund to pay for our trash contract? And then there's a large community uproar about this issue. And we say, well, it's a $3 million difference between the two things. If you want weekly trash collection, we'll put a $3 million override on the ballot, and you can pay for it, and it'll go into a revolving fund. It could only go to trash collection, but put that question to the people themselves. Like, is that something that we could even consider or possibly have as an option here? Because I just, you know, I just want to have, I just, it's a highly theoretical question I'm asking, but it could be a potential process where we could, you know, ask voters themselves to make the decision on what they would like to see with this process.

[Tim McGivern]: Maybe a Bob question. Yeah, I mean, so the contracting doesn't have to follow the typical public rules and process so you can negotiate at times where you normally couldn't. So my gut wants to say yes to that question, but it really is almost like a procurement law question. Yeah, or Fiona, yeah. Yeah, exactly, and I'm not sure if she's on here. I think she is. She is here, yeah. Fiona, if you heard that question and want to chime in, the question was, could this contract that we entered be renegotiated mid-contract, basically, for more services?

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, for more services or potentially for less services.

[Tim McGivern]: Or potentially for less services, yeah. Like I said, my gut tells me yes, but Fiona, do you?

[Zac Bears]: Fiona, you're unmuted, if you could just give us your name and your title.

[Maxwell]: Can you hear me? Fiona Maxwell, the chief procurement officer here in the city of Medford. And I'm paying attention to the meeting, but I actually did miss your question, Tim. So if you don't mind reiterating.

[Zac Bears]: That's totally fine, Fiona. It was a long-winded question for me. Basically, the short version of the question is, could we potentially have something in an eventual contract where the city or both parties could exercise an option to increase the frequency of service or reduce the scope of services during the agreement itself?

[Maxwell]: Well, I would recommend that anything that you put in there would be up to the discretion of the city. Certainly not the vendor. And I'm not 100% sure the best way to answer that question, but I can certainly take a look at it and review it. The first thing that comes to mind is if you're adding services or removing services, you're looking at amending the contract. Um, so I would need to do a little bit of research in order to provide you with an accurate, you know, answer for that question.

[Zac Bears]: Got it. Yeah, and just if it's helpful I could give you kind of the hypothetical situation I proposed which was essentially, if we, you know, if we had a contract price come in at 8 million for the bi weekly trash pickup and 11 million for weekly trash pickup. could we say we wanna go, we wanna agree with the contract for the 8 million, but we want an option to go up to the 11 million, and then we could potentially, if the mayor and the council, obviously this is a highly hypothetical situation, could ask the voters themselves to raise that additional revenue to pay for the contract, something like that.

[Maxwell]: Okay. Yeah, let me do a little bit of research for you and provide you a response to that question.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you so much. 616 my sixth question may also be a little bit out of the box here. Did we at all, did the task force at all explore or has city staff at all explored insourcing the program? And is there any way that that would cost less than outsourcing into a private vendor? And or is regionalization a potential option, like looking at neighboring communities to see if we could get a better deal by partnering with more than, doing it more than just Medford? I don't know if it's legal on the regionalization one, but yeah.

[Tim McGivern]: We didn't explore regional options. We kept it within the bounds of the municipality. As far as in-house goes, I mean, I thought about it, but I'm not set up for that. That would be a much longer transitional period. Yeah. The contract ends. you know, June 30th, 2023, we would be hard-pressed to ramp up operations for in-house. Very hard-pressed, that's probably not possible. That would be a long-term vision, long-term plan if we ever wanted to do that, I think. We'd probably need a new facility, a bigger one.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah, bigger than the one you've got now.

[Tim McGivern]: Yeah, we'd need a transfer station. There's so many things that we would need, and we would need to do it according to law and all that. It's very different. than when it was done like that in the 70s. So it's a very different atmosphere. I think there are still some municipalities that do it on their own, but it's rare.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah, no, and I just asked it because, you know, again, it's such a cost driver and maybe just maybe an option out, you know, outside of this box, and I appreciate how much effort has been put into the in the box option because I think we're going to get really good data to make a good decision. But you know those kind of things. Maybe it's for the next contract, and hopefully you'll both be here, because I think you're both amazing at your jobs. But maybe it's for the next contract, thinking about a regional option, if that's even possible. Because as you pointed out, we're going to get some economies of scale on certain things now that we don't currently or not. Basically, it'll just be bigger economies of scale, potentially. And yeah, so I'll leave those more outside the box questions at that. Last question is just on the process beyond that timeline that you outlined. So we're looking at an RFP now, we're getting our input and questions into it. You're gonna get quotes back and kind of get into agreement. And the goal is to get that done by June 30 of this year. Who makes the final decision? Is it just the mayor or do we have a role in the process?

[Tim McGivern]: Well, the, sorry, the role that this body has is the longer agreement, longer than three years.

[Justin Tseng]: Okay.

[Tim McGivern]: But, you know, obviously the mayor is the executive contract signee. So, you know, that final say would be hers, except for the piece of having a contract longer than three years, which would be on the table for city council.

[Zac Bears]: Okay. So if we were trying to enter a contract longer than three years, we would vote on that. Yeah, we'd like to. Yeah.

[Alicia Hunt]: We understand that best practice is seven to 10 years. What we have in the RFP right now is seven years with three one-year extension options. But that's because that's where the sweet spot, it is my understanding that it takes seven years to depreciate one of these trucks.

[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Okay, I'll do one more outside the box, then I'll go to Councilor Tsengley, raising your hand. But I have one more, okay. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

[Justin Tseng]: I was just going to say, I do know that there are folks at home who are concerned about the biweekly transition. Obviously, we've heard the merits to it, and it's a discussion that we're going to have for a while yet. Right. And so there's going to be tons of time for people to write in and ask questions and have their questions be answered. And we're not making any final decisions.

[Zac Bears]: Right, yeah, no final decisions are being made in this meeting. If I could just ask my one outside-the-box question here. Um, one of the things we've seen is just that again, the cost of waste removal is going up over time. Now are maybe my question assumes that that will always be true. But and best practice I'm hearing from D. P. P. S. D. E. P. Is 7 to 10 year contracts with a longer period. Maybe mean locking in a lower price for a longer amount of time for the city potentially, or is that just really not not an option?

[Tim McGivern]: Well, that's it's an interesting question. I think If I was a company and I was entering a contract agreement, the longer it is, the more enticed I'd be to have a lower rate. So I think your logic is sound there. So I think there's risks associated with entering a contract for such long periods of time as well. So I think those have to be weighed. 7 to 10 seems to be the recommended sweet spot for waste management contracts.

[Zac Bears]: I mean, again, and it's your RFP, and you put a lot of work into it. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing maybe seven with three one-year extensions, and that's fine. But I'd love to see maybe what it would look like at a 15-year period. And I don't want to box you in on that. and then maybe we wouldn't go down that road. And if you think it's gonna affect the quality of the RFP and the bids to even have that in there, then feel free to not include it, but I'd just be very interested to see what that might look like. Maybe 10 with a five-year option or something like that, or seven with two or three three-year options, something with a little bit of a longer period, if the contractors are even willing to do that. But it could just give us more options and that's really the point of my question here around cost mitigation are there options where we can maintain more services and still have the lower cost or or something there. Because, you know, again, I don't want to. My biggest fear out of the whole thing is that we end up just spending a ton of more money on waste removal, and we don't have the money to spend. So any way that we can find around that, I think is really important. Those are my questions. I think that's a good idea, and we'll leave it on the table. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, just let me know. Absolutely.

[Richard Caraviello]: Councilor Caraviello. Thank you, Mr. President. So, I mean, after listening to all the discussion this evening, I don't see how I think that the bi-weekly is obviously going to be the lesser expensive of the two. I don't see how it can't be. So I think the council bears a question about, you know, people are going to say I'm filling my stuff up too much. I would think as I, the day of the big family is kind of a thing in the past. So I would think most people can get away with the biweekly with the receptacle. Maybe you can make an exemption for the larger families. Maybe you can just look at the census. They were a family of five. Maybe we could do something for those larger families that would give them that second barrel. Or maybe And even for the ones that don't, maybe we can give them maybe a couple of bags a month or something versus going crazy. I mean, the cost of the bag isn't that much, I mean, even the weight. So I would think those are options in order to keep it into that bi-weekly thing. I guess I'm gonna show my age here, we grew up with the old, they used to call them spool buckets. I mean, they used to be in the backyard and I don't know if anybody, I'm thinking maybe Mr. Darby might remember. Remember the old barrels in the back, he used to, I remember my mother used to make me go out and that's when we always, that was before composting was a fashionable thing. You always brought the table scraps out and you put in the back and the guy came once a week and he picked it up. So I guess we all kind of, We're going full circle here, everything's history, everything comes around. I think, you know, I would hope that, you know, like I said, I hope we can get the best possible deal. In like seven to 10 years, I know it's best practice in all contracts, you know, maybe, you know, you can go seven to 10, maybe with a small, maybe an option, you know, a smaller option, but I don't know, you know, going up 15 might be a little dangerous. for us, but, and again, I want to thank the committee for the work they did, you know, a lot of work and time goes into this and this is probably one of the biggest decisions the city is going to make for the next 10 years. I mean, you know, the crash has always gone up and there's really no way of stopping it. So again, thank you for the work you did. Yeah, go to Councilor Collins.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you, President Pierson. Yeah, just to go off of kind of what Councilor Caraviello was alluding to, and kind of in closing, I think any point that we're reevaluating a contract of this scope, I'm sure that there were growing pains when the last contract was signed, and those aren't fresh in my mind, because that was 13 years ago, and I wasn't a resident yet.

[Richard Caraviello]: It's gonna be the end of the world yet. When we switched over to waste management.

[Kit Collins]: Well, yeah, I think to your point, I think there's always gonna be some, friction and getting used to a new system. And I think that this is an area where we can consider, you know, what do we want to have set in place in this contract that 25 years from now we can say wow we're so glad that we started composting 25 years ago we're so glad that we made it easier to recycle 25 years ago we're glad that we took this particular line item budget off of the DPW at this particular time so I think it's great that we have a long runway to be thinking about some of the wrinkles that might occur based on some of the changes that might occur based on some of the responses that we might get. Obviously, we're all still in the kind of hypothetical run up phase right now. But I think as we go forward, it will be interesting to look at the scenarios we're considering based on the responses we get and then what sort of mitigation strategies we can use on the city side outside of the contract, same the way that we have the recycling compactor now. Councilor Caraviello, you know, to your point, I think that there's a way that outside of the contract, we can offer waiver systems to make sure that, you know, households that need extra assistance or extra, extra help and compliance adapting to the new system that everybody's taking care of as best as they can, and that we're still getting the best contract for the city that we can. So thank you both so much for your work on this. So appreciate it.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Collins. Sorry, I was chatting with the clerk. One other just thought, and this is just to you, Tim, around your budget, not your budget itself, but just how it's presented, and it may be something to talk about with the mayor and with finance director Dickinson, I think it'd be great if it was clear to the public how much of your budget is this contract. because right now it's like buried in the spreadsheet breakout view, you know, at the bottom of clear gov and it's like half your budget. And I think people should understand DPW doesn't have a 15 plus million dollar budget, has a $7 million budget and a seven and a half million, or maybe a little more than that, but in a seven and a half million dollar contract with waste management. Yeah, just a flag. Any further questions from the council? Anything from President Morell? I closed my computer.

[Unidentified]: I'm all set, thank you.

[Zac Bears]: Thank you, President Morell. Any members of the public who would like to speak? Yes, come to the podium, give your name and address for the record. And I may leave in the middle of your comments, and I apologize, but Councilor Carmelo.

[John Doherty]: I'm gonna keep this to two minutes. Okay. I'd like you to hear what's at. John Daugherty, 190 High Street, Medford. I just wanted to come up just to thank the hardworking employees of the city of Medford. I volunteered simply because I had some professional experience in this area and it's an area that I'm interested in. But I just would like to say to the people in the city of Medford, the mayor, I don't know her, I volunteered. I think this task force committee system worked perfectly. There was so many contributions by all the committee members. And I just really wanted to step up here just because I think it's important to thank the city employees and the task force members who really gave up a lot of time. And we lost that nice gentleman from the Medford Housing Authority who contributed a lot. So I just wanted to have the word go out to Medford citizens. If you're cynical about government, if you don't understand, join these task force and realize how complex these questions really are. And at the same time, you might really be impressed with hardworking people. And I can say also a thank you to the final work, to the consultants, they were excellent. And there wasn't any question that we couldn't put forward. And I just wanted to make sure that that was part of the record here. A very sincere thank you. And I know I speak on behalf of the the other board members, but at least I want task force members, but at least I wanted one person to come up and thank you very much.

[Zac Bears]: So much for starting much appreciated. Yeah. And I will, I will echo again, our thanks to the task force to our wonderful city staff, um, as, as the people who pulled this together and we're at a great point right now, we're going to get a lot of information over the next few weeks and months, and then we're gonna have a big decision to make. Um, and that wouldn't happen. It wouldn't have happened without all the effort and work that's come in from everybody involved, including everyday citizens so far. on a volunteer basis, I may add. And we're gonna need more of that going forward. I think residents are gonna have a lot of opinions about this and we're gonna be hearing from them. And I will make one last plug to your point. The city has many boards and commissions as well as task forces that meet regularly, public meetings. I'm sure there's open spots on them. And if you go to the new city website, medfordma.org, that's a way that you could apply to join and be on those committees and be part of what the city does.

[Richard Caraviello]: I'll make a motion to keep the paper in committee. and to the next to the next week.

[Zac Bears]: Great motion by Councilor Caraviello to keep the paper in committee seconded by seconded by Councilor Collins, Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. Can we make that a motion to keep the paper committee and adjourn as one motion. Great. Thank you.

[Adam Hurtubise]: Yes. Yes, affirmative to absent the motion passes and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.