 program and we also have public information manager Rob Golding. Rob will share with us some of the logistics for tonight's event in a moment. I just want to say thank you for joining us this evening for the second of two informational meetings on consolidated collection and for folks who may not be familiar with the term consolidated collection is an approach to how a community can approach picking up trash, organics, and recycling. So we'll have a short presentation tonight but mostly want to hear questions and comments from members of the public in advance of an upcoming city council meeting. So with that, thank you for being here and Rob wants to share some of the logistics for tonight's event. Well, Jepin, and thank you to everybody who joined us here. Thanks to Town Meeting TV for being on as always. Really appreciate you doing that. As Jepin said, we'll have a mini presentation where Jepin and Lee will present some of the background on consolidated collection. But we also want to set this up as an opportunity to hear from you. So there's about 10, 12 people on right now. So everybody's going to have a chance to talk. We'd ask that you hold questions or comments until after the presentation. We'll go around the room and ask folks to use the raise your hand feature on Zoom. If you look at your Zoom screen on the bottom toolbar, you should see something called reactions for most of you. If you click that, there's an option to raise your hand. Hopefully you all see that. If I don't think anybody's called in, but if you do decide you need to call in for whatever reason, you can also alert us that you wish to speak by pressing star nine. And so when Jepin and Lee are done with the presentation, we'll open that up for comments and questions. We'll ask everybody to try to limit it to about three minutes. And I'll watch the clock just so everybody has a chance to talk. And certainly if there's time, we'll want to go back around and let everybody speak again. If for whatever reason, we get to the end of the meeting, starts running late, we will ask that you email us, we'll get back to you, you know, within a day or two, if you have further questions and comments, we don't want to leave anything out. And if you have any technical issues or questions during the meeting that you'd prefer not to answer, not to raise here, I'm going to read out an email address that we'd asked you to use and we'll try to troubleshoot for you in real time, or ask a question or raise your comment if you'd prefer us to do that. That email address is dpwcommunications at burlingtonvt.gov. And again, just let us know if you're having any issues or want us to read your question aloud. With that, I'll pull up today's agenda and presentation and turn it back over to Jepin and Lee. Thanks Rob. And while he's getting this up, presentation will be about 15 minutes. And so the bulk of the time this evening can really be reserved for you all. Division Director Lee Perry will start out and I'll clean it up and we'll open up for questions. So we have the agenda here that Rob went over. Welcome overview and the wrap up with questions. And we do have the date listed either September 13 or the 27 for our next public meeting, which will be at the City Council meeting. A little background on consolidated collection. There's many ways that communities coordinate the collection of trash, recyclables and food scraps. Here in Burlington, it's a subscription basis where residents subscribe to with private haulers to collect their trash recycling and compost. Or they self haul to one of the area Chitton's Hall Waste District drop off centers. And according to a survey that our consultants did a 461 communities nationwide, this kind of subscription collection service happens in about 11% of communities. Whereas on the other hand, consolidated collection occurs in 83% of the communities, where either the municipalities collecting the waste streams itself or contracts with a private hallway. Next slide, please. A little more additional background about consolidated collection and how it's been explored in our region back in 2000. DPW did an evaluation that was initiated for the council resolution. In 2009, Chitton's Hall Waste District did a countywide evaluation that really didn't gain any traction. And then again, in 2018, with the city council resolution, DPW collaborated with Chitton's Hall Waste District in the city of South Burlington, to have a consultant evaluate consolidated collection. Next slide. Now what are the benefits of consolidated collection? Reduce cost to residents through more efficient collection routes. Other benefits are reduced environmental impacts, increased safety and increased diversion. And increasing diversion is the most cost effective mechanism to add food scraps to the collection of the waste streams. Next slide, please. And on this slide, we have what we have done for public outreach to present. So we started in 2019 with our consultant reaching out to 261 Burlington residents through a phone survey, all the way up to tonight's present meeting, and also listed as the upcoming council meeting on consolidated collection. And all the information from these meetings can be found at the city website. And there are four operating models that we explored. The first one would be the franchise model, which was studied by our consultant. That is where municipality contracts with a private holler to collect all three waste streams. And then the second model is similar to franchise model, but franchise model is city bid. So this is where the city would retain the right to bid on districts against private contractors for the collection of all three waste streams. And then our third option is the municipal operation model. And this is where the municipality itself would collect all three waste streams, conduct oversight of the collection, customer service, scheduling, frequency of pickup, service levels, and do the billing internally itself. And then our fourth model is the hybrid municipal franchise model. So underneath this scenario, the city would continue to collect recycling as it does now, and then franchise out the remaining trash and compost collection with private hollers. Next slide, please. And to touch on what we spoke about earlier about the prevalence of each model with that 83% that our consultant was talking about, the 58% would be where the municipality is contracted with a private holler through a franchise collection. The 40% would be where the municipality itself collects all three waste streams. And then the 2% would be sort of a hybrid model where the scenario where the municipality would bid against private contractors on districts. Next slide, please. And on this slide, we have the projected cost for all three waste streams. So we have it broken down into the municipal model and the franchise model with three options from a 0% opt out option to a 25% opt out option for each model. And you can see in the chart that the resident monthly costs are fairly close. We're a little bit higher on some, but that is because on the municipal model and includes a lot of heavy capital investment, you know, that that is accounted for in there. And in the franchise model, there is the consultant did not include the additional costs of a additional worker to oversee the performance of the contractors and a collection of the waste streams. Next slide, please. And this is where it turned it over to Chapin. Thank you, Lee. So we evaluated the various operating models in a number of criteria you'll see down the left hand side here. A number of the criteria in the top have relatively similar benefits across operating models that customer choice is reduced from the subscription based model by basically saying that there are two options for residents. One would be working with the the the hauler of choice, whether it was private or or the city. The other option would be going to the CSWD drop off center. So all consolidated models have that similar attribute. Similarly, on customer convenience, environmental benefits and community benefits, the consolidation regardless of model performs similarly. In blue here, we've highlighted some of the distinguishing features under the municipal fully municipal model option three, and the hybrid option and option four. And you see under the municipal option that it received the most check marks and you can see at the bottom how we defined low benefit, medium benefit, high benefit, that city would have the most control under a fully municipal option if there needed to be any changes in service levels or program design. If we were running the program, the city would have the greatest control. In addition, the municipal model option three has the one where there's the greatest number of union employees working for the city. The projection is under the hybrid option that there would be a three to four additional union positions. And under the full municipal option that there would be somewhere in the range of 12 to 14. What that doesn't factor into is whether there's any job losses from private haulers from that municipal operation. But from a municipal perspective, there are more union workers providing the service. A number eight effort to launch. It's important to recognize here where staff in our review felt that the hybrid option had a lower entry effort to entry due largely to the fewer steps needed to stand up a municipal operation. There would not need to be on the city's time and effort, the need to hire the additional staff to such an extent to build a new building to house our operation to purchase the new equipment and the carts and stand up a billing operation to manage the service. Upfront capital costs. This has been certainly an area of significant discussion. If the city were to start a fully municipal operation, we would need to purchase significant assets and those capital costs are estimated to be approximately six million dollars and include the construction of a new building acquisition of commercial heavy duty vehicles and and carts under the hybrid option. The city's responsibility to expend the capital dollars would be much less if if if anything legislative approval. One of the benefits of the hybrid option is that we would not need to go to the council or state legislature to seek a charter change. A charter change would be required if the city needed to set up a new enterprise fund. An enterprise fund is similar to what we have with water or electric. When we have a business in the city, we set it up as an enterprise fund when it reaches a certain level and has certain requirements of audits and the like to ensure that the ratepayers interests are served. A risk to city government. We believe that the hybrid option has less risk than a full municipal option given the fewer steps and approvals, fewer votes that would be needed in front of the public. We wouldn't need to borrow the bond. We wouldn't have to go to the state legislature to set up the enterprise fund. But there is an easier path to to launch and that is reflected in the time to launch number 12 here. We're projecting two to three years would be needed to stand up the hybrid option in three to five years to stand up the municipal option. Lastly, future flexibility. As you'll see here, setting up a hybrid system would allow us, since we wouldn't have to acquire new capital assets and set up a new business at this point, this would allow us the flexibility in the future. Should we want to move to full municipal operation or even to shift back to franchising that the flexibility of going different directions would be there? Whereas in a municipal option, once we build the assets and set up a business within the city, it would be very difficult to to change that substantively. So as you see at the bottom, we assigned points. It was not a weighted ranking. We did ultimately through our due diligence come to a recommendation. Staff recommendation of option four and on the next two slides we'll just summarize some of the. So one of the benefits of the hybrid option is that it's built off the city's recycling program. We've become experts in running the recycling program. We continue to do that and then we would allow the private sector who has the experience of doing the trash and we're going to pick up in our community to continue doing so. It also achieves a number of benefits in the second bullet here that I touched on briefly. Less to bond for and fewer capital costs up front. Smaller human resource investment. It's a shorter timeline and less overall risk. It does still create additional union positions. The hybrid option three to four, which those positions could be utilized during winter maintenance periods on plowing and ice control, which are key functions of the department. And another key key distinguishing feature is we would be able to accommodate the hybrid option at 645 Pine Street, our base of operations, because we wouldn't have new commercial vehicles or a greatly expanded team. So there are some other benefits for the hybrid option. We already have the city solid waste generation tax. So on your, if you have a private hauler collecting your trash, they're required to put on the solid waste generation tax with funds or recycling program. We could adjust the tax rate in order to fund the hybrid option and still enable the haulers to bill as they do today. It doesn't require us to launch a new customer service effort and new range of customers for the consolidated collection program. That service would be provided by the hauler. We talked about the future flexibility and it also maintains a role for the private haulers under this option here. And lastly, it provides clarity for the direction for the Flynn Avenue property that CSWD and the city have control of. It originally was for the purpose of setting up an expanded drop off center on Flynn Avenue and knowing what the direction on consolidated collection would be, would give us a direction on what to do with the drop off center moving forward. So with that, we have brought forward this recommendation and what we have done with this period. We thought we were going to the council in August, but the council had asked us to come in September. We've taken that time to do additional engagement. These two meetings are part of that. We've also set up a survey online that really gets to some of the key service level questions, regardless of what model is selected. If the city moves forward with consolidated collection, it's important to get a sense from the public what level of service they want in terms of weekly or bi-weekly collection, whether the residents want an opt out option. If they want to go to the drop off center, we've heard strong support of opt out to date. We'll hear tonight whether that's consistent. What properties participate? Currently, we're recommending one to four unit properties, but there are many streets near the university, for example, that have five, six, seven, eight, nine units. The more houses on a street that are in the consolidated collection system, the fewer trash trucks will be on the streets. Then other service options as you see here. We encourage everybody to take the survey. It's online. We've had over 200 responses to date, looking for even more. Next. Here is a conceptual timeline of what it would take to launch the hybrid option. We're estimating here about two and a half years. Just as a placeholder looking to start service in 2024, should the council give the go ahead to move in this direction. There's some very important steps in here, including needing to complete negotiations with the Chittin Solid Waste District and Casella for the various tip fees for the three waste streams, as there aren't many options for dropping off the waste streams. We need to know for any bidding process what the cost would be so that all bidders would have an equal footing. Next. In terms of process with other bodies to date, the Public Works Commission on June 16th voted five to one for a hybrid consolidated collection model. You'll see the various components of that here. The Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee of the City Council, which is comprised of three members of the City Council, they voted two to one on June 22nd to advocate the municipal, full municipal operation of consolidated collection. The City Council is going to take up this issue at it's either its 13th or 27th meeting, and the Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee will be bringing a resolution advocating and supporting the direction of a full municipal operation to that meeting. The full council can debate it and choose the direction, but that is what the two committee will be advancing to the council. Next. Here's the last page for comments going forward. It's the same that Rob shared at the beginning of the meeting. Lee's phone number is available for folks who don't want to or don't like email, and we have that great resource on the web. And really appreciate the time to share this overview. We know for some of you that this is a presentation you've already seen, so we try to go through it quickly. Happy to answer any questions and hear your comments. Thank you. As a reminder for folks who have recently joined us, if you do want an opportunity to speak, ask questions, share comments or concerns right now with us, we'd ask that you use the raise your hand feature on your Zoom screen. If you're on desktop, that will be on the reactions button, which you might see, and if you don't see it, it should be under the more button, which will bring you to the raise your hand feature. If you're on mobile, but on Zoom via mobile, you should be able to also tap the reaction screen or a more screen on the bottom of your iPhone or Android device. If you have called in, we ask that you use Star 9, and that will put you in queue also to share some comments or questions with us. And Chip and Lee, at this time, looks like Andrea has a question, so folks, you should be able to unmute yourselves, and I'll also ask you to unmute yourself via Zoom, so you should have that option, and folks should feel free to share screens, so we can all, if you want to, so we can all kind of see each other and diverse. But Andrea, you are available to speak now. Thank you. Hi, so I haven't lived in Burlington all that long, but is this really something we need? What is the actual, like you put four at the beginning, that supposedly they'll save money? But this is an expensive proposition, and so there's going to be an investment, and it, you know, you didn't actually see the figures that I saw on how much money it's afforded to save the taxpayer. Burlington is a super expensive place to live for its size. I think we should be moving in the direction of making it less expensive rather than consolidating things at the cost of higher expense, and in terms of noise and pollution and environmental friendliness, at least where I live, we've got a bigger problem with people racing cars on the street and dirt bikes than we do with noise collect of trash collections, so that's my two cents on it. I think the status quo is fine. I don't really see a need to spend more money to solve a problem that I don't think really exists. Great, thank you Andrea. My quick piece is on traffic calming. If there's a concern with that, feel free to call us a customer service and we can address that issue through our traffic calming process. As it relates to the goals of this project, the consultant estimated that the savings to two customers would be in the range of 1.6 to 3.6 million dollars collectively by consolidating, by having one hauler collecting all trash, all recycling organics in a particular neighborhood that economies of scale would be achieved. Each community is different however, and then on the environmental benefits, the projections were a reduction in vehicle miles traveled and emissions by two-thirds for the for the service of collecting from residential properties. That said, appreciate your comments and happy to take any additional comments. Sharon Busher, it looks like you are next in line if you'd like to speak. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay, hi, good evening. Thank you. My name is Sharon Busher and I support the direction you're going in. I'm not certain if I thought the franchise or the hybrid was the best model. I do believe that reducing truck traffic on streets is a goal and a laudable one and one that people have commented on in the past. It depends on where you live and how many haulers actually come down your street on a given day what the impact is. So the previous speaker might be lucky enough to live on a street where most everybody uses the same hauler and might not be as impacted as others. There is a cost associated with this and I really am concerned about pay for people that do this business. I know that we have the livable wage. I'm not quite sure if we select this hybrid model. Will the employees, if they're not already paid at least a livable wage, will they be required to be paid that? That's one thought. I'm glad there are some union jobs being created. I think that's good also. My son asked a question. So as you move forward and you have and you reach out to the haulers to have them apply, is that a stagnant process so you select some haulers and you divvy up the city? But what if a new hauler comes into the business? Are they precluded from ever doing business in Burlington? How does that get evaluated? And one of my older neighbors, you know I used to be a city counselor so people still reach out to me occasionally. And one of my older neighbors, not that I'm young, but one of my older neighbors said, asked, she uses a very small hauler. She's used this person for forever and is very worried about their viability moving forward. So I know I've thrown a lot at you but these are accumulation of comments and thoughts and I appreciate your time. Thank you. Great. Thank you Sharon just quickly to respond to those contract requirements, livable wage. Those haven't been set yet but clearly the city has a livable wage ordinance and our expectation would be that under a hybrid model any bidder would need to comply with livable wage and any other provision that the city felt would be necessary to protect the workforce. As it relates to new hauler opportunities that would be made available at each bid cycle. It is important to note that to get a low bid and to ensure kind of consistency our consultant is recommending a seven year cycle for bidding. So any new vendor could come and be part of the bidding process every seven years and then there has been some conversation about was it less, is it more, but it can't be substantially less for the haulers to amortize their expenses. And then lastly you asked about a small hauler viability. We could put out a bid process that allowed for and provided bonus points for haulers that worked with smaller haulers maybe organics collectors who have sprouted up that a larger trash hauler could partner with them for their proposal. So those are some options. Obviously under a municipal option there would be no role for the private sector for the residential pickup. Thanks for your comments. Appreciate it. Sure there's other questions or comments out there we're happy to answer them or just hear them. I'll just share that reminder that if you do want to talk use star nine if you've called in or use the raise your hand button below. If you're having any trouble feel free to just speak up certainly want to hear from you. It looks like Stephen Hamlin is looking to speak and you're welcome to speak now. I was just curious as to how big of an area we're going to be divided into. The size of a ward is it going to be you know like a five or six communities at a time. It's going to make a big difference how many how big of an area these haulers are going to be because if it's too big that's not going to be any cost savings it's going to be a monopoly and these guys are going to be able to charge us higher rates because they're the only ones allowed to come in here. So do we know what size an area we're going to divvy this up as. Thank you Stephen for that for that question it is a good question is one that we have been talking through with our consultant team and I think to your point Stephen you're rightly identifying that you want to have a number of districts should the city move ahead with consolidated collection under the hybrid model having a number of districts and limiting the number that each hauler can win will help enable competition into the future. So we've been talking about four to six districts that all could shift a little bit as we continue to do more due diligence if the city council directs us to continue going down that road but we'd be looking to have enough districts and limit the number of districts so that there would still be a range of haulers available now into the future. Hopefully that answered your question Stephen. Thank you. Got another question from Andrea and no one else is in queue so Andrea you're up. So I guess I wanted a clarification because it wasn't had it been clear to me from reading the proposals that the model would actually keep potentially most of the current haulers in business and that it wasn't going to be one contract to the whole city so is it correct that there are going to be multiple wards and so likely most of the current haulers and the jobs associated with that would continue. Right well thanks Andrea for the clarification we're all trying to you know understand what this recommendation entails and and what it doesn't entail and so under the hybrid model the city would still collect recycling would be the only collector recycling other than taking it and self hauling it to the drop-off center DSWD and then for trash and organics there would be a number of districts and I suggested to Steven it would be four to four to six districts bid out and no hauler could achieve a certain number of districts just off the top of my head I don't think we'd want one hauler to get more than half of the districts that would need to be set out in the bid documents and the policies that we establish if the council supports this direction if the council advances the municipally managed and operated direction then for these small residential properties there would be no role for the private haulers. Okay thank you thanks Andrea there's someone in queue your phone number ends in 1953 and you are welcome to join us. So we've just for now put that person in the waiting room to see if maybe their camera was on by mistake but we do still have the caller with who ends in 1953 802 238 1953 looks like your hand is raised and we'd welcome your input if you are ready to talk and just to clarify how do they unmute Rob? Sure it looks like they are on mute but I've also just asked them to unmute so they should get an instruction on their on their phone on on how to unmute. Maybe we should go to someone else and we can get back to them if they can unmute. Yeah right now there is no one else in queue if you do want to join us star nine on the phone or raise your hand on zoom and for the caller who has called in 802 238 1953 you are certainly welcome to join us if you intended to speak. You should have the opportunity to unmute now if you're having any trouble email us and we'd certainly be happy to help you troubleshoot or read your question or concerns off for you. Great and even if there are no questions any comments I know a number of you on this call have submitted comments to us via email or on the survey you're welcome to speak now and share your thoughts on either model of consolidated collection or whether we should proceed or not proceed in this direction just keep the subscription service ultimately the council and the administration will need your guidance and how best to proceed. Oh thank you can kick me out I'm a kicker boy you can't kick me from that meeting oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah it is impossible. Sorry about that everyone I think. Hey what the hell why did you mute me? Hey stop it stop muting. All right I think we've solved that problem for now somebody's mic might be on or maybe we're getting zoom bombs but we still have the opportunity to take any comments or questions from you folks. So barring any folks raising their hand at this point there the city council will be taking this up either at their September 13th meeting or the September 27th meeting we're coordinating with President Tracy to determine when it fits on the schedule so we'll have that update on the website as soon as we hear and we love your input the survey is still online and we want to capture your feedback it's really a helpful way to weigh in on service levels if the city does proceed with a consolidated collection approach we need to know from you whether there should be opt out provisions allowing people to opt out of either of any of the three way streams what schedule you would like with bi-weekly or weekly again this is advisory but give us a sense of service level whether we should have options with back door service container sizes etc so please hop online and fill out the survey and participate in the upcoming council meetings we very much appreciate your participation tonight and any final words uh Lee and Rob I'd just like to thank everyone for showing up and participating and listening to our presentation and hope to see you at the city council meeting that's coming up thank you everyone have a good night