Curbside composting won’t begin until fall
Rollout pushed back as Austin officials nix proffered contracts.
An intended rollout of residential composting services initially set for June won’t begin until at least the fall.
And at Hornsby Bend, mounds of sludge-based compost from the city’s wastewater treatment operations are piling up without anyone to haul it away.
Both are the result of Austin officials hitting the pause button on new city waste collection contracts amid political fights over their execution.
City Council members have repeatedly nixed staff-recommended contracts in recent months, responding to opposition from the city’s Zero Waste Advisory Commission, but fueling angst among companies vying for the jobs, who argue the process is becoming unfair.
On Thursday, council members opted to temporarily lift a ban on lobbying during contract solicitations so companies that bid on recent contracts can weigh in on city waste policies. Council members noted that any new contracts
would wait until a working group reviewing these issues reports back June 1.
“There seem to be unset- tled issues that are causing (these contracts) repeatedly to come up,” Mayor Steve Adler told industry representatives who came to the council meeting Thursday. “It was the intent of council to say: We need to stop that. We need to actually decide, if there are policy questions that have not been resolved, let’s resolve them.”
After various contracts were rejected, staff members
said they didn’t know what council members wanted.
For example, should the city refuse to send trash to landfills that have been the subject of environmental complaints? Should the city dictate waste management services for events co-sponsored by the city, or should private events control their own waste removal? Should waste removal contracts be competitively bid at all?
Those are questions that a working group established March 23 will grapple with. In the meantime, all contracts that were up for rebidding have been extended with their current provisions.
The contracts that council members declined to award include one for the management of sewage byproduct,
known as biosolids, from a city wastewater treatment plant; one to sell and remove compostable material from the wastewater plant; one to empty dumpsters and remove other waste from city buildings; and one to make a curbside compost-
ing pilot program into a citywide initiative.
The contract to empty dumpsters and collect other waste from city buildings around Austin drew contro- versy in December, after the
Zero Waste Advisory Commission re c ommen d ed
against the city’s proposed contract with Re p ub l ic Services. The commission
said the proposed contract expanded the city’s previ- ous waste collections too much, especially over special events.
City Council members twice postponed voting on
the item, then denied it Feb. 16, instead directing the staff to work on policy issues.
Last month, the council indefinitely postponed a con- tract for curbside compost processing, saying it should wait on the overall policy process. The current con- tract, with Organics By Gosh, is for a pilot program serving 14,000 customers. That
will delay a first phase of the citywide composting rollout from June until at least
September, according to a staff memo. If a new con- tract isn’t in place by Octo- ber, the pilot program ser- vice will cease.
Holding off on the wastewater biosolids reuse and compostable material re- moval, meanwhile, might have an expiration date. The
current contract with Synagrow doesn’t cover removing compost that is created at the plant — a mix of sewage sludge and yard clip- pings known as Dillo Dirt — and the city hasn’t been able to sell it as successful- ly as in the past, staff members said.
So curing piles of Dillo Dirt are taking up more and more space at the wastewater facility near Hornsby Bend. A staff timeline to address that aims to request proposals this summer, so a new contract can be in place by early 2018.
Critics of the city staff argue the proposed contracts were drafted in a way that
increased city authority over waste removal and changed the way some waste had been managed in the past.
“Staff has brought a number of solicitations for projects that were inconsistent with past policy positions,” said Bob Gregory, president of Texas Disposal Systems, which has recently opted to lobby against the new contracts rather than compete for them.
But others involved in the process have cried foul at the council rejecting staff recommendations, saying it undermines a structured competitive process and could affect future requests for proposals.
“The pattern of the city, or (the Zero Waste Advisory Commission), ignor
ing, rejecting and/or arbitrarily or capriciously reject
ing bids is having a definite negative and chilling effect on the (request for proposal) process,” Progressive Waste Solutions’ Steve Shannon told the council last month. “We have not bid on some recent projects, and one of our major reasons why is we expected some kind of monkey business.”