In a unanimous vote Monday evening city commissioners agreed to begin the two-year process of transitioning the city to having a fully automated trash pickup program.
Though the commission room looked a little different this week as commissioners and the public tuned in from living rooms all over the city, the message came across loud and clear: Plant City is still in business.
One of the three votes that evening sparked a passionate discussion at the virtual dais and, despite the hefty price tag attached, city leaders eagerly embraced the future.
Jill Sessions, Solid Waste Director, laid out the basics of the plan. Essentially, the new Pay-As-You-Throw program is structured based on the volume of garbage generated by the household. They project cost savings from an automated collection with its new rate structure to be approximately $200,000 per year.
“It’s something that’s been thought about for quite some time,” City Manager Bill McDaniel said. “Over the last five years it’s been a major topic of discussion. We’ve had a lot of work to go through to research it and see how it’s being done in other areas. We’ve identified pitfalls, pros, cons. We found out what we could change and what we should keep. We looked at other implementation models. Then we had several meetings with commission and detailed one-on-one meetings to bring them up to speed. There are so many benefits to this switch, but it took a lot of work for us to get to the vote this week.”
There were a list of issues with the current system in place the city hoped to eliminate with a switch. Right now, there is a higher exposure risk to employees who handle the trash, a higher potential for injuries, a greater level of manpower is needed to perform the job, there’s higher employee turnover, a reduced longevity of the workforce and an unsightly streetscape.
Under the new program, families can choose what size trash they want to have at their residence. The city will provide those roll carts and then the resident will be charged per month for the size of their container. A 95-gallon cart has a proposed monthly rate of $27.50, a 65-gallon cart is $25.50 and a 35-gallon cart is $23.
The plan is to spend the next few months educating the public on the transition and then begin implementing the program in the next fiscal year. Solid waste trucks used for manual collection are scheduled for replacement in fiscal year 2022 anyway, so that helps reduce the initial cost for the city. Commissioners agreed to purchase four fully-automated trucks in fiscal year 2020 for $1,060,000 with the plan to purchase three more in 2021 for $795,000, which is a cost increase of $30,000 per truck.
Purchasing all of the roll carts — approximately 12,000 — will run the city $689,000 in fiscal year 2021. The total net additional capital costs of $899,040 will be paid from Solid Waste reserve funds.
The first phase will convert three of the six residential garbage routes and the other three will be finished in the next fiscal year.
The new program will also cater to those who are unable to roll the carts to the street. If they fill up the carts, Sessions said, they will have someone take it to the truck and then return it to the door.
With COVID-19 launching the issue of safety with potentially contaminated projects to the forefront of everyone’s mind, having a program in place where employees don’t have to touch the garbage seemed like an asset for all at the dais. It also helps with the physical safety of those in the truck.
“This dramatically improves the safety of our workers,” McDaniel said. In the obvious way where you don’t have your employees jumping on and off the truck in roadways, take for example the routes along Park Road. That really drives it home. You’ve got two guys jumping off the truck with that 45-mile an hour traffic whizzing by three feet away from them. Then you’ve got the less obvious ways like the hazards they deal with when they’re touching all of those bags. Plus these guys are lifting those often very heavy bags all day long every day, so they’re dealing with a lot of back strain. It’s physically intensive work and its oftentimes hard to find people.”
There have also been numerous traffic crashes over the years involving garbage trucks. Some of the worst are when the truck is in a neighborhood where two employees are on the back doing collection and they’re rear-ended. McDaniel said recently, in a similar situation, one employee was doing something while on the back of the truck and ended up slipping off and getting run over by the wheel of the truck.
Commissioner Bill Dodson voiced his support during the meeting of transitioning to keep their employees safe and many others at the dais echoed the sentiment. McDaniel said while overall there will be a reduction of staff over time for that department, there will not be an elimination of positions. They will either merge with the new program or be reassigned to another position.
