Residential polycart customers, if city rates were equitable, would pay a little over $21 a month for their once-a-week, 95-gallon polycart pickup. Instead, they are paying nearly $35 a month, subsidizing free recycling for businesses, commercial dumpster services and those customers taking waste to the city’s transfer station.
Someone at the city, we don’t know who and we don’t know how much the study costhired Parkhill, an engineering consultant in Rio Rancho, which in turn hired NewGen Strategies and Solutions, an “economic development and management firm” based in Richardson, Texas, to do a solid waste rate study over a year ago.
The study was presented at the city commission’s Feb. 28 meeting.
It took a year to do the study, from February 2023 to February 2024. The study calls it the “test year.” The firm probably had to observe and record and create records of revenues and expenses for the city’s various services over the year. I have made various Inspection-of-Public-Records-Act requests since 2019 that came back “no such documents exist” that confirmed the city does not keep detailed solid waste records. Solid Waste Director Andy Alvarez admitted during the meeting that separation and tracking of various services’ costs and revenues “is all new to me, but I’m willing to learn.”
During public comment, I requested that the city commission allow the public a Q&A session with NewGen, to no avail. Once again the city’s citizens and customers are expected to pay increasingly higher utility fees with no questions allowed.
Dave Yanke of NewGen gave a brief presentation that just went over the highlights of the study, but the complete study is available on the city’s website under city commission meetings. The study runs from page 74 to 111 of the 149-page city packet.
The city commissioners were allowed to question Yanke, but, as usual, asked few questions and mostly praised the private company’s study.
City Commissioner Merry Jo Fahl asked what a “tipping floor” and “rolling stock” were. She asked why some costs jumped some years and Yanke said capital projects or equipment purchases caused the jumps. The tipping floor, for example, is about nine inches thick and made of concrete, Yanke said. It needs to be replaced for about $135,000 in 2025.
Fahl said, “I had no idea we had so many different kinds of [waste] services.”
Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister asked why the one-ton tipping fee paid by those bringing their trash to the city’s transfer station are recommended to increase from $60 a ton to $90 a ton. Yanke said the city pays South Central Solid Waste Services $57 a ton. All costs are included in this rate, such as SCSW equipment, labor, transportation, fuel and tonnage put into the landfill. The city’s $60 charge, on the other hand, only covers the SCSW fee. It doesn’t cover the city’s labor, equipment and other operating costs. Yanke recommends this increase not occur until 2025.
When I asked Yanke, (outside city chambers), if the nearly $35-a-month residential polycart charge was inequitable and if their fees were subsidizing other city trash customers’ services, Yanke said, “No.” Yanke was then quickly escorted away from me by Solid Waste Director Andy Alvarez.
Yanke’s response contradicts the study and his presentation remarks, in which he pointed out the current rate structures’ “subjectivity” that “can lead to inequities.”
Yanke’s “no” response does match his plan for changing rates very slowly, taking five years for equities to be attained, if then. In the meantime, polycart customers will continue to subsidize other trash services.
Yanke recommends that polycart rates stay the same for five years, although in fairness they should be reduced. The study shows that residential polycart customers paying almost $35 a month should be paying about $21 and commercial polycart customers paying about $50 a month for a weekly pickup of a 95-gallon container should be paying about $27 a month. Polycart customers’ rates have gone up 5 percent a year for many years, while rates charged to other customers have stayed the same.
For example, Solid Waste Director Andy Alvarez said those using the transfer station, which charges come to about $60 a ton, have been in effect since 2014. Yanke recommends the city wait a year before increasing it to $90 a ton.
Egregious inequities are found in the “commercial dumpster rates.” Currently the solid waste department decides if a business is a Class 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. The business may choose a 1.5 cubic yard or 3 cubic yard dumpster; both are the same cost. The business chooses how many times the dumpster is emptied by the city, up to six times a week. The cost is the same. Class 1 pays $70 a month, Class 2 pays $111, Class 3 pays $162, Class 4 pays $218 and Class 5 pays $626 a month.
Yanke said these rates are “incredibly low,” and asked the rhetorical question, “Who defines the classes?”
Rates should stay the same for commercial dumpster customers until 2025, he suggests. Then they should be based on size of dumpster, charging more for 3 cubic yards. The rate should increase for each pick up as well, Yanke said, not remain the same.
Most outrageous of all, the city solid waste department has been offering recycling services to businesses for free. The business may choose a 1.5 cubic yard or 3 cubic yard recycling dumpster, and again, the business may opt to have up to six pick-ups a week.
Yanke, in figuring suggested rates for commercial recycling dumpsters’ cost of service, said recycling refuse costs the city about $30 a ton. But, and this is a big but, Yanke presumed that all the city’s recycled goods are “processed on site” and do not go into SCSW trucks, which costs an additional $57 a ton. The city only receives about $20,000 to $27,000 a year for recycled goods according to the city’s yearly audit reports available on the State Auditor’s website. It is highly likely that most of the recycling tonnage is going to the SCSW landfill.
Yanke’s study assumes that the commercial dumpster service for trash and recyclables will drop by 30 percent and then remain steady for the next five years. He didn’t explain how he arrived at this presumption.
It is unclear if Yanke’s study assumes that construction and demolition waste, yard waste and tree branches are also “processed on site.” I haven’t seen this waste on site and the proposed rates don’t appear to include SCSW’s $57 per ton cost.
The study also does not show that the solid waste department, out of its customer fees, pays the utility office $110,000 a year, supposedly for billing services. This is another hidden cost to rate payers, found only in detailed budget documents. The water, wastewater and electric departments also transfer $110,000 a year to the utility office.
Yanke said the cost of trash trucks have gone up enormously and are driving rates up. As an example he said side-loader trucks used to cost $50,000 and are now nearly $500,000.
He recommended the city increase rates until they put aside the bare minimum of 90-days of service costs in reserve. The city should have six-months in reserve, Yanke said, given the cost of a truck and service and repair fees. Starting this fiscal year and each year through 2028, Yanke’s five-year plan proposes $236,000 in equipment purchases a year.
The city commission approved the study unanimously, which Assistant City Manager Traci Alvarez was necessary to set in train rate-change resolutions and ordinances, which will come before them soon. Assistant City Manager Traci Alvarez is the wife of Solid Waste Director Andy Alvarez.
City Commissioner Fahl asked City Manager Angela Gonzales to put in the upcoming budget training costs for utility staff, and “to see that they get it.” Hopefully Gonzales understood Fahl’s request to mean training on how to keep records on the costs and revenues for the different waste services. So the people will pay utility staff’s full salaries and also for their training. Alvarez has been the solid waste director for about 10 years. Similar to Traci Alvarez becoming assistant city manager, Bo Easley becoming electric department director, Arnie Castaneda becoming water and wastewater director, these positions are filled behind closed doors, bypassing qualifications vetting or equal-opportunity advertisement.
Gonzales replied to Fahl that training is not only being done, but that she has arranged “for trainers to come to us.
The blue recycling bins at businesses are for corrugated cardboard only, and are available to all of us to use. The Recycling Committee of The Bountiful Alliance worked with the Sanitation Department on newspaper ads to let the public know about this. The Sanitation Department funded these ads, with a goal of increasing cardboard recycling. If the city now starts charging businesses for the blue bins, where is the incentive for businesses to recycle cardboard rather than putting it in the trash, let alone sharing the bins with the public?