Good morning, and welcome to the July 9th meeting of the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development, and Arts Committee.
It is 9.38 a.m.
I'm Lisa Herbold, the chair of the committee and council member representing West Seattle and South Park, joined at the table by members of the committee, council members O'Brien, and so on.
And we're gonna get right to it.
The items on the agenda include approval of the agenda, public comment, one item of business.
We have nobody signed up for public comment.
And if there are no objections, the agenda is approved.
So we'll move right into the first item of business.
Newell.
Item one is every other week garbage collection pilot background and findings.
Thank you, Newell.
Brian, you want to give a quick overview?
Sure, Brian, good night Council Central staff.
This is SPU's here to discuss every other week garbage collection pilot that was conducted in the city in the last half of 2012. The pilot was known as the one less truck pilot project and included about 800 residences.
And with that, I'll turn it over.
Great, thank you.
Introductions.
Ken Snipes, SPU Chief Administrative Officer and still Soloway's Director for a while longer.
Congratulations.
I'm Van Dusen, SPU.
Fantastic.
All right, so thank you for this opportunity.
We're here to talk about Seattle Public Utilities 2012 one-less truck pilot, also known as the every-other-week garbage.
As you know, council authorized new solid waste service contracts earlier this year, including supporting new fleet investments.
These contracts and investments support the continued weekly garbage, along with weekly yard waste and every-other-week recycling.
In this context, SPU has no plans or contract provisions to shift to citywide every other week garbage.
And the executive also doesn't support anything other than weekly garbage for every part of the city every week.
So we also believe the robust 2012 findings that we will review today will demonstrate significant economic and environmental and customer challenges.
and any other, excuse me, any future considerations of every other week garbage, including limited operational savings for collection contractors and limited potential fleet emission reductions, potential future customer garbage bill savings at under 10%, accompanying a customer perception that the service would be reduced by half or by 50%.
And a particular concern to SPU and Mayor Durkin, the findings that lower income households larger households and diverse communities were less supportive of the change.
In short, we believe the pilot findings and current context accurately capture the financial neighborhood and environmental limitations for every other week garbage today and in the future, and continue to believe the current collection model right now is the best for Seattle rate payers.
And so I'm going to turn it over to Hans, and he's going to provide a little bit more background and launch into the presentation.
Great.
And before we launch into the presentation, just want to see, when we get to the discussion around the findings around customer satisfaction, we're going to delve into that a little bit more.
Should I hold my questions until we get to that, or is?
Sure.
I think there's a slide or two on that.
Okay.
Okay.
That's probably a good time.
Does that sound good?
I'll wait.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
Okay.
Thanks for the intro, and we'll go over Some of the findings from the 2012 pilot.
And just to set the stage for context, right now the frequencies we have, we collect recycling every other week, garbage and yard waste collected weekly.
And just for context, similar amounts of material are collected in each of the waste streams from the single family households here.
And so we do have the every other week with the recycling and are able to achieve the fleet and cost savings there.
This is particularly just talking about household services, of course.
Multifamily and business services are collected many times a week depending on their needs.
So this is just focused on the household services.
And when you talk about fleet cost savings, how have you captured those as far as being able to quantify what those savings are?
Yeah, we do have a slide or two that touches kind of what the operational efficiencies might be from that shift.
The current?
Yeah.
For recycling?
For recycling.
Yeah, we've had every other week recycling for 20 years here.
And so that hasn't changed.
So we've been able to maintain that.
So we haven't seen a shift in cost one way or the other there because we've continued that service.
But can we quantify what we save by doing it every other week as opposed to once a week?
We touch on it a little bit here for garbage.
And so maybe it's slightly parallel with recycling.
But we don't really have an apples and oranges comparison there because that's what we've been using.
So we don't have a number per se.
OK, so every other week garbage in other cities.
Just by the way, the services in place in Tacoma, Olympia, Renton, and Portland have the service today.
As you're probably familiar, also in parts of Canada and Europe, it's used.
And then further...
And I'm sorry, on how many years have many of these cities had the every other week garbage?
Sure, less than 10, the ones in Puget Sound, and same with Portland.
They've all been winning about the last decade or so, so not forever, yeah.
And then longer in Europe, I would say.
Yeah, that's a good question.
And then in terms of a couple of notes in terms of how these other cities implemented it, often it was done when yard waste went to a weekly service and the food scraps were added to that yard waste collection.
So often when they adopted their every week garbages, when they shifted and added food scraps to the weekly yard waste collection, And then also both Tacoma and Olympia, we should note, are municipal-run operations.
City employees are running those operations, and so they sometimes can more dynamically capture the savings through their own operations on a month-to-month or a year-to-year basis.
They have more opportunity to capture those savings at times because they're direct employees.
And then the pilot study got into this some, but all of them had some challenges in the near term for sure in implementation.
And then generally today, it's working OK for their customers.
to slow down just a little bit.
Thanks.
So as it relates to the other cities, can we get a breakout of specifically which cities implemented every other week garbage collection together with their moving towards every other week for their, for recycling and or yard waste, and which ones did it separately?
Yeah, yeah, I could guess, but it'd probably be better if I just followed up later with you guys on that.
That's fine, that's absolutely 100% fine.
Certainly, at least half of them did, but I'm not sure all of them did as I look at the list, yeah.
And help us understand a little bit more about why it is that cities that had their garbage collection services performed by municipal employees were better able to capture the savings of going to every other week garbage collection.
Yeah, so yeah, generally big picture wise, we contract for the services.
We do contract for about a decade.
And the private firms that bid and provide that service will amortize over that term, over that decade term, and they'll have labor contracts.
usually four or five a year labor contracts, but that might align as well.
Whereas with a municipal operation, you might be turning over your fleet on a regular basis.
You might be just buying, just like we do with the water department, we just buy new trucks as they come up.
So you're more turning over your fleet on a more frequent basis, and then you might have more opportunity to change your labor staffing through retirements and things like that.
So just you're a little more nimble in year-to-year accounting.
than we are when we contract out for a decade and some of the finances align.
So it's more episodic in the contracting than it is.
It's a function of the contract, not of anything that's inherent about the source of labor.
Yeah, operationally, it's not very different.
And the employees are generally not paid that much differently.
They're all well represented and have good benefits in general and stuff like that, both in the private and public sector.
And then the last question for this slide that I have is the final bullet says other cities experienced challenges in implementation and positive customer reactions after an adjustment period.
Do we have any information about the length of that adjustment period?
Yeah, we'll check on that for you.
I mean, I know we did some outreach, you know, when we did the pilot project.
And so I think there's a little more data there from that outreach, yeah.
Okay, great, thanks.
Good questions.
OK, so for SPU, our involvement has been that, so as Ken just mentioned, we just started contracts this spring.
So that go from 2019 to 2029. And the prior set of contracts went from 29 to 2019. And then we just finished them in March.
And in preparing for those contracts, the RFP requested prices, and then we did receive prices for what would happen if we adopted every other week garbage, and there were a couple price options.
So we had the window, and we had in advance prices to make that transition in 2009, 11, 13. And so that was kind of the context for doing the pilot.
in the six-month pilot in 2012. And then, like we said before, those were accompanied by that shift to the weekly yard waste in 2009 that we went from every other week and that all food was added.
So, yeah, the pilot was, as was mentioned earlier, single-family customers and to look into the financial neighborhood, environmental benefits and challenges and the benefits and the challenges.
It was six months in the end of 2012. 800 households, as Brian mentioned, in four different neighborhoods.
And then in each of those neighborhoods, everyone had to participate.
We had entirely new customer bills.
They had options, you know, to keep their same size or to change their can size.
They had a new bill structure that was adopted for the pilot.
Everyone participated.
And then we intentionally went after a diverse mix of neighborhoods to allow us to look at the impacts in different communities.
And there's two slides here, so we'll touch on some of this satisfaction elements.
Customer satisfaction increased with the experience of the pilot.
That is to say before they were more skeptical than they were afterwards.
Sixty-three percent of them were satisfied after the pilot.
And that increased from before the pilot, but we certainly noted that that's much lower than our citywide satisfaction for our current services at the time, 89%, which it is today as well, around that same level.
And then about 53% of the pilot participants said they recommended it for us to go citywide with that.
So what was the baseline satisfaction at the start of the pilot?
Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head.
I think it was, I want to say in the 40s or so, but yeah.
And how did, in the survey, how did we ask people to to measure satisfaction.
It's on a scale of one to seven, yeah, and so then we converted this.
Was it just open-ended satisfaction, or was it satisfaction according to, oh, you know, there were smells, or, oh, I thought I should have gotten a more reduced bill, or what are the, what makes up satisfaction?
Yeah, this particular number is their overall satisfaction with the service, and then we also delved into some of those elements of the service elements, yeah.
And do we have a sense of those elements which most contributed to either people's satisfaction or lack thereof?
Because I've heard anecdotally from SPU that the thing that people were most upset about was this notion that they were expecting their bills to be reduced by half because their service was being reduced by half.
And so I'm trying to get a sense of it.
Is that the largest factor that contributed to dissatisfaction or were there others and how did we weigh them?
Yeah, yeah, there were others.
I mean, I think that had the highest resonance was the challenge that the service, the perception of service being reduced more than their bill, you know, because of kind of the financial constraints around that.
And then it varied by community to as well and the household, you know what their individual needs were So all of those came came out not wanting to have their service for two weeks That there was some feedback on neighborhood conditions and we also monitored for that but that wasn't as high as some of the other feedback factors and the bill savings we talked about and then their Yeah, yeah, just waiting.
I think the other one that I recall there was not wanting to have had to hold on to it to manage it for two weeks.
It came up as well.
And I mean, this is some of the feedback that was highlighted.
Satisfied participants said they liked the efficiency improvements.
They liked the cost cutting.
They liked the fleet reduction.
and they didn't perceive negative impacts.
So those are the folks that were on the higher end of the satisfaction.
On the lower end of the satisfaction, they had concerns regarding having garbage too long, like I mentioned, and some potential for smell and odor from their waste.
So those were the two kind of concern factors that were highest on the less satisfied.
So according to this slide, the issue of bill savings is not rising to, be one of the factors that led to people being less satisfied, and that's contrary to information I've received in the past.
Yeah, I think that was more contextual to their recommendation, you know, should we go forward citywide?
So then their experience piece of like what they liked and didn't like about it, were they satisfied, unsatisfied, yeah.
I'd like to take a little bit deeper dive on that.
Sure, sure.
The reason is, I think, The dissatisfaction about a reduction in bill size is something that we could, prior to looking at another pilot or another similar shift, the option of an opt-in, option, those sorts of things, we could educate the public much better this time to manage their expectations and explain why bills aren't going to be reduced in half on the front end.
And I think, again, this is a seven-year-old study.
I think people's expectations in the light of climate change are a little bit different for what they expect in return for participating in activities that address climate change.
And I also think people's tolerance level on the storage of garbage is different, too, because I think a lot of people actually don't take their garbage out every week because they're not accumulating that much.
OK.
I'll just go back and make sure we covered this.
Yeah, so we covered some of the things that we're concerned about recommended citywide, the service reduction of bill savings.
And then we talked about the other cities, you know, and then we can follow up with you a little bit on what that dip period looked like, kind of.
And there's the demographics of the satisfaction.
This is, once again, their overall satisfaction with the program, which was on average 63%.
And so you see there is a difference both in income, race, age, household size, and then whether they had diapers in the family.
And where are the other racial demographics represented?
Well, there's a group there of other.
I'm just curious, I mean obviously mathematically it is under other, but I'm just surprised that you have a breakdown for Asian but not for...
other Latinx or black, it's just.
Yeah, no, we have those in there.
All the demographics are in the report, so we can provide that as well.
This was just a high level summary for the slide.
But yeah, that's interesting as well.
We can provide that.
And so again, this is the overall question around general satisfaction, not individual questions about aspects that encompass that.
Right, right.
So that's all in there as well.
And I think that this highlights where there was a delta, really.
So there's a lot of other demographic comparisons where the delta wasn't so significant, and so that doesn't show that as well, which is interesting to know, to pursue also.
I just want to note, though, that even though there is a delta, and it's interesting to see that, it's reflecting majority support for every other week.
I mean, even if you look at the big differences, like the households which had diapers to dispose of, households that didn't have diapers, even the households which had diapers, 58% is satisfied.
Is that what I'm saying?
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
All right, so in terms of some of the operational elements, moving on from the customer side, this is kind of what we saw in the pilot and in the negotiations kind of that led up to that service contract as well, so it provided some context.
For the garbage, household garbage collection fleet, the trucks that are serving just garbage just from households, it looked like about a 35 percent reduction in the fleet.
And so similar reduction in emissions.
And just to provide context there, it's not actually 50% reduction, because people still put out close to the same volume of garbage, say, so the routes get a little smaller, and it's a little, you serve maybe 400 houses a route instead of 600, and so you have some more trips and stuff like that.
So it's not just like you can cut the fleet in half.
So I hope that makes at least some intuitive sense.
And then- And the 5% reduction is still pretty fantastic.
It's pretty great.
Yeah.
And so yeah, and then if you look at the whole fleet, which includes our cycling highways fleet, our commercial fleet, our multifamily fleet, it represents maybe about 15% reduction in fleet emissions.
Just in terms of just being accurate in my own head, when you say 35% reduction in fleet emissions, you're basically, the metric you're using is number of trips, right?
A number of miles would be a good way to think of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the fourth, the bottom bullet here is the reduction on your street because that's where you had, you know, one week you had three trucks coming and the other week you had two and then you would just have two each week and so that's the 25 reduction.
I'm just trying to understand when we, I mean, reducing emissions is a big goal and so We're measuring this through the number of miles reduced through every other week pickup.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's, I think, a good way to think of it.
Because there's obviously a lot of variables about which fuel we're burning and which truck.
And the trucks evolve, and they're cleaner as well.
So there's those things going on.
We're continuing to reduce our emissions through technology.
And this is about, I think, miles is a good representation of it.
And given that for Seattle, our greatest gains in addressing climate are in transportation.
I think it's 67% is the target number.
So I think the more that the city and its departments can do on the vehicle emissions side, that's again where the greatest gain is for our city.
So then on the recycling benefits side, we looked at that in the study as well, and we did see that across those 800 customers, garbage was reduced, recycling was increased, and food waste diversion was increased.
The estimate at the time was that every area of the week, garbage would produce about 9,000 new tons of diversion for 2012. A number of things have happened since then.
We made the requirement that food waste need to be in your yard waste in 2015. We did a lot of outreach around that and still to this day.
So that number is probably a bit lower today because through other policy measures, we've achieved significant diversion.
But it's likely that the program, you know, that shift would still help people on that final step of taking things out of their garbage container.
So on the financial side, just big picture, as Ken mentioned, we don't have any service or contract price options in the current contract for this.
So we can't provide any specifics there.
When we looked at it before, it suggested that the operational savings could be about 30%.
And so that's similar to what we talked with the fleet reduction, but also there's other fixed costs there that you won't save.
And then the amortization of the fleet needs to be addressed.
So we just started new contracts with new fleet, and so the amortization period is the most challenging right now.
And then on the customer side, we talked about this before, that because of the number of costs that are covered on their garbage bill, it helps support recycling yard waste, it helps support clean cities, it helps support a number of other efforts as well as fixed costs and historic disposal, current disposal, things like that, that the actual savings on the bill would be under 10%.
So going forward, future options, we, as Ken stated clearly, plan to continue weekly garbage in the near future.
And it's specified in the current contracts along with the fleet investment that was there to support that service.
So there's a whole new fleet on the street today supporting that frequency.
One option that you mentioned, that was mentioned was that we could consider in the future a voluntary opt-in option.
And we did provide terms in the contract to allow that, to allow customers to opt in individually one-on-one and us to be able to track and support and bill for that.
One challenge in the last bullet there is we probably would need to identify additional revenue because the actual savings would be minimal, certainly initially.
And so if we just did a cost of service reduction, it would be very minor, which is one option.
But if we wanted to do, if the city wanted to do that voluntary opt-in with a larger cost of service, a larger bill savings of some sort, then we would probably need to find revenue.
Instead of looking at a voluntary subscription every other week per household, is there a way that we could consider, because I don't see how we would realize any reductions in vehicle emissions if it was based on individual households, because you still have to drive that street even if one person is opting out of weekly garbage.
So is there a way that we could do a voluntary opt-in per neighborhood as a way of actually combining the desired outcomes, both of the resident to not have their garbage picked up every weekend, our public policy objectives of realizing reduced vehicle emissions?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't see that the voluntary opt-in per individual accomplishes anything.
Yeah, at least not starting out.
I would guess that's kind of a tipping point thing.
If you get enough participation, then they would reroute and achieve deficiencies.
And then you would gain.
So it depends how many people opted in, I think.
So I think, you know, yeah, it's a matter of scale.
How many people opt in on that part of the question?
And then the other part of the question is could you just draw a line, you know, do certain neighborhoods?
I think the contract terms would support that.
The same piece of the question is there, if you would want to offer that neighborhood or neighborhoods, you know, more than a very minor discount, then you would need to find the city would need to find revenue to support that.
And so that would just be a financial challenge if you wanted to give them a slight discount for making that change in that neighborhood, then there would be a revenue question.
But I think operationally, the contract terms would support us moving that if that was a desire of the city.
Council Member Bryan?
No?
Yes, maybe?
I have a bigger picture question.
Okay.
So maybe I'll wait just one second.
Okay.
Council Member Swann?
And I'll just say that that was the final slide of substance.
I guess, I don't know if you would call this a bigger picture question or not, but I And maybe this was discussed in previous meetings and I don't recall, but what is the rationale from SPU and the executive about why Seattle should not go to every other week when many other comparable cities have, when there are strong arguments for, you know, carbon emission reductions?
that we have on our side, a very strong recognition on the part of the majority of the households in Seattle about the dangers of climate change and the need to reduce emissions.
I mean, I really don't question the commitment that ordinary people have for this.
And I also seen, and again, this last part is anecdotally, I don't have statistical information, maybe SPU does, but I have anecdotal information just from my own experience, like my own household and people I know, Every other week, actually, and the understanding of climate change, it does prompt you to change your behavior.
And Council Member Herbold, you were mentioning this earlier.
The behavior change that you see, which is quite remarkable in reducing garbage itself, because you know it's not gonna be picked up for several days more, and you don't want to deal with the smell and the odor, and you will really take pains to make sure that You know, in terms of reducing garbage, even when you make grocery shopping decisions, but also when you're doing garbage and recycling, taking real care to separate things out and so on.
So I just feel like there's so much going for us.
to move towards this decision, and given that other comparable cities have done this?
And as you said, yes, it's less than a decade maybe, but roughly eight to 10 years is a long time that other cities have done it.
So what is the rationale behind all of that?
Either one.
I mean, that's asking us to restate what you said in the beginning, Ken.
And I can do that or you can do that.
Either one.
I think some of the major concerns have been around for some of the underserved communities making sure that we didn't increase from a cost of service issue, you know, that we're not passing on additional cost and we're trying to be more mindful of affordability.
And so there's been a lot of analysis and conversations around, understanding that, you know, while a certain segment of our city population is okay with moving forward, there's others who are not.
So as it relates to the cost, so even though there would be savings associated with every other week pickup, you're saying that the costs are associated with the contract.
Is that correct?
Additional costs?
There could be, right, and as we said earlier also, the really tricky thing for us too is that, you know, we just signed a new contract, right, so.
And remind me, is there re-openers in that contract?
No.
There are no re-openers?
No, I mean the contract is a 10-year contract with extensions, two-year extensions after that.
Okay.
It does allow for It does anticipate different models in the contract that we could try different things.
Yeah.
There's no earlier term, but at any given day with any contracting partner, you can sit down and say, maybe we could change things.
And there is language that would allow for some sort of an opt-in subscription that's in the contract.
That's right.
So we could potentially have a conversation around what that might look like in a way that could conceivably allow for an opt-in for a larger geographical group.
Of course, I would be totally interested in looking at every option possible.
I'll just say though, and I've said this before in other contexts, opt-in are not the best way to go about things because it does have a real dampening effect on how much any program is subscribed into.
And in fact, one of the things we see the problems with opt-in in are related to services for the underserved, for low-income people, on food assistance, all those sorts of things.
When you depend on opt-in, it doesn't work as well as when you automatically target the households that need it.
Obviously, here we're talking about something slightly different.
It's about the larger goal of reducing emissions.
which we want everybody to be committed to.
I just feel like, I don't know if opt-in is the best starting point.
So I, first of all, I really appreciate the report and the kind of reminder of the work that was done seven years ago.
That's helpful.
I appreciate the clarity that this is not currently in the plan.
We received a letter from the mayor this morning saying exactly that.
We're happy to present, but this is not a plan that we're planning to do.
And I want to, you know, I don't wake up in the morning thinking like, how can I make life less convenient for people who live in Seattle?
And clearly, going to garbage every two weeks can be less convenient, seen by less convenient for folks.
This is not driven by customer satisfaction, necessarily.
It's driven by another set of goals, which we have.
I mean, the most convenient thing is probably just to throw our trash on the curb and let someone throw it all in a dumpster and haul it off to the landfill.
And our goal is to not do that.
So I'm looking at the recycling report that came out last week, I think.
And so I appreciate that update.
And at least my quick read, it looks like we've kind of flatlined in the last few years.
And unless you guys have some tricks up our sleeves, we are nowhere near going to meet our 2022 targets in the single family sector.
We need to increase our recycling rate 10% in the next three years.
It went down 1% last year.
The multifamilies, we need to increase it 17% to 54%.
So we need to almost double the recycling rate in the next three years.
And the commercial sector, similar 10% increase needs to happen.
So I get saying that I don't want to be the person that tells people we need to change our behavior and go to one I'm looking at you all, but I imagine, I realize you're messengers here.
I'm interested in hearing, is the department and the mayor saying, we're giving up on our zero waste targets, we want to redo the zero waste targets?
Or is it like, we don't think every other garbage, every other garbage is a strategy to get there, which is I think what we did in 2012. Here are the other strategies that are going to get us a 10% increase in waste reduction in the next three years.
And it's going to require, like, change in behavior.
I mean, it's a hassle to start compost and recycling and garbage right now, and yet we do it because we were appalled as a community at the amount of stuff we're sending to a landfill, and we wanted to meet this commitment.
Frankly, I haven't seen any changes in the last few years that are putting us on that trajectory.
So I would love, I appreciate the mayor saying she doesn't want to do the other week garbage.
I would like to hear the mayor come back to us in a month and tell us what does she plan to do to hit a 10% increase in the single family zone in the next three years.
And if it's not every other week garbage, that's great because it's, you know, I get the complications around it.
What are the things you're going to do instead?
And if it's just cross my fingers and hope that people do a better job, I don't think that's going to work.
Or if the mayor wants to come back and say, I'm going to propose that we're going to slow down our zero waste ambitions, I will probably disagree with that.
But let's at least be clear that we want new goals that are less ambitious if that's the policies we're going to set.
And so I don't know.
what you would recommend, Committee Chair?
I asked for this briefing because I, like you, am frustrated that we aren't pushing forward and implementing some of the solutions that I've seen other jurisdictions implement.
I was, as it relates specifically this particular strategy, I was at a People for Climate Change event The Multnomah County Portland Director of their version of the Office of Sustainability and Environment gave a presentation and talked about the actions that they had taken in their Climate Action Plan.
This one jumped out at me, and I remembered the pilot.
I remembered what, at the time, felt like a decision that was a political decision backed up by a customer satisfaction survey to not move forward.
And I just really feel strongly that it's a seven-year-old report in people's attitudes of change, and I'd like to test that theory that I have.
Not only have people's attitudes of change, their expectations of their government, to provide bold solutions and ask for their, as in the community's, collaboration and partnership on those solutions.
That's what they expect of us.
And I really feel strongly that people's perspectives have have very likely changed in the last seven years.
Also, as it relates to meeting our waste reduction goals, I've been trying to also push a legislative change in the land use code, specifically the building construction code for multifamily buildings to make sure that new buildings have every other, I'm sorry, have every floor have garbage, compost, and recycling facilities located on every other floor because SPU's own studies show that that is the one thing that would make the most difference in improving our recycling goals in multifamily buildings.
This is another element that I think would really go a long ways.
I'm looking forward to getting more support from the executive on that effort as well.
So I'm with you, Council Member O'Brien.
If not this, what?
Thank you, Council Member Herbold.
I look forward to collaborating on that.
And I know you all are capable of doing amazing work.
You know, we've been doing this work for years and I've been impressed.
And I also recognize that this work requires often uncomfortable conversations and pushing people's behavior because that's, you know, part of it is policies and about how do we require, make it convenient, make it easier, make it less smelly, all those things.
How do we make it the cheaper alternative to do what we want them to do?
And at the end of the day, it's also behavior change, and that requires a type of political leadership so that you guys can do what I imagine you know we're capable of.
And I'm just, you know, I'm gonna personally hold myself accountable here.
You know, my first few years on city council, this was an area that I paid a lot of attention to.
Say in the last few years, it hasn't been on my radar, and I know that I have not been providing the political leadership necessary to continue to move the needle and you know when I go back and look at the report from that came out last week and where we are I feel like I've let myself down and let people I try to represent down and I want to figure out how to how to up that game again.
You know Seattle I think has been a national leader in waste diversion for decades and I feel like I feel like we've been resting on our laurels for a few years again not because I think that that your team isn't capable and doesn't have a bunch of ideas, but because there hasn't been the political demand to say pull those ideas out, we want to make them happen.
So I think we have a role to do with the mayor to shift that dynamic and kind of unleash the potential that I hope you guys have to make something happen.
And I think we just, we need to be really clear about what that's going to take.
And it's going to take behavior change.
If, you know, I agree with Council Member Herbold.
Well, one, I think Council Member Swann highlighted You know, even in 2012, the majority of the people that went through the pilot recommended we should do it.
Narrow majority, for sure.
And it's shifted since then.
There are race and social justice implications of that, and I think I appreciate highlighting that.
It'd be good to know where we are.
But let's start a pilot, a mandatory pilot, in the wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods in Seattle first, then, if that's our concern.
And let's see how that rolls out, and let's see what we learn.
And let's work on, you know, if diapers are the issue, what are the type of, you know, odor-sealing bags that we can offer everybody with diapers in the household?
I mean, there's things that we can do to address those concerns.
It takes a little bit of work, and like I said, it takes some political leadership to do that.
Let's do that.
I don't know that the council is positioned to come up with the specifics.
I think you guys hold the expertise.
And so I think how we can ask the mayor to support the department coming back to us in the next month or two and saying, here's a roadmap for how we think we can get to, you know, if we hit every, you know, here are the things we would need to do if we want to hit our 2022 goals.
in the next few years and it's going to be ambitious and require more resources.
Here's what we have to do, but let's at least have an honest discussion with the public on what the options are before us and as a community are we ready to kind of live up to the goals we set a few years ago?
Or are we saying, no, we're going to give up on those and adjust our goals and be clear about what the changes need to happen?
Yeah.
And I just, I find, I mean, I scheduled a briefing on this 2017 report as a way to initiate a conversation.
I'm not quite sure why that prompted a 9-25 a letter from the mayor basically saying it's not a conversation that the mayor wants to have.
So I hope that together we can work on changing that so that it is a more open and collaborative discussion about what the possibilities are.
Council Member Swan.
On one of your slides you had a point about how in the other cities the satisfaction went up after the households had been in the program for a little while.
And I don't know, it's just one bullet point, so I don't know whether it was a period of months or years or whatever.
But I think that's also something that we should take into consideration.
I mean, if we, if there is genuine agreement, not just lip service, but genuine agreement that we need to go towards, I mean, we need to take every possible measure we can as a city of Seattle publicly to reduce emissions, then We should take the example of other cities where the satisfaction did go up because they saw that it does make a difference in everybody's well-being if the carbon emissions of the city as a whole are reduced, which I have no question in my mind that the majority is strongly majority of ordinary people understand.
We don't we don't need to explain to them.
They understand the need to reduce emissions.
Honestly, it's a question of whether there's political leadership in City Hall to do that.
And then the other question I wanted to raise is as far and just again to highlight that even in this City of Seattle pilot program, everything, I mean all the satisfaction bars you had in the bar graph were all in the majority.
So yes, some of them may be slim majorities, but it's important to know that they're majority.
So I'm still I don't want you to repeat what you already said, but this is a question really directed to the mayor's office and not so much to staff.
I still don't see what the compelling evidence is to not move forward when even the lower satisfaction was in a majority direction.
And then the other last question I wanted to ask is, and if you don't have information about this right now, that's totally fine.
In fact, I would like it in written form also.
So if you could send this electronically, that'd be very useful.
One of the points that you brought up was a question of whether having employees in-house, you know, public as a public employees versus contracting with a corporation, if that was a variable that had some impact in other cities.
So I don't know off the top of your head, do you know if most of the other cities that have moved to other every other week also happen to have all their garbage recycling and, you know, yard waste employees in-house or not.
I would be interested in seeing that.
I do see, I do acknowledge the point you made about that the the wages and benefits to the workers are comparable, but setting that aside, what is the cost to the city when it contracts with the for-profit corporation versus in-house?
I mean, I think there's a lot of evidence to show that when services are brought in-house, overall the cost to the city go lower.
So rather than rejecting this program as a whole, what we would expect is the different kind of leadership where We talk about real options to bring services in-house if that is going to make a difference.
And I would assume, just generally speaking, that it often does.
And taking those measures to reduce costs to lower income households rather than saying, well, lower income households don't like this.
I don't even agree with that on the face of it.
I think lower income households are very clear about the dangers of climate change.
They are on the front lines of the problems related to climate change.
Rather than put the onus on them effectively, I think the onus should be on us.
Well, if there are no other thoughts, I think I'm going to talk to my colleagues on this committee to talk about how to move forward.
I'll also continue to talk to folks at SPU and the mayor to see whether or not we can craft a path forward.
Again, I believe that the public expects us to do more and we'll be talking as well with the folks on the ground who are, you know, taking the lead on pushing us as elected officials to do more to address climate change as well.
Thank you for your presentation.
I appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks.
Thanks for your input.
It's 1023 and the meeting has adjourned.