City to Bid to Be Its Own Waste and Recycling Hauler

With the exception of curbside garbage pickup, , most of the rest of the refuse and recycling collection and disposal process is handled under a private contract.

Curbside recycling and yard waste pickup, operation of the transfer station at the city yard, and hauling of waste to a landfill or recycling center are handled by Waste Management Inc. under a contract that hasn't been revisited since 2002.

Now, the is preparing to rebid that contract – and plans to submit its own bid for the work.

Public Works Director Bill Porter, like his predecessor Bill Kappel, has crunched numbers and believes the city could save money by doing the job itself.

Good public participation in recycling has made it a profitable program. A concurrent reduction in the amout of garbage collected has reduced landfill costs. The result is an opportunity to cut out the middleman, as it were, and pocket more of the proceeds from the recycling side.

There is a lot at stake: The request for proposals will ask for a seven-year contract worth at least $9 million, with the possibility of two one-year extensions, taking the city's solid waste service into the next decade.

A change is in order – as in a change order

As a bidder for its own services, the city needs to pay an outside, independent manager to move the bid approval process through the Common Council.

Porter was set to ask the council's Budget and Finance Committee on Tuesday night for approval of a change order to its ongoing contract with the firm AECOM, of Sheboygan, which had already been retained to help develop the RFP.

The city had already agreed to pay AECOM $19,500 for its services; AECOM has asked for up to an additional $11,170 to cover unexpected additional costs.

The added costs are not all associated with playing impartial umpire in the city's bid to pick up after itself – in fact, most of the added payment to AECOM would go to cover complications that cropped up as it developed the RFP.

AECOM, considered expert in the area of solid waste management, found seven viable alternatives in the area of handling recycling alone, and needed to develop them all in the RFP. That amounted to $3,500 more than anticipated in preparing the document.

Remember the blue bags?

Also, as it dug into the work, AECOM found that so much had changed in the city's solid waste programming since the 2002 contract was let and approved, it had to practically start from scratch in terms of assessing the costs of some services.

For instance, in 2002 and for some time beyond, the city had its memorable "blue bag" recycling program. That changed in mid-contract, as blue bags became passe and curbside carts all the rage.

That and other such alterations in the existing contract added $4,200 to AECOM's costs to develop a workable RFP, the company said in a June 22 memo to Porter.

Welcome to the digital world

Then there was the matter of the missing Word file.

Search as they might, high and low, city staff could find no digital copy of the 2002 contract, and so instead had to hand over a printed copy to AECOM with which to develop its new benchmarks.

It cost an extra $3,000, AECOM said, to digitize, cross-reference and correct the 2002 document.

Finally, additional meeting to time to sort all this out – and to fairly administer the city's own bid – adds another $1,010.

Public Works is asking the Budget and Finance Committee to approve the change order to ensure "that we can meet projected timelines and have an orderly RFP process."

According to that timeline, bids would be advertised Thursday and opened Aug. 9.