After a loud and mostly angry crowd of South County residents
showed up to protest a possible change in garbage hauling services
at a community meeting, county officials decided to take a closer
look at the proposal they recommended to the board of
supervisors.
MORGAN HILL
After a loud and mostly angry crowd of South County residents showed up to protest a possible change in garbage hauling services at a community meeting, county officials decided to take a closer look at the proposal they recommended to the board of supervisors.
About 150 people attended the Thursday meeting in San Martin, which was called by the Santa Clara County Department of Agriculture and Environmental Management.
Audience members began shouting questions and complaints at the department’s staff as soon as they began to give a presentation on the proposed changes. It was often difficult for staff to hear questions from the crowd, as several people spoke simultaneously and with raised voices.
Until Thursday’s meeting, the department’s Integrated Waste Management division was ready to recommend that the county accept a contract for garbage pickup services from GreenWaste Recovery. The current contract with South Valley Disposal, the only other company to bid on the next contract, expires Sept. 30.
The board of supervisors was scheduled to make a decision on the contract at its March 24 meeting. However, that decision will be postponed to an undetermined date so that county staff can make a better determination of what the 4,000 South County customers who will be affected prefer, according to Greg Van Wassenhove, Director of the Dept. of Agriculture and Environmental Management.
“We will be setting up a focus group in the next week or two, and we will go back over the essential services that the residents wish in the new contract,” Van Wassenhove said Friday morning. After the staff has a better understanding of what residents want, they will ask the two bidding contractors to revise their bids based on a refined list of garbage pickup needs and services.
Van Wassenhove said staff will send the new proposals to the board for a decision sometime between April and July.
To those attending Thursday’s meeting, one of the more contentious changes proposed by the department was the use of 96-gallon plastic containers for customers to store yard waste for pickup by the hauler. Now, customers receive 12 vouchers per year to haul yard waste to landfills as part of their service.
Supervisor Don Gage said he disagreed with the staff recommendation to begin with because it didn’t adequately portray what the customers wanted.
“We’ve got to get a better read on what people want and need,” Gage said. “They don’t want increased costs. That’s loud and clear.”
People at the meeting explained that because they live “in the country” and many of them have much larger lots than customers in North County, they produce more yard waste than is able to fit into the containers.
They also complained about the monthly rate increase proposed by GreenWaste Recovery, which is higher than that proposed by South Valley Disposal. The average monthly household rate for garbage pickup under the previous recommendation would increase from the current price of $22.90 to $25.85 to empty a 32-gallon container, with the cost rising proportionally for residents who use larger containers.
That’s about a 13 percent increase, and South Valley Disposal has proposed increasing rates by about 4 percent, to $23.92 per month for the most commonly used 32-gallon container, according to the company’s general manager Phil Couchee.
Several audience members Thursday also complained that because the staff presentation intended only to provide details of GreenWaste’s proposal, it sounded like a “done deal.”
But Van Wassenhove said afterwards that the purpose of the meeting was to “educate” the community about the recommendation. He said comparing proposals or re-evaluating them was not the purpose of the meeting.
But now, he said a chief concern of the focus group he plans to put together will be to compare monthly rates for the same services, once his office determines exactly what services the customers want.
County staff thought they had a good idea of what South County residents wanted prior to Thursday’s meeting. In the months leading up to the meeting, they distributed surveys to the affected customers asking for their preferences in various aspects of garbage and recycling pickup.
More than 1,000 surveys, or about 25 percent, came back completed. Most of the surveys indicated that people wanted the changes reflected in the GreenWaste proposal.
Besides the use of yard waste containers instead of vouchers, those changes include weekly pickup of recyclable trash, instead of every other week; the use of “single-stream” recycling which allows customers to place all their recycling in one container rather than sorting it into multiple bins as they now do; and the offer of a smaller container, at a lower price, for non-recyclable garbage than is currently offered.
However, many residents at Thursday’s meeting said they only just received their surveys, days after the posted deadline to turn them in. Staff said residents may still send in their completed surveys, and they will still be counted.
“We’re optimistic that we can work through this process with the residents and come to some consensus, and we appreciated the input that was provided” at Thursday’s meeting, Van Wassenhove.
The county is divided into seven “garbage districts,” and district two, which comprises South County, is the only district where the current contract is set to expire after September.
The bidding process for the new contract started last year, and Van Wassenhove said one purpose of the new services is to make district two consistent with the rest of the county, and industry standards.
County officials said another goal with the new contract, no matter who wins it, is to encourage recycling. Elizabeth Constantino of the Department of Agriculture and Environmental Management said at Thursday’s meeting that the population of South County recycles about 24 percent of its trash, while the county wants residents to recycle at least 50 percent of their trash.
South Valley Disposal is also the garbage hauler for the city of Morgan Hill under a separate contract that expires in 2015. Residents of Holiday Lake Estates, a subdivision on the unincorporated eastern edge of the city near Anderson Lake, are served as city customers because of the lack of clarity in where the municipal boundary is. Those customers pay $25.06 per month for garbage, recycling and yard waste disposal.
“It has been administratively easier for South Valley to treat them all the same, especially since they belong to a common homeowner’s association too,” said the city’s Environmental Programs Manager Anthony Eulo. He said there are no other unincorporated areas near Morgan Hill that fall within the city’s service.
South Valley Disposal currently serves about 30,000 customers in Santa Clara and San Benito Counties, Couchee said. He said if the company loses the 4,000 customers to the change in services, it would likely have to lay off some employees.
