and call this meeting of the fiscal committee, special fiscal police order on November 18th, week 31.
If you want to go around the table and say who we are first, so we start third, district 40.
General Manning, you're deputy public works director. Morning. Nate Nichol, business manager of public
works department. Lazarus Sears, director of sanitation department. Adam Wason, public works director.
Isabelle Piedmont, city council district. Cynthia McDowell, fairs office.
if we're all listed in council. At 30, it would be kind of by and large. Janet, machine and city control.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I just opened up my computer and analyzed the whole thing and restarted
it somehow overnight. So I'll bring up my agenda. But I think basically we need to through the agenda
and then we have sanitation here to discuss their memo, presentations, questions and comments from the
Committee and then public comments and then we need to get back to our official salary discussion and
public comment on that scheduling because we always have to have notes on scheduling and then adjournment.
So any concerns or additions to the agenda? Great, we'll proceed like that and I will hand it over to
our wonderful sanitation folks over here who are going to tell us.
All of it. Great. Again, public works director with the whole team here to back me up when I say something
wrong. But it's kind of ironic that we're in here today to talk sanitation rates because when this room
first became a conference room in 2016 2017
We sat around this table for months and months on end with the Sanitation Modernization Advisory Committee.
We did not call it the SMAC, but it was when we first looked at how to revamp and modernize sanitation.
That's where we got with CART system and the rate system that we're currently using, where we're doing
a single family collection from units four or less. And that's a weekly service for both trash recycle and then
yard waste during yard waste season. And so since that kind of big switch over in 2017, we have seen,
we've really had great benefits from the new programs, lower injury rates. I think customer satisfaction
is higher. I was sitting at a table with some
folks yesterday at a luncheon and the topic of conversation when it came to public works and sanitation
was how glad they were that they didn't have to still go to the grocery store and buy stickers
for collection. So while we have a much better system in place for both residents and staff, it's a
more expensive system and everything's more expensive right now, as you folks have been seeing in our
budget requests and everything. So
We were asked to put together from the fiscal committee some projections on what it would look like
to eliminate the general fund support for the sanitation division and what those fiscal impacts would
be. We have sent off a memo to the fiscal committee and to the council that outlines what we considered
in all of this.
to set those rates, a couple of big factors to recognize upfront. Everything is simply more expensive
right now. It's not just that trucks that used to be $360,000 or $350,000 now, but all of the supplies
across the board for sanitation are more expensive. Fuel, we all know what's going on with fuel costs
across country. Those are hitting us directly.
We've been averaging between $600,000 and a million dollars in general fund support is looking more
like a million and a half for 2026 here and into the future. And so what we've kind of worked on here
is a rate structure for council to consider that would at the council's request, we put together a
projection here of what it would look like to eliminate the general fund support over a three-year period.
So those are all outlined in the tables that are in the memo. To just cut to the meat of it, what that
looks like to sanitation, the residents that use our sanitation service, our monthly costs for our,
so we're continuing to propose rates that are based on your cart size or trash.
the 35 gallon, 64 gallon, or 98 gallon. The proposed increases from 26 to 27 are going to look like,
so from $9.66 for a 35 gallon up to 1072,
or 64 gallon from about 1750 to 1940, and then 96 gallon would go up to $29.11. You'll see three subsequent
charts that outline what that would look like for 28 and 29. And then also, as we look at this ordinance
update, we would also look at updating the costs for moving on to page like 10 in the memo would be
a chart that outlines how we would change rates for yard waste, large item appliances, cart exchanges,
and extra pickups. Overall, this is a rate proposal that it looks like it's about 12% first year, 16%
the second, and 12%, again, the third year. That does capture the amount of revenue
by the third year to cover the whole cost of the system, with the caveat that what will happen with
costs going into the future is still somewhat of an unknown. There's a lot of information in this memo.
I think probably the best way we could go about this is to just go through questions that the council
committee has and let us
try to answer those as we're able to today and such. But Gretchen, Jeff, do you have anything you want
to add on this topic of convenience? You know, there's a lot covered in the memo here. I would just
call our attention to the annual or competitive to market rates and what's available on the market and
note that, you know, in the market, if you're getting the largest size crash and you don't need weekly
recycling pickup, we can, you know, we're on fargish with those services.
But the majority of, if you're looking at the 257 proposed rates chart, that shows the total Carson
inventory for 34 gallons, 64 and 96 gallon, the majority of Bloomington residents choose the smaller
size. And so as we think about our environmental goals and what our costs are to residents and whether
we're providing them a good value for a city service compared to what they can get on the market and
covering the costs, I just think we should keep that in mind that one of our
The UI goal, obviously, is to encourage people to make less trash, and offering smaller parts is a really
important piece of that, and also lower service costs. So anyone who's concerned about the cost of their
trash making less trash pays off for a resident. And then I guess just the other, this is just sort
of another piece of information to consider as far as the numbers go. I've been looking at your monthly
expenses versus revenues.
taking out the fleet set rate, taking out any capital expenditures and taking out the transfers from
the general fund. You're basically running both from last year and this year around a $45,000 monthly
deficit in just basic operations. I'm just saying 43,000 last year, 42,000 this year. So the numbers
are actually per month.
deficit. Again, that's just that's basic operations. Does that kind of jive with what you guys are saying
also? A couple other things to note with the with any equipment intensive division of public works or
Department of the City. One of the biggest things we can do to stay ahead of increased costs in the
future is to have a really strong capital replacement program.
we need to replace at least one truck every year. With the rising costs that we've been seeing, we've
not been able to keep up with that like we would like. We're about one year behind right now. But we
also have, from the initial purchase on the sidearm trucks, we need to, over a couple of these years,
we probably need to try to replace two trucks. So you will also see built into this a capital
line that should cover those costs into the future. Just to put a bow on that, anytime you get past
the best management practices or life cycle for a particular unit type, these are obviously big heavy
equipment unit types, seven to 10 years to max. We've been in a position where we've been running a
lot of trucks that are 10 to 12 years, and the cost on that from a repair and maintenance perspective
is just really, really high.
So that capital part of everything's very important. Thank you. Do you guys have anything that you want
to add to any of this from your perspectives? Yeah, we do offer a lot of services that do not generate
revenue. Oh, true. Yeah. Yeah, such as a little recycling, car replacements, or when the new developments
come in, you have to furnish totals for every single house.
The other thing that we looked at on this line of thought is, you know, when we talk about the general
fund support numbers that go towards sanitation, that also includes all pickup from our city parks,
every pedestrian scale, trash can we have through the city, and then every city facility. So we service
Twin Lakes, we service the ball fields down at Winslow, we service, you know, that all gets captured
into these costs as well. So there is some level of general community benefit with all the
you know, these other non-revenue generating services that we do provide. And you've included that as
what, 200,000? Roughly. Really trying to figure out the cost on the recycling for that is a little more
difficult, but yeah. And I would add one thing to what the deputy mayor mentioned too, just as a pilot
sector comparisons, they typically only offer one, sometimes two sizes only containers where we offer
three. And our recycling pick up as weekly
We're private callers. They operate for the five of you. Any other? Yeah, I got a question. Yeah, let
me wait on questions for just a second. Anything else that you guys want to add? Open it up to the floor,
please. And then before I open that up, Dave, I do just wanted that chart that you pointed out, because
you emailed something about there being a chart that didn't quite have the right numbers on it. Was
that the chart on page 10? Yes, it is. That was on page 10.
Number of items should not have dollars. Exactly. Yes, until we've got that updated. So we could run
through what that should be, and I don't know if that could be shown on the screen at all. I don't know.
It was Zoomed. It was Zoomed. I'm not in the Zoom right now. I don't know if it's Zoomed. I just added
page numbers to the document. Sorry. OK. And do you want to project anything in this room?
You're asking something that I might not know how to do. There's also another factor. My computer is
on absolute red and my charger is over in my office in the garage. I apologize. Others, do you have
it on there? Yeah. Okay.
So basically, let me just walk through it verbally. So for the chart that had some misinformation on
page 10 there for yard waste, large item appliances and such, in the initial chart, we had dollar figures
for the number of items collected. Yeah. So for like yard waste, we did at a dollar per bag for yard
waste, we did 45,000
We collected 45,353 items for 45,000 in revenue. Large items, we collected at $25, 1,484 of them at
37,100. So that updated chart will reflect the actual number collected in the total revenue amount.
So it was pretty minor. It was just, yeah. But all through that column, there's discretion. So Gladrid,
could you maybe send that?
to me, and then while we're doing some questions after that, I'll figure out. And it was in the updated
Google link. It was in the updated Google document. OK, I made a copy of your document for this folder.
So I'll just figure out a good way to show that up on the screen, and I'll join the Google link while
we're having those questions. You were saying the numbers were actually. The dollar numbers were actually
correct. It was just the number of items collected that we had to adjust.
Sorry. That's okay. Thank you. So, Dave, why don't you start us off. Well, I'll start with a question
people ask, someone asked about pay as you throw. So that's been discussed for a number of years. I
know there are reasons why you're averse to that, but could you just
Have you considered it? Absolutely. We certainly tried it. We've had two failed vendor relationships
on the hardware software side that have not been able to meet the obligations necessary for us to collect
that data. We cannot find a vendor that can provide a service that tells us exactly how many times we
pick up a cart, even with the RFID and the serial numbers.
It has not been a successful attempt in either of those iterations back in 17 or in 21 when we went
to different vendors. A lot of the challenges is we have so many carts that get placed so close together,
the readers cannot distinguish when you've got 301 North Washington with three units and nine carts
or six carts.
And they put those all out front. That reader cannot discern when it's on one card versus the next when
they're two or three feet apart. And we could never get valid data month after month to tell us anything
close to how many times we're picking up to every individual household. We were just at the national
conference with the American Public Works Association. We talked with vendors again. At this point in
time, I'm not confident that we could find a vendor that could provide accurate enough data with their
systems to do that.
The logistics are problematic. But it must work somewhere. So are those carts that are shipped or something?
We have RFID. We can try to pull some examples of other communities that may do a sample type of pay
as you throw. But we have not found success with ours. So I'll be happy to do some more research there.
But we have tried twice now. OK, good.
So let's just suppose you can do it. OK. That was a big hit. You can't do it. But suppose you can do
it. You can't do it. You've been trying for nine years. Well, I'd like to work through other, what do
you encounter in terms of obstacles or actually advantages? I mean, we want to reduce the waste drain,
right? People would be incentivized to not put their cart out every week and maybe find ways
compost or whatever, but then you're driving streets anyway. So you're spending fuel doing that.
So that's, that's the downside. So are there any other things I should think about regarding your, your
needs or, you know? If we want to go back to a sticker system, if we want to go back to something that
shows we've paid for that week, the collection side has not yielded a system that, that accurately collects
that data.
Certainly. Go ahead, please. But you just made a really great point, Dave, which is the trucks are still
making it around. The trucks are still there. The people are still there. We would get low if there
was less trash. Our disposal rate would go down. Presumably, the tonnage goes down. But there's a lot
of phase costs that are still the same. So people are interesting. So anyway, there's something I don't
think you got the answers right. But I would just like to run through the scenarios
just to see if there's, if it could be cost effective, if it's possible. Because people do ask about
it and it is, it's a legitimate question. Why am I, why am I subsidizing others? You know, when the
goal is to reduce what we're all, you know, trash. And I'm doing my job composting or whatever they're
doing, you know, to reduce waste. In conversation we've had every time this has ever come up and there's
never been the perfect solution.
I've heard, yeah, Dave, I've heard this ever since we came in 2017. I mean, another option would be
to point out that the smallest size that we offer is smaller than anything we can get in a panel. So
that is the incentive to create less trash. Yeah. And, you know, if we wanted to create the mini, mini,
mini trash size, you know. We can't go lower than 35. No, ladder does not allow something smaller. Sorry.
35 is bad.
I have kind of a math question related to that, that if you think about those fixed costs and you think
like, because like the electric company does that, right? I don't know if you guys read that, but there's
like a $12 a month, like base electric charge, and then your usage is on top of that. So if we have
some kind of a base sanitation charge with some sort of usage on top of that, I guess my question or
like my thought is, if you have the smallest container right now, would that usage cost
plus some kind of an actual disposal charge actually be less than the, oh my God, why are you, would
that actually be less than the smallest monthly sanitation vendor? But are you still suggesting we'd
have to know when they put it out?
No, no, I'm just, it's kind of like a math question. It's like, I mean, I think that the people who
do this, like what they want to do is they're like, well, like I'm paying more than I should be paying
based on how much I throw away. My question is, are they actually in terms of, you know, having to have
the truck store around in terms of what's in the bin? Because in terms of whatever that base charge
would have to be to run those trucks with those people.
and do those operations like it might not actually save any money, but I don't know if it would or not.
Yeah, that was actually gonna be my question to phrase the different way. I was gonna say what percentage
of your costs are fixed costs just associated running the routes versus the disposal costs? So total
budget for 27 proposed is 4.066 million. So right off the top, 58% of that is category one
Personnel, 2.3 million is just, so almost 60% off the top is personnel. You know, so roughly 85% is
probably fixed cost when you think, well, 75% to 80% would be. Say that again. So if a million, could
you have it right in front of you? Yeah.
Category one personnel off the top is 58% of the overall budget. Which is how much? 2.32 million. Okay,
so it's basically the fees that we've collected. Roughly, yeah. Well, yeah, somewhere between like the
20-27. Yeah. There are like very weasy ways to get in, like the fairest way to do great design, and
like CDU does this with like how do you fix costs, how do you get allocated. Right. I think that's probably
like beyond
what we need to do. But I guess I made the point today that the vast majority of people don't have the
smallest card and do have an option for size down, waste less, and save money if they want. The people
in the lowest card option, no, they don't. Like there is a floor, but it is lower than the rest of the
county. You know, any other private office, they're a little like, I'm interested in your questions
too, David, like it's continuing to explore technology solutions, but like on balance, I think we're
doing all right. That's my point.
I guess my question was more like for the public out there. Here's the other piece to think about when
you're assessing this bill. Sure. People always feel agreed about the fixed charges on their Duke and
their Sarah Boyd and their NSCEU. And actually those are under, like the Duke, I know for a fact the
Duke ones are lower than they should be based on fixed costs. But it's always an negotiation,
isn't it Paul? Yeah. That's acceptable. I have another quick question.
Matt had raised his hand before that. You've already started talking. Go for it. Briefly, I had a few
as well. So this is, Trash is part of the CDU water bill for everybody who gets it, right? The orientation
services. The program that Cat Zeiger has helped to move forward as far as folks experiencing economic
insecurity and struggling to pay their bills, that we've got to make some progress on,
trash included in that, or then exempted in some way. That's also, I think, worth noting here, but I
think is a concern, in terms of our rate increases, is folks facing economic insecurity, how do we support
them? And we actually are, and it continues to be. And that's another form of... That's CBU dollars?
Is that a general assumption? We put $25,000 into that. Oh, that's great. So yes, that is there too.
So thanks for comparing, I think. Thank you for answering all my questions. Thank you. So I'm looking
at page six of the packet, maybe page seven of the memo, I'm not sure. There's, well, it's a table that
starts on the previous page, projected deficit slash surplus with new rates.
It shows for 27, 28, and 29, it shows a surplus. Is that to build up the reserves? Yeah, we do have
to keep the cash balance with the sanitation fund. Mr. Controller, can you help me explain exactly?
Well, yeah. Anytime you have salaries in a fund,
You have to have enough cash balance to be able to make payroll the next year before the revenue starts
coming. So there's not a rule that says we have to have exactly this amount. You have to have enough
to be able to handle your early on expenses at the beginning of the year. Yeah. And we need a push.
I mean, we've seen how much the general fund support amount has kind of increased or changed over time here.
We definitely need a cash balance for market fluctuations that hit us, like fuel this year, other things.
There's plenty of unknowns in any given year of sanitation. So on the same chart, the... Oh, I'm sorry.
I just answered my own question. Okay, so that includes the $200,000.
that will be built to the general fund? Yes. All right, I have more but. Okay, I have a question about
that while we're talking about that. So in terms of that, it's phrased on here as it would be billed
to the general fund, but then there's actually an amount. So would it actually be like billed to the
general fund or could we think about that as a general fund subsidy in order to
just in terms of like how you were thinking about it, not necessarily as like this is the plan we're
going to do. Yes, that's certain that the general fund would still support that basic amount of community
service that we're providing that is not repaid or supported. Right, but it wouldn't necessarily be
billed in terms of, you know, some kind of like, I'm just trying to think of like how easy it
The ease of transfers and the ease of inter-city communication. I mean, a budgeted transfer is the easiest.
Okay. I wasn't going to try to answer that. I was just going to keep looking across the table. I wouldn't
use the term subsidy. It's not for services actually. Just really quickly to that point.
We've had a lot of discussions about all of this. And there are certain things that we're still going
to subsidize slightly. So an appliance pickup costs us more than the even proposed amount that we're
putting in here. But if we actually charge the full amount, we're going to be picking up washing machines
on the side of the road. And so there are certain smaller things, but those are not a large portion
of the revenue we're bringing in.
And that's still internal to your rate. Some of that cross-subsidization of types of activities within
the rate of charging is inevitable. Yep. Well, a constituent asked about going completely privatized,
you know, and running numbers and seeing if that's competitive. I'm not saying I'm going to do that.
That was the question.
I have not on those numbers. We are a strong supporter of our union workforce, and I've not been asked
to do that. So we have not gone to the market to see what it would look like. And would, I mean,
we would be, might be even more affluent of like price fluctuation. If it went privately, fully privately.
From the basics of what I know of communities that have private sector contracts,
It's a very much negotiated thing that the Council and the Board of Public Works would enter into over
a multi-year period. I know you can separate structures that are capped and I'm sure there's a lot of
legal language in there that outline all of it, but again, we have not
done a deep dive into privatization. Okay. Again, I'm just asking a question, but one quick question.
Have we locked in fuel prices? Our fuel prices fluctuate every few weeks. Adam, I was just talking about
that. We may need to do an additional get this year because of fuel escalation. So, pollution transit,
in the past, I don't know if it's still low up here.
They lock in prices. They anticipate that there might be some pretty big fluctuation. If your prices
go up in a couple of weeks, we're going to have to... Oh, absolutely. Is there any way to lock it in?
No, we have never seen an option where we can lock in for 12 months or anything. We can explore that.
We put our fuel out to bid every year, and basically, we've got five or six vendors that said they would
want to bid on the fuel. We have one or two vendors that ever respond anymore. It's a really tight market,
and I'll be happy to explore with Jeff and Cory and Joe, but we have never seen an option to lock in
at a price for 12 months. That's not how it's ever worked. Contingency plans, if there are shortage
I mean, we're trying to reduce fuel usage, but no, we're at the limits of the market in that way. And
the other thing too is we do pay gas tax. That is one of the things that we don't, you know, so we're
benefiting as a city from the suspended gas tax. So I know. The irony. The irony is.
Well, yes. You can get some money back. Yes, there is. We just got them yesterday. Yeah. We have been
with seasonal payments. But I understand the uncertainty with fuel and we'll try to answer your question
about locking in longer term. Yeah. Other questions? Do you guys want me to throw that chart up there
now? Sure. All right.
I will share my screen. Can I ask the following? Yeah. I think Dave had a good question. What are the
contingency plans if there are shortages? Every year we try to budget at a very conservative price per
gallon amount. When I say conservative, we project high. This year, even though gas, when we were doing
our budgets and
at this in August of 2025, we were predicting 359 to 389 in our budget projections for that year. So
we always project high. That's our contingency. When we have a fluctuation like we've had for the last
10 months where it has done what it's done, that is, I mean, we're at the lens of the fuel market at
that point. Just to answer further on the contingency, with any kind of shortfall like that,
The first contingency is to transfer from other lines in the same category that have several. Now, I'm
talking about actual shortages. Like if there's rationing. Oh, like you can't buy it. Like 70. Is that
part of our emergency? At this crew walk around, yeah. We don't keep those parts. I was not following
that, but the heart palpitations got us. Hey, and today's
I don't think this is fantasy. No, I get it. Do we even have storage facilities? We have our tanks at
our two fueling sites within the city limits, and then the fueling tanks at CBUs, and that would be
the limitation of storage we have. And trash trucks are diesel? Yes. I assume. And we try to keep those
full in the map. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're always, yeah. I mean, the logical thing to do would be alternate
or just skip.
Do it every two weeks. Oh yeah, no, we would immediately scale that. So it would be like winter weather
season this last year where, you know, there was a couple of week period there where we couldn't pick
up. You know, we would certainly, there were fuel rations. So let me get back to the core question.
If there was rationing of fuel, we would be rationing services accordingly. So we're doing weekly pickup
right now. If we were checking out that we only had fuel to pick up every resident once a month, we
would be moving it once a month. It would be a very, very,
stressful time. On that kind of line before I, I will actually draw my attention to the screen at the
moment where I did put those numbers in. Thank you. For actual items collected instead of. So how is
that charged fine if yard waste is a dollar per thing? How is that 45353 go to 45202 dollars?
That might be version control. I was going to say, that sounds like a timing issue on numbers.
And then say, is there any like, I mean, so you said that trucks are diesel right now. Is there any
electrification in your area? Is there any other alternate fuel? Is there any other options at all?
And are those in any way
Yes, there are alternative fuel sources for sanitation equipment. There are some electric, so Lafayette
is running a couple of electric truck routes and I talked with their drivers, they really like them.
It's the upfront infrastructure cost of having the charging capability.
I think those were almost double the price of a traditional diesel, so then you've got the higher upfront
cost. But yes, the other compressed natural gas is always a possibility, but then you need a CNG filling
station, which the infrastructure for the filling station is, I haven't looked in a few years, but probably
at least a couple million dollars upfront to have a fueling station for CNF compressed natural gas.
So there are options that come with high upfront costs and high infrastructure costs to support them.
Oh dude, does the cost of like any electric sanitation truck compare to the cost of a diesel, like the
original? I think it's about the, $1,000,000. Last time I checked it was $1,000,000 for a truck and
a charging station. And a charging station. That was 450 to 480 right now. Yeah. Okay. So it's like
four times the cost essentially.
And that would scale back. Once you have the charging infrastructure in place, right? Yeah. Are those
trucks, have they been around long enough to know if they're locked? So actually, I followed up with
the LockYet team a couple of times. Since they've had them in place, the drivers love them.
They're quiet. They're not running on diesel. They're smooth. And they've had good maintenance success
with them, but they're, I think, only
They're less than a year in service right now. Winter. The mileage goes down, but it was during road
school last year when I was up there, so they've had them through the winter. So they have to be back
at the road work? Yeah. So then we don't really know the answer to that question yet. Is there a projection?
I would be answering questions I don't have fully accurate answers for, so let me- Just in terms of
who's selling them and what they're- Volkswagen.
Well, no. Well, sorry. I mean, what they claim. They're a thing of like, yeah. Sure. And so that would
be the, I can imagine that they're quite four times. Oh, I see. Yeah. Do we still need this up here?
I managed to get all of the things on the screen so that we can see that number of items there.
So this is still the copy, so it's not the updated version, but I did chat with all the updated version.
That's not those two little tweaks again. Yeah. Like, I mean, yeah, I changed it. I went in and manually
changed it in the fiscal committee folder, but. We'll review all of them. Perfect. Yeah. Double check.
OK. So we did put those, and I will stop my screen share and go ahead.
Um, so another couple of little questions on the tax and the memo. Um, so page nine, top page nine of
the packet, um, the 20, 27 proposed rates with complete general fund support elimination. Does that,
uh, but you say complete general fund support elimination, but this does factor in the $200,000 quote
bill to the city, right?
understand what these figures mean. So this is, so just for clarity, we're talking about if we made
the leap all in one year to get things in it, does that, you're asking if that the revenue from parts,
that's just the revenue from broken costs. So it doesn't include
It's not showing the expenses, it's just showing the chart on the shows, the revenue. Oh, I see. It's
just for figurative, the show. Okay, so it's, my question was a bit, sorry. This was, if we did it all
in one fall swoop. So this is just, that chart is just to show if we didn't do it over a three-year
phase period. How are you looking at it? I'm totally in it. Just. Top of paper. Oh, there we go, okay.
On page 11 of the packet. You have a paragraph that talks about yard waste. If yard waste was added
to the recycling percentage, it could be reasonably considered as being diverted. But we do charge for
yard waste, right?
Yes. This is just talking about the actual diversion rate of things not going into a landfill. There
are some revenue. There is revenue associated with that. As I was interpreting it as diversion. Oh,
I see in that very last paragraph of it. It also kind of makes the cost comparison. We don't get money
to do that diversion, but we do get some money. Sure.
Okay, other questions? Oh, maybe related to that. So the yard waste you don't get any money for is the
leaf picker. Yes, that's October through December and also the holiday trees that we live in. Gotcha.
And do you have any breakdown of expense for that leaf pick up at this point in terms of like number of
Cause we do it by bag now, right? So like, is there any, like do you even track that? Like the number
of bags that you pick up? No, we do not. We do not. I just take that. Or yardless. Okay. So you don't
really have a concept of the expense for that. We could easily, we could associate a labor expense and
things, but the actual, we can do a labor expense and there is no disposal costs on those.
Yeah, so equipment and labor costs, we could put some good close estimates on that. I guess I would
appreciate that partly because I feel like that maybe is also a service that we're providing everybody
because the leaves are then not clogging up stormwater and causing other problems. So it's almost this
idea of what part of what sanitation does is to prevent other problems from happening at all.
It's a service, but
It's for our benefit. Yeah, it's not just for the benefit of the property, all right. It's for the benefit
of the whole system. Then similarly, I guess, do you have any idea how many pollinators you can get?
How many pollinators do you have? Or is there a labor potential you could associate with that? I'm assuming
there's no- We could do the same cost estimate on leafing. Because that strikes me as maybe less of
a- Oh, it's very much less.
And it also is very then individual, the people who benefit from that are the people who have holiday
trees. Like it burned into the waste reduction list. Yeah. Not that I want to push the boss. Oh, no,
we do. We want them to pay for our recycling program eventually. So, no, this is a very valid point.
I was going to try to fit this in and thank you for the way to do it. City residents pay the majority
of funds into our solid waste management district.
for the whole county. And the benefit that we received from them is pretty limited. Their whole goal
in what they do is to eliminate waste, correct? So it's a waste elimination. It would be high time,
in my opinion, to have a very robust conversation with our colleagues at the county and others about
how we pay in so much to that fund. The only city residents that benefit from that are the ones that
take things to their facilities.
And so when we want to talk about subsidizing recycling, the Solid Waste District has a mighty fine
funding mechanism that could help support city recycling efforts. By mighty fine, you mean property
tax. Sorry, yeah. I mean, everybody's property tax, yes. The Solid Waste District receives property
tax from everyone in the county, including city.
And, well, this is probably getting into the leads to my step. I would love to know all that. It's going
to change with SB1 because I feel like they were on the list of things that ends up being. It was like
$120,000 impact or something. I can't remember. No, I can't remember. Other questions? OK, I want to
take note that it's 950.
which I'm not at all surprised about and I wanted to prioritize this discussion, but I want to have
a public comment just for a minute and then I would love for council members to just kind of everybody
give a two minute, that's how I feel about this right now kind of thing to help give some guidance on
where to go. So if there are members of the public, there are none in the room who would like to comment,
you could raise your hand.
That would be excellent. And again, specifically comments about sanitation rate increases in this discussion
that we've had this morning. Yeah, I'm not seeing any hands raised. So that actually helps us a lot
here on the council end. So if one of my colleagues wants to go first, Matt, go for it. Thanks. I think
this all looks pretty great. I've been advocating for it for years.
And I think phasing it in is generous and beyond reasonable. Even the doing it directly in 2027 did
not create a reasonable cost. Increased standpoint, I don't think. Part of middle-sized card defucks
them up. That's not wild to just actually start getting full grade out of a cost star. But
I was forward-weighted in the approach as well. Thank you. Sorry, Dave. Or, Isabel, do you want to go?
I'm good with all the new agreements.
Yeah. I think this is a good proposal. I think we should do it. Dude, we don't need two minutes. Great.
I just want to follow up on something. So there's the current diesel trend for the stratosphere right
now. I mean, there was a shutdown of Joliet, Illinois, I think.
refinery, which is going to add the cost of the near term. But this is why I'd like to see prices locked
in. I mean, if we could anticipate. We would like that, too. Yeah. Well, not now. But I mean, back.
Dave, I don't think that was an option. I think it might have been for us. Yeah. It was going to be
at the rate that it's going to be probably soon.
It was for, somehow it is an option for Wilmington Transit. We'll explain. We'll remember about that
repeatedly. Maybe when Lou was here, but if that's been the case in the last five years, I'd be very
shocked. Okay. I'll check. I will. Okay. I also generally think that it's a good proposal. I do want
to make sure in terms of that,
That general funds expense going toward the things that are city benefit. I just want to make sure that
those are really third credit. I would also honestly prefer because there was some conversation in your
memo about the potential of fluctuating that you're needing that flexibility of rates to deal with fuel prices.
And I would prefer not to do that kind of thing on our residents. Like, especially for this kind of
service, we need, I think, a stable monthly price that at least lasts one whole year for people to be
able to budget their expenses. And so I would personally rather see more flexibility in how much the
general fund is paying in to give that cushion than asking our residents to have that potential of flux
mid-year for some of their bills.
I know that that might happen with other mills, but we have the power, I guess, to help soften some
of those blows. I would rather do that as a personal thing than the potential of rates having to change
mid-year. And similarly, and that might just be a mid-year transfer, but I guess I want to say I, as
a council member, am more open to a mid-year transfer to help cushion some of those uncontrollable expenses
than an increased rate mid-year.
Yeah. And that's like the only thing that kind of made me go like, you know, like, how do we want to
handle that, you know, $200,000 and how strictly we want to stick to a $200,000 and put it in there.
So then y'all don't have to, you know, pull the hair out and have heart palpitations as much, you know,
around some of that stuff and our residents don't either in terms of that stability. Yeah.
I just want to say this is a really great example of this committee working really well to meet its
purpose. I feel really good about the, you know, earlier conversation we had that led to the four-plus-shot
memo and just having a conversation and getting this ready before it goes to council. I'm happy with
the process and how things are going to be planned. I think it starts with all the research and gathering
the data. Yeah. Any other last words for sanitation and all this topic?
All right. Actually, I guess I have a question. Is your next move coming to council with a proposal
or are you going to put together something more specific with a specific ordinance and bring it to us
again for feedback? What do you all think? I'll defer to Gretchen here. My comment would be this was
council-driven. We were asked by the council to really do this and move it forward. We're going to need
a council.
From my perspective as a public works director, I don't want this just to be a public works raising
revenue conversation or raising rates. I would like it to be the council and we are in sync with moving
this forward together. So we would need a council sponsor. It would be an ordinance update. We would
take advantage of opening up the ordinance to clean up other things. So there will be the whole rate
schedules and things, but there are other things when we open up the sanitation ordinance that we will
want to clean up.
i.e. student move-in and move-out language and how we might capture more revenue when they dump their
whole house out onto the street. Missing containers. We are going to add some language about, Lazarus
talked about, we cover the full cost of purchasing and supplying a car to a brand new residence. Not
only when we have redevelopment in the student neighborhoods and such,
that add a bunch of units, there's no cost, there's no fee to give them a new cart. We want to put language
in there that says, think of Sudbury, you know, think of some of these larger developments coming if
we absorb all of that cost to purchase all, what was it, 200 carts is $10,000. So just as a technical
analysis, we want to raise rates in 25,000. We do need to get this to council and get it approved before
the end of this year.
who and I can get together with legal and Julius and council schedule to get it on there to make sure
before the end of the year we tidy this up. And is there a council member on this committee who wants
to sponsor or co-sponsor and help with that in English? No.
Thank you. I'll sponsor that as first chair and we can just make sure you keep on bringing it to the
committee and I do kind of expect as a committee that we can continue advising on it and checking it
as, because I do think that it's not technically in our kind of special thing to have this committee
look at different rate increases, but we've talked about that as a sort of specific committee would
do for councils to understand it.
I'm happy to work on it with you, but I really appreciate you volunteering as a student. Jeff. And then
just to remind everybody that the current budget that's been advertised has a $1.6 million subsidy in
it. So that will be something that if you want to adjust, you'll have an opportunity like the budget
here on next Wednesday. And so the people right now would be adjust that down to $1 million, right?
1.2 million. Okay. Based on the three-year phase. Anything else to kind of add about that question I
asked in terms of finding the kind of phase they were going to try to get it before the end of the year?
So it sounds like it could stretch into January if it needed to.
Hopefully, I mean, that would certainly change project. I mean, anything that goes into next year would
change these numbers. And we'll be fine to notify residents if they change too. And you guys have a
very tight schedule for the year. Well, that's why I'm more concerned about our tight schedule. I'm
a little bit concerned about getting the ordinance with all the other changes done. So if worse comes
to worse, we could do an update just at the right tables by the end of the year and then come back and
fix everything else in January. That would be nice to do.
I think there's only three things we want. It's pretty basic. Do you have that file somewhere that's,
or is it all in your head? We got it. All right. Anything else to? All right. I want to thank the board
for coming. Thank you. And the writing this memo, it says that it's from you, so thank you. And I appreciate
that. At this point, we have six more minutes of our meeting. So I think for the most part, we need
to scrap our last agenda item.
Um, but what I will say about the electric salary depression is I kind of started making a new compensation
framework for 2026. The guiding principles were the ones that Matt and Isabella worked on earlier in
the year that we kind of approved the annual process. I kind of used the former, uh, the 2024 one and
added a little bit of date stuff in there in terms of
I added in physical committee concept. And so totally to take feedback on that and the relevant information
and data. I added a few things that we had talked about from the original document. And then it was
really the spaces of salary setting. I was kind of like, how do we want to do that this year? And I
think that we need to figure that out.
But we need to figure that out because we're kind of getting down to, we can say, the proverbial wire
on this. And so you can see my thoughts in there in terms of in an ideal world, we would have something
that could be consistently applied year over year. But then right now, we maybe just need to have something for 2027.
I don't know how useful any of those city comparisons have been because they really are all over the
place in a lot of ways. And I don't have time to read how maybe to go into, you know, I've been looking
at like the AIM Salary Study, they're just all over the place. Do we have access to that Excel sheet
with the comparisons that has been updated? Because I don't think it was fully filled out. I think it's
still not fully filled out. But there is some information there too.
Yeah, and the, I guess what I looked at essentially it hasn't changed from, like most places have not
increased. I had a conversation with the mayor of another city who's been advocating that their council
increased salaries and their council themselves have been saying no.
because in their interpretation, it was partly about privilege that most of the people serving on that
council don't need it in any way. Then it's like, well, that's one situation with the anecdotal in some
ways in terms of the reason why, but we have said that's not how we necessarily want to think about
our public serving officials. That's why I was like, is it really useful at all to compare because we
don't know why councils across the state
Honestly, across different states have made this choice to not increase their salaries. When I was looking
at some of that AIM salary chart comparison, we get an email and we can request it. Because one of the
things on here is thinking about comparing to civil city and civil departments and how much do we pay
our city staff. I was looking at some of those and like, wow, we pay our department heads a lot more
than department heads in other cities get paid.
and our council gets paid the same as roughly as the ones in other cities. So there's definitely somebody
out of whack in terms of council versus our city staff. But what do we want to do right now with,
of course, the consideration, financial uncertainty, and all those things. If that's a consideration
we want to make, should it be somehow proportional to what
department has made from, is that, did we put that in here as a, it was just relevant, part of the relevant
information. Yes, it was part of the relevant information that's, yeah. And I'll say we have not done
consultation with other Bloomington elected officials. I asked the mayor yesterday, she was going to
pull up, and I'm pretty sure that I remember the court saying that she also was
was just interested in the poll this year, and I know that that's what she advocated for. I'm pretty
sure that I remember her saying that, and I thought that I was going to see her on it. But that's for
27 salary. That's not for an ongoing grant. Correct. So where do we want to be right now? We need to
hamper this out. When is our next meeting? Two weeks?
Two weeks, and on the preliminary schedule, that's right after Q3 ends, and Jeff is going to get together
Q3 stuff. We could postpone that, I think, Jeff, if that's okay with you. Up to that. I mean, I will
have the data ready. I shouldn't present it at your convenience. Okay, yeah. I mean, it's right after
Q3 ends, so maybe that would even give you a little bit more breathing room for getting that together,
and we could talk about Q3 in four weeks and talk about
electro official stuff in two weeks. And that kind of covers my notes on schedule. I'm not going to
be here in two weeks. I mean, if you zoom in, that's okay. I won't be here at all. Isabel, as long as
you're going to be in person in two weeks. As long as the two of us are in person, you can zoom in,
Dave. But if you're unable to zoom in, we can't have a meeting. I will zoom in.
Okay, period. I'll remind you all that I'm going to stop in my absence, but maybe you should be pretty
consistent the entire time. I think we do need to change. I've been abused on what I think are reasonable
basis for that. I don't expect a change this year, but I've been abused. Well, if we're going to talk
about framework, we should maybe invite the mayor and clerk. To at least that part of it. To at least
that part of it. No, and at least, yeah.
Ask them to think about framework again from future and not just the next team. Okay. All right, I have
a note about anything else from the committee about this. All right, let's go ahead and go to public
comment, because there's a public comment. Is there any members of the public who are interested in
Making a comment on what the official salaries such as they are and that we're going to talk about it
again in two weeks. Raise your hands. See one number with their hand raised Mr. Keough. I asked you
to hear me. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, real quick. I left a comment in the chat and it's basically about
what you've been talking earlier about the
the sanitation costs and how this reminds me of an article I read in the 1980s. It's a management account
in the article. It's called the $6 Aspirin. The article detailed the methodology at that time hospitals
were starting to implement to charge patients. Bottom line, it's just so unsustainable. It results in
obviously higher than COLA cost increases. I even actually Googled it.
Yes, the classic case study in healthcare cost accounting illustrates how hospital allocate indirect
and structural cost and routine to routine over-the-counter medications rather reflecting the market
price of the pill. I guess that's a key thing. I don't know if you guys did talk about the market price
of sanitation other delivery service and then you did I missed it then. So hopefully it's in line, but
I guess it just thrown us out. This is something that early on when you do this, it has unintended consequences.
This is a great case study. This is from 1980, well before the health crisis, the insurance of the whole
health affordability. Just another call on the red flag. All right, enough said. Bye. Thanks so much.
In that panel, there's a cost comparison at the end to private dollars. That is something that we
Discussed. Well, it was discussed in the memo and they only discussed it as a committee. Any other public
comments? I don't see any hand raised, so I'll go ahead and close that. So, yeah, all right.
So next meeting, we'll dive much farther into the elected official salaries. I'll try to talk about
both for next year.
And then also an ongoing framework. And by the end of the meeting, we need to have a proposal that can
get written up and sent to council for a vote. Okay. Any other? Oh, and of course, the other note about
schedule is there is the must pass course meeting this afternoon and one in the courthouse. I'm going
to that. We are going to that as well. Wonderful. Are you willing to share every report out with council
members? Anything else?
Great return. Thanks so much, y'all.