Recommendation to direct City Manager to work with Public Works and report back to City Council in 60 days with recommendations for a pilot public outreach program within the East Village to landlords with dumpsters and offer the city's current "Locked Bin Program" to address the issues related to trash, specifically with illegally dumped items.
Thank you. Next up is the regular agenda. We have item 17. Item 17 is communication from Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Gonzalez. Recommendation to direct the city manager to work with public works and report back in 60 days with recommendations for a pilot public outreach program within the East Village to landlords with dumpsters. Thank you, Councilmember Pearce. Great. Do you guys have the clicker for the PowerPoint? I want to thank my colleague, Councilmember Lena Gonzales, who also shares the East Village for signing on to this item with me tonight. And I want to thank the East Village Association. I know that you guys have been working hard on this and sorry for the later time, but you guys are fantastic. So the last bend item, we know the world produces over 3.5 million tons of trash daily and over 300 million tons of trash each year. I'm going to try to go quickly in Long Beach and between 2015 and 2017, we saw an increase of 56% of illegally dumped items, an increase of 123% of go Long Beach reports, which I take as a huge win for the city. 47% increase in scheduled bogie collections and 22% increase in calls for ESB service. I attribute this not only to increased trash and population, but the fact that we have been working really hard as a city. Our public works team and our mayor has really committed to making sure that we have a clean city. And I know that we're working on that report. We wanted to highlight what East Village looks like. This alleyway looks like this every week. We are out there every month doing cleanups and trying to educate on where we can do bulky items. I know we've done some mail around this, but our residents in the area really have worked hard to make sure that we're working with public works to introduce a pilot program for locked bins. As you see here every week, this is kind of tough. We're out there cleaning up more trash, more cleanups. So we just wanted to introduce an item where we could do a locked bin process. I do want to turn this over to community members to talk about the needs. I also want to take this opportunity. There are two items on the floor in front of us, but let's talk about our locked bend needs and then also the DeKalb program that we are working with staff to create. And then I'll have hopefully some questions for Mr. Beck as well, since he's been working on this closely. So with that, we want to say it takes a village to change the world. African Proverb Very nicely done, Karla. I want to give Karla props for her PowerPoint. So yes, with that we want to just highlight the fact that we are looking at locking bins in the East Village, how long this pilot program will work and what the decals would like to be on there. So I'm going to have it over to public comment. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Joe Harding. I'm president of the East Village Association, and I'm here with some of our board members this evening. And we're looking for your approval on the recommendations set forth before you. The issue at hand here is really of the overflowing of trash bins, partly because there's inadequate pickup schedules for the buildings that are there. Some buildings, if you can believe it, have no bins at all. And those residents use the other trash bins that don't even belong to them, including city bins. The illegally dumped items is actually just to the point of being ridiculous that we have to do six neighborhood cleanups a year to get rid of some of those things. We can't work without the Dolby and all this, all that they've done with their clean team and the Alley Busters program, that's been fantastic, but that's just helping with the program. We want to take it one step further. You throw in the residents have to listen to sometimes four times a night, residents going through the bins, looking for dumpster diving for their items. There is disturbing. Plus, there are safety items. We had a one just behind the end of Long Beach other day where a dumpster was. They took stuff out to make a fire to stay warm. Our proposed program. Have enough bins, have the schedule for pickup, adequate for the volume of use. Lock the bins after 9 p.m.. But instead of just locking people out of the bins that may be looking for source of income, food, shelter and other items in the bins, we want to put informational stickers directing those in need to the correct services so they can seek the help that they need rather than living off the dumpsters. We have a success story in the East Village at First Street in Frontenac Court. Many of you know that alleyway that's by the house of Hayden in the garden. Those those bins on both sides of Frontenac Court on First Street have been locked for over two years. The residents and businesses hemmed and hawed when it first started. They were annoyed and didn't want to do it. It's now become habit and that alleyway is clean 95% of the time, with no illegally dumped items in that area . And the program does work. We want to try that success program all over the East Village. We're asking you to accept us as a pilot program. If it works with us, maybe it can work throughout the city trash as an everyday part of our lives. But filth doesn't have to be. So we want to live without the filth and clean up our neighborhood. We want a clean, safe and healthy place. It's been great working with CD2 and CD1 on this issue. Their staff have been very receptive and we're appreciative of that and we're looking for your approval tonight so we can get started on this program. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. Speaker, please. Good evening. Johanna Cunningham, executive director for the Apartment Association. I think this is a great project to embark upon. My only concern would be my comments that I have received from some of the owners and landlords that some of the locked bins, things get thrown off to the side and then those become then the responsibility of the owners or landlords to have to bring somebody in and incur extra costs to be able to get rid of it. Some people talk about the locks that are being broken off of those things. And I was just over the past probably 15 minutes shown a picture of someone taking one of the bins and walking down the street with it. So those then have to be replaced again, incurring the cost by the owner or the landlord. So as you go through the pilot program, just wanted you to be aware of some of the feedback and comments that I've received through our office and that you're just sensitive to that as well in the research so that all of those things are reported as well. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Councilwoman Gonzales, that you are Councilmember Pearce. All right. I wanted to turn it over to hopefully city staff to describe how we are working on doing this as a pilot program and how we envision it working. Mr. Beck is Mayor in Memory Council, Councilmember Pearce. Certainly this is a program that's been in place but not widely utilized. And I think the idea of a pilot program would be to identify a geographic area and work to require that all bins within that area would be locked. We would certainly work with the East Village Association to to identify what those boundaries would look like. I think part of the analysis would also include sending out our refuges field investigators for instances where we know throughout the city and certainly in our East Village area that we have apartment buildings that don't provide enough trash bins or disposal area for the residents that live there. And so we would send out our field investigators to analyze, to make sure that all of the services that are provided, because it is a mix of city staff and city sponsored municipal waste collection and private waste collection. So we would have to work with all the private haulers to follow suit and have those bins locked as well. But we think it's very realistic to move forward with a pilot program, bring back those results and make a decision on how we maybe we can modify or extend the program citywide. Great. And can you elaborate on the timeline when we think we can? I know that we need to do all the outreach as well. So what's the timeline that you feel like is reasonable? I certainly anybody that wants to do it on their own can do that now under the existing program. But doing a mandated program, what I don't have before me is how many private haulers there are. So it'll take us a little bit of time to connect with the private haulers, understand again how many accounts we're dealing with , and then what the timeline to make that conversion would be. I think certainly within 60 to 90 days is very reasonable. Great. Thank you so very much. I urge my colleagues to support this item. Councilman Gonzalez. Yes. Thanks to Councilmember Pearce for bringing it forward into the East Village. I appreciate you all very, very much. I've been to your cleanups and you do incredible work for our community. Aside from what the deal is currently doing and aside from our neighbors as well. So we really appreciate it on behalf of the First District, and I'm glad we brought this forward. I think, of course, working in conjunction, continuing to work in conjunction with the Dolby would be great. They have some great programs that supplement this. In addition, I just wanted to ask as well, because I know that there's a couple layers that I see. So it's the property owner and then the property manager. Are they both being noticed when it comes to any of these issues? Illegal dumping over overflowing trash. Congressmember Gonzalez, I think in response to your question, it depends on who manages the account. Sometimes it is the property manager, sometimes it is the owner. But we we base it on the property location. So, for example, recently we had a unit that had or a building excuse me, that had 12 units in it, and they were all multiple individuals living in each of the units, but they had one dumpster and they probably needed to have two or possibly three. So we worked with them to make sure that their service was increased and that they were paying for that additional dumpster so people could appropriately dispose of their trash. Okay. Thank you. And then as far as, you know, just doing my research about illegal dumping, I know that the city of Los Angeles, I would just like us to loosely look it into this. They have a cleanliness cleanliness rating index that addresses illegal dumping. So they're looking at a variety of different things related to, you know, a specific area. It goes above and beyond. You know, it's just a trash assessment overall in addition to illegal dumping and a few other things. So I would just like us to kind of look at that to see if there's something we can perhaps partner on or or jump on to. And then lastly, I know the locked bins. Just sort of a thought going forward, if, you know, we see success or perhaps we don't see so much success, I think going forward and I know you'll kill me for this one, but just the Go Long Beach app in terms of overflowing trash , perhaps that could be included down the line depending, you know, where this where this lands. I think that might be a good one for us to to include just going forward. But thank you very much again to the East Village. We appreciate it. I certainly wouldn't kill you over the Golan Beach app. We see a lot of success with it. Thank you. I want to add a couple things. One is I'm very supportive of this. I think we've been talking about locked bins and there's a lot of examples across the country as some cities that do it and other cities that don't for a variety of reasons. But I think piloting a specific area I think is is smart, and I think that's great. I also think, Mr. Beck, that I think most of the council know there is a tremendous amount of work happening right now on on issues around cleaning the city. I think we all obviously as a body passed the Clean Long Beach initiative and that initiative has doubled the amount of resources for clean teams. It has brought in, you know, some academic work through Harvard, through the Bloomberg initiative. It's brought in a bunch of students to kind of study all of our systems, including the Ghavami Chap and others. And I know that we had a a study session not that long ago, maybe six months ago or so on the item I would request just, I don't know of a topic that is probably receiving as much kind of interdepartmental attention, I think, as this one is right now, the topic of blight and how we're addressing it. So I would request that we maybe do another study session at some point in the near future, just so that the entire council is completely brought up to speed on on all of the initiatives here, because I think the work you guys are doing is amazing. And I think the councilmember pointed out some of the the numbers as it relates to trash. What's what's amazing is we have completely changed the way we are reporting trash. We are reporting so much more and cleaning so much more than we have. And that's a really good thing as well. And so I'm excited about this pilot program. I think the East Village is a perfect place to do it and we'll see how it works out because I'd love it if this works. I'd love to see this expand as well. So very supportive. And I want to thank the East Village as well for for their work on this. Members, please cast your votes.