Recommendation to Receive an Update on Procurement Process for Alameda’s Integrated Waste Franchise. (Public Works 274)
Good evening. Good evening, Mayor. As the Ashcroft vice mayor, not white members of council, this is an update. It's a recommendation to receive an update on our procurement process for the Integrated Waste Franchise Agreement that we've been negotiating. As you all know, that covers our waste recycling and compost services that happen in the city. It's a it's an important agreement. It does affect all residents and businesses in the community. It's also important because it's a pretty significant cost. It's currently running around $20 million a year, and the duration for these contracts can exceed ten years. They can go along at 20 years, which is as long as our current franchise agreement is running for. So it's a significant cost. It also helps us achieve some pretty fundamental goals for the city. Our Climate Action Plan has goals associated with our franchise agreement, and there are new laws coming down on a regular basis related to zero waste and other waste management initiatives. So it's an important agreement for us. And I'm also we're also going to share the results of a customer satisfaction survey that we had done. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Liz Acord, our public works coordinator extraordinaire. Liz has been instrumental in this effort, and she's going to provide us with a little bit more detail and introduce the rest of our consultant team for this project. I'll turn it over to Liz. Welcome, Mr. Accord. Nice to see you. Thank you. And thank you, Assistant City Manager. Good evening, Madam Mayor. And members of the City Council. I was accord public works coordinator. As I mentioned, tonight's topic is returning to council with an update on the sole source negotiations with ACA. Alameda County Industries for Alameda, this new solid waste franchise agreement. The focus of tonight's presentation again is to share with Council the results of a customer survey that we conducted in July. And before I turn it over to Curt with three, I'll just provide you with a quick update on the negotiation process. So since we've updated you in July, we've continued to meet with ECI with a focus on scoping programs in the new agreement and completing the detailed cost forms. We were hoping to have more information to share with you this evening regarding cost proposals. Unfortunately, due to the recent fires, our schedule has been slightly delayed and we do not currently. Have. The firm cost parameters to share with you. So as such, we aren't able to provide more of a robust status update this evening other than to say that we are still underway. And I think importantly that at this time the schedule delays are not of great concern to staff working closely with ACA to keep moving forward. So with that update, I will now turn it over to Curt with F.M. three and then the curtain. I, as well as Rob Hilton with age up and age, will be available afterwards for any questions that you may have. All right. Thank you. All right. All right. Oops. So. There we go. All right. Great. Thank you, Liz. And good evening, Mayor. Members of the council. Nice to see you again virtually. I'm a little SFM three research and I'm going to go through some highlights from the survey we conducted this summer. This go to the next slide. So a quick note about our methodology. We were given a list of customers provided by MCI that had residential customers and a smaller subset of commercial customers. We gave the same survey basically to both sets of respondents there. For the residential customers, we did offer English, Spanish and Chinese per other recent surveys conducted for the city and and like the same methodology, we offered respondents an opportunity to take the survey both online and on the telephone. For the residential survey, we did a little over 500 interviews, so roughly four and a half percent margin of sampling error. The margin of error for the commercial customers is large, so don't worry about that as much. Go to the next slide, please. I just want to kind of put a little bit of an introduction on what we're going to go through here. The slide deck is longer, but I'm just doing the first several high level slides focused specifically on the residential customers. I'll touch just briefly on the the results of the commercial customers responses that are in more detail in the appendix. And they've been very, very dramatically here. So with that, let's get to the slides. And I think that they're all going to sound pretty consistent. On the next slide. We shall see the so the residential customer reviews slide five here we presented a random order, whether on the phone or online, a different utilities and quasi utilities that residential customers here might interact with. And we asked them, well, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of them? The shades of green or favorable opinions, shades of red or unfavorable? The darker the color, the more intense the feeling. And you'll see here that Alameda County Industries, I mean, this use the name itself, 83% of residential customers had a positive or favorable impression of them. Only 11% had an unfavorable impression. So this is a really high number and significantly outpaced utilities like PPG, ENI and Comcast. Next slide, please. So one way of asking about this is by name. In the event that people weren't as familiar with ACR by name, we also asked basically by service and we asked, How satisfied are you with these different services electricity, natural gas, your waste and Internet? And you'll see here that a pretty similar number here, 89% said that they were satisfied with their garbage recycling or organics removal, including 56% who were very satisfied. So satisfaction levels were were very high as they were for electricity and natural gas. We often see this in other communities when we ask about waste disposal services. Next slide, please. We also asked, well, rates, do you feel that what you're paying is reasonable for those same for services and you'll see here that there's a pretty high positive numbers there as well. You essentially have three quarters or more who thought that electricity rates, natural gas rates and waste disposal rates were reasonable. 74% specifically for garbage recycling, not against removal. Much more of a split opinion on the Internet. That's not the topic of this particular survey. But you see here, again, favorable impressions of ECI. Favorable impressions. Satisfaction levels are high for the service and three quarters of respondents feel like what they're paying is at least somewhat reasonable. Next slide, please. We did ask an open ended question. So if you said that you are satisfied with your waste removal services, we said, well, tell us in your own words or type in your own words why? And then for those of you of ten, some of our surveys like this, before, we do our best to kind of put things in the categories and you'll see the reliability was the top of the list. More than half of those who were satisfied cited reliability as one of the reasons for explaining it. And also just generally do a good job and the customer services is solid as well. These numbers do add up to more than 100% because an individual could have mentioned many different rationale for being satisfied. The next slide, please. This is for only that sliver. You know, roughly 10% of us who had any sort of negative things to say or satisfaction levels were negative and tip top of the cap to your staff who suggested that one of these items might be on the list, which has been problems. They seem to have a pretty good pulse on things. But of those who were dissatisfied, putting the bins were creating a mess after pick up was one of the things that they mentioned and also some concerns about rates. So while overall there's not a lot of concern about rates that most people feel like they're reasonable, those who do have some levels of dissatisfaction, the rates seem to be one of the contributing factors. Now, keeping in mind this slide, that this is only of those who are dissatisfied, which is a pretty small percentage of residential customers . Next slide, please. We did asked respondents to unpack a few specific elements of the services here. So picking up the carts on the service day, providing instructions about what goes where. Responding to questions, you know, customer service essentially, and picking up illegal dumping. And we see for those first three categories, the satisfaction levels, again, were consistently high, particularly for picking up on there on the data. So the reliability issue, we saw that a couple of places in here. Customer service and instructions, that's actually positive in other communities. That can be a little confusing with the different bins and and whatnot. Illegal dumping. This sort of stuck out here as something that the satisfaction levels were low but sort of satisfaction because that gray bar is huge. 60% said I don't know what's the takeaway could be that there's a lot of residential customers don't really understand that HCI plays a role at all in picking up illegal dumping. Next slide. So this kind of wraps up the presentation here, at least for the part I was planning on going over here. But overall, positive impressions feel like I was doing a good job. Feel good paying for is reasonable. The only real material concerns were around costs and leaving a mess or having bins put in weird places after a pick up here. But those were a distinct minority of respondents. Not a lot of understanding of their side does play a role in addressing the legal dumping. We did also ask a couple of other questions I didn't cover here that you'll see later on in the survey, but I just touch on them here, just for brevity sake here. We did ask about keeping us an office in Alameda, and there was broad support for that, as well as hiring someone to help educate customers here . And even though we did say that those things might cost a few extra dollars on their bills, we did go through a variety of other recently adopted or proposals you're considering. Regarding waste reduction. I touched on that a little bit here in his introduction there, and I think the response is there are roughly two thirds or more of all the residential respondents supported all those different policies that have either been recently adopted or are being considered here. Some of the ones that had the highest levels of support were supplying recycling organics containers in public areas and having giving renters a free, annual, bulky pick up in terms of the commercial customers. Again, I'm not going to go over that in detail because there were very similar responses or just distinctions and in intensity. There was one exception in there, and this is, again, only 50 people or companies were able to get a hold of one of those. There was a little more the vision about whether or not to charge a fee to residents of businesses who do not properly for their compostable or recyclable material. Support levels for that policy proposal were much higher among residential customers and roughly an even split among commercial customers. So with that in mind, that brings us to the end of the presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. Big. Thank you, Mr. Gallo. Councilmember Desai, I see your handout. Just a quick question. Was there ever a variable that was satisfied? You have very satisfied and you have somewhat satisfied. Was there ever a variable that was just satisfied? You're a musician? Yes. So the way we structure that question is that we ask initially, are you satisfied or dissatisfied? And then as a follow up, we say, well, is that very or somewhat? So if you aggregate those together, that would be the total satisfaction number. But we try to push people a little bit to the different intensity levels. Hmm. Okay. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Thank you. You mentioned about having the office, and one of the reasons I like it is that that's where you drop off your batteries if there was no office. Now, what would people do with their batteries? Do we do we know this. Is, of. Course, something that we can explore as a. Contract component. For an alternative pickup resource? Okay. Well, I'm not advocating closing the office. I'm just saying, you know, that's one of the benefits of having an office. Not to mention, if you're late on your bill, you can run it down there without having to travel to another city. And then the other question I know well, two questions. I know that. And it's tough place. We talk a lot about, you know, the diversion rates in multi-family units. And I appreciate that there was that. The need for a bulk pickup because sometimes those bins fill up as someone needs to live in a multifamily unit. We working with staff, waste it all on helping achieve their goals and improving the diversion rates at at these multifamily units. Rob, I'm going to ask you to jump in on that one. Good evening, counsel. Yes, that is one of the things that we're we're looking at a combination of solutions for. The multifamily generators as well as our our commercial generators. And that's part of the question that was in the survey about providing a staff resource to go out and provide some technical assistance from the multifamily property owners or managers. And the the businesses need a little bit more hand-holding because their waste needs are more complicated than they are in in the residential single family environment. So that's a piece of why we're looking at that. And it's also a piece of why we're looking at that that bulk item program to prevent illegal dumping. Will you just introduce yourself? Tell us your affiliation, please. I'm sorry. Rob Helton with age. I have an age consultancy. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Because they're also newer to, you know, the sorting, you know, relative to, you know, single family residence. In the last question, there was a bullet point about enforcement. And I know that some police, they have some programs where, believe it or not, there's cameras in the bins and you can see what goes in and tell whether it belongs or it doesn't belong there. And, you know, have we reached out to stop ways to work on some of these enforcement things? Because, you know, they can actually enforce, you know, issues with people sorting and not sorting property. Okay. That's a suggestion. And any other, you know, benefit. I didn't ask if we had public speakers, but we're still on the council clarifying questions, I think. We do not have any public comment. Or public comment. Okay. I'm sorry. That was kind of a question to see if there's been any. I'd be happy to jump in and respond to that. So the sister company to ECI is the one that did that pilot project that you probably heard about at the Stop Waste meeting out in Livermore. And so we've got some really good data from that. And it's one of the things, as we're talking to them about the contamination, monitoring and management that we can introduce into the discussion. The the challenge with that program is the cost. So each of those cameras in the bins has its own cellular service attached to it, and it's got a monthly fee attached to that. So as you saw, one of the concerns was related to the rate impact of things. And obviously, as we're negotiating the contract, one of our concerns is about the rate impact of things. So, you know, as in the Livermore situation, it may be a targeted approach to using that, but I like the idea and we could definitely bring that up. Thank you. It seems to me you talked about the education piece. I think some more resources directed toward customer education might go a long way to and probably be less costly, although that's kind of intriguing about the camera in the barn I just can picture. Does anyone remember Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street? Dave just writing about the garbage cans and. That's pretty much how it is. Yeah, I watch some of the video entertaining, but. Yeah, well. We'll have to we'll have to see that other comments questions council. Councilmember Daza. And twice. Just a quick question. So is it. Staff's. Request that the council consider doing a Sol, doing the contract, you know, completing the contract for the next 20 years on a sole source basis? So as opposed to going out for an RFP, is that the bottom line recommendation? Know, the the conversation tonight is really just an update. We were with counsel starting in February of 2020 to discuss the sole source versus not sole source. And we were exploring the negotiations with API. And if that was not going to work, then we were going to shift to a competitive bid process. But what we are finding is that the negotiations are going well with API. We don't have those numbers that we were hoping to have this evening. Our public works coordinator, Liz Acord, made reference to it in her comments. There have been just some unfortunate personal situations that have arisen because of some of the fires where some of our API folks, and so they just need a little more time to develop those numbers. But the sole source negotiations are going reasonably well at this time. We're not talking about another we're not talking about a 20 year term for this contract. It will be shorter. We can't we don't know the exact numbers yet. It affects the rates that will be bringing forward for council consideration. If we can stretch out the amortization frame for for the equipment and things like that, it helps it helps the rate structure. But there's certainly a lot of good momentum right now, positive momentum in our sole source discussions. And there isn't, at least at this time, any thought to shifting gears and going to that competitive process. If things change, we'll certainly be back to report, back to council and talk that through the burden. Any further questions from council? So this is a report for us to receive, as I recall. Um, anything anyone wants to add with me or next week? Thank you. It was a good, good report. And I appreciate it. The survey data as as as was noted bin placement know rated about where you would expect it to be based on the comments we read done online and the emails we receive as we're going through the discussions and whatever else. I think looking for a metric that might relate to, you know, I'm not looking for perfect bin placement, but I can definitely say there are some times I come home and wonder what the heck happened with the bins, you know, that somebody must have picked up the bins and move them half a house up multiple of them . It doesn't quite align with, with, with my experience with what I would expect of the thing is just picking up and putting it down over and over again. So I just wondering if there is some way to to address some of that. On the other hand, it is very clear that ECI is getting fairly high approvals. And I and I don't make these comments as if somehow they are doing a terrible job. I'm just saying, if there was a place for improvement and I think the single family homes that they that would probably be the one that we hear the most about. And so thinking about through our conversations with them, how we might address that would be great. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'll just say this is anecdotal, but it's personal information out there. You know, every once in a while, not very often a Ben or two don't get picked up at our house. And I've always found this guy, folks at the office, when you call to be just top notch and pleasant and efficient and they're out there, you know, as soon as they can be. And I don't know. I always think it's kind of miraculous to get your bins out and then, voila, there, they're empty when you come home. And I'm also aware that in many cities, and I'm sure Asia is having these challenges, you know, some places are picking up glass. They're not accepting glass for recycling anymore. And they're limiting what, you know, what they will take. So, you know, so far we've had we've managed to keep doing what we did. But this is a challenging market. Okay. Well, if there is nothing further that people want to add. Okay. We won't quite move along. Heard everything that. I think the one comment that I always have to double check now, the one comment I would make is, you know, even if it's not a 20 year contract, let's suppose it is, it's a ten year contract. I have to you know, I mean, at a minimum, the value of that contract is going to be $200 million over ten years timeframe. It's hard for me to see a sole source contract even as good as ACA is. I. I just think you have to test the market, so. But. But don't get me wrong. I think ACA does a good job from what I can tell. But it that aside, I think you still have to test the market. But I'll leave it at that. That's my opinion. Thank you. Okay. Anything further from any would be okay with that? Um, we, we have received the update and I will close this item. Thank you all for for being here for your presentations. Good to see you guys. Mr. Burton. Good see you. Thank you. Have a good night. Good night. Okay. We are moving on to item six EA. Recommendation to waive the encroachment permit fees through October 31st, 2021 for the Commercial Streets Program. DeLay short term temporary special event street closures along major commercial and side streets, and accept the September 2020 status report on transportation and adoption of resolution authorizing the City Manager to apply for up to $75,000 in county to County Transportation Commission COVID