City to survey residents about future plan
Initial indicators are the people want weekly recycling, Platte City officials say. And city officials say a trial run of a less frequent pickup of recycling did not result in substantial cost savings for the city.
A recycling pilot program was started in February by the City of Platte City and ran through the last week in July. During that period the curbside residential recycling collection–which had always been weekly– was reduced to twice each month.
“The initial feedback the city received from customers during the pilot program was a strong preference to return to weekly collection. A future survey to all customers will let us know if the informal feedback is widespread among our customer base,” DJ Gehrt, city administrator, told The Landmark this week.
When the board of aldermen approved the pilot program in November 2021, it was set up to return automatically to the weekly recycling collection while staff reviewed the results of the pilot program.
“Staff is still sorting out the long term financial impact of the solid waste/recycling programs, however, the short term impact is that the pilot program did not result in substantial cost savings; or at least enough to make a noticeable dent in the structural deficit in the solid waste program that has resulted in small but increasing annual operating deficits in solid waste/recycling collection,” Gehrt explained.
In short, the every other week recycling from February to July was the pilot program; the end of the pilot program brings back weekly residential curbside recycling.
Curbside recycling happens on the same day as the customer’s regular trash pickup.
Gehrt says a review of the pilot program is in progress by city staff and is focused on the following three areas:
a. Resident’s experience and preference with the pilot program (a survey will be sent to residential utility customers by the end of August).
b. Impact on recycling tonnage: This involves comparing recycling tonnage delivered to WMI recycling center during the pilot program dates (February 2022 through July 2022) compared to the same time periods in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
“We used the last four years data to help confirm collection information that may be skewed by COVID impacts in 2020 and 2021,” Gehrt explained.
c. Cost savings/rate impact: Did reducing the number of curbside recycling collection cycles have a significant impact on the cost and net financial position of the solid waste program.
City officials say the city’s solid waste fund has had small operating deficits three of the past five years, with the largest being last fiscal year and the projections for the current fiscal year, which will end on Oct. 31.
“The pilot program cost savings were not anywhere close to reducing the solid waste fund’s slowly increasing gap between operating revenue and operating expenditures,” Gehrt said.
“Operating revenues have dropped over the past two years due to loss of a major multi-family customer. At the same time, operating costs have increased due to staff retention/salary actions, increased health care costs and increased fuel costs,” Gehrt commented.
“The hope that the pilot program would help reduce or delay increases in solid waste/recycling fee increases was not supported by the initial review of the pilot outcomes,” the city administrator said.
In addition to follow up Facebook posts, Gehrt said the city will send out a media release on the end of the pilot program, as well as mail a survey to its residential utility customers. Both of those will occur within the next several weeks, he indicated.