City Council - Regular Meeting

Alrighty. Welcome, everybody. We are a few in numbers today, but we got important work to do. Jordan, thanks for calling in. Sick kiddos at home, appreciate you calling in so that we could have a quorum. I'll go ahead and call the meeting to order. Clerk, will you call the roll?

Corliss. Halliburton. Morales.

Here.

Nash.

Yes. Here.

Stead.

Here.

Willits? Here. Four present, two absent.

All right. Madam Mayor, I move approval of the minutes from the council meeting work session and regular meeting on August 18th, 2026.

Second.

We have a motion and a second. Clerk?

Morales? Yes. Nash? Yes. Stead?

Yes.

Willits?

Yes.

All in favor, motion carries.

Madam Mayor, I move approval of the consent agenda.

I'll take a second. Clerk?

Morales? Yes. Nash?

Yes.

Stead? Yes. Willits? Yes. All in favor, motion carries.

We have a couple items on third reading. I move that further reading of ORD 35-26 and ORD 36-26 be dispensed with and the record reflected has been read the third time in full.

Second. We have a motion and a second. Discussion? Clerk?

Morales? Yes. Nash?

Yes.

Stead?

Yes.

Willits?

Yes.

All in favor, motion carries. ORD-35-26, an ordinance entitled the Annual Appropriation Ordinance for the Fiscal Year beginning October 1, 2026, appropriating $1,804,900,395 deemed necessary to defray all expenses and liabilities of the City of Boise City, Idaho. for said fiscal year, specifying the objects and purposes for which said appropriation is made, repealing all ordinances and parts of ordinances in conflict with this ordinance, authorizing a levy of a sufficient tax upon the taxable property, providing for a waiver of the reading rules, and providing an effective date. ORD-36-26, an ordinance amending Title IX, Chapter 2 of Boise City Code. This amendment updates the development impact fees per service unit and related schedule of development impact fees and providing an effective date of October 1, 2026.

Madam Mayor, I move that ORDE 35-26 be approved.

A second.

We have a motion and a second discussion.

Madam Mayor.

Yes.

I just think that Council Member Halliburton and Council Member Corliss took a risk on letting us finalize the budget without them. And so speak now or forever hold your peace.

All righty. With that, Clerk.

Morales. Yes. Nash. Yes. Stead.

Yes.

Willits.

Yes.

All in favor, motion carries.

I move approval of ORD 36-26. Second.

We have a motion, a second.

Morales. Yes. Nash. Yes. Stead.

Yes.

Willits.

Yes.

All in favor, motion carries.

All right, we'll move into special business. Jeff Barnes, thanks for joining us today. Oh, I have, I'm proposing the appointment of Jeff Barnes to the Public Works Commission for a four-year term that would end August 31st, 2030.

Madam Mayor, I move, or I ask unanimous consent to appoint Jeff Barnes to the Public Works Commission for a four-year term ending August 31st, 2030.

Without objection. All right, Jeff, you are official. Thank you so much for being willing to volunteer your time. I have a letter and a portfolio to hand to you if you don't mind just POPPING UP HERE AND YOU'RE WELCOME TO SAY ANYTHING IF YOU'D LIKE SINCE YOU TOOK THE TIME TO BE HERE BUT IT'S ALSO NOT SOMETHING THAT YOU'RE OBLIGATED TO DO THANKS FOR YOUR SERVICE THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU And also we have a reappointment of Crispin Gavitt. I just want to say in advance that I appreciate his long service on the Public Works Commission. And this term would end also August 31st, 2030.

Madam Mayor, I ask unanimous consent for the reappointment of Crispin Gavitt to the Public Works Commission for a four-year term ending August 31st, 2030.

Without objection. Thank you, Crispin. All right, next up, the main event, the Solid Waste Strategic Plan. It was a great day for Jeff to be here, but Jeff, do not feel obligated to stay. You are always welcome, but you do not have to stay. I appreciate your service. And we have now, we're going to go through, as you can see up here, the strategic plan. Oh, that's a great picture of the composting facility with the public works team that's here. And Peter, welcome. I don't know that your mic's on. And we will be adjourning after this presentation. We will not have an executive session.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, Council. Happy to be here and appreciate you guys taking the time to listen about our strategic plan and our curb it programs. So Boise has a complex materials management system, and we recently developed this plan to really to guide the evolution of our programs over the next 10 years. We've established a vision for our programs, which I'll go over, and we ask the community what matters to them, which obviously we feel like is important because they're the ones that are participating in these programs. Our strategic plan really lays out priorities. for the coming decade and presents a roadmap for us to follow. And we'll talk about that plan today. We'll talk about what the community said to us when we asked them and look at some of the major outcomes. Just a quick outline. We'll talk about our Curbit programs. We'll talk about the vision, as I said. A little background on our previous strategic plan and our current plan's purpose. We'll look at the development process. I tried to shorten that down just to six steps so you guys understood how the plan was developed. community feedback and a couple examples of these broad concepts that we came up with and then several other plan outputs and then look at the next steps moving forward. So this is kind of Waste Management 101, which I think a lot of you already know, but I just thought I'd start here to Let everybody know that we base a lot of our programs and a lot of our current programs on the waste management hierarchy. We get this from the EPA. It starts with source reduction and reuse. This is really what we want to, our goal for everything is we want to reduce the amount of waste that we create in the first place. So we have a whole program, reduce and reuse program. And, and, and that's, that's the, that's the place to start. It costs the least to manage. And it's the best for the environment. So we really, we want to start there on a Shameless plug that we'll have a repair cafe on Thursday at the jump. So if you're in the mood or you have anything that needs to be fixed. We have volunteer repair experts there that can help you fix that and keep that out of the landfill for free. Next down on the line of most preferred is recycling and composting. And, you know, those are kind of the programs that we're best known for recycling, composting, our householder hazardous waste. Really important programs. And, you know, these are all just designed to keep materials out of the landfill. Next is energy recovery and recycling. I'm not sure if everybody's heard, but this used to be our hefty Renew Orange Bag program. Fortunately, that program has been discontinued, but we'll be looking for other ways to take care of those materials. We also have recently added number five plastics to the regular recycling, so that will help. And like I said, that was kind of a new thing that just happened. And the last, of course, is pre-mended disposal, and that's the landfill and throwing away the trash. And we want to avoid that as much as we can because we have limited landfill space.

Madam Mayor, do you want questions now? Okay. Hey, thanks so much. I saw the Hefty announcement. When did we get notification of that?

We got... Oh, yeah.

When did we get notification that Hefty was going to discontinue the orange bags?

Mayor, council member, thank you for the question. We got notification of that about two weeks ago, and we didn't have all the details. They said, you know, like, hey, we're thinking of doing this. And, you know, we wanted to make sure we had all the details of the how, when, why, before we, you know, made that public.

I'm a diligent person. user of this. And I think we've talked about this before. I think a lot of folks in Boise obviously recycle, but the question is, is how much of it is actually recyclable after cross-contamination? What sort of strategies do we have to let people know that that program is going away? And that also, like if you put a plastic bag in there, it's not going to get recycled right now.

Mayor, Councilmember, yeah, thank you for that question. So a lot of things that we're thinking about there, we're definitely going to be reaching out to the public more. You know, we put a press release out just yesterday, and we're going to be making sure that we get the word out to the public that, you know, these items will no longer be accepted. The good thing is we have quite amount, uh, a good amount of time to do that. Um, and, and those materials will still be, um, kept out of the landfill until, um, the, the program ends, you know, approximately six to eight months from now. So, so we have, we have some time there. We to do some refunds, I think, if people have full bags left, full boxes of bags left. So that's good. And then we really want to focus on our reduce and reuse, where we started back there in the materials management hierarchy. A lot of these products that are made now, they're just made out of really small amounts of very low quality plastics, and there's not a market for them. And so we want to try to help people make the best choices they can. We understand that you can't always buy a product that doesn't have these materials in them. It's almost impossible. But what we want to do is help people make the best choices and look at different alternatives. Can you buy this instead of that that doesn't have all that wasteful plastic included in the packaging, right? Not to roast on Costco, but... When my significant other goes to Costco and buys apples and a plastic clamshell, I get upset, right? Because it's like there's no need for that, right? Like you didn't have to do it. So we're really going to focus on that.

So the message is keep using your orange bags till they run out?

That's correct. That's correct. Yeah. And as I said, they'll still be going to the same outlets that they have been. And so we're not throwing them away or anything like that. So keep using them, and we'll keep updating people on the timeline.

Thank you.

Yeah. Great. So moving on to our vision. So we thought when we were before we even started the plan, we wanted to make sure we understood what the vision of Curbit and our programming is. And you can see it there. And you'll see that in the plan, we tie back to this vision and we scored a lot of the concepts that we came up with on environmental impact, the service value, and the input of the community. These were kind of the three core topics that we made sure we always were looking at. So we're really happy to have this vision. And like I said, we use it in a lot of what we do now. Just a real quick background. The last strategic plan we had was done in 2007. Some of the significant outcomes there were automated cart service. Before, there were just regular cans and not automated. The compost program and mixed recycling before you had a little small bin and separated your recycling. Then we moved to mixed recycling where we got a lot more material. That plan was really residential focused. It was focused on what people would put out at their homes. The new strategic plan, which started in 2025 and we just finished up in 2026, we had a lot of contributors, the community, obviously, the materials management staff, community engagement, public works commission, our consultant and leadership. It was a 15-month process and it focuses, as you'll see, on both residential and commercial waste because we realized that that commercial piece was missing. So what is the purpose of the strategic plan? You can see here we kind of have four main points on the purpose. You'll hear this word concepts a lot. We wanted to develop concepts and action items that will reduce waste sent to the landfill right that's kind of one of our, our core purpose. Our core purposes and and concepts are are broad areas of focus that we're going to make sure that that we We pay attention to going forward. We wanted to prioritize community support and tie it back to our vision. So we provide the services that the community wants. We want to make sure we support and align with broader city policies and priorities. And we wanted to really have this tool to serve as a guide to our programs in the next decade and make sure that it was a living tool and it could adapt as things change. Because as we know, with the hefty bag program, things change and with recycling all the time. So we want to make sure it's adaptable. So just real quick. on planned development process, you know, it was 15 months. There was a lot of, there was a lot that went into it, but I tried to kind of boil it down here into six main points. First, you know, we, we really wanted to understand today's system, the, the, the waste management system that we have now in our programs. And we found out from the community survey that we did that people will participate. They said they'll participate in things if they understand it and they understand where it goes. We really wanted to make sure we did that. So we made some waste flow diagrams and things like that to try to make sure people understood. And then we wanted to identify the opportunities, right? We brainstormed new initiatives. We identified gaps in current programming and conducted a community survey to develop these planned concepts that we'll talk about. We wanted to measure support, so we hosted focus groups and we learned about, we taught the focus groups, the volunteers about some potential concepts and they actually scored those for us. And we took that information back and used that to develop the plan. We also evaluated our priorities. We used those scores, as I said, along with 12 other scoring criteria to connect to our vision and identify the priorities for the upcoming 10 years. And then we build a roadmap and an implementation plan with three phases. And that's all based on those final concept scores and bring it all together in the plan. So as I mentioned, community feedback really was a focus for us and wanted to go over a little bit of how we did that. So first of all, we did a community survey. We asked questions about our current programs, about potential new initiatives, and about customer behaviors. We were really happy we got 4,000 responses. I think it's the highest amount of responses the survey has gotten in the city. And those responses helped us guide the development of these concepts, of these ideas. And so we used those. The community survey really was great, gave us a lot of insight on a variety of topics. And just so you know, the community survey and the focus groups, all that detailed information is part of the plan. And so you can look through all the questions and everything like that if you want to get really deep into it. The focus groups were, we had two focus groups with community members and then two Public Works Commission sessions. And during those, the volunteers, they viewed a set of our ideas of these concepts. They asked questions about them. They provided comments. And then we asked them to score those concepts based on what they thought would work best for Boise. Okay. So just a couple highlights on the community survey and then on the focus groups. Some of the findings we saw, we had really strong support for multifamily housing and businesses to provide recycling. We heard that there's a lot of places that just don't even have recycling available. or composting for that matter. And so we had about 80% of the people really strongly supporting that. We had support for what people were saying to us in a variety of ways in different questions, that they supported that people who create more waste should pay more. And that people who are making the effort to participate in the programs that take a little more time, that they should pay less, right? Makes sense. It's kind of like a lot of utilities, right? If you use twice the amount of electricity, you're going to pay close to twice the amount of money as the other customers. So we're looking at that and we're looking at ways we can adjust our fees so that people that are participating really are rewarded. We also found out that we were looking at our current programs and we asked, okay, like we accept food waste in the compost program now, but how many people actually do that, right? And we found out that 44% of our compost customers don't use their cart for food waste. So this is a situation where we have the program available, but people aren't using it to their fullest potential, right? So we have to look at ways, why not? Do they not know? Do they know? But there's barriers there that we need to make sure that we try to avoid and try to help them with. So we'll be looking at that to try to understand how we can get more of that food waste. Some of the focus groups findings, you'll see here the top three concepts that the focus groups scored. And I'll read those off, just a little hard to see. Require recycling and reuse of materials from construction projects. Create a pricing system for waste collection that incentivizes reducing and reusing waste that I touched on before. and develop waste reduction and diversion programs specifically for multifamily residents. I touched on that before also. So you can see some similarities between the focus groups and the community survey. And as I said, these focus group scores were used as one of the scoring criteria for each concept. Moving on. I'm going to give just two examples here, get into a little more detail on those. So the concept here, which we mentioned just previously, is create a pricing system that enhances incentives for reducing and recycling waste. And you can see we have goal, some metrics, and potential actions there. So the goal, obviously, is to reduce waste sent to the landfill through incentives and rewards that that recognize that extra effort that customers make to reduce and separate their waste. And metrics, we're looking at trying to implement three different rate adjustments by fiscal year 2028. to help out with that, right? And there's a variety of actions we could do. We want to really research other cities and other areas and how they do it, look at them. We want to use the community feedback to adjust for specific rates. I mentioned previously that people are really supportive if somebody has a second trash can. So basically they're creating or have capacity for double the amount of waste how much more should they pay for that, right? And right now it certainly isn't double, right? And so should it be, or should it be close to that? We'll try to, we'll work on that and get feedback, of course, from council and others. And then we, you know, just obviously outreach is really important. So we will, we'll do an outreach campaign on how we can, how people can reduce waste and save money with, with the rates that are available today. Another concept that was really popular with the folks groups and with the survey was requiring recycling and reuse of specific materials from construction projects. goal again to to decrease construction waste to the landfill um i think i think our our citizens see all the construction that's going on in the city right now and they can tell that there's a lot of waste created there and and i and you know they they've told us they they they want everybody to participate in the programs that are available not just people in their homes and um So our goal there is to increase the diversion rate for construction waste by 15%. That's after implementation of the requirements. We'll gather feedback from stakeholders, identify materials that can be recycled locally, and then we'll draft an ordinance and see, okay, does this work? How can we do this? And... And how can we get support from the community there? This is just a list of... Quick question before you go on.

Would this new rate increase be in addition to the one that we had with Republic Service a few months ago? How does that configure?

Mayor, Council Member, thank you for the question. So we're not proposing an across-the-board rate increase for anything. And I think I should probably, instead of saying rate increase, if I did, adjustments. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that people creating more trash are paying for that. And so we don't need any more revenue than we're already asking for through normal rate increases. We would just adjust so we might lower recycling, increase trash costs, if that makes sense. So like if you have an extra trash cart, that would maybe cost a little more and then lower something else so that it evens out.

Got it. Thank you.

And this is just a list of all you know those were two examples of of the plan concepts and sorry those are hard to see it, but they're also there they're available in the plan, obviously, so we broke those concepts down into three phases and those were ranked by the combined scores of of all of our. 13 scoring criteria, so you can see there the phase one concepts, those are the ones we'll start on first. phase two, and then the lowest scoring ones, phase three. It's possible that some of those ones in phase three that were lower scored, we don't get to or something else comes up over the course of the 10-year period that we use something else, but we have them available. And as you saw in the previous slide, each concept has goals. There's a timeline in the implementation plan. and there's specific action items for each of these in the plan. And some of the key outputs from the plan, and this ties back to our vision, a shared understanding. So as I mentioned previously, Customers told us they really want to understand the programs that they're participating in. We created a waste flow diagram for that. And it really just explains what happens to your waste, where does it go, how does it work, right? So that people understand and they can feel like their efforts matter. And we also created a transparent prioritization tool, right? This is the scoring matrix. It shows us how the concepts were evaluated, shows us what they're evaluated on, and how they were scored. The great thing about this is it's adaptable. So if we hear from the public or if we hear from council, hey, we're hearing that people really want to focus on this area, and we can adapt, we can do another survey, and we can take those comments into consideration and change the scoring. We won't do that, of course, all the time, but we plan to do updates to the plan every year, but also do surveys maybe every three to five years to kind of keep it updated. And then it really gives us a roadmap for action to the future. It identifies phases, timing, and priorities for us. So that that we're really focusing on the things that that matter to the community that can reduce waste and and that have a good value for for the for the public. And real quick, if you would like to look and this works. I guess it's not gonna work. I won't show you the waste flow diagram, but the waste flow diagram is in the in the plan. And now my slides are not moving forward. That was the second to last slide. The last slide will say, Any questions for the audience? I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this. The plan will be made available now. We wanted to talk to you first, and then we'll also put this plan on our website and make it available to the public to look at. And, you know, I encourage you to take the time to take a look at it. We did provide an executive summary in the beginning of the plan, too, knowing that people like ourselves don't have time to read a 60-page plan. And that really will focus on most of the high-level action items and details. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the work that's gone into this. I have received questions over the years from folks wondering if they have a smaller can, why aren't they paying less? So I appreciate that effort and also really am interested to see what the team comes up with for how we can reduce that construction waste. I think that's a really important piece of the puzzle too. Thanks so much for all your work on this. Great info.

Thank you, Council Member.

Oh, Council Member Ellis has raised your hand.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, just thank you for this presentation and thank you for the information that we received in the packet. I think I'm glad that the focus is on how we can move forward in the future. And I would just confirm that I've heard a lot of these same things as I've been out in the community, especially When we're in condo developments and apartments, there really is a strong desire for recycle. But there's also people that are interested in composting, too. So I've been very grateful with our food drop off sites for people to participate in that. And it seems like that's going well. I think you're right in terms of usage of food waste and scraps in our compost bins. that we do need to, to work harder to educate and inform and encourage people. You know, I won't, I won't out which neighbor of mine borrowed my compost cart recently. And I had a Costco rotisserie chicken carcass in there and they were like, you can't put that in there. So, you know, I think we, we still have some work to do and kind of sharing that out. And I'd also say that just me personally being interested in, in the composting and food scrap program I've, had to be pretty concerted about it. But I have noticed a reduction in normal weeks. I could put my trash out every two weeks if I'm composting and recycling well enough. So I think being able to kind of consider those things and how we're reducing costs and stressors on the system and using it most efficiently. And then I think just a couple other things. I appreciate you talking about the clamshells. I think that's a common frustration for people that there just isn't a good thing for them. maybe a question would be if there are kind of further upstream efforts to get, you know, producers, you know, our food industry to get away from those recently bought a cardboard box of raspberries from, from a retailer recently. So wondering if there's a movement there. And then also just kind of curious as we are projecting our demands on the landfill, you know, is there, are there any concerns from our County partners about,

know flow rates are we kind of trying to incorporate in and help them understand how our demands might change um the amount of usage we might have ideally or kind of projected so it's just those kind of two questions there madam mayor council member morales thank you for the questions um yeah the um starting with the the food waste i'm happy to hear that that you're participating in that and and doing your part and and and we're definitely We definitely know that some of what we think and what we've heard from customers is there's a little bit of an ick factor with the food waste and how to get it from your kitchen to the bin. And so we kind of want to work on that and see if there's ways that we can help with that. Is there tips that we can give? Is there... Can we give discounted little kitchen pails to people that they'll use so that they can easily transport that food waste to the compost bin? So we're looking at different ways to try to help that. Um, you also mentioned, um, you know, the clamshells and, and, and different packaging and, and, and looking upstream and, and that's exactly right. Like that's, that, that's the reduce and reuse piece of it. And we want to, we want to promote businesses and, and, um, things like the farmer's market and things like that, that where you can go buy, um, food and vegetables and produce, and there's not as much packaging. Right. Um, And, you know, there's a lot of other states that look at what's called extended producer responsibility laws, where people who produce certain types of waste, they're responsible for taking that waste back. They're looking at that with the lithium ion batteries, with all the fires that have happened with those, but even with other packaging. So There are movements there. Those are usually statewide laws. I haven't seen one that's just citywide, but we always keep an eye out on those and see if there's opportunities for us to do something similar. Then with the landfill, you mentioned the landfill and the flow rates there. We've been in contact and we've been meeting with the landfill recently. Myself and the director have met with them and we really want to keep them informed. The landfill is a great resource. It's a great resource to have close by. in the city. And so we want to, we want to use that resource responsibly. And we also want them to, to know how much waste we'll be, we'll be sending their way. So they have enough revenue to, to, to keep their, to keep the landfill going. So we've been working with them on that and you know, we'll, we'll continue to do so.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you.

All right. Well, thank you so much for updating us. You know, I was at Deli Days on Sunday night and Gabe from the Curbit team and Nina Schaaf were there. There were other city employees that were volunteering as well. But they did an incredible job of keeping the waste of that festival to a minimum. I mean, the volunteers showed me they each had about not even one full garbage bag. And there were thousands of people that came through for food throughout the day. It was really neat, the diversion program that they were demonstrating.

Madam Mayor, Council Member, thanks for bringing that up. I just had a conversation with Gabe about that yesterday and he showed me some of the pictures. It was great. You know, it just goes to show that like when you make the effort for an event, you really can. You really can make a difference because a lot of times events are really hard to manage. to do that with because it just takes it takes so many people and great signage and really to plan before the event um and their biggest plan was that most of the stuff that they they used um for the event was was compostable or recyclable so like people didn't even have the opportunity to create trash because it wasn't even available unless they brought it in. So yeah. It was really cool. Yeah.

Especially to see, as you were talking about in composting and Council Member Morales brought this up. Yes, you can put that chicken carcass in your compost container. So there were, there was so much food. Yep. in the compost bin as well as the plates that they'd gotten and some other things. So in the same way that we're looking at making sure that those families that are using larger compost and recycling bins and smaller garbage bins, and to make that give some financial incentive there, I'd love for us to be thinking about how we can help events come along too, because at the end of the day, I mean, that was so much less waste put into our landfill, which is costs to taxpayers. because that event committed to trying to do this. It was really cool to see.

I have one other thought about it too. I know as we're all on high alert for rat awareness, I still see in, I know even just like walking through the alleys in my neighborhood, some folks use like kind of still do their own composting in a pile in an alley basically. And that, um, I know that that's certainly, um, supports the rat population that kind of behavior and so just kind of another reason to be utilizing the city compost program because with those big bins I think it's a lot less likely to be a hazard for the rat population Madam Mayor I'd just like to say that just go on the record I'm not seeing that kind of behavior in my part of town so

Thank you for the comment.

I thought we were going to make it through without. It's devolved.

Yes. But we didn't.

Thanks. Thank you so much. And thanks to you. And the team looks like Council President has one more thing to say. Nope. Okay. Really appreciate the work that this team does. And thanks for being here today.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

All right. I'll take a motion to adjourn. Madam Mayor, I move to adjourn.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned. Thanks, everybody.