City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, August 18, 2026 study session of the Olympia City Council. For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present tonight. We have just one business item on our agenda for this evening, and it is the waste resources briefing and discussion. And that discussion and presentation will be led by our Public Works Director, Mark Russell. And I'll turn it over to you, Mark.

Thank you mayor. Good evening mayor and council for the record I'm Mark Russell public works director and with me tonight is our waste resources director Ron Jones. Tonight we're going to continue our discussion around the waste resources maintenance facility project that we started last study session in April. And so go over our purpose and agenda first. Our purpose tonight is to clarify the next steps on the approach to addressing the waste resources maintenance facility needs that we have I Just want to start by saying we're not here because we have a problem with our waste resources utility We don't have major issues we don't have concerns It's functioning just fine They're well-loved by our community, which we've been seeing in our recent surveys and most recently with some emails. And our staff are certainly dedicated and talented to the services they provide our community. So I just wanted to set that stage. We are here, though, to discuss a key financial decision and the resulting rate impacts to constructing a new waste resources maintenance facility. I'll start out tonight by reminding you of some of the background information you've seen before and summarize our past discussions. We'll go over what we've learned since April and other city experiences, give you a rate forecast, discuss some pros and cons for municipal and private collection, and an estimated timeline moving forward. So if you're all right with that agenda, we can proceed. So just for context, I'd like to begin with the programs and services our waste resources team provide to our customers. As you know, we provide garbage, recycling, and organics collection to 16,000 residential households. We have approximately 1,250 commercial customers where we provide garbage, organics, and bulky item collection. These include both permanent and temporary containers. With our Dropbox program, we average at least 5,000 halls annually. These include our shared compactors downtown, debris from construction projects, and our large quantity generators like the hospital. We also provide other services listed here in that far right column, many of which are unique to Olympia. To name just a few, our clean team, downtown litter can program, Multifamily recycling special event support and more as you can see there. Let me remind you about our current situation with the maintenance center. As you know we started to feel space constraints as early as 2006 20 years ago. The Public Works Maintenance Center is no longer operationally efficient for our crews, and we've outgrown the space. There are challenging environmental conditions on the site with steep slopes, wetlands, and Moxley Creek that limit the usable space we have to work with on the site. The most recent building condition, which focused on mechanical and electrical system, is rated poor with known equipment, thermal, and energy deficiencies of at least $6 million. This critical facility doesn't meet seismic requirements, which impact the city's ability to deliver 24-hour service in the event of an earthquake. The facility does not meet current ADA guidelines. And due to space constraints, some of our operation and supplies are located at various facilities across the city, which brings their own inefficiencies to our programs. Clearly, the building and major systems are at the end of their useful life. For these reasons, early conversations started in 2009 about how to remodel to build capacity and improve operational functionality. Previous assessments estimated at least $15 million in needed repairs or renovations, including addressing environmental and stormwater concerns on site. However, repairs and remissions alone do not address the space constraints and the fact that we are outgrowing the site. Over the past 50 years, we've gone from four operational programs to 11 and doubled our vehicles and staff. We have adapted and modified along the way to meet these growing needs because that's what we do in public works, but that's not sustainable in the long run. Because of these space constraints, we did extensive analysis and early decisions resulted in phasing our maintenance facility needs into two buildings on two different sites. Carpenter Road for our waste resources utility and a new maintenance center for the rest of Public Works operations on the existing site. The first phase is the Carpenter Road facility, which is what we are here to discuss tonight. So in 2020, we hired an engineering firm KPFF to develop a conceptual design about 10 or 20% design to help us with site preparation. Key features of that facility include staff offices, making sure the facility is ready for future electric vehicle charging, a truck wash station, covered parking for waste collection vehicles, and storage for our container inventory. We would move our medium and heavy duty fleet operations to this site, especially since our larger vehicles will be located there. But our light duty vehicle maintenance would remain at the current East Side Street location. So what would this site support? About 40 public works staff would be housed in the building, including all waste resources staff and our heavy duty fleet staff. There would be about 46 vehicles, including our collection trucks and heavy duty trucks, cart and container delivery vehicles and our light duty trucks and vans. We need a lot of space for our large collection vehicles and container inventory. This includes about one and three quarter acres to store various containers and to provide enough space for our vehicles to maneuver and pick them up and drop them off. You can see from the picture how many carts drop boxes and dumpsters would be stored and coming in and out of the site, which is why we need that kind of space. This slide really shows why carpenter road works for our waste resources utility it shows how the sites are located in relation to each other, you can see the maintenance Center there on the left on East side street. And then over on the right on carpenter road and Martin way intersection is where the carpenter roadside is where race resources would be housed. It's in Thurston County, part of Lacey's urban growth area. And the reason this works for waste resources is the proximity to the Waste and Recovery Center off Marvin Road, which is shown all the way to the right. As you can imagine, our collection teams are driving this way to the Waste and Recovery Center, and it makes sense for that facility to be out that far. As I mentioned earlier this is not a new project for us but has been underway for more than 10 years. The Finance Committee was briefed throughout 2016 and 2017 giving direction to staff to proceed with the phased approach for replacement. Council ultimately approved the project direction and spending as part of the rate setting and budget process in those years. Since 2020 we've been actively working to advance the conceptual design With site preparation and beginning to raise waste resources rates to build capital project funds to pursue the carpenter road site. which brings us to 2026 with the site being shovel ready for construction, we spent approximately $2.6 million getting to this point. So this slide shows the current cost estimate for the Carpenter Road facility. You've seen this before. It's about $33.5 million for the building itself, which includes site development, the building, furniture, fixtures and equipment, our heavy duty fleet equipment in order to maintain our heavy duty fleet, and a truck wash station. We always put a 10 percent contingency in our projects for things that come up that are unknown. And then we always have construction management and fees that design costs that go into these kinds of projects including project management design and inspection permit and impact fees and various connection fees. So the total cost is just over 40 million dollars. Because of that cost, we know we need to look at potential debt in order to fund that size of a project. So we work with our finance team, and with a $40 million debt obligation, the annual payment over 30 years would be about $3 million per year. This equates to a waste resources utility rate increase of 24%. That doesn't include normal annual increases in expenses and other regulatory requirements such as wages, benefits, and waste recovery fees. This would basically reset our baseline for our waste resources utility. The average monthly residential bill, excuse me, the bi-monthly bill every two months would increase from approximately $65 to $81 with that rate increase. And we'll discuss this a little bit more on an upcoming slide where we actually do some rate projections with this and other typical things that happen in the utility. Some more to follow on that. You asked us about other costs the utility might be facing in the future. And there are some new regulatory requirements coming in 2030. The organics management law requires cities to mandate curbside organic service for all residential customers. Currently, it is voluntary. It also requires collection for non-residential customers generating at least 50 gallons of organics per week. For this increase in service, we would need to add at least one truck and driver. This would be a $600,000 one-time expense for the truck and approximately $335,000 ongoing annual expenses for employee and vehicle costs. Also in 2030, the Recycle Reform Act establishes a producer responsibility program for paper and plastic packaging. It begins with a 50% reimbursement for recycling costs, phasing into 90% by 2032. We don't know yet what the reimbursement calculations will be. Those will be defined later. But the city would see some additional revenue in this area, which could offset customer recycling costs somewhat. And then just to review the municipal waste hauling options that we've seen before. There are three major categories. First, a city can operate and manage their own solid waste utility. 27 municipalities do this for at least one waste stream, like garbage or recycling. Of those, nine provide both garbage and recycling similar to what we do here in Olympia. The second category is where the city contracts for services with a private hauler. About 157 municipalities do this. They can do this with all or some of their waste streams. Rate setting authority may be retained by the city or set by the Utility and Transportation Commission or the UTC. And finally, the third category is really a completely hands-off approach where solid waste collection is provided by private companies and overseen by the Utility and Transportation Commission. Currently 92 cities do this. The UTC regulates those services and rates and investigates complaints. So that concludes revisiting the background you've seen before. I just wanted to refresh that so we all can start on the same page again. And so now I'd like to go over what we as staff heard at the April study session. We heard loud and clear that the need for a new maintenance center for public works operations needs to be addressed and cannot be delayed. So thank you for that, we appreciate that. We also heard that waste resources services, programs and employees are highly valued by our community. That was very well stated, so we appreciate that as well. We heard there's concern about the overall cost of a new facility and the affordability to our rate payers. Some of you would like more information on several topics before making a decision on whether to advance the construction of Carpenter Road. And finally, there was interest in what other cities experienced regarding privatization. So as we were prepared for this study session Ron and I have learned some things since April that we'd like to share with you. First an alternative bidding process or design build we feel is the least cost and preferred option for building a facility like the one proposed at Carpenter Road. We've successfully used that method before with this building City Hall and the hands on Children's Museum. Just to refresh about what that means in short it's having the builder or contractor on board throughout the design and that brings efficiency value engineering expertise and most importantly cost control to the project. We understand that there's been interest in furthering the design on Carpenter Road to have better cost estimates before making a decision about the facility. I would not recommend that because the further we go in design, the less benefit we receive from the design-build process and the efficiencies we could gain. We were really at the perfect point in the scoping and design of this project to pursue the design-build contracting method. Second, Ron was able to connect with consultants that help cities with contracting and renewing contracts with private collectors. We learned that in order to obtain real costs from private collectors, it requires a formal request for proposals with serious intent by the city. Anything short of an RFP with serious intent will likely not generate proposals or real cost information. You also asked about what other cities have experienced thinking about privatization recently. We found only two cities that have recently privatized from municipal collection. It's our understanding that Shelton did this in 2017, mainly out of fiscal necessity, and Poulsbo is currently in the process. For these reasons, we weren't able to receive any feedback about success or concerns after privatizing. Also, Bellevue was never a municipal collector as we originally thought. Their most recent contract was in 2013 and extended until 2028. What we may be hearing about is that they're currently working on RFP for a new contract, but that's a contract renewal. So unfortunately, we weren't able to learn much from the experiences of other cities that are privatizing recently. We doing okay so far? All right. So this next slide goes into a 10 year rate projection assuming we move forward with the carpenter road facility and I'll just walk you through the numbers. Certainly in 2026 our rate is 65 dollars again our bimonthly rate of a typical residential customer. We are proposing somewhere around a 6% rate increase for 2027, and that would take the rate to $69. You can see in 2028 and 2029, we bump up the rate in both those years by 17%. 12 of that is for the Carpenter Road bonding. So we would spread that over two years. We could spread it over more, but we just assumed Spreading that rate increase over two years the 24 percent I talked about early or would be spread over two years. And then we assumed a 5 percent inflation costs for normal increases in waste fees in employee salaries and benefits and other contractual requirements. So that's how we came up with 17 percent. And you can see at the top of each of these columns what the corresponding typical bimonthly bill would be. In 2030 we added a 15% rate increase. 10% is for the organics collection that I talked about earlier with the new mandates from the legislature on and that's bringing on a new truck and a new driver and expanding our routes in order to organic collection. And then again, we added a 5% inflation for typical yearly cost increases of salaries, benefits, and other costs. From there on, from 2031 out to the 10 years in 2037, we just added a 4% inflation factor. And you can see that by that time in 2037, the typical bill could be around $143 for two months. Any questions on that? I know that's a lot of information. We try to lay that out as clearly as possible.

Council Member Madron. Yeah, appreciate seeing this. I'm curious with the adding on organics in a mandatory in 2030. What about people who currently pay for that service? Do they also get a 15% increase? Like how does that shake out?

Yeah, that would be a rate for all our customers, an average rate increase. Because we're adding capacity to our system, we would spread that out across the whole thing. By that time, though, we would probably be looking closer at bundling our services. So then the rate would be for garbage, recycling, and organics. And so, Ron, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Yeah We had done some cost of service work here a few years ago Which we've not acted on because we're working on this right now But the idea would be most likely bundling so you would have garbage recycling organics under one feet kind of like we have garbage and recycling today So this is kind of a best stab in the dark. You're looking out, you know, four or five years. We know that we would have to buy another 6,000 to 7,000 carts for those customers, and that's about $500,000. Then the truck and driver. So this is a good kind of like, it's not perfect, but it's somewhere in the range. And so we have to throw a number at it. We kind of think in 5%. Now that could be, it could end up be 3%. It's, it's, it's really hard to say given the other factors. The other thing about the organics management law that I would kind of throw out there, this is a, this is a mandate on cities to, this is a requirement by state law for cities to require organics collection, make it compulsory. That law implements in 2030, but they will also be providing opportunities to extend that or ask for a waiver. So say a five-year waiver. So in 2029, we would have the opportunity to ask for an extension to push that out to say 2034 or 2035 for actual implementation to give us more time to tool up for that. So there are a lot of options at our disposal, but that again, that would come back to council. Do you want to enact that in 2030 when we're supposed, you know, initially supposed to, or would we have some opportunity to extend that out? Especially given if we, for example, went forward with Carpenter Road, that might make a lot of sense not to have three things happening at one time. But yeah, is that the answer?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, apparently this is very complicated and you're working on averages here and it's not that, you know, everybody's bill would just go up 15% regardless of whether or not you currently pay. You're looking at the whole system You're looking at restructuring rates. And if you already pay for organics, maybe it's, you know, not 15% for you, but somebody who's not paying, it would be higher. So that's kind of what I'm hearing. I would think that, you know, if the state's eventually going to make us do it anyway, I think it would probably be aligned with our comprehensive plan to, you know, move along with that. And I just, one thing I think we should also be considering with mandatory organics is the community education and outreach that's going to come along with that because what we don't want to have is a bunch of contaminated organics because people don't understand what is being required of them.

Thank you. Council Member Green followed by Mayor Pro Tem Wynn.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. This is super helpful. One question that came to mind for me, though, when I was looking at it was, is there any, over the same 10-year period of time, I know the expectation is that the population in the city will increase as well. Is there any threshold or like how frequently do new trucks, new routes, new whatever need to be added as the population increases? I mean, is it for every 2,000 rate payers or is it just very dependent on on what part of the city they go to and Yeah, I guess is any of that accounted for in here or would that be something that that we could even know That's a great question councilmember green We've been with seven trucks since 2000 and

Six five uh we went when we went automated uh I think we had six trucks in ninety eight for residential or seven trucks I think we've had that same compliment it's just how we use them so when we went to the single stream automated. Um we're running like on residential anyway we run between four and five trucks on a daily basis with two trucks at well. One truck is a spare, and then another one is kind of a half spare because it does some multifamily. So we've been running seven trucks for quite a number of years, absorbing growth and absorbing a couple of, for us, large annexations where they were 500, 700 homes. On a given day, our trucks will collect between 750, depending on the density, 750 to 1,000 households, one truck one day. So we're on residential. Our just nominal growth year to year is like about a half to 1% because most of it is now infill. We're not looking at any big annexations. We have one annexation we take over this year. It is two customers. It's just something. It's a little bit of cleanup work. So we're really not looking at what we feel is a large need down the road. At least on residential and then on the commercial side is it's we're not again growing Exponentially, it's just businesses Open and businesses closed and we kind of take two steps forward one step back kind of thing So to kind of make it a little more colloquial Thank you Mayor Pro Tem win Yeah, I'm thinking as this conversations going I'm thinking about the amount of waste as someone's producing

Um, and that being a difference in, in their billing. Um, so if, uh, so as I'm thinking about that, could you share with me when you're doing these projections, um, what's your sort of average for how much waste folks are, um, putting out for you to pick up?

Yeah. Another good question. Um, I approach them when the, the largest, uh, of the four cart sizes we have for garbage. 20, 35, 65, and 95. The majority of customers, I'll say the largest number is a 65-gallon. So I don't have the percentages. We have a beautiful slide. It's not here in the presentation, but I would say that it's probably the majority of customers on a 65. I could try to throw out some numbers just from my brain. It's like we have about just under 1,000 customers on a 95-gallon. We probably have about 8,000 on the 65, and then the rest are split between the 20 and the 35, somewhere in that range.

Thanks. That's helpful. And then are we seeing, you know, are we imagining a future in this 10-year projection where we're still, as a city of Olympia, offering the option to do free yard waste drop-off, cardboard, that kind of thing, if people want to haul it themselves to a site?

Well, we've lost the site with the sale of the Justice Center. That was where the yard waste drop-off site was, the Saturday drop-off site, which then also included the cardboard. In order to bring something like that back, we would need real estate for it to happen. So we would need, I think we mapped out, that's probably an acre of space right there. So basically what we had at the Justice Center is what we would need. So that would need to be property that we would either need to have and develop or purchase and develop to bring back the yard waste drop off site that served on average about 30 customers on a given Saturday, nine months a year. And then a little bit of the cardboard that they brought. That was something that we, just for context, the yard waste drop off site was really a legacy program from the very beginning of yard waste diversion. And then we brought in, at some point, added commingled recycling because we thought it would be a nice thing to do for customers. We added the scrap metal because, well, we can take scrap metal. We already do our own scrap metal. And then when we added the... We tried making the recycling 24-7 for folks, and it failed due to contamination. It lasted about three weeks. We had to pull it. And then we tried cardboard. We tried that as just an option, not thinking about how successful it would become. So it was one of those little bit of an accidental programs that we put into place. It would be challenging to bring something like that back. Something like that service is really best served through a transfer station like Thurston County Solid Waste. where they actually have the facility, they have the staffing, they can move the people, and they can move the trucks, if that kind of makes sense. It's really something where you want a true transfer station where when you fill up materials, you can move containers out and bring in fresh containers. And so that site was actually quite labor intensive for us on a daily basis for what we got out of it in terms of diversion.

Yeah, thank you. I just dropped off a bunch of glass. I loved it. And that legacy program of the yard waste, I love that legacy. I like the accidental cardboard program too, but that's me as a user and not having to maintain it. I wonder, we probably won't get that far today, but I wonder if a future maintenance center that I'm really crossing my fingers for is... Could there be a possibility of, you know, maybe it's not cardboard, maybe it's something else. There may be a partnership with Thurston County. I think there's some kind of like that, or at least we can use it still. But yeah, I just, I'm looking at these rates and I think it'll be, I think it'll be different, you know, and it's a little bit of like a pay to play model. You know, if you want to create a bunch of waste, you're going to have to pay for that waste. Yeah. So I just, I just think there could be some possible variants here. So just bringing it up. Thank you.

All right, back to you. Super. We'll move on then. So we're going to move into some high-level pros and cons that we use to evaluate this since we don't have specific information for you. As we develop the pros and cons of municipal and private collection that we're going to go over on the next slide, We wanted to really ensure that that list was unbiased. We worked really hard to remove bias. So we used this filter of categories or criteria for evaluating the pros and cons. These aren't in any priority or particular order. And we probably didn't think of everything either. But we wanted to provide at least a high level view of of what some potential pros and cons of the services could be. So the categories are just general services that the utility provides, customer service, emergency services we provide when those occur, our climate program, what strategic control would look like, accountability might look like, our budget and rates, and the risk we take. So we think it's a fair pro and con table, given the information we have at this time. And again, we probably didn't think of everything, but we wanted to at least give you some high level flavor of what these two options might look like. So on your desk is a larger version of this slide, which is a little easier to read. And I'll go ahead and walk you through this line by line if you're okay with that approach. I'm certainly open to interruptions if you have questions or comments as we walk through it or clarifications. Ron was instrumental in helping with this as well as Jay. So if you have questions or comments or did you think about this or that, please feel free to interrupt me. I'll start out, you can see there's on the left two columns are the municipal pros and cons and the right two columns are the private pros and cons with the criteria or categories on the left. So just starting with services, this is what the utility would provide. Right now a pro of our municipal collection is we provide an alternating every other week collection. We do garbage one week, and recycling the next week it allows us to use the same trucks and the same drivers without having to duplicate that effort. The con of providing that service in that particular way is it makes us less nimble to implement changes. If we wanted to change that service model, it's a little harder for us to do that because our trucks and our drivers and everything are set for that particular way to do things. Mark, you have a question from the Mayor Pro Tem? Yes.

What kind of changes? Are you saying like if we wanted to, we can so easily change to a weekly collection? Is that what you mean? Correct.

Yes. If we want to change how often we do the service or when we do the service, it makes us a little less nimble to make those changes.

Okay.

So that's what we mean by that.

I see. And are you on the private pro side for weekly garbage collection yet? Are you going through?

Yes, I'm going to walk through. So I'm just was ready to go there. But if you want to.

Oh, great. Could you could you add when you share next why weekly garbage collection is a pro? And I really sincerely don't mean this to be leading, but it just seems like we would not want to encourage people to have more garbage.

Understand. Yes.

Thank you.

So moving there with the pro of private it could be that weekly garbage collection is a pro people could have smaller garbage cans picked up more frequently. That way they don't potentially smell or or collect too much so one thing that happens now is because. Private collectors tend to do we in the area tend to do weekly collection, they have smaller containers because they pick them up weekly. As ron said earlier, we have 65 gallon containers because they're picked up every other week, the majority of our customers so we're with the private collection, the majority of their customers have 35 gallons so. That could be a pro of private collection is more frequent garbage collection and smaller containers, not having things build up at somebody's home. The con of that, though, is a private collector is going to have a standard model for service. They're unlikely to make a change just for us. And so that would be a con of private collection.

Anything else on that, Ron? Would just go back to the every other week and how it's less nimble. It really has to do when you We're only running one truck on residential on any given day whereas if you looked at The hauler around us every other week when they're doing garbage recycling organics are running three trucks So you have three trucks going down the road that could be a con where we're only having one and And then also with the every other week being less nimble, for example, when we just if we get to a point where we expand and now we have to do organics for all customers, we We will need to make some major structural routing changes. It will be more than just adding a truck to the organics route. We'll have to shift some customers. We've done this in the past. It's been many years, but where we have to kind of balance the customers around, potentially change days and get them balanced. We wouldn't be able to do all 16,000 customers on two Mondays, if that makes sense. So we're less nimble. We've got a system in place that This takes a little bit more work when we need to really expand in a large capacity.

So we have two questions in the queue. The first is from Council Member Madrone, followed by Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen.

Yeah, one of the things that I've heard that, you know, I've heard some folks in the community who favor a weekly garbage collection. And one of the things that I've heard is if you miss a week, you're not waiting a month. for your garbage to be picked up. And so the question behind that is, what happens right now? I've got a reminder in my calendar. I can't remember the last time I forgot to get my bin to the streets. What happens if you miss your service? Are you just waiting for another two weeks, or do we have a response for that?

Yeah. If somebody calls in, if we miss them, we go back and get them. There's no charge for that. If customer sets out late, we usually give them one or sometimes two grace periods. We just go get them. If it becomes a repeat, then we have a fee for that and we go back and get them. So, yeah, we go back and get customers. We don't leave them hanging for two weeks.

Okay.

That's not acceptable in our book.

And I have one additional question around that, around the service. You know, often when I put my bin at the street, it's, you know, sometimes the lid is up and there might be something hanging out of it because I had a little bit extra. And one thing I'm curious, if you know the answer to it, on the private side of things, do they tend to charge extra fees if your bin is over full? I've never been charged a fee for it with the city. So I'm curious on the private side, is that something that people would be facing? And you might not have the answer to it. I know I missed the last study session on this and didn't ask that question then.

Yeah, I couldn't speak for the, we have a way that we do charge. You know, if it's up a little bit, something's hanging out. That's one thing. If it's an actual, another 30 gallons of garbage, then that definitely necessitates a fee. Private haulers have that in their tariff and our rate fee schedules, how they charge. Yeah, I couldn't answer that.

Yes.

It's to this.

Related to this. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem, the city manager has a relevant point. All right. City Manager Pernick. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem.

So the other thing, and I think Mark's going to get this too, but this question kind of highlights something else, and it's really around the control piece. So in our model, as Ron said, if someone misses a pickup, we have a customer service model that says, if you call us, we're going to go get it. On the private side of things, we'll have less control of that, right? As was pointed out, there's a standard model for service they have. Whether or not we can write into a contract how we want that to happen or not is to be determined, right? But we don't have any guarantees that way like we do when we have full control over the customer service model that we provide. So I think Mark's going to cover that in a future pro-con, but it's just relative to what you asked, and so I thought I'd bring it up.

Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Witt.

bit of a squirrel but how will you know if someone is generating 50 I think it was 50 gallons or more in organics I mean unless it's a Christmas tree but you could chop it up stick it in a bag like how would you know what will compliance look like that's a really good question and I think I

Everyone in Washington State has that same question, at least all the haulers and all the cities that manage contracts have that same question. On the residential side, it's easy because you're a residential customer, so it would be compulsory. On the non-residential or commercial side, we've been asking that question, how do we evaluate that? I know that for us, on our commercial waste, for Spencer, who does our commercial waste outreach and has been working diligently on the organics management law. We've come up with some processes to look at this. But yeah, that is a really good question. The state has not figured that out within the law, and it's It's a good question. How do you really know who's generating what and how do you get them on board? So, yeah, great question. Sorry, there's not a great answer for that one.

No, that's great. And you know what? Honestly, Ron, if you had the answers, maybe we shouldn't give away our strategies.

Council Member Barrett. Thank you. I had a question on the commercial side. Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Do we market to people that are not our customers to try to get growth? I just want to have a concept of how this works.

So on the commercial side, so Olympia, because of the way the state's set up with garbage territories that have been in place since 1961 cities have the option to be local control. We've been doing municipal collections since I think it's 1938. Um, I think all the municipals out there were probably preceded that 61 law and just remained in the business. Um, so we're the legally, we're the only entity that can haul garbage out of Olympia. We can't haul outside of our city limits. We can't touch garbage. Um, Commercial recycling, and that includes both recycling cardboard and organics, is an open competitive market. There's no flow control, so anybody can haul it. We can haul it. Any private hauler can haul it. That's also construction debris. So we don't really market. We just provide the garbage service for commercial customers. We have not entered into the commercial recycling arena, because we would literally be in direct competition with what would be our competitor, LeMay Waste Connections, where we also work with them to get rid of our recyclables. So our recyclables transfer through them as it is today, go to their recycling facility in Tacoma. So, yeah, we don't market in that regard. And then with the Dropbox service, construction boxes, as long as that material is being hauled to a processing facility, not a place destined for garbage landfill, anybody can haul it. So, yeah, we don't. We don't market in that regard. But service is compulsory. You're supposed to be on our service. So if you have a business in Olympia, you should be signed up with our service. And we even have a minimum service level if you want to do some self-haul. So you can self-haul. That's totally legal.

Did that answer your question? It helped a lot, but I mean, do we do 50% of the commercial? Do we do 25% of the commercial?

For garbage, we do all the commercial garbage.

Yeah.

Every customer. So 1,250, 1,275. It's like 1,250 customers, I think, or a little over 1,200. And then, I don't know, about 1,300 containers, I think. So all commercial customers. And then anybody that's on a big roll-off or a compactor, we have all of those. And then we just do some commercial recycling with our roll-off, like the 10-, 20-, 30-yard boxes. So, yeah, it's all the garbage customers. It's all the customers in Olympia that we have. So, yeah, they don't really have an option. Yeah.

All right. And Ron alluded to the next line number two there about because of the way we do every other week collection on the way nearby private haulers do weekly collection. We pro could be that there we only have one truck in a neighborhood per day where a con for private would be there be multiple trucks in a neighborhood per day because they're doing both garbage and recycling or garbage and organics. So Ron already alluded to that one. I won't spend more time there. Last one we thought of under services was the ancillary or special services we provide such as litter cans downtown or special event supports illegal dumping on the side of the roadway. Those are all services that we provide as a municipal hauler. If somebody calls us and says there's a couch on Wheeler Avenue between our and this will be a pro kind of later as well. between our streets department to pick that up and our waste resources to haul it away, we partner to take care of those types of things. That's just an example of a special service we provide. The con to providing that service is that there's a cost for doing that that really isn't tangible. It gets worked into our rates. And there's growing community expectation around those kinds of services. They want a clean and vibrant downtown. They don't want couches on the side of the road and understandably so. So those but there is a cost to providing that that service. Mark we have a question from council member Madrone.

Does that include clean team then?

Clean team would be considered a service like that that we provide. But we also have downtown litter cans that that we put throughout the downtown that one of our staff go out and empty every morning and make sure that when people are using and frequenting the downtown, they're not overflowing. So that litter can is separate from the clean team.

I was just wondering, you didn't specifically call out the clean team, so I just wanted to be clear.

Thank you. With a private hauler, a pro would be that that would be a non-traditional service. If we decided to want them to do those kinds of things, that would be negotiated through a contract, and we could set that up how we decided we want to set that up. The con, though, is the cost for that non-traditional service would be unknown. We don't know what they would charge us for doing those types of non-traditional, just pick up garbage at a residential household type services. We'd have to negotiate those.

Okay, we have questions from Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen, followed by Council Member Vanderpool.

I'm so interested in this tonight. Is the, so we have about 40 people working waste resources. Is the clean team part of those 40 people?

Yes.

How many people? About?

Seven, eight.

Does that sound right? I should know this. Yeah, seven and a quarter.

Oh, wow. Seven seems to be a thing.

Yes.

Seven trucks, seven people. We're going to do it somehow. Okay. All right. That's good to know. Thank you.

Mm-hmm. Thank you. Council Member Vanderpool, followed by Council Member Green, followed by Council Member Madron.

Just a quick question. So on the non-traditional services negotiated through contract, how often does that actually occur? And if we, like, how often does that occur in a city? Would they take on, because we do a multitude of non-traditional services, including downtown. So I'm curious, how often do private owners do that? And would those jobs transfer?

Yeah. That would all be something we'd have to ask for in a request for proposal if that's what we choose to do. and then negotiate that into a contract. We want you to do this service on this frequency or on call if it happens to be the couch on the side of the road example and we would ask for them to provide that service or we could not ask them to provide that service and then we would ask them for what would they charge us to go pick up the couch on the side of the road for example. So that would all have to be, We'd all have to determine, is that a service we want a private company to do? We'd have to ask them to do that and then negotiate the cost for doing that. I don't know how often, like, for example, in Lacey, I don't know if LeMay, for example, does that kind of thing. If Lacey calls them up and does that, my guess is... Probably like see Street operations staff just go and pick it up themselves and take it out to the work themselves would be my guess But I don't know for sure You know how that would work if you don't have it in a contract and negotiate that particular service That answer your question.

Yeah, and that would be a part of the that be a request proposal after the initial contract or that be a part of the main contract usually

we would i'm not sure i understand so if if we were to negotiate a privatization contract would those non-traditional services be part of that or would that request proposal happen afterwards i would assume we'd make the decision in a request for proposal before we would release one whether we want that in there or not and then if we put that in there they would give us a proposal on how they would handle that that type of work and the cost associated with it

Okay, thank you. All right, Councilmember Green, followed by Councilmember Madron.

Thank you, Mayor. One thing that's not covered in your services section but is a question I get a lot is around the types of items that can be recycled or commingling of recycling. As far as you know, the private haulers, at least those that serve Lacey, Tumwater, the county, Do they offer pretty similar recycling options to what the city does? Do they take more? Do they take less? Do you know about that?

I can start, or do you want to just take that one? Go ahead.

Council Member Green. Again, good question. We are well aligned in terms of what we have on our acceptance list, and there was a time when we actually weren't as well aligned. We actually had more materials. A lot of that was... ALIGNMENT REALLY CAME WITH THE CHANGES TO CHINA NATIONAL SWORD AND RESTRICTIONS ON WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES WOULD TAKE. SO REALLY AROUND 2017 TO 2020 WE STARTED REDUCING AND WERE WELL ALIGNED. THE PLACE THAT WE ARE DIFFERENT WOULD BE WE HAVE GLASS DROP OFF IN OLYMPIA AND AROUND THE REST OF THURSTON COUNTY THEY HAVE CURB SITE COLLECTION. Which I don't know how many customers participate that in that anymore, but they do provide the curbside collection The material ultimately goes to the same place Something that will be coming with the recycle reform act in 2030 is the goal of that is to get a unified list statewide so right now they were working on a unified list statewide of what would be collected recycling so that would be standardized and You wouldn't be going from one city to the next not knowing what to do So we could see some changes and that could be a good thing for us.

So for right now, we're pretty much the same Thank you Good to know councilmember Madron followed by councilmember Gilman It's gonna take you forever to get through this table, isn't it?

I don't actually have a question. I just want to offer a reflection. I'm really glad we're having this conversation because I think in the back of my mind, I knew that it's not just about trash pickup. There's a whole array of services behind the rates. And by having this conversation, I think more people are understanding what they're paying for when they pay the bill. And, you know, it makes it almost impossible, actually, probably impossible to compare our rates to anybody else's, um, And I think all all the work that happens with solid waste and waste resources in Olympia is valued. But one thing is that you know the trash gets picked up every week and people don't you know it just happens you don't think about it, but when I think about the clean team we get so much positive feedback around that particular. part of the team. Like I said, everybody's valued, but like, you know, when things are running smoothly, you know, you don't hear about it as much. But with Clean Team, they're responding to things that people see out in the community, getting out there and cleaning it up. And some of the things that I'm reflecting on right now is that Clean Team is actually a critical part of our homeless response work. So when there's a challenge downtown, we have OPD, meeting with homeless services, Clean Team's there. And, you know, as we're talking about all this, it's just, I'm It seems like it would be a stretch to think that we could get that kind of cooperation through a private contract. So no question in there. I'm just sharing some of my thoughts as we're discussing.

Yeah. Thank you. All right. Council Member Gilman. Thank you, Mayor Payne.

I agree. I think clarifying the difference between having a waste utility and just specifically contracting for collection of containers is two different things. So I appreciate your illuminating that. I wanted to ask if you could, I heard a question within Council Member Green's question. When she said the haulers who work the other two cities in the county, my understanding is that for the entire southern Puget Sound area, there's only one firm that operates under maybe some multiple brandings. But is there essentially one firm that would be potentially bidding on services?

Yeah, great question, Councilmember Gilman. Before I, I can't really say yes, because you don't know until you would go out to RFP who might bid, right? So there are other haulers in the state, and we've even heard that haulers have come from other states to bid, but I don't know if they would do that in Thurston County, more like the King and Snohomish County. So yes, Waste Connections and then all their subsidiaries that are in southwest Washington, with a few exceptions, Olympia, the city of Camas still does garbage, but they contract with Waste Connections for recycling and compost collection. I think there's a couple other still independent haulers in that region. I couldn't name them or exactly where they are. And then also Jefferson and Parts of Jefferson and Clallam County is a waste connections a myriad of subsidiaries So yeah, so pretty much everything south of the King County line Now would they be the only better no one knows so yeah All right, we've touched on some of these but I'll move on to customer service I

As you heard, a pro of our municipal operation is the strong customer relations we have, and some of the examples we gave about that is what Council Member Madrone said. If we miss the garbage you know we don't make them wait two weeks. We go take care of it. If it's a repetitive thing then we have to talk about fees. But if someone forgets to put their garbage out or is late for whatever reason you know I've heard numerous stories from our drivers about how they go above and beyond they know They get to know who's on their routes and they you know someone might have had hip surgery or they hear that and they see that their can is an out they'll actually go and you'll stop the truck and go and get it. So just numerous stories I hear about things that our drivers go above and beyond to do so that's a pro for municipal. The con on private regarding that particular issue is. All those customer relation things would have to be negotiated through a contract. And our guess is those would likely be more standard responses as opposed to what we do and curtail our responses to the issue at hand trying to help someone out. So that's how we talked about our customer relations. You mentioned this earlier, we have dedicated education and outreach staff. They're constantly educating our public, whether it's special events or whether it's newsletters on how to move waste out of the landfill and into recycling and all that type of thing. The con of that is the cost to provide that service. That's one of those services that is built into our rates. Council Member Madron.

Sorry, you're like looking down. I'm like, hey. How many people do we employ for education and outreach? Four.

Three. Three? Three, currently.

Okay. I remember when they did that really cool thing where they were like actually opening bins and like looking at what people were putting in there and kind of, you know, letting folks know when they were doing great and when there was more work to be done. And I think about we have some pretty substantial goals in our comprehensive plan around waste management. And I think that kind of work is very important to do with communities because we can't control what people put in the bin. It's got to be somebody interested in learning to do it and be done in a voluntary way. Even if we make them take organics, you know, we can't force them to use it correctly. So, again, no question there, just reflecting.

And they've even been out in the schools. There was a dirt works program at one time where they teach kids about how worms and breakdown and all that type of thing. It's some really good programs that we've done over the years.

Dirt works? That's part of the waste resources?

That was part of our, wasn't it?

It was, yeah. I think we were a major... Influencer behind that probably breaking ground in 88 89 and we really were active in the backyard composting bin But really that's kind of managed now as it's on city of olympia parks property But it's pretty much a thurston county master gardener program now. We've pulled back from that largely just focusing on our utility on our immediate needs because it's kind of taking care of itself and Got it.

That's what I thought but when you said that I was like wait maybe there's something more I don't know.

I just remember our staff person just raving about going in fourth grade right?

Fifth grade? Third.

Third. Okay. Just raving about you know teaching the kids about how composting works and that type of thing. Again if We wanted that type of education and outreach from a private company. That would be a non-traditional service that would have to be negotiated through a contract. And we would have to see what the cost for that would be. And that could be a potential con, not knowing what the cost of that would be. Finally under customer service, but certainly not least our employees know our businesses They know our community and they know a customer base. That's certainly a pro for our drivers and the rest of the waste resources team a Potential con for a private hauler would be that we may get new drivers You may lose the long-standing customer connections that have been built up over several years Keep moving Emergency services, I alluded to that. Waste resources is really fully integrated with the rest of our Public Works Operations team. They work together, whether again, it's a couch on the side of the road, whether it's a windstorm and debris, for example, our street section will be collecting all those branches and downed trees, and then our waste resources teams help help consolidate that and haul it off to the appropriate place so we really have integrated operations within our department to provide quick response to emergent needs whether it's a natural disaster or whether it's something unforeseen that happens day to day again a potential con of that is there is a cost built into our rates to provide that service A potential pro for the private sector doing that is they could have more resources available. A bigger company might have more resources to respond. But again, those costs and that work would have to be negotiated through a contract, and we think there would likely be longer response times because they're not right here to respond to it. Regarding our climate work, a pro for municipal hauling is that we have a dedicated climate program. We're already moving forward with small and light duty electrification. A con to that work is scaling up to provide electric vehicles is costly and there's a lack of infrastructure and there's even a lack of technology to do that type of work on a large scale. a private hauler there may be able to scale up quicker they still have the same technology issues that we do with with battery life and infrastructure but because they're a bigger company they could scale potentially quicker but again we don't know what the rate impact would be for them to scale their fleet to electric vehicles for example mark we have two questions from council member madrone followed by council member green

Um, and I do apologize that I missed the last study session on this. I may be asking questions that are redundant to what you covered a few months ago, but it's good to have the conversation all at once. Um, for the maintenance facility that is, uh, attic carpenter. Um, what I saw that you include in your slide, like having it ready for electric, can you just speak a little bit to, you know, how the design currently incorporates a future of electrification?

Absolutely be glad to do that and no it's not redundant what we talked about before so glad you're asking those questions, so we would certainly make sure that the facility has the conduits and electrical infrastructure in place as we're building it and in the walls that we could provide. Plugins and charging infrastructure for future vehicles that may be electrified We may not install the chargers themselves, but we would make sure that the panels are Sized properly to make sure they can accommodate that kind of electrical load We would make sure the conduits in place that we could run wires to charging stations. We would think about where those would be and We would certainly do other things to meet our climate goals such as solar panels on the roof. We would, as we're bringing power to the site for this operation, we would work with Puget Sound Energy to see what would it take to bring that kind of electrical load we may not have them actually do that work at the beginning but again can you bring the the basic infrastructure and the conduit to the site so that way it's an easier upgrade and a less expensive upgrade in the future when we're actually ready to bring that so we would be thinking about all of those types of things to make sure that the facility is ev ready when the time comes We might put a few charging stations because we do already have some light duty vehicles that are electric so we want to have some there, but as far as having a bank of panels for charge and we probably would not do that at first we would just set it up so that it can be easily upgraded.

Is that like that EV readiness already incorporated into the $40 million? Yes. Okay. And one last question on this, you know, building outside of the city of Olympia where we have our own regulations on new builds in terms of what we expect of others in our community, are we aligning with that at the maintenance center? on Carpenter?

Yes, our consultant's been in touch with the county and city permitting to understand what would impact fees look like, what would permitting fees look like, what are the requirements that would need to be made. So they've been looking at all of that in their scoping to make sure that those costs are incorporated. well and my question is is that in the city of olympia we have higher standards around ev readiness are we modeling those standards oh absolutely yeah yeah absolutely okay we are going to build the facility to meet what we want and what our standards are absolutely even if it's above what the county or the city of lacey would require us to do as far as those kinds of things go okay great well i'm glad to hear that that is a part of the cost and that we're not

lowering our standards when we're not building in Olympia, you know, I think we should, you know, keep that up. So thank you.

Sorry, I misunderstood your question. Council Member Green, followed by Council Member Barrett.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to put my memory to the test here and for my colleagues. Tell me if I'm remembering correctly. So we recently saw a presentation from the head of the fleet maintenance. And I don't remember, was that finance committee or was that full council? OK, so in that case, I'm going to ask this question for all my colleagues. So in that presentation, he talked about the availability of electric vehicles, particularly when it got into heavy duty like garbage trucks. And I remember him saying that right now the cost of those trucks is in the ballpark of $800,000 to $1 million, and they're not that good. Do the larger, do the private haulers have these fleets? They're just harder for smaller haulers to get? Or is that true across the board, like everybody is slow to find effective electric trucks?

Yes, it's the latter. Everybody is struggling with the technology is not quite there. The cost is nearly double of a typical vehicle. Some of the larger companies have one or two of those. And if they have a route that's more flat, they may be trying those out. Potentially they could scale up. Buying an extra vehicle or a more expensive vehicle in a bigger fleet is gonna be less of an impact than in our smaller fleet. But they're having the same technology issues and usage issues that we do as far as having them be able to last for an entire day's route and the technology available and of course the cost being nearly double. Thank you.

Councilmember Barron, before I call on you, Councilmember Vanderpool has a comment to make in response to Councilmember Green.

I guess the best example I can come up with is at Intercity Transit, we were looking at electric and hydrogen. Hydrogen has its own problems and is also very expensive, but hydrogen buses had double the range than the electric buses, and they couldn't because you have to run them all day long. And so part of the, I would even say, probably in the same situation is, You don't want to have to have double the amount of vehicles to meet that range of having that heavy, all that usage all day long because you don't have time to stop and charge it even at a fast rate. So it's, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if something else leapfrogs it in the future, but I don't think we're ready for that yet.

Thank you. several years ago the city of olympia bought a green direct contract with pse in which the electricity bought by the city is ultra green uh wind generate wind generated power it was a designee um uh and i i'm assuming that if the city had the utility and we went electric we would be operating under that contract of green electricity but I don't think a private hauler would be under any obligation to do that. Now, the state is requiring PSE to green up its grid overall to everybody, but the sale times the week before last did a large article about how it was actually heading in the wrong direction, that the electricity provided by PSE was actually getting Oh, more coal or natural gas oriented, more natural gas generation, I guess. If we went private, they would be under no obligation to operate under our, well, they wouldn't be able to operate under our green direct contract, could they?

I don't believe so. That's a program we pay for and participate in through PSE. I don't know how private companies, if they even can, buy into that program for whatever facilities or infrastructure they have, but there would be no obligation, as far as I know, for them to do that.

Thank you. I don't think PSE, for whatever it's worth, I don't think PSE has the capacity personally provide that much green energy to private carriers for whatever it's worth. Right.

Thank you. I believe that's a municipal program. Yep.

All right. Council Member Gilman, followed by Mayor Pretem Wynn.

I was just going to agree with Paul that As inner city transit was looking at the zero emissions fleet, we had a couple of meetings with PSE officials who didn't know if they would have, if multiple agencies moved heavy vehicles onto electric. They didn't have the capacity broadly, let alone from green energy right now. So the Skookum Wind Farm gives us what it can, and we invested in it, and I'm glad for that. But the demands of commercial fleets are like another city's load. It's considerable. So that's why I think being ready at this point, being plumbed for it in construction in case something evolves, but not imagining putting in a substation and all that juice right now. It's something we thought long and hard about at inner city and realized we would use more electricity than St. Pete's and the whole east side of the city to power the buses.

All right. Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen.

Just quickly. It's a good point about the emerging EV technology or electric vehicle technology. And I understand that it is our goal to move towards all electric fleet. Though I will say, though, that if it is, if we were to go to private and they're keeping their standard schedule or model for service, I mean, even if they were all electric, that's still triple the impact, if it really is three trucks, triple the impact weekly, adding stress to our roads and our ears. So, you know, large vehicles. So, you know. I mean, yes, green energy. And also, there they are, ripping and running around. Thanks.

All right, ready for the next topic? OK. The next topic is strategic control. Jay alluded to this. Obviously, with a municipal operation, a pro is that we have direct operational control. We have control over the routes, the type of containers we provide, how we do our day-to-day business. You have control over rate setting, all of that type of thing. The con to that is, you know, we assume all the risk and liability for those operations. It's our program. We're responsible for what works well, and we're responsible for what doesn't work well sometimes.

Mark, we have a question from Councilmember Madron.

Me again, yes. And I wasn't sure exactly where this question lived, but I decided it goes here, so I'm going to ask it now. So we're wanting to see a lot more dense urban development happening in our community and one of the things i recall us discussing in the land use committee in years past is like you know the challenges of managing solid waste in that dense urban environment um so could you speak to like you know in terms of strategic control um is how you know how how is it different that we manage our own solid waste services in being able to accommodate that differently than if it was the more standard model on the private system. Would we have more flexibility in terms of how that could play out so that we can achieve the housing density we want? Or is it apples to oranges and hard to compare?

No, that kind of goes into how our departments and the rest of the public works divisions work together when we are looking at updating our ed standards with narrower street standards or we're looking to build a construction project. We're working with the waste resources team to make sure that and we're working with the fire department to make sure that those decisions we're making are allowing them to continue their operations. So it kind of goes into that weaving of our programs and our and our departments and divisions together working on that. You know we actually have had waste vehicles go out and try to make a turn before we make a decision on how to design this project for example. We had some concerns out on the new phones road project just happened in the last two weeks where some of the decisions we made with a narrow lane configuration is causing problems for for the drivers out there. They started to see that as that got constructed. And so we immediately worked with them to make some design changes at the last minute before the contractor poured some concrete and accommodated those types of things. Um, that's where that strategic control works is, is we can, um, make the decision, the policy decisions we want to make for, for our community, but we can also, um, because they're right here can work with them. To to make sure with private. That would probably be harder to do we would probably just put a standard turning template, for example. And this is what a typical truck would do and that's how they would work so that's just one example i'm using kind of an ads. or design standard example because it's happened a couple times actually in just the last month where we've had to work with our waste resources team and. and partner with them to make sure those types of things work.

Yes, Council Member Barrett.

This kind of goes back to community benefits. And so I'm sorry I missed the question when I should have. But when I walked in this evening, I saw this great brochure that was out on the table, Utility Assistance Programs. And we have lifeline rates for low-income and disabled or low-income and over age 62 for our garbage utility. And I'm not trying to ambush anybody. I was curious how many people benefit from that reduced utility rate This brochure said low income or disabled and low income and over 62. If you qualify, it's a 50% reduction in your garbage bill each month. Do you have a sense of how heavily that's utilized in the community? There are two different programs. There's Helping Neighbors, which is a different, it's more of a grant program, but this was actually a Lifeline rates, I actually called the number, and they were great. Virginia answered the phone. She was great, and she said she could get back to me tomorrow, but it was like, four o'clock today, you know.

I'm familiar with those programs because we work with our utility billing folks and finance to help set those programs up. I do not know the magnitude on how much, I don't know if you do, on how often it's utilized and how much it's utilized.

So, sorry. Your mic, your mic. All right well, thanks back to you mark.

And then just a con of that control for a pro for the private I'm sorry is that management responsibility would be shifted away from the city as we determine through any any sort of negotiation or contract and then a con of that is that control with them be more and direct we can you know, have a contract in place we can try to. to make sure we cover everything. But the control will be what does the contract say? And it'll be much more indirect. So along with strategic control, obviously we have 40 plus long term valuable employees with job certainty. That's a pro for our municipal operation. They do great work. They're dedicated to the work they do. and the services they provide. A con for privatizing would be, would lose those 40 plus long-term employees and there would be job uncertainty for them as much as we would work to make sure they're taken care of, there's still uncertainty around how that would work. So I just wanted to point that out. Accountability is very similar. Under the municipal operation, we have direct accountability to our rate payers, to our community, and to you as the council. That's a pro of a municipal operation. A pro for private is they would have to adhere to whatever contract we set up as far as rates and that type of thing. But that accountability, as far as a con goes, would only be managed through a contract. We could only force what we ask them to do in a contract. So again, it's much more indirect. Budgets and rates are very similar. We have full control over our budget and our rate setting as determined by the council on an annual basis. A con to having that control and being a smaller city is that our rate impacts can be steeper when things like this come up because we have a smaller customer base to work with. A pro for private is rates would be spread across a larger customer base. But again, our contract will have provisions in it if that's where we go, but there would be less control over the rate setting. We could only force what the contract spells out. And finally, risk. We care for our city employees, and we manage our own equipment. And the con of that is we assume the full risk and liability for claims and injuries. If there's an accident with a vehicle, we're responsible for what we damaged and for getting the vehicle replaced or fixed. If there's an injury, we work through L&I to make sure that employee is taken care of. A pro for the, or I'm sorry, a con for that is that we assume the full risk and liability for those injuries and claims. We have to take care of that. And when it comes to employees, we want to take care of that. A pro for the private side is they have a larger number of employees and equipment for the workload. So again, there's potentially more that they can do. But we don't know what their employee policies are with regard to how they take care of their employees and we don't know what their claims practices are. That would be a con for the private sector how they handle that type of thing. So again these are some things we wanted to bring forward and get us all talking about. It's certainly not an all inclusive list of everything that we could think of but. We tried to hit some of the major themes of the services we provide and the services a private contractor could provide Keep going, okay Next slide is some conceptual timelines for the options Between building carpenter Road and exploring privatization and If you were to ask us to move forward with building Carpenter Road facility, the timeline's the first bar graph. And so what that would entail is we would really start the design build process. That would include getting state approval to use that. That's a specialty process that we need state approval for for a city our size. We would select a design build team, we would select an owner's representative, and we would work through that design process with them. That would probably take most of 2027 and into 2028 to be ready for construction if we started right away. We anticipate construction of that facility would be late 2028 and through 2029. and then potentially moving in early 2030. So that would be the rough timeline for building the Carpenter Road facility. Thank you. Councilmember Vanderpool.

This is kind of a what-if question. You may not be able to answer it. You know, as we were in this meeting, I got a news update about the situation with Lacey and their own waste services and their rates changing and going up. I'm not sure where they are with their system, but when I'm looking at this timeline here, I'm wondering if we went the route of building the Carpenter Road facility and Lacey's looking at their own contract. I brought this up last time, and I know that going from privatization to public takes a lot of work, but I wonder about that a little bit, where they're looking at their own rates, and if we go the route of building a facility of joint operations and things like that. I wonder, as they're looking at their own situation and how expensive it's going for them, you know, this is me thinking out loud, I'm wondering if there's ever an alignment where we can work with LACI to help them by regionally doing waste services. I mean, the new facility is going to be in Lacey. There are neighbors and we jointly work on a lot of work. And I think that this isn't, I'm always for opportunities to help our neighbors and work together on these types of things. And so I'm curious about that.

It's certainly a possibility. I don't know if the timelines would align I know if they are looking into private or into bringing it back into municipal there's a 10 year. Waiting period before that could happen so they're going to be a long time before they can do that so I'm not sure that would work with our timeline but. It's always something we're looking for partnerships with our regional partners to see if there are some ways we can work together and whether we build the facility and then later on they decide to do that there may be some opportunities then to expand or work on the same site or near the same site. So it's always something we can look for. But with my understanding of the process they need to go through I don't think their timeline and our timeline would necessarily align. together, so if that helps.

It does, but it is something that if we go down a certain route as a council and as a city, I want to put that out on the table as an option in the future.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's a great suggestion. Mayor Pro Tem, when?

Oh, also. Clearly, everyone probably knows how I feel about this. But also, I heard that in their timeline that there is a possibility for partnerships there. And I thought, oh, possibility for more maintenance and the free drop-off. But one needs to remember to think about everyone. But also, what that reminded me of Councilmember Vanderpool is that You know, it's a little bit of a, you know, oh, could this happen to us? Like, you know, if we went private, how long would it take us to get back if we wanted to? And we might not even ever be able to. I mean, 10 years?

Council Member Vanderpool. 10 years plus the cost to construct things go up every day.

All right. second timeline is is what we think exploring privatization would entail if you were to ask us to explore privatization we would put the carpenter road facility on hold or pause that so these are not concurrent timelines they happen to be very similar timelines but we would not move forward with carpenter road and we would be following the timeline in the second group there we think it would take About a year plus to develop and publish a request for proposal and getting the input that's necessary to do that we want we've never done this before and we'd want to do it correctly. That would include evaluating you know getting that put together making sure all of you are comfortable with it and the public's comfortable with it. A value is sending that out giving. Proposers time to to respond evaluate those proposals and then select a vendor. Once we do that in 2028 we would need to negotiate then with a preferred vendor and that would probably take the rest of 2028 to do that. And then. Changes would not occur overnight. There would certainly be a transition period to move from municipal to private. So we anticipate that would take about a year to transition from once you have a contract in place to transition from one entity to the other. So that's our best estimate of what we think a privatization timeline might look like and what would be entailed to do that. So I know we've just gone over a lot of information. Appreciate your time and your comments. So Ron and I are here to answer any further questions you have as you discuss this project.

Thank you, Mayor.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Mark and Ron, for a very thorough presentation. Yes, Council Member Gilman.

So finance committee just forwarded this conversation here. We didn't have a specific recommendation to come in, but I want to offer sort of the experience on finance committee over the last few years of looking at this. First, I appreciated that council member Madrone brought up the comp plan goals, right? That ultimately the purpose of this whole utility is to have a clean, healthy, and vibrant community. So we start there. I think we've done our due diligence, that while we've taken a closer look in the last few months, this has been a 10-year planning and council consultation process that's already invested $2.5 million, already prepared a site. So I just wanted to be clear that it's a lot longer process than what we've done between May and today. And I thought it was important due diligence for us to have a conversation about the privatization possibility because the previous finance committee had been courted by a private hauler who was offering the world, and it sounded pretty amazing. So if there was a way to vet that, to find out that it was true, then it would really be worth pursuing. I think what we found in the short term, from my experience, is that putting together the request for proposals, staffing it, is expensive and time intensive. there's no guarantees of who will respond or what kind of responses we'll receive. And we know that we'll relinquish local control should we choose that option. So that for me is enough of the exploration of the RFP. Councilmember Vanderpool's point that construction doesn't get less expensive over time. I was just looking back 30 years ago, a dollar from 1996 is $2.15 today. And construction costs have gone up much faster than just the dollar. So that's always an argument for go ahead and issue the bonds and let's go. Because if we wait another decade, it's going to be a lot more expensive. In finance, we spent some time looking at the city's bonding capacity. We have capacity to be the guarantors of this funding. It would be the utility that would be paying those monthly costs or the annual costs to carry it. I think that there are just like three big reasons, I think, that it makes a lot of sense to decide to finally act. The first one is about that being able to continue to pursue our comp plan goals of waste reduction and greater efficiencies. When it's under the city's direction, we can do education work, we can do more organics work, things that that wouldn't necessarily happen. And the synergy with first responders, with public works, with our homelessness response team, and special events downtown is something that's pretty special that we've created with an in-house team. The last thing, and I know several of you in conversations have talked about this, and we've heard from over 100 constituents that we have a high satisfaction, well-loved crew of city employees who staff our waste resources and I think that that alone is a huge factor in considering this investment and this decision. So I think we've done our due diligence and that it would be great if, as the mayor suggested, we gave clear direction this evening so that staff doesn't leave with feeling we're awfully ambiguous.

So thank you. Thank you, Council Member Gilman. Council Member Green.

Thank you, Mayor. Mark and Ron, thank you so much. When this first came to finance several months ago, we had a lot of questions. There was a lot more questions in April, and I feel like we have gotten a lot of answers. For me, though, I don't feel like this is the end of our due diligence. I think there's a lot of... And let me say, your pros and cons chart, I think I'm very much in agreement with in general. However, a lot of the cons are unknown, but those things are not unknowable. We haven't asked the question. We haven't said, what does it, what would it look like in a scenario where we need to maintain a clean team or where a private hauler manages litter cans or where we don't know, but they know. because they do it in other places. And I think when I think about that 10 year estimate, which I'm gonna assume is probably pretty close, right? Like we can't do it perfectly, the 10 year estimate of what would happen with rates. We're talking about if we move ahead with construction, we knowingly more than double the rates in 10 years at a time when what we're hearing from our community over and over and over again is affordability. and to not even know what it would look like in another option. It strikes me that a few weeks ago we had a study session where we talked about approaches to sidewalks. Three options with sub options and ways to handle sidewalks and with advisory committees. We got options within options within options. And in this scenario, the only option I'm seeing is constructive facility, which again could absolutely be the right decision. But that's the only. option that we can confidently say we know what this looks like. So I think that's, you know, really the heart of my struggle. And Mayor Pro Tem, you used a phrase earlier around pay to play, right? You make more waste, you pay more money. Well, it's a lovely idea, but If you live in a multifamily complex, you don't have a choice. But generally, we don't really have a choice. You could self-haul maybe if you're living in a single family or in certain scenarios. And I think we're all experiencing right now, trying to apply that to other utilities, like how many people are trying to use less energy, but our energy bills are still going up through no choice of our own. So for me, I feel like the RFP, and I understand folks who... Feel like there's a statement being made by even doing that rfp but for me as I think about us as as policymakers I don't understand how we could say we make a well-informed decision if we really aren't Making a decision because we know that not doing it's not an option We know that working with existing space is not an option as you said, you know That was clear from the last study section study session. So to me We would really only be deciding well, it's not even really a decision. There's only one option if we don't ask the question. So that's where, for me, I'm really clear that I feel like the RFP is the only way we can know some of these things that right now are a con because we don't know them. I'd rather they be a con because they're crazy expensive and rates would also double in a private hauler situation. And then it's, you know, that decision to me is a no-brainer. But to say we would double rates, but I don't know what would happen if we went private. It's, to me, a pretty impossible question to answer.

All right. Thank you. Council Member Madron.

Yeah, thank you so much for all the information that you've brought forward. And, you know, Council Member Gilman was just recognizing that it's just, it hasn't just been the past few months. It's been, you know, kind of a decade in the making of building up to this moment. And I'm really glad that we have said, hold on, that is a very expensive option. And we are facing affordability challenges in our community, and we need to explore what some other options are. And recognizing what Council Member Green said, that there's still a lot of uncertainty on the other side of the equation. And I think in a perfect world, we would be able to have cross comparisons across cities and not have to go through an extensive RFP process that sucks away a lot of staff time. I heard you say RFP with serious intent. And if we're like, oh, maybe we want this, maybe we wanna keep our own. I don't know that we would even get the information that we want through that kind of an RFP process, especially since I understand we're very split as a council on this. And so even seeing that, you know, I don't know that we would even get the information that we want. And then we're causing those delays for things that are needed in the long term. So I do want to adjust the play to pay comment too. It's just like, I'd be very curious to know, not right now, but at a future date, what kind of opportunities there are around tier rates for low-income households, because the whole pay-to-play thing doesn't sit really well with me. It just means like, oh, if you have more money, you can make more trash, when really we have, you know, lots of low-income families that, you know, have babies at home, and they can't afford the, you know, the cloth diapers, you know. So those are the kinds of things that cross my mind, and I think it's a real real issue for our community affordability. That being said, I look at the value that we get with the system that we have in place here. It didn't even dawn on me until this evening that clean teams is a part of this. And that's not something that I want to lose. And it's not something that I think we can replicate through the private market, especially with how things are so integrated. I think about how we're growing as a community and the kind of interdepartmental collaboration that needs to happen in a nimble way so that we're able to grow in the ways that work for the services we know our community needs. I think about all of the goals in our comprehensive plan. You know, we just put a ton of work into updating that thing. And, you know, I think one of the uncertainty that we're just going to have to acknowledge is that we really don't know how the private sector could be responsive to the goals that we have in our comprehensive plan. But like I said, I don't know that we're going to get that information through an RFP process, but I know that we can work internally to figure those things out. So it's, um, you know, it's not, it's not an easy decision. I mean, it kind of is because, you know, we've got a great system and, you know, it's worth preserving and it's also hard because we have these affordability challenges. But, um, uh, It sounds like I'm not being clear, even after all that I was saying earlier about being super clear. But just to be extremely clear, I don't think it's worthwhile to pursue the RFP, only because we know what we have and we can feel certain about it. And we don't know if it's more expensive or not. And the amount of effort it would take to explore another option and likely not get the information that we need or go down that road and, like, you know, find that we can't accomplish the things that we want to do, and then we're two years later in getting the facility that we need. So hopefully I'm, you know, making good on my promise to be very clear on the direction with this. And to be extra clear, I actually was not sure where I was going to be at on this issue until we had the chance to sit down this evening. I just, responding to some of the public comment that we heard recently that, like, you know, the decisions are being done behind closed doors and this and that. I just hope that people are hearing this conversation that we're having and respecting us as a council, that sometimes we need to get the information and have the conversation. So I just needed to say that too.

Well said. All right, additional comments. Council Member Vanderpool.

I agree with what I'm hearing to my left and my right. So very clearly, not private, right? But when we're going through this, and I like what I'm hearing about income-based rates, thinking about the cost of living, right? That's not your words. That's my words. That's my words. I was thinking about incomes and the cost of living and your comments about that. Give me this look.

Oh, sorry. You just lost me. That's all. Keep going.

OK. So I was thinking about incomes. I was thinking about the cost of living and making sure that we have rates that work with affordability that people are dealing with. And I was thinking about income rates an idea. But I think outside of that, when I was thinking about where do we decide on these types of things, and you go out and you talk to folks in the community, I think heavily about who are we serving and why are we doing what we're doing. The public supports this just like we support the fire department and parks and all of the other things we do as a city. And so I have no interest in privatization. just on that basis because um i there has been cities in this country who've privatized things uh famously chicago to save money privatized its meters and uh it ended up in a bad place because they're still responsible for the pavement and the maintenance but the money doesn't come back to the city it goes to uh I believe Merrill Lynch or one of the bigger companies. And so for me, that alone is a perfect example of why we shouldn't privatize. I think the other part of that is when we're going through this list, there are so many great unknowns that are risks. I don't want to put us in a position where rates go up, like private power goes up. I don't want us to, with absolutely no rationale, I don't want us to be in a position where we lose our customer services. I don't want us to lose those non-traditional services that we do all the time. There's a variety of reasons why we should not privatize. And so to be very clear, I think that pursuing the facility is the right move. And that's all I got.

Thank you. Council Member Barrett.

Thank you, Mayor. I think we just have a great utility service. And Mark and Ron, thank you for that presentation. That was really good. And it was what I was looking, hoping for this evening, something really thorough. And I think you really hit it out of the park. We have a great service. I think it reflects our community values in many, many ways. different ways. Even I learned about services that this utility is providing for people in the course of this evening that are important to the community and that I know we would lose if we went down the privatization route. I'm not comfortable with privatization, I have to say. I worked in the private sector for 20 years. I worked, you know, developing RFPs, frankly. So I've seen how this works on both sides of the aisle. We are so much farther ahead if we can have control and effectuate our recycling programs and our climate programs ourselves. I think that these are the things that are really gonna make a difference on moving our city forward in an affirmative way. I think we need to have integrated responses on emergent issues in-house and not be dependent on external forces to address problems that happen. And I think we're going to have more and more of these emergent issues that we need to have the city management be able to address in a nimble way. We do have to dive in to identify cost savings. We have to do that. And I look forward, Mark and Ron, to talking to you face to face about this new facility Are there ways of cutting costs with that? I think I'm committed to doing everything we can to make sure that the public interest is served in a cost-saving sense as well. So I, too, prefer to move forward with the facility and not pursue an RFP.

Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Barron. Additional comments? Mayor Pro Tem Nguyen.

I really appreciate this presentation. I do feel like there was, I felt like in the April presentation, I don't mean this to be a compliment insult, but in the April presentation, I didn't feel it was balanced. I didn't feel like we talked about, uh, we talked about things that, that I certainly really value in our utility service or waste resources specifically tonight. Um, and you know, you outlined so many things in this pros and cons list here, um, and verbally that it is such a value add to our community. It has been around for a long time. They have collages in their break room for a long time. There is a community within the, I know I don't need to tell you to this, but there is a community within the waste resources staff. They positively impact our community. We have seen it in the survey. Don't quote me on this cause I can't do a control find at the moment, but I don't remember smell coming up in the community survey or a lot of complaints You know, I don't think, you know, we don't have people showing up to public comment saying that they must have waste pickup every single week. I also, a lot of times when I talk about this, I'm so gung-ho on not, or keeping this in-house and not doing privatization that I skip some things. You know, when you just feel something so deeply where you feel like what is the right answer and this is one of those moments where I feel like keeping it in house in the municipality is such the right answer that I don't take the time to stop and explain every single reason why because I'm like duh of course it's the right answer this is one of those moments I know it's expensive okay I know it's expensive I know that when I look at the rate chart it doesn't the 10-year forecast, it doesn't excite me. I don't want to pay two more dollars for certain things. I'm human, too. I will say, though, that we have something so special in waste resources, and I don't want to belabor it because I think it was actually outlined well in this presentation. It's not something that can be replicated. it's not a surprise to me that a private hauler was, um, was, you know, sniffing around, uh, wanting the business of the city of Olympia. Of course they should want our business. And I hope that if we went out for an RFP, which I don't think we should do, that we'd get more than one better. Like we have something here. Why wouldn't they want our business? And it can't be replicated. Um, this is not something if we decide to go private again, we can't, you know, we can't just change our minds. Um, And that site, you know, I had a great time out there, standing on the dirt mound, looking around to see the prepped and ready site. And it took a long time to get there. It was a big road to even get to a site. That's my understanding, right? That's right, it took a long time? Okay. And it's ready now, so let's go. Really, really appreciate the comments about... about caring for our community's affordability, cost savings. Love that Councilmember Barron made a lot as one of the learning journeys of, you know, I'm going to call it the Lifeline Rates Program. I think that's great. So I am not, you know, void of understanding that there's cost associated, and costs impact people too. Um, and I, and I would be, uh, I don't think this is the last time talking about that. We'll work with our utility advisories, uh, commission as well. I would assume, um, to, and they're, they're not, you know, our utilities advisory folks, you know, they're tough, they're rock solid people. They're not just gonna, you know, be like, yeah, sure. Increase all the rates, you know, it's, you know, we will, uh, I think we'll get to a good place on it. Um, I don't think we should explore privatization, um, any further. Not a fan of privatizing anything that's an essential service. Yeah, so anyways, I digress. Really, really appreciate this presentation tonight. Yeah, in-house municipal waste services all the way. Duh for me. Thanks.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. I think it's fair to say that, like, Regardless of whether or not we keep it in house or privatize when we look at the the rates in terms of the projection they will go up I think it's a matter of how by how much and how fast right and so. First of all, I just want to acknowledge a couple things here. I don't think we were as divided on this as we actually think. Council Member Madrona, I heard you say earlier that we're pretty divided. I think where we were divided as to whether or not we would be sitting here having this discussion tonight. That's where we were divided in terms of whether or not we even have another study session to have this conversation. like you I also came into this with a completely blank slate wanting to hear all of the information which is why I did support having the study session for tonight to hear and learn more and now that I have there's a few things that I give me pause in terms of supporting the idea of privatization, beginning with the fact that we don't have a problem that we're trying to fix. And it's very hard for me to justify when I look at here a con just all by itself is to lose 40 plus long-term valuable employees who would not have jobs or job uncertainty. So I'm a little bit concerned about losing 40 plus employees without a clear problem as to why they have to lose their jobs. So that's the first thing. It's also an essential service that is very popular. The other is... We don't have any information on the success or challenges known from other cities So this one really concerns me because of the fact that we we really don't know How this is going to impact us? We don't even have a recent case study to point to To really know or to try to guess The other the constituency is not requesting us to support privatization. Most of what I see coming to us is to keep it in-house. And so I'm not getting a lot of phone calls and emails that tell us that we should privatize. And that's something to pay attention to. There are just so many unknown costs in terms of long-term impacts to our residents. And obviously we've talked at length about affordability concerns and I share those concerns as well. But we don't know a lot of the costs and I'm not sure that doing an RFP process, we would still come to know that because what I see here repeatedly on your chart under cons is negotiate, negotiate. And so we're going to have to bit by bit have these discussions about whether the nontraditional services or alternative services that they would do, that all would be subject to discussion. And I'm not sure that we're going to get the information that we think we would get with an RFP. And if we're pretty certain that we need to be pretty... intentional about pursuing it then we need to know We need to be pretty dedicated to it. And I'm not so sure we're going to get the answers that we're looking for with a lot of the question marks that we have marked quite a few down. So for me, those are a few of the reasons that now that I have this information tonight, I'm going to be supporting proceeding with our facility and and supporting that we keep it within house. So are there any other questions or comments? All right, seeing none. Well, thank you both. Mark and Ron, we really appreciate you digging in, bringing this information back to us. I do think there is some work to be done in terms of looking at cost and the impacts to us. And I also think there is perhaps maybe even some work to be done in terms of if we're deciding not to privatize, if there are. You didn't mention any foreseeable challenges you know, within the next five to 10 years in terms of impacts to service delivery or anything like that. But of course, I'm sure if there were, you would have shared that with us. But if there are, we would love to know those things going forward and work them out. So if there are no further comments, thank you both very much and have a great night. All right. So that concludes our discussion for our only business item tonight. At this time, we are going to recess for five minutes and then reconvene in room 423 for an executive session for up to 90 minutes. No decisions will be made. And after that, we will be adjourned for tonight.