City Commission - Regular Meeting

I hope everyone is doing well. We have two workshops today, one on the budget visioning and the other is on solid waste management. And so without further ado, we'll kick it off, except that I have some sad news. It came to my attention just yesterday that Israel Rodriguez So to, who for such a long time was the chair of our Board of Adjustment, passed away. And so we're very, very sorry to hear that.

And we wish his family well. We're thankful for his service to the city. And if we could just begin with a moment of silence, please. Thank you very much. Mr. Clerk, would you please call the roll.

D. D. GREGORY

GREGORY

Vice Mayor D. Hernandez? I'm here. Commissioner Rodriguez? Here. Commissioner Schwartz? Here. Mayor Castillo? Here. City manager Dodge? Here. City attorney Goren?

I'm here. You have a quorum. Thank you very much. Mr. Dodge?

Yes, mayor and commission. I think this is the first year that we've ever presented to you a preliminary budget overview so early in the year. Normally, we're doing this around June. And I'm pleased to say that through our review of every department and every fund that we have, all of them are balanced at this point with the exception of the general fund. But with the general fund, there are a lot of unknowns.

And our expectation is that we will balance this one as well by the time we come back to you in June when we need to set the millage rate for advertising purposes. The presentation this evening will be by Mrs. Chung, and she will start the conversation. Thank you.

Good evening, mayor commissioners. This is Lisa Chung, assistant city manager, finance director. Thank you for allowing me to present to you this afternoon the visioning. And I just really wanted to acknowledge as well any of the members of the Citizens Budget Advisory Board who are here with us in person, as well as that may be listening online. As you know, our visioning is really the kickoff or the starting point of our budget process.

We normally hear from you all as to any projects, any plans, any special policies, any priorities that you want us to focus on during the budget season. It gives you an opportunity early in the process to give us that feedback and that information so that we can incorporate some of those in the budget as we go along. The agenda for today, we're going to look at the all funds overview. I'm going to touch quickly on the property tax reform. And I'm going to look at some of the major funds, which is the general fund, the road and bridge fund, and the utility fund.

This is the overview right now where we stand as of today. In red and bold is preliminary. This is where we are just starting. And as Mr. Dodge mentioned, we are currently in a very good position because all our funds so far are balanced except for the general fund, which is out by $8,200,000 Mr.

Dodge has met with all the department heads as a first round to go over their budgets and their requests that they have. We will go into a little bit more detail into the general fund. But the good thing where we stand right now is that with all the other funds being balanced, we can really focus in and hone in on the general fund in the event or whatever happens with what comes out of Tallahassee. I also wanted to bring to your attention, there are some grant funds that are not yet included, because we have not gotten those numbers from the state or the federal government. And those are our SHIP and CDBG funds.

I'm going to skip over this slide for a second because I'm going to go through each fund separately and in a little bit more detail further on. I wanted to touch a little bit, too, on property tax reform. As you know, there were a lot of bills going through the House over the last few months. The regular session ended without them coming to a consensus. There was, at one point, I think Sam maybe can know seven or eight bills proposed by the House.

During that time, we went through the analysis of what the impact of those bills would be to the city. We met with the Citizens Budget Advisory Board. We made presentations to them on those impacts of what those bills would mean. But as you know, the regular session ended, there was no final bill proposed. They are currently in a special session.

That session right now does not include property tax reform. The Senate president and the House of Representatives have called another special session to discuss the budget, May 12 to May 29. There is a possibility that they could bring up property tax reform possibly, but we don't know that for sure that that will happen. And alternatively, the governor could call a third special session for them to review specifically property tax. So it's not off the table.

There's still a possibility that that comes back to us. In making the presentations to the Citizens Budget Advisory Board, one of the things that came out of that was that they were saying we should really start providing some information to our residents. And with that, we created, I call a flyer, but this is, my staff calls it, an that we have put out to the public. We have created a separate web page under the finance department, specifically for property tax reform. On that, we created a short video of the impact to the city of the the bill that would impact us the worst.

I guess somebody could say that. And on there as well, we have the presentation that was made to us by Marty when he went around talking to all of So we have information there. They're also using it. Again, we're being very careful because, of course, we are providing information only. We're not advocating.

Looking at the general fund specifically, year over year, which is our adopted budget last year versus what we are proposing this year, again, we are just in the beginning stages. Our revenues are increasing by 5,600,000. We are being very conservative. The main driver here is our property tax values. We are assuming a 5% increase in property tax values, even though last year we were closer to 6.8, 7%.

We're trying to be very conservative. Those numbers we will get preliminary numbers from the property appraiser June 1, and then they provide final numbers in July. Our expenses so far are going up by 13,800,000 4.8%. That includes any collective bargaining increases that have been approved. It also includes any CPI increases on contracts that we have.

There are additional positions that we're adding to the budget. And we have some capital purchases in the general fund. This slide is really showing us where does the money come from. This is our revenues. You can see that 38% of our revenues come from ad valorem taxes.

17% are charges for services. That is a plethora of different things that we have, anything from soccer fees to golf fees to what we get back from SROs from the county, what we charge or get back from the insurers for rescue transports. So this is that category charges for services. 12% is special assessments. The main category for that is our fire protection special assessment.

Our intergovernmental revenues and franchise fees are at 7%. Intergovernmental, we're talking mainly about sales tax revenues. Our rents, royalties, and utility taxes both are at 6%. And any other are at seven We're talking here about investment income, all the other miscellaneous revenues. This dollar is showing where does the money go. How does the city spend this money? 37% right now, as in the proposed budget, goes to police. Fire and rescue is at 26%. So between both police and fire, we're at 63% of the budget in the general fund goes there. 10% is under public services.

This is a mix of different smaller departments. Grounds and maintenance is one of them. General government buildings is another. Recreation and cultural arts, 9%. Technology services, 5%.

General government and community services 4%, and finance at a steel only 2%. The general fund pressing our budget right now, we're at $176,000,000 Out of the total budget for the general fund, that's almost close to 60% for personnel. Right now, we're proposing to add five new positions, One under fire assistant division chief, three lieutenants. Under police, they're adding a real time crime center crime analyst. Some of the capital purchases that are currently in the budget police at $5,400,000 $30.8 of that is for replacement of vehicles and equipment.

I know they're purchasing approximately and the chief I'm not sure if there. Can you correct me? Maybe 37 patrol vehicles are in this within the range of, I think, twenty sixteens, anything that was 2016 and older. We are doing $600,000 for software, various software that they're purchasing. I'm not sure that this was provided previously, but we're just giving some additional detail, which is the software they're getting for live feed data analytics.

There is $800,000 for various types of equipment. We're talking about radios, drones, ballistic armor, and various other miscellaneous items. Under the fire for capital, it's $4,000,000 Their debt in there is 1,100,000 for a tactical support unit, dollars 1,200,000 for two fire engines, dollars 600,000 for various other forms of equipment, which would be self containing breathing apparatus. There's half 1,000,000 there for an ambulance, dollars 300,000 for some other vehicles, and $300,000 for changes to the fire training facility. Technology services, we're at $600,000 in capital purchases.

300,000 of that is for replacement of the Cisco Edge and core switches. Government buildings, 400,000. For them, it's really fencing around the building for public services. Recreation at 400,000, 200,000 of that. Loft extension for the SMG storage room and some other items that they're purchasing.

The road and bridge fund, we're at this budget year over year from last year to this year is really status quo. It only shows a change of $85,000 Within this budget really is just all the contracts that we have for road maintenance, cleaning of the roads and streets and the sidewalks, the street lighting contract that we have. There's no strategic plan projects regarding roads in this budget at this time. The utility fund, as we said, is balanced. This year, year over year, is showing a change.

Probably the only fund that's going down by $9,200,000 The main reason for that is they have looked really at their capital budgets and what they were able to accomplish year over year. I think Tim has done a wonderful job in looking at some of those projects and kind of scaling them back a bit to know what they can actually accomplish during the year. This particular year, 'twenty six, 'twenty seven, will be the first year that the utility fund has absolutely no debt. We are in discussions about when the timing will be right and for what projects that they will actually be borrowing. So some of the capital projects under the utility fund, total for that is $14,000,000 There's sewer treatment plant projects at 7,800,000 They're getting $3,000,000 for two emergency blower replacements, dollars 2,500,000 for phase two of some electrical equipment, 2,000,000 for rehab treatment for Unit 4.

Underwater distribution, there's $2,900,000.1800000 of that is for the AMI build out that they're currently undertaking, 1,100,000 for utility infrastructure improvements at the Howard C. Foreman campus. Water plants, 2,400,000. Dollars 1,200,000 of that is rehab treatment for Unit C, dollars 1,000,000 for additional funding to replace the risk being aquifer well, Number 6. Under sewer collection is $1,000,000 for the replacement of a 30 inches diameter, prestressed concrete cylinder piping for the force main.

And that's where we stand right now. I welcome any questions, any comments, any input that we have. Do you project any new equipment millage? The millage right now, we're projecting no. We have left it unchanged at 5.69. Again, we get the tables, the taxable values from the property appraiser by June 1. Actually, he kind of gives it to us Memorial weekend, so I'm normally working at that time. But that's when we get the first numbers from them, usually. First,

thank you to you and your team for not just the presentation, but for always being available. I'm sorry I'm looking down, but I wanted to respond to a couple of the items that you mentioned. And thank you, Manager Dodge, for making the team always available in the event that we have questions. We call them directly. So I appreciate it.

Made some notes, but I did want to touch on it was just reported that the governor has said that the special session on property tax reform would not happen before June. That's why I'm looking down At the earliest his words, not mine. So I don't know what that does to your projections. I'm sure that doesn't make them any easier. And I'm not quite sure, given the fact that their fiscal year begins on July 1 and ours begins on October 1, and we have to make projections based on their budget.

And I don't know how they can make very accurate projections based on their budget, given the fact that when the property tax reform could take effect if we vote on it in November? Is it the next fiscal year? Yes.

So vice mayor, that's right. If you vote on it in November, it doesn't take effect until the next fiscal year. We have to almost start preparing as to how we would handle that situation starting So it does affect this year's next year's budget as well, really.

So well, there you have it.

No, I wouldn't.

Yeah. But just looking for future years, the fact that it may be in June that they have this, and we just don't know what the proposal is. The House passed something very favorable to what the governor was asking. The Senate doesn't look like that's how it would be. The governor did say that something. I guess he's finally going to propose something instead of speaking in the abstract about how just eliminate them all. I think he's getting concrete now. And he's actually saying he's looking at a phased approach, whatever that means. Because I don't really understand what he means half the time. But regarding the funds, they're concerning that you have a little bit of a gap.

But $8,200,000 I'm not as concerned about because I think it's, relatively speaking, something that can be made up pretty quickly and something that I know Manager Dodge and the team can address soon. Is it June 1 that the preliminary taxable values come in from Mr. Keyar, the property appraiser?

Yes. That's

correct. Okay. The preliminary coming on June 1. The final ones come July 1.

July 1.

The challenge we have is the school budget is fiscal year July 1 to June 30. So we have our estimates for our charter school budget, which will be presented to you June 17. We don't know what kind of education dollars he's planning. So that one is probably a little bit more difficult for us.

I guess this is a conversation for another day, but I've never quite understood why the school district budgets launch on July 1 and why municipal budgets launch on October 1. I know I'm not going to resolve that issue here, but I've never quite understood that. That's just something I want. And it's not your fault, obviously. But just mentioning it on a state by another I

think it's the federal fiscal year. Is that it?

I do believe so, but maybe think

the federal fiscal year starts

in October. Oh,

October. Federal's October. That's why they need to always don't know why try to approve the a budget state. In

State is July 1.

State is July 1. So it's the state funding,

Yes. July I mean, we're amending the constitution so many other ways, right? I was kidding. What on earth is that? I don't know. Just a couple of other questions. Don't know what number it is, Lisa. I'm sorry. The property tax reform status. I believe it was Commissioner Rodriguez that really advocated for making sure that the city's residents understood where property taxes go and exactly.

And I love that dollar that we always put out that only this much that you pay goes to the city's services. So I applaud all the communication that we can put out as a city on that. Because oftentimes I'm asked yeah, that's the one. Oftentimes I'm asked, well, I pay all of these taxes. Where do they go?

Well, we actually post that all the time. We explain it's also the second one that shows 37 police, 26 fire rescue. So I'm all for continued communication, especially given the fact that there is so much confusion. My day job is in media. Sometimes newsrooms don't get it straight either because there's so many confusing pieces of information as to when a fiscal year starts, would this property tax reform go big or go modest, how that would impact municipal budgets in particular because we're the government closest to the people.

So I will always at least count on me on my personal pages. I can't speak for the city, obviously. But any information that I can be putting out, whether it's town halls or in my meetings, Century Village or HOAs, about this, I want to show it to them. Because oftentimes even we're confused with the responsibilities or duties of an HOA, which we do not have control over HOA fees, etcetera. So anything that you can provide me personally, don't wait.

Just email me because, especially one in this form, I really do want to get ahead of the game. Mr. Dodge already mentioned the 8.2. I'm not very concerned on that. When on fire? When do we expect these in a perfect world, if we could find the perfect candidates and bring them in right away, around when do we expect these five additional positions to be filled after fiscal year? It would be at the beginning of the

fiscal year. These would be promotions. So they would be promoted right around October 1 or thereafter.

Same with well, police, I think. Is that a promotion for Real Time Crime Center? Or are

you bringing I believe that's a new position. I don't know if they're going to promote somebody, but it does create a new position. Okay.

I want to commend you on the they don't have numbers, so I'm sorry, Lisa. But the utility fund Retail. Where we're talking about $3,100,000 in debt service that we paid down. Oftentimes, all hear complaints. I want to commend you for paying off $3,100,000 in debt service and looking forward to doing more of that in the near future.

The final point I just want to put on the record, I understand that we try to reduce overall aggregate millage and keep certain millages flat. I know it's not a cause of the municipal government. I think we're budgeted very well. And I think it's a very well run city. That's kind of why I live here.

But I would like to put on record some consideration if there is any wiggle room to reduce not just aggregate millage, but another piece of what the several rates are that we set, even modestly given the affordability crisis that we have given Tallahassee's ignorance towards property tax reform, which I don't care what they say, they've done nothing for it. They didn't even bring it up this session in the House or the Senate. They didn't even give it a shot. I have well, the mayor knows this because he's represented Century Village for twenty two years as commissioner and then mayor. Those people are struggling. They're struggling with their monthly fees. Again, this isn't the city's

issue. But

any relief modest in nature that we could offer them, I think, would be welcome without obviously, jeopardizing essential services here in the city of Pembroke Pines. But I appreciate you and your team. You guys do great work. And I appreciate always providing me information. Thank you.

Thank Vice

you, Vice Mayor. Mr. Goode?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. So yeah, I echo what my colleague with this fine clean-cut on his hair did.

I'm late because I'll get him my hair cut

out. Looks very good, very fresh. And thank you for the presentations. And thanks for all the years of your service to the city and making sure that we're financially capable and stable. So I wanted to just follow-up on the mayor's question. I don't know if I heard correctly. I heard that the millage rate is not anticipated to change. Is that the aggregate or the general?

Just the operating act, which affects the general fund only.

General fund will stay the same. Okay. Good. Thank you. The other question I guess I'm having, and Mr.

City Manager, we're about ready to enter into a conversation regarding solid waste. And certainly, I think that's been on all of our plate for the last several weeks. And just kind of taking a review at solid waste in general for the city, I think one of the things that I'd like to ask, and I'm going ask my colleagues at some point to support it, is that the solid waste is a sizable budget. And I think that we probably need to have an additional staff person for solid waste sort of at the director level. It could be an administrator, but certainly have a director level capabilities because we certainly should we move forward with our next item that we have in the workshop, I think that's going to be really, really important.

But still, I think it's important to have it. Now, I know that we have staff that have taken on the solid waste concerns. They've done an extremely great job. And I think that they would be benefited with having another level of expertise in the house that they can manage and direct in order to bring us to higher heights in terms of our solid waste future. So I don't know where that would go or when that conversation takes place because this is a high level presentation here.

So there's not really a lot of details included. And I don't know where those details may be because these numbers did pop up from somebody's spreadsheet. I'm certain of that. So we'll probably have a conversation in the near term just to go over some of my questions in regards to what would details be. But from a high level,

I

think the presentation is acceptable. I can tell you that many of my residents, one of the major concerns

I have

is ensuring that they're getting service. They're basically getting what they're paying for. So the service level meets their level of expectations. And so I think we've been doing a pretty reasonable job of that. And I'd like to say that we continue doing that. And a lot of my comments, Mr. Manager, of course, are based on the fact that there is no substantial change through what we are doing with this legislative session. If it's status quo going forward, all my comments are very relevant. Any changes, I'm certain, as all my colleagues will do, will have probably difference of opinions in terms of what we do going forward. So those are my comments at this point. So thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Rodriguez.

Thank you so much. I took the visioning part of this a little bit far, so bear with me. I want to go over some of the concepts, ideas that, while obviously not included in this very large overview of what we're doing in our budget, I do want to keep us in mind to see if there could be any changes, if my colleagues are in agreeing with certain positions and certain things that I may mention, that we take priority in at least looking into the possibility of these options with that understanding that we do have kind of this large asterisk of the property tax conversation. But I think it's important for us to either way I have hope that nothing happens up in Tallahassee, and maybe I'm just so really optimistic at this point. But I think preparing for both the worst case scenario and the best case scenario allows us to move forward when whichever one of those kind of options comes down the road to be able to spring into action and not think, oh, we worried so much about the bad scenario that we didn't have enough of a vision to look forward as to what we could do with the funds available to us, especially because I think if it doesn't happen now, there's conversation that it might happen in the future.

And if we're able to pull in our resources currently, well, mean, things will always be more expensive ten years on the line than five years before. So then to keep that in mind for us. And this is not necessarily like a budget item, but because I do want us to take advantage of some of the advantages that we have this year versus other years. This year, we lowered the or we increased the threshold to what comes to the city commission to $100,000 So I like our departments to be able to, because they're not worried about putting so much into the agenda, to be able to, in some way, be more innovative and think more outside of the box within their own departments as to what we could be doing in the future within their scope of work and whether it's I don't know if you would call it seed funding or something like that. But if there's new technologies that people would like to invest in within a specific department, especially our IT department, with so many things changing, could we put some money outside to quote unquote test some different innovations and projects and technologies that may be out there?

Because now, in an ideal scenario, at least what was kind of sold to us in raising that threshold, is that our staff would have more time to work on other outside projects. So that's a hope. And maybe seed funding wouldn't be the right word because we don't really do that in government. But to encourage our staff members to think outside of the box in that sense and have a little bit of a cushion to think maybe what could we be doing if not in this budget, but in subsequent budgets if we have the allocation for it. I wanted also confirmation. I know we had, for the strategic plan, about $60,000,000 That's all separate from any of this. Yes.

That's not included here at all. Okay.

Along those lines, I really do want to make sure our parks are as good and pretty and accessible as humanly possible. I recently visited Weston Regional Park, if I'm not mistaken. And all of their signage is exactly the same. It's pretty new. And maybe Christina has more insight.

But even their trash cans all have that beautiful Weston W on all of it. When you go to a Weston Park, you're not confused about what kind of park that you're in. You're in a Weston Park. And I think that goes into the larger aspect and communication that we've had on branding about the city and making sure that people know that they're in Pembroke Pines and what kind of services they are receiving for the city of Pembroke Pines. And in that case, whether it's something as simple as like a uniform trash can or something like that.

But at this park, for example, I saw uniform signs. And I see that our parks don't have uniform signers. If they are, they're a bit older than what we'd like them to see. I know the I think the one next to the charter school, the baseball one, Flamingo Park, yes. The sign on there, for example, really needs an upgrade.

And I want to make sure that we're doing that uniformly across all parks, at least in a staggered formation, because one side of the city shouldn't have pretty parks and the other have ones without good signage. So making sure that we're putting in the investment where we can in these smaller chunks that really do make obviously not building new parks, because that would be very, very expensive. And we've put in money for the playgrounds and the turfs and here and there. But if we can invest in the things that people kind of see every day, think that's well worth the investment in that. And maybe this is more of an in-depth conversation.

We can talk about bringing back the numbers a little bit further down the line. But I know we had talked about additional positions within the communications department. I assume that was budgeted into this, or if we can have any explanation on changes on that. I know that we did one last year. We did add

a position. This particular budget doesn't have an additional position. But we can have that discussion with the manager.

I'd like to have a

broader discussion on that. When I sat down with both IT and the communications department regarding our new website, which I believe all of us might have had a similar meeting on that. It was very visible that we need a lot of work on our website and that's not a one time job. That's not something that is simply going to be redone with whatever website software program that we have and stuff like that, but that it's going to need continuous update, and that we want someone specialized. And I believe someone was moved over from IT to the communications department to do so.

But whatever we can invest in that, again, bringing in kind of that concept of thinking outside of the box, what can we do for online accessibility for our residents? It may mean investing money, because every contract that comes through here for IT is sometimes enormous. And I understand, obviously, these software companies can do 20 updates a year and make us pay for all 20 updates if they really want to. But I think that moving into an age where so much is online, we really need to put more investment into that. And that's comprehensive of a bigger communications plan, which we've talked about ad nauseam, I think, with two communications not experts, but working in the field of that up here, we do talk about that consistently.

And I want that to be at the forefront of this budget to make sure that moving forward, we're focused on the website updates. We're focused on communication plans. And I don't believe for a city of our size, two and onetwo people or three people or even four is enough for a communications department. If you look at Coral Springs, they have about 10 people on their staff for communications. And when we were talking about the metrics and everything else on social media, yes, we're beating them on social media.

But the internal communications and the communications that go out in Coral Springs outside of just social media are so much more robust thank you so much more robust than what we see here. And for being the second largest city, I think we need to really scale that up. And I don't want to put any more labor and work, more hours on the three people currently because they do so much. But we need to scale it up in a way that fits what kind of a city that we are. And for that communication, that branding, all of that to come together within that department would be ideal.

You. On that end, just the user friendliness of how we work on our website and all of that, I know will take a lot of investment. My ultimate goal is to kind of have a one stop shop. And Matthew has told me, kind of impossible sometimes. But it is something that we need to work on.

And whether we start investing in that now, I think moving forward, it will make it that much easier for us to really make it as accessible to pay your bills, to pay your business tax receipt, to do all of that in an ideal scenario with one login for just your address or something like that. Because people are going in to pay their water bill in one place, their business tax receipt in another, or at least have to have different logins and things like that. So I do want to put emphasis on that, because the world that we're moving into is all online. People don't necessarily want to come into City Hall. Some of our older folks might want to do that And have the duality of both of that be super, super good in the personal services that we see here at City Hall, but be equally as accessible online.

And I think that's going to take a lot of investment on our end as well. Within that as well, I know that I've mentioned a couple of times the intergovernmental affairs position. I think that a city, again, of our size, that's something that's really crucial. I know Fort Lauderdale, Coral Springs, a couple of other larger Sunrise, a couple of these other larger cities do have that position. And while our staff currently within their own scope, serves as kind of a mini intergovernmental affairs position in whichever space that they're in, whatever department that they're in, I think something a little bit more encompassing is what we should be looking to work towards.

And I'll talk more in how that would be very useful in regards to the Solid Waste Authority later down the line. Because I see when I go to these conferences, and it's just me. I'm the representative that goes. But everybody else goes accompanied by an intergovernmental affairs person. And they get walked around.

They get into meetings. And we can do that with our lobbyists, and they have been very helpful. But the truth is that our lobbyists work with a lot of other cities. And so they do not have the time, nor do we pay them enough for them to be exclusively ours. And for example, the intergovernmental affairs person for Fort Lauderdale went and had her commissioners set up meetings, do all these things, and knew what was going on in the legislature.

It wasn't me researching and me asking and me kind of figuring out almost by myself to do these things. And thankfully, my background allows for that because I've been in politics for a bit and understand the dynamics of Tallahassee. But if I wasn't here with that kind of knowledge, nor do we I mean, we all have second jobs or do other things. But it can't just be on our plates to do the research, to do everything that needs to be, to attend all the meetings that we have to attend. Commissioner Good goes to the MPO.

I go to the League of Cities things. But sometimes there are the SWA meetings. All of that stuff, while we do have representatives there, I'm not getting some of that information back to me in the ways of reporting. I go in and watch the SWA meetings. That's just one example.

But these are the kinds of things that an intergovernmental affairs person could be able to work with us on and say, hey, I actually saw at this whether it's League of Cities, we bring back and I bring back ideas. And I know the mayor has brought back plenty of ideas and conversations. But if we had additional assistance on that, we could get more into the weeds of different policies that other cities are putting forward that are being innovative about and bringing that into us and not us just saying, hey, can you get that done? Because you're not going to know exactly how to do it. But maybe someone with the job specifically designated for research and for innovation and for policy, I guess research at that end, would be much more valuable to us.

And I think however much an intergovernmental affairs person goes, it's probably a significant amount of money. But it's not something impossible. And I think the investment is worth it for a city of our size. I'm almost done, I promise. Very small ask on this. But I know we've been working on an internship project. And that's something that I've tried to advocate for within my own department and every other department. And I've talked to HR about it. And this is quite small, but I would like our interns to be paid even a stipend of a small amount. And that's not something that seems impossible with a budget of our size.

It could be $500 $1,000 for the summer, whatever it may be. But I really think that we're in the age of things being so expensive that while our students may want to participate and help us with free labor, it's not genuinely fair to take that of them, even if we are giving them experience. They are deserving of something, especially when they're putting in time and effort and getting that experience. But really, Camilla does a lot of stuff for me, basically. And I would like to be able to say in an official capacity.

I've done things through personal side, but in an official capacity say, hey, this is what's available to you. Because then we're kind of bypassing the students that actually have to work and can't get this experience because their families don't do well enough to simply just let them not do something for free, more or less. So that's a small ask, and I really hope that makes it onto the table. I also want to and maybe I can talk to our city engineer about this, as to what the plans are for capital investments in the general budget about our roads and speed calming measures. I know we're working on some of that through the $60,000,000 strategic plan.

But I get calls from HOAs all the time about how bad the speeding is out west. Because even and I was talking to Bill earlier from the Budget Advisory Board. And really, lot of what an example would be when we're doing expansion of roads or anything like that, while it alleviates the traffic in one time frame, those peak hours, that does make it so that people are speeding even more. And we need to find ways to work on that similarly to what we've done in Silver Lakes, I believe. We've put in some measures.

And John, the president of the HOA there, has been very vocal and advocate about some of those changes and just making sure that we're connecting with our HOAs and asking them, hey, obviously that's part of our job too, but you all have the list of our HOAs as well. Can we reach out to them like, hey, where are the trouble spots within your neighborhood on speeding, whether we can work with police to get something a little bit more patrol there? Or could we look into speed calming measures and traffic calming measures that we

can

implement small amounts throughout this year and upcoming years? And then lastly, I did really want to bring up the concept of our city's transportation. I know I believe we had extended the contract for transportation authority six months and then about a year for the school buses. My assumption is that's coming to us sometime soon, I hope. They're talking over there.

Yes, so at some point. But I would really like for us, and when that comes up, for us to highly consider bifurcating that contract, or trifurcate, whatever. It has like three different parts. Splitting it up so that we can look into different options regarding micro transit. I know that for seniors, we have different programs where they are able to call in and ask for kind of one on one rides to their grocery stores, things like that.

But I would like to see just how much it would cost with some of these micro transit vendors, like Freebee and Circuit, at least open up that discussion. Because I think that there could be some cost saving measures. And if not, to maybe pay even a little bit more for the type of technology that someone may be able to order that quickly on their phone like they do in Uber, rather than what we're currently doing. And that kind of goes back to the idea of this thinking outside of box innovation. We've had that method for however long Transportation Authority has had their contract.

And I think it's time for us to think outside the box and see what we can invest in. Because I think that our seniors are worth that investment. And we have great facilities like our Southwest Focal Center and things like that. But a lot of our seniors are still in their homes and not getting out and kind of bound to that and bound by the fact that our city runs on the infrastructure solely for cars and not for anything else, unfortunately. And I know that we're putting in a lot of effort into changing that.

But public transportation needs to be at the forefront of our budget. And I think that's because it should be at the forefront of the values that we set forth for the city, making sure that everybody feels that it's something accessible and that it's not if I checked for my house to City Hall, mostly because tomorrow I don't have a car. I have to take it to dealership to get fixed on something. But it would take me about an hour to get to the city hall, or even more sometimes with a transfer on a city bus. And I know I've mentioned that before, but I want this upcoming budget to really reflect that because there are different options.

And we can't keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result for our seniors specifically. And our teens, I think. They would take a lot of advantage of that sometimes. I know going to soccer and baseball practice sometimes isn't the best use of a parent's time, nor do they have the capabilities. And if our younger students and our younger residents can take advantage of those kinds of services, would be really helpful, even if it means an investment from our end as well. Because that makes just the life easier of our residents. And I think that's well worth any kind of money to put into it. And that was it. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much, Commissioner Schwartz.

Good evening. Good evening. Good All good points. There's two cities, Key West and Lakeland. They have free public transportation. And Key West is called the Duval Loop. It was originally designed to keep employees from taking parking spots in front of the places of business that they work. It turns out that there's a lot of tourists who get on it. And it's spectacular. They have an app.

You get on the thing. It's like ten minutes away. It's basically the economic center of Key West. Lakeland, transportation have called The Squeeze. Now, we're stretched out, turnpike to the Everglades. It's a tall ask. But we do have some economic centers that would make a little bit of sense for us to explore what options there are to get people I like that ringtone. That's good. I like that. Is that ERAM?

Love you, brother. Okay, so there is a focus right now, I guess a refocus on with the price of fuel, people trying to find alternate ways to get around. Fuel prices go up, fuel prices go down. But I can tell you this. The more electric cars go on the road, fuel prices are going to go up. Why? Well, we have franchise owners. You pick the gas station. You pick the brand. The more electric cars, those folks still have to make the rent.

So fuel price is going to continue to go up. None of us want to pay what we're paying today, but that's for a different reason. But just think about the future of where fuel is going to go. Big scandal down in Dade County. They have electric buses, millions

of

dollars in taxpayer money sitting there. For all the praise that Miami Dade government gets, they really stepped in on that one. So I think there's a time and place for us to explore new technology, new things, learn from other cities, and take really good ideas. And we have plenty of talent in this building to do that, plenty of talent. I'm actually more interested in sending staff to seminars and conferences than paying for tables at ten for one night.

And we're just not getting anything other than a few pictures on social media. I just don't see the return on investment. I would rather take those dollars and invest it in staff than to invest it in me going to a one night affair. To me, the return on investment just isn't there. We have a planning and zoning board where no one is certified.

There hasn't been an education on the planning and zoning board since Henry Rose was removed from the board. We have a board of adjustment that certainly can benefit from some of these conferences, some of these education seminars, working with staff, spending more time understanding what the process is. We have volunteers that serve at the pleasure of each district commissioner and the mayor. I, for one, have felt their level of frustration that when they serve up here, they can't even get water. It doesn't cost anything to do that.

It doesn't cost anything for our board members, whether it's quasi judicial or if they meet at the Frank, to not be offered a polo shirt with their name on it to serve. They are a part of our community. They are the voice of our citizenry. It doesn't cost that much to do those things. But it's incredibly important to me that they are recognized and they understand the value in which they provide all of us.

Our small business owners are getting squeezed really bad now. And there was a time that we offered grant money, different programs. I'd like to work with the Chamber of Commerce in a collaborative way to find out what their needs are to see if there can be a public private partnership without exposing tax dollars to waste as you see in other governments. I am not interested in any kind of a handout. There has to be a benefit to all of us if we were to support that.

The administration is in a very difficult position not knowing what Tallahassee is going to do or the electorate is going to do, depending on what Tallahassee does first. There is a commitment for public safety. I'm happy to see that. But we need to find a way to resolve some of the exterior we can't talk about here tonight. But we to get things done and moving forward.

With respect to revenues and Ms. Chung, I apologize for having you stand there. I'm almost done here.

No, I'm fine.

But I want to thank our building department for implementing something I've been advocating for a very long time. And that is to ensure that our hauler is a part of the permit process and that we're not going to lose any more revenue, like what I saw over the weekend, or a major franchise restaurant here using a different vendor in their parking lot. Despite those efforts, they're still happening. And investment in code has been occurring. The implementation of ensuring that our economic sectors are being monitored seven days a week is imperative.

There was a time that code would give me a report for every shopping center East Of Flamingo Road. I looked at it every week. It was a time where it was necessary. And we've made some adjustments. We've changed the way the code's been happening.

And there hasn't been a need to look at it with that kind of critical detail, except for the fact that when the resident asks what's going on with this, I had an answer for them. Bless you. I believe that through code enforcement and through our building department, there are revenues that we can capture because people are doing things on the weekends. And their houses are getting bigger on the weekends. And their doors are being changed on the weekends.

And the impact windows are happening on the weekends. I believe there's an opportunity for us to capture some revenue opportunities. It is my desire to keep the cost of living in the city as economically viable as possible and livable as possible. The country is going through challenges right now. And everyone has to take a look at what are we doing to make sure that dollars are being spent wisely, that our procurement, if there's an opportunity, Mr.

Dodge, for us to buy fuel like what they do with the airlines ten years out. What I'm saying is it's forecasting larger fuel purchases instead of being hit with the economics of the day. If that means that we have to partner with other cities, so be it. I'm concerned about and we're going get into it in this next phase, next workshop. But the regionalization of services shouldn't have to be duplicated for unnecessary reasons because you want to have yours and they have theirs.

I recognize that the city of Pembroke Pines and staff has been tasked to do more than most cities, meaning they have less help. The efficiency of our government should be measured by the level of customer service happiness of a resident or a business owner. I believe technology can help us with that. We had that discussion at a workshop just a few short weeks ago. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the administration comes back with.

Dollars 8,000,000 is a big number. There's no mention about Pines Place. I don't know where that falls in, if any, into the general, if any.

It does.

If any. I also recognize that we have a retiring workforce, folks who've been here for a very long time, who would like to enjoy time in retirement. And we need to start thinking about the benches that we're building. Are we prepared for passing the torch? Are we ready in that kind of position?

Mr. Dodge, do you see us having a workshop similar to this to update us when the state makes a decision in June? Or do you anticipate being tasked with providing us a budget on August 1 with assumptions. Every government, every local government is facing the same issue, right? I won't ask about reserves and how much is being placed in reserves in this year's budget or the percentage of.

I'm not asking that today. But there's got to be a way of giving the public of how we're going to spend our money. In a very short period of time, we are going to be going out and asking the public in open forums, public forums. And certainly, the state budget and our budget is going to be a part of it's going to be a conversation. So the more answers we can have, the better we're going to be with respect to legislative aids and that sort of thing.

I know some municipalities have spent a lot of money having an aide. I'm open to the conversation of how it would be executed. With respect to internships, I'm offering a summer internship. So I have an office account. There are ways that some of these young folks can serve and eat at the same time.

I am concerned, again, about our nonprofits getting literally their backs against the wall with some of the changes in state law that's been made. I still would like to see some type of an application process, window that's going to be open, a window that's going to be closed for tables attend. Again, there needs to be a return on investment for that. And overall, I think the presentation fantastic. Mr.

Dodge, you're right. I mean, twenty years, I've never seen this being balanced. Is some good stuff, right? So I want to end on a very inspirational positive thing. We are in a good position right now, despite the $8,000,000 We are in a very, very good position.

I would just ask our vendors and our staff to protect the assets that we buy as if they own them. The signs that get deteriorated, the equipment that gets broken, the inventory that gets lost, it's got to stop. My support for vendors and renewals and stuff like that is really going to be based upon how did they take care of the assets that we spent public dollars for. I mean, it's to have to redo things because somebody doesn't want to fix a sprinkler pump, because they over watered grass, or they didn't water it enough. Those days are done.

We cannot continue to make those same mistakes. So I would still advocate to have one or two members of our police department be connected with the property appraiser's office. Property appraiser care has spoken to this commission about it, about the revenues that are being captured in Fort Lauderdale. It's like a nine to one return on investment. You pay the officer $100,000 and we're getting $1,000,000 back in revenue.

It pays for itself. So with that, mayor, thank you. And I look forward to the next item on the agenda.

Okay. Is there anything else, commissioners, that we wanted to add? Any thought that was triggered during the discussion? Mr. Dodge, do you have enough?

I have enough here. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you very, very much for your presentation. What's the next

item? The next item, mayor, is our workshop on solid waste. Mark Holmes is going to begin. And Mr. Cooper is also going to present. This is going to take a little bit more time than the budget. Thank you.

Mayor, for planning purposes, we have a hard stop at six Is your intent?

I'm sorry, Commissioner. I didn't hear you. Did we have a hard stop at six No. No, I don't think so.

Go right ahead. Good evening, everyone.

As you know, I'm Mark Gomes, assistant city manager and director of procurement and sustainability. And I'm here to present to you this item on our resolve project, which we're calling the Recycling Energy and Sustainable Organics Lifecycle Value Enhancement Project. With that being said, we're going to go over a couple of things today. One of those items are the history of the city, how we got to where we are now, the new waste management recycling facility that's opened up in the city of Pembroke Pines, the Broward County Solid Waste Authority and what their regional efforts are, the project that we're presenting tonight, and our recommendations for you. With that being said, first I'd like to talk about our previous contract with Rudra Recycling Facility.

Approximately forty years ago or even more, Broward County established something called the Solid Waste Disposal District. It was later called the Resource Recovery Board. And when they did that, they brought together a lot of cities to form this entity and build incinerators, waste energy incinerators in the county that a lot of municipalities utilized. Back then, the city of Pembroke Pines were very opposed to using incinerators, and we decided to look into alternative recycling options. We partnered with three cities back then, Dania Beach, Allendale, and Pompano, and Rooter recycling facility.

They're a company that was based out of Minnesota, And we got them to come down to Pembroke Pines and build a facility out west. Eventually, there was a situation that part of the process that they had, they took our waste and our recycling materials, but they also did a composting option at their facility. Based on the environment in South Florida and what they were used to in Minnesota, it didn't work out and it had some odor concerns. And that facility was later sold to Waste Management. Back in 2022, in January 2022, our contract ended with Ruder recycling facility.

At that time, our rate was $86.92 per ton, and we were unable to negotiate a new agreement with Waste Management. Part of the situation back then was, as you know, the market conditions for selling recyclables was declined. Other countries weren't buying those materials. There was increasing processing costs and concerns with contamination in our recycling materials. That led us to suspending our recycling program, our blue cart collection program, back in January 2022.

Currently, we have an agreement with Waste Connections. The city commission approved that, and it goes through 09/30/2026, And it has one year renewal options. The waste that we take for our residents goes to Deerfield Beach transfer station. They charge us $60.6 It goes up annually by CPI. And they transfer it to a landfill located in St.

Cloud called the Jet Landfill. That landfill has some recycling opportunities or resource recovery opportunities where they capture the methane and they sell it back to the grid and it powers about 8,000 homes. When it comes to the new recycling facility that was recently had their ribbon cutting this year from waste management out West Pines right next to the Rooter recycling facility that they also own, That's a $90,000,000 127,000 square foot expansion. It's a separate building right next to it. It replaces the previous recycling option operation that had a lot of manual processes in it where there are people manually pulling out certain materials from the process.

That facility serves Broward, Dade, Monroe, and Collier Counties and it still recycles paper, plastics, metals, and glass. Some of the capabilities of the facility is that it'll process 275,000 tons per year, about 60 tons per hour. The recovery rate went up from 80 to 85% now to 95%. Optical sorters in the facility that will see the materials and separate items using AI. And they state that less than 20% of the residuals from the facility go to lantils.

One of the things we like to mention is that even though they mentioned that it's 95% of the materials are recycled, part of that is the source separated single stream recycling. As you know, we used to do the blue cart where you'd have to separate all your recyclable materials into that facility. And that's the material that they'll take. They're not taking the waste into that recycling facility. That would have to go through a transfer station and sent to a landfill or somewhere else, such as an incinerator.

Even though there's improvement of the 80% to 85% recovery rate going to 95%, if we look back at our 2021 solid waste tonnage, back then we had based on our numbers from Waste Pro, our hauler, we had 8,841 tons of recycling in that year. So if they recycled 95% of that, that would generate only 8,400 tons of material that's recycled, and that's only 6.7% of our whole waste stream, not including our wastewater biosolids. Earlier this year or last year, late last year, we actually had an opportunity to partner with waste management where we had our charter school AP students and members from our environmental advisory board go out to do a micro habitat planting event. So this is some pictures of our students and one of our EAB members at the facility with that great outreach effort. In addition, I'd like to talk a little bit about the model of the typical contract that waste management has with other cities that we can potentially utilize.

It uses average market value or a blended value contract in which right now the rate is $178.43 per ton. So that goes up by CPI. It's capped at 5%. But it's based on composition audits where they'll look at the materials that we have. When the truck goes into the facility, they'll dump it onto the tipping floor, and they'll go through it. Every six months, they'll audit it about 25 samples. And then they'll come up with a new composition mix for our waste for our city. And they'll do that for all the other cities as well. And the cost for recycling also fluctuates monthly based on a commodity index. So they get a monthly index that changes.

That will say what the price of aluminum cans are, what the price of paper, cardboard, and things like that. How the cost structure works is that they recover their processing fee first. Depending on the blended value, let's say there's a lot of glass in our recycling material, that could actually increase the cost. While there's other things like aluminum, which has a better value on return, so that will lower the cost to the city. So there's pros and cons of it, but it fluctuates and it's not a static number that we can necessarily predict easily.

With that being said, some of the risk with a contract like that is the volatility in the price. As you know, we set our rates annually for our residents. It changes in October. And now with volatile pricing, we may have to do true ups or figure out some other method on how we assess rates to our residents. There's also a transportation and disposal charge fee that they have in theirs.

It's about $63 last time I looked at it, but it could fluctuate at any time, any month. It's uncapped, and it's based on their cost to transport and dispose any contamination over 10%. And based on their agreement, they also state that materials may be rejected by waste management and there's no guarantee that materials could be recycled because there's different impacts with the market. With that being said, just going over the rates that I just talked about just to show you a little comparison. Back in 2022 when our contract ended with the Ruder recycling facility, our rate was $86.92 and that was taking our separated recycling materials and our solid waste.

So both were getting the same rate of $86.92 Right now with Waste Connections, we're charged for the commingled waste, dollars 60.6 per ton for waste. And with Waste Management's new facility, they charge $178.43 But that rate fluctuates. It could be up or down depending on market conditions. In addition, when we think about rates for our residents, we also have to think about not only the disposal aspect, but our collection aspect. It can impact the rates depending on how far our haulers have to go.

They take our waste, but they have to take it somewhere. And in addition, not only how far away that facility is, there could be concerns about how long the lines are at those facilities because that slows down their operations as well. So with that, I'm going to go into the solid waste authorities regional efforts and what they've been doing. As you may know, we brought an item to the city commission a while ago. And then in 2022, 2023, they formed the Solid Waste Authority. 28 out of 31 cities joined that entity. And that represented about 83% of the population in Broward County. Three cities did not join. That was Pembroke Pines. As you know, that was presented to you.

And our city commission voted that down. Along with Hollandaille and Pompano Beach also did not join that entity. Back then, the city of Pembroke Pines, we did not join for various reasons. One was the potential use of incinerations. There were concerns about that.

There was also concerns about what facilities might need to be created from this entity, whether that would have incineration sites close to us or landfill expansions or anything like that next to the city that the city may not want. In addition, it required certain financial contributions from the cities just to get to the place where they're at now, which is the master plan and facilities amendment. And that cost that was estimated for our city was around $175,000 to $230,000 annually to become a member of that and move forward with the plan. As you know, the city has a certain policy on incineration. We made a resolution, and we adopted that in May 2024.

And we sent that to the Solid Waste Authority to let them know that we would urge them to prohibit any incineration and also urge them to prioritize non combustion technologies. And we had various health concerns with incinerators. And we also partnered with the city of Miramar to financially contribute to their efforts to fight against Miami Dade County's incinerator plans that may be looking to build incineration facility close to the city of Pembroke Pines and Miramar. The current status of the SWA is back on April 17, just about two weeks ago. They approved the facilities amendment, and they provided it to cities so that the cities can have one hundred and twenty days to approve that plan if they wish to participate in the new ILA or continue with the ILA.

So that deadline is 08/14/2026. It requires the members of the ILA representing 80% of the population to move forward with that plan. If they don't approve it, the SWA will terminate and cease to exist. And if entities enter into that or approve it, they'll be committed to a forty year agreement or the rest of the forty year agreement, which takes us to approximately 2063. There is a potential option for cities to rejoin later, but that would be up to future terms determined by the SWA.

And obviously, if entities join, that limits certain flexibilities and options that the cities may have by going into this agreement. As part of the process with the SWA, they worked on building a master plan. And if you look at the master plan, it's over 1,200 pages. A lot of great information in there. Part of the process, they evaluated five different scenarios.

They eventually selected scenario A as their preferred approach, which targets a 62% waste diversion rate. Waste diversion, obviously, is not necessarily the same as recycling. Diversion could be diverting it from a landfill, but maybe not to an incinerator. So there are certain clarifications that may be needed to be made there that we would have to look into with the SWA. In addition, by 2045, the SWA anticipates that 2,700,000 tons of material is to go to landfill.

So there's still a need for landfills in in their plan. And they are also looking into focusing on recycling and waste reduction with a big education expansion to let all our residents know how they could use less waste. With that, there there are certain programs that are outlined in scenario a in the master plan. One of those are reducing trash collection to once weekly. As you know, our city, we currently have trash collection twice a week.

They also look at restoring county wide curbside recycling. As you know, we've suspended that program. They're also looking into curbside waste collection. I'm not 100% sure if that's in a cart or outside of a cart, so another thing that they're looking at. Food waste drop off events, expanding hazardous and electronic drop off sites, and increasing reuse and diversion programs. If you join the SWA, or if any entity joins the SWA, they would have to adopt their uniform rules. We wouldn't get to follow our own independent rules set by our city commission and our residents' wishes necessarily. We'd have to follow the rules that they set forth for us. In addition, we'd have to deal with flow control. They will be controlling where our waste goes.

So if the city had an opposition to incineration and the SWA said we need to take our waste to incineration, that would be their determination and we'd have to follow that as being a member. In addition, the SWA would also look into establishing contracts with facilities, including negotiating those rates. The plan is that the SWA would have economies of scale and be able to negotiate beneficial rates. But those rates would be not something that the city would get to negotiate. We'd have to follow along with the facilities that we're taking our waste to as directed by them and what the rates are set by them.

In addition, our franchise agreements that we have with our haulers would need to be amended as well to meet the terms that they set forth for us. In addition, as you know, our waste collection for our commercial sites, we have an agreement with WastePro. They collect all the waste at our commercial sites. Based on the SWA's plans, commercial collection will become nonexclusive. So that may impact our current haulers' economics, and I don't know how that would affect our agreement and our rates as well.

Potential impacts to our city. I kind of touched on this while I was going through it, but we lose that exclusive commercial collection rights. It may impact our residential rate stability, could affect our collection haulers economics, uncertainty on how our condominiums would be collected. Right now, our condos are they have the opportunity for open market. I'm not sure how the rate assessments would be addressed with them as well.

This is some of the proposed infrastructure that the SWA plans with scenario A. They have a landfill which is supposed to be 3,000,000 tons per year and it needs six forty acres. All five scenarios that they evaluated requires landfill and six forty acres. However, the master plan, from what I saw, says that there's no site been identified, so I'm not sure how the SWA plans to move forward with that plan. Furthermore, they plan on three transfer stations, one in North Central And Broward County, each collecting 190,000 tons per year at those facilities.

Two single stream MRFs, material recycling facilities, maybe not similar, but somewhat like the new waste management facility. Mulch colorizing operations, two of those at 175 tons per year. A biochar pyrolysis operation as well. Permanent drop off centers, eight of those. And C and D recovery facilities, two of those.

With that being said, all five of their plans needed a landfill, but it doesn't look like they've identified the site of where the landfill could go. Therefore, I'm not sure how the plan is really going to move forward with that. As you know, there's class one waste. Class one waste is the protrusible waste, the wet waste, the garbage that you typically have in your house. My understanding is the BIC landfill is permitted for accepting class one waste, but they currently may not collect it.

And there was a settlement with waste management at the Monarch Hill Landfill. And that, my understanding is next year they will not be able to accept class one waste. So I'm not sure how the SWA currently plans on addressing class one waste. When it comes to funding considerations, they address that they plan to establish flow control, and that's why they're going to be collecting money from the cities. And they're also planning on building capital reserve for building these facilities and expansion programs in the future.

They're going to be setting up those recycling locations and drop off locations, educating our residents, and also they'd have their administrative services that they need to pay for as well. This is the timeline on how they plan on implementing the funding. As you can see in 2027, it's similar to what they presented to us when we first evaluated entering into the interlocal agreement. It's going to be an annual fee based on our population. After 2027, it'll be a surcharge that they'll have at the facilities.

Now they'll have flow control after you enter into it. So they'll be telling us where to take the waste. And at those facilities that we take it, they're gonna tack on a rate of $2.22 per ton at those facilities. That's gonna last from $20.28 to 2,030. And then in 2031, they're planning on doing a non ad valorem assessment that will go to our residents and property holders.

They plan on that rate being $2.72 for the assessment at this moment for our residents. Looking at one of the presentations from the SWA on March 17, they had the mass balance model, and they listed the tonnage that each city they anticipate generates. As you can see in this example, they list that Pembroke Pines, even though we're a non ILA member, were listed here as 429,000 tons of waste. While when we look at the waste we actually collect with our waste haulers and the data we have, we generate about 128,000 tons of waste in 2023. So there's a big disconnect.

There might be reasons for that that we may have to look into to see why. But obviously, we do want the assessment to be, to our residents and our commercial properties, to be reflective on the waste we are actually generating. In addition, the SWA states that there's maximum service charges that they've outlined. As you can see here, they said that recyclable materials in 2025 would be $110 yard trash would be $52 yard trash for beneficial use would be $80 class one waste would be $57.49 while class three waste would be $52.56 These rates are established as the maximum increased by the SWA board and the executive committee by two thirds of the municipalities representing two thirds of the population approving it. So depending on the rates that they're able to negotiate or not negotiate, those costs may be unavoidable and they might have to increase those costs.

In addition, like I mentioned earlier, the cost that the city pays is not only based on the disposal, but it's based on the collection. So if we're taking it to a further location or a different type of location, it may change some logistics that change the cost for our residents and our commercial customers. In addition, I went over some infrastructure that the SWA needs, like transfer stations and things like that. Right now, they stated that they would not be building any incinerators or landfills. However, there is a need for a landfill in all of their plans.

But if they did want to build an incinerator or something like that, they'd need 80% approval from their board to move forward with that. This slide talks about the different at the end of the agreement with the SWA, when they're winding down, what happens? There's two options outlined in the plan. One is for the county or successor entity to take over. And another is the county or municipalities going back to how it was and taking back some of those assets.

So there's requirements for the county or successor. The county would obviously have to approve it. Then they would also need approval by 51% of the population of the municipal partners, representing 55% of the tonnage in the SWA. Those assets would get transferred and nonparticipants like how we are currently now would receive no asset value. If it was going back to the municipalities, there's some opportunities for those assets to go to those cities.

And there's a process for that as well. After those assets are sold, those funds can be divvied up and provided back to the cities that were participating based on population. When we talk about risk of joining the SWA, these are just some of the risks that may be potential to our city. Flow control is one. We lose that by entering into this regional effort.

Long term commitment, we'll be in this for forty years till 2063. On future disposal future, I'm not sure how they're handling that landfill, where it's going to be built. They said they need six forty acres. I'm not sure what the game plan is with that. Incineration, I know our city's against it.

Are we going to be directed to take our waste to an incinerator? And limited flexibility to pursue alternative options when we're in this agreement. With that being said, I'd like to bring up Mr. Cooper to present our next portion of the slide regarding our resolve project, which is our recycling energy and sustainable organics life cycle value enhancement project. Thank you.

Commissioners, we're going to take a five minute recess.

Yes, sir.

Okay. We're reconvening. Mr. Cooper, it's a pleasure to have you at our podium again. Thank you, sir.

Please proceed. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Commissioner Good and Schwartz. It's nice to see you both again. Good see you, John. And Commissioner Rodriguez and Vice Mayor Hernandez. My name is John Cooper. I'm an environmental engineer, and I've been at the city of Pembroke Pines for many years. I'm very excited to talk to you today about this. It's a great project. So you know we gave out that white paper. And there's a lot of details in there. But we're going to spin through the high points with you this evening. I have basically two things I want to try to achieve.

So if you could talk just a little closer to Two

things I want to try to achieve. One is to explain exactly what we're proposing. And the second is to explain how can we implement this. So what exactly is being proposed? Before we get started, let me just use EPA terms because there's lots and lots of words floating around this subject. And I think they kind of overlap a little bit. So I'm going to use two terms mainly. This all comes from EPA's sustainable materials management information. The first term is waste to energy. And the second is resource recovery.

So waste to energy is typically what incineration is. You may have also heard the term gasification, which is a form of incineration. It's also a waste to energy type of system. But for our purposes, we're just going to use those two. There's lots of others floating around. And under resource recovery, there's basically three things that can be done landfill gas recovery, pyrolysis, which I'll explain to you later, anaerobic digestion, which we'll talk about quite a lot, anaerobic digestion. So first, we're going to talk about what we're not doing. We're not doing incineration. And you all know what it is. But just in case, I'm going go through a couple of details.

First of all, of course, waste goes in and it's burned. It's heated to very high temperatures. And then the energy is recovered in the form of steam, just like your tea kettle. And that steam then drives a generator, which puts electricity into the grid. Sounds great. It is a very long term technology. It's been around a long time. And frankly, theoretically, it's a pretty good thing, right? We're taking the waste from making electricity. But it's got a downside.

And one of the downsides is that it takes in everything it can. So this is when we talk about flow control, that's what that is. So in order to make this great big system work, it's very expensive. It has to have enough fuel to make it work financially. So when you talk about flow control, that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about making sure the incinerators get enough fuel that they can produce enough energy to pay for themselves and to make a profit. The other downside, of course, is it causes air pollution normally called ash or top ash in the industry. It also produces bottom ash pollution, which is I don't want to say hazardous, but it does contain a lot of heavy metals. And it's landfilled and then creates, of course, another problem years down the road. So many reasons to be concerned about incineration.

So if we're not talking about waste to energy, incineration, or gasification, which by the way, gasification is just incineration that's hotter, and it turns the ash into gases that can burn, What is resource recovery? Well, under three categories, we've already heard from Mr. Gomes talking that we are already sending garbage to a landfill that does gas recovery. It basically puts a grid of pipes underneath the landfill and collects the gas from the landfill and uses it. It's not a terrible thing.

It not approved by the Sierra Club so much. They've got some negative things to say about it. But it's not a horrible, terrible thing. It's not efficient. And the gases are not as refined and concentrated. Paralysis is a type of steam treatment of garbage that also produces methane gas, which can be used in the same way. It also produces a bottom type of ash called biochar, which is basically charcoal that can be used as a soil amendment. And then there's anaerobic digestion, which you've been hearing a lot about. We'll talk about that in detail. There are other emerging technologies that are not on the EPA list.

We are not trying to address them tonight, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them came up. As you know, in the white paper, we talked a little bit about the legislation that's coming across the country about prohibiting organics from going to landfill. And that's because of the, as you'll see in a minute, the gases that those organics produce are valuable. And they're greenhouse gases. So legislation is targeting this.

So what will happen is technology will respond. So there will be more and more technology responding to that legislation. So anaerobic digestion is a form of resource recovery that is capturing and creating gas. We all know what this is. We've all driven by it a million times. And the Monarch Hill and we all know from all the study that you've done about the expansion of this and the up and coming landfill, It's going to get big. It's

going to

get much bigger. And it's a huge problem. It's everybody's problem. We all produce garbage. It's a worldwide problem. So you're familiar with that, but you may not be familiar with this. And that is a fire. It's a controlled fire called a flare. And it's coming out of the landfill. And so you may be asking yourself, if that's not familiar to you, why is the landfill on fire?

Why are there flames coming out of the landfill? You may see these if you drive down the Turnpike at night. They are burning all day, all night, every day of the year. They are all over the world. And that's the gas that's being captured. And the rest of the time, the landfill is emitting greenhouse gases all the time regardless of the flare. So why is it burning? It's burning for the same reason your garbage pail smells at home, right? The microbes. The microbes are eating the garbage.

So we all know what this is. You know what it is. The tree falls down in the woods. You come back three months later, the tree is gone. That's because the microbes ate the tree and it decomposed. So when the microbes eat the garbage, it rots. That's what we call rotting. It's actually being eaten. And then it smells because that's what microbes do. They convert food to gas and byproducts.

So garbage plus microbes equals landfill gas. But again, lots of terms being thrown around. It's the same as methane, the chemical name, or methane if you're British. It's also the same as biogas. That's a word thrown around a lot.

But the real term we should be using is RNG, renewable natural gas. But they're all the same, same language. And just as matter of detail and to be thorough, there are other gases mixed in with landfill gas. And so landfill gas does require some refinement. It has carbon dioxide and other gases in it.

And when I said earlier that landfill gas collection systems aren't the greatest, they aren't very concentrated. So you do get the methane out of that system. But if you can get it more concentrated, that's better. There's less of those other gases that you need to remove. And removing the bad stuff or the unusable stuff is called scrubbing.

So it's like scrubbing the gas, cleaning it up, getting it ready. And getting it ready for what? Well, it's valuable. So it's TECO and other gas providers throughout the country. They get it from the underground, maybe in the Midwest, through drilling and fracking and all that good stuff. And it's pumped and shipped all over The United States. And it's the same gas. And we pay for it if you have a gas stove at home or a gas heater. It's the same stuff. So it has value.

So why waste it? Why flare it? Why let it go into the atmosphere and cause more greenhouse emissions? Why not capture it? Why not recover it? And we can. And we can do that through the process called anaerobic digestion. So what exactly is this? What you see in this picture are a couple of big green tanks and some pipes. So an anaerobic digester is basically a tank. It's a tank with a cover on it. And in goes the food, the garbage, the wastewater biosolids, etcetera. Give the bugs some time to eat it. The bugs will eat it. The bugs will produce gas.

The gas will get collected. It'll get scrubbed and refined. And then it could be used on-site for various processes. Or it can be shipped over to the gas company for a sale. This is a very interesting picture because this is a picture of an anaerobic digester. But you don't see it. It's in a metal building. And what you're seeing there in that big blimp looking thing, that's just a gas container. So the point of this picture versus this picture, this looks like a wastewater plant or a water plant. This kind of looks more like an industrial building.

And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about a metal building, probably three stories or so high, that will house all of the equipment. The garbage trucks will go inside the building. The building will be under negative pressure or vacuumed so that the odorous stuff inside the building will be captured. And that odorous air will be scrubbed before it leaves the building. It will be cleaned. So it won't look like a wastewater plant. It'll look like a commercial building with these blimp like gas containers outside of the building. Okay. So this is nothing new.

And there's a group called the American Biogas Council that has lots of neat statistics. And they claim that there are 2,300 digesters in all 50 states. Most of them are on farms, or other 300 plus are on farms. 66 of them are on food waste. And six forty five are doing landfill gas, and two thirty nine are doing wastewater biosolids.

I'd just take a quick second to give you an example. There's one that I really thought was excellent in Des Moines, Iowa, where there's just tons and tons of agricultural waste. So the guys get the farmers got together. They built an anaerobic digester. And they bring in all their agricultural waste. And then they create the methane with that. And then the bean farmers bring their beans. And they dry the beans with the methane. So when you go to the grocery store and buy a bag of beans, it's been dried by an anaerobic digester. And then they have so much gas that they sell it back to the gas provider in their state. That's, I thought, a pretty neat example. But there are lots and lots and lots of examples.

What about

Florida? Florida has 65. 36 of them are at wastewater treatment plants. We have a neighbor that has one across the street. Our friends at Miramar have an anaerobic digester right there doing their wastewater biosolids. There are 22 at landfills, eight in agriculture installations, and one doing food waste. And a note again about food waste. You've heard the presentation from Mr. Gomes mentioning food waste. Other countries do this a lot.

They're collecting food waste at home in separate containers and distinguishing it from the rest of the garbage. That's called the organic fraction. Hear that term being thrown around quite a bit. And so the organic fraction is where the meat is for producing the gas. So a lot of these digesters are just taking food waste because that's where the most efficient food is.

So food waste is a big, big part of this picture. Interesting statistics here. If all of the potential for digestion in the state was utilized, you would produce enough electricity for 650,000 houses. And the equivalent climate benefit that is removal of greenhouse gases from the climate of 70,000 cars diverting 5,000,000 tons of food waste out of landfills. That's a lot.

That's 10,000,000,000 pounds of food waste. Okay, hold on a second. Don't anaerobic digesters smell? Yes, they do. And no, they don't. If you have a wastewater digester that produces little methane, the solution to dealing with that methane is to flare it. You can't let it build up or it'll explode. You have to do something with it. So periodically the flare goes off. The flaring of anaerobic digesters being used for biosolids is very odorous.

Landfill gases, when burned, are also odorous, not quite as bad because the landfill already kind of smells. So you don't really notice it as much. However, anaerobic digesters that are designed to collect biogas do not smell because we're collecting it. We're not burning it. We're not letting it go to the atmosphere.

It's being grabbed and collected, scrubbed, and then sold to a gas provider or perhaps used for a drying process or for some other purpose. But it's burned. So the key there is the flaring and the burning. And especially, like I said, the biosolids are especially stinky. Okay.

So this is not a combustion process. There is no burning involved in anaerobic digestion. It is 100% biological. It gets warm because that's just part of the process of the biology, right? The bugs heat things up because they're growing and multiplying. It gets warm. But we're talking about warm like 150 degrees, not 1,000 or 2,000 in a combustion chamber. So it's not combustion at all. And you may have noticed that I beat that point to death with the EPA. And they actually answered me in an email.

It's in the appendix of the white paper. Okay. So it's renewable because garbage never stops. And it reduces emissions, as we said, from the landfill. It recovers recyclables, which I'll show you in a minute.

There are no combustion byproducts. It is a resource recovery. It is a proven technology. It also solves biosolids regulation problems. You may be familiar that just this month, still in April, the governor signed new legislation disallowing biosolid land application unless it's class AA.

So we now have a few years to the entire state to convert to class AA. That will help, but that's not going to solve the biosolids problem. So the biosolids problem is that we take this enormously rich nutrient dense material and we put it on the ground as a soil amendment, as a fertilizer. And the grass grows like crazy. When you buy a pallet of sod, you know why it's so green? Because it's been eating biosolids. That's why it's so green and beautiful looking. But the problem is when it rains, it runs off. And where does it go? It goes into the Kissimmee River.

It goes into the local Okeechobee. It goes out to tributaries and causes algae blooms. So if we can stop or at least do our part in reducing the amount of land application of biosolids, we're doing the state an immense favor and the environment an immense favor. So I like it from that standpoint as well. Co digestion is a term also that we need to know because as it sounds, it would be blending.

And blending what? Well, blending organic fractions, blending yard trash or woody waste, blending biosolids. All kinds of stuff can go into an anaerobic digester and be taken out of the trash cycle. Reducing landfill dependence, we've talked about that quite a bit. And by the way, it's perfect for the strategic plan and the green plan of the city.

I'd like to just quote for a moment SCS Engineers, which is the company that worked for the Broward County Solid Waste Authority, they make this statement about anaerobic digestion, offer the greatest potential for increasing divergent rates. These technologies are cost effective, low risk, and a foundation to high performance waste management. And real quick, divergent rates, as Mark said, I want to make that perfectly clear. When you're talking about divergent rates, 100% is what you have. If you divert 70% of it, you still have 30% going to the landfill.

So when you hear very high diversion rates, like 95%, they're probably talking about just diverting organics or just diverting plastics. It's the total diversion rate that really is the number that we should be talking about.

This

is a slide that I threw in because I thought it was very interesting. These are other countries. I've told you about The US. I've told you about Florida. And this is very common, it turns out, all over Europe.

And this is interesting because throughout Europe they're using this technology both for RNG that either goes straight to the gas grid or it turns a turbine and makes electricity. But in all of these cases, they take what comes out of the bottom of the digester called the digestate. And that goes to compost. So compost is a commodity for them, not so much for us. So compost would probably not work so good for us.

It probably would be a landfill unless you were able to do something better, which we think we can. There are a couple of sites in Georgia that one is underway and one is permitted that is using the digestate for fuel. So remember that the digester produces the gas, but it also at the bottom produces what comes out of the bottom. Well, what do you do with that? You could dry it and you burn it.

So it has BTU value. So you can use that as a fuel. And the other thing that's good about this chart is I'll just kind of highlight here. In Ulster County, New York, just this month they awarded 150,000 ton per year digester project. And that's just about the size of the one that we would need, a little bit more than that.

And they do plan to use their digestate for landfill cover topping for waterproofing. Every once in while, you have to put a topping layer on the trash. And they're going to sell the gas to the local gas company. Last one there is in Spain. That is food only. And again, I said they do food separation at home in Spain. And that's what they're doing there. Okay. So if this is so great, why haven't we seen more of this? Why isn't it more common?

Well, very interesting. In recent years, there have been some very important and significant technological advances. The first is that digesters are now much more efficient than they used to be. There's a term out there, high solids digesters. These digesters take on more per batch than the old style.

And then there's a real key here, which is pretreatment. There are at least two and maybe more types of pretreatments that basically ramp up the material and make it much more digestible, make it much more efficient and more productive for the digester. And now you're producing a whole lot more gas than you were with traditional digesters. And that's why these things are coming around. Technology comes around with legislation.

Okay, so waste goes into some sort of pretreatment device. And then RNG comes out. It's a beneficial use being sold to gas providers after it's scrubbed and to their standards. And then the digestate, the stuff that comes out the bottom, it goes to either compost or solid fuel or landfill. And we believe that we can get as much as 70% of the total garbage produced by the city to not go to the landfill.

So 70% of the garbage ain't going to be garbage. And I think that's pretty exciting. Okay. We happened to know some folks at FAU. And we started a conversation to collaborate with them on a study.

And they have already done several on food waste, freshwater weeds, algae bloom stuff, and of course seaweed that we get on the coast in large quantities. They've already done those studies. And now what we're going to do is we're going to take some of this material from the digestate of the plant in Georgia and mix it with biosolids and run it through their digester to prove the concept from a very, very high technical standpoint. And I think we're all aware of the Sierra Club's zero garbage. That might not be the right word.

Zero wood. Thank you. They do support this technology, anaerobic digestion. And I think that's a big, big plus. So this is the project, single cart collection going to a pretreatment, which the first step is separation, separating what can be recycled in terms of financially viable product.

So there are seven types of plastics. Not all of them are recyclable. So we have to kind of face that fact. But the first step is to get everything out of there that has recyclable value. This will be basically a miniature Rooters right next door doing basically the same thing, taking out everything that is of value, the real recycling.

And then everything else will go into the pretreatment process, which is going to, like I said, turbocharge the material for digestion. It will go to a series of digesters. And then the gas will be scrubbed. And we do also have a potential on this project to include solar power, because this plant will need power. Wouldn't it be great to power some of it from solar energy?

And then the gas will go off to wherever it can be utilized. We know that it can go directly into the grid, the gas grid. We know that it can go to natural gas powered power plants sorry, natural gas fueled power plants. Even trucks and city trucks can be fueled. City vehicles can be fueled with it.

The bottom stuff, the digestate, could go to fuel. It could go to the landfill. It could go to compost, etcetera. Yard waste, woody waste, can also be put in. It wouldn't need to be separated. It would go straight into pretreatment. And of course, my favorite, biosolids can be put in there as well. And so how are we going to do all this? Basically, we have two things to do. We've got to buy the land and prepare to build it.

And then we have to buy the system. So we have two, I think, parallel courses to navigate. The city has identified basically the perfect location right next to the Rooter facility. And you see it there in green. And that's a 59 acre parcel that is owned by a community in Weston as a mitigation site.

And it is not all going to be used. We think there's something like maybe 24, 25, or hopefully less acres needed. So we're working on whittling that down. You see our favorite road there, Pembroke Road. It is intended that this project will not interfere with the Pembroke Road expansion. It will be probably following Pembroke Road's completion. And so we will have the East West connectivity with two lanes each way. And of course, US 27 would

be the main

corridor for the big trucks. And it kind of creates a sustainability park concept. The whole area maybe could attract other businesses as well. Okay. So this is a diagram or a flow chart of what has to happen. And first, we've got to buy the land. And we're in the process of that. We've already got the offer out there. We have to get government approvals to do what we want to do. So the site is a mitigation site.

It is currently a well maintained, managed, permitted mitigation site. We want to release a portion of that and replace that somewhere else. We want to mitigate the mitigation, so to speak. And so we need places to do that. You saw in the white paper there were some suggestions about city owned property.

We are working diligently on calculating all that and working with the agencies. And then we need to put together a plan to get the site ready for the vendor, which would basically mean excavating and creating finished land, flat, tabletop land, and a lake for water management ready for the vendor to come in and build. So as soon as we get all the off-site approvals, all of the government approvals, we can build the off-site mitigation. We can build the site. And now the site will be ready to go.

We all know that we did an RLI. That's why we're here. And we got some interesting responses. And we learned a lot. And now we're ready to go for an RFP.

We're ready to go forward with this solution. So this would follow a regular RFP process to select the vendor and then build it. This is a very schematic type of schedule. I'll just tell you that the idea is that the construction of the mitigation will land in the top portion up here, up here, will land at about the same time the construction of the facility would be ready. So if we start with the RLI, and we've already done all that, and we start with an RFQ, it's going to take time to do all that process.

Then that guy is going to need to design it. He's going to have to have time to design it. He's going to have to have time to permit it. He's going to have a number of permits he's going to have to pull, not the least of which is a state solid waste permit. So once we get all our permits done up here, including planning and so on and so forth, and getting the contractor procurement to do the actual work, we think that the two things will dovetail together in the end of approximately end of fiscal year twenty eight.

And then we can start actual construction and ground bake about one year later. So Mr. Gomes, would you like to finish? Sure.

So what we're bringing to you today is the recommended actions for our city commission to make. The first thing is to authorize us to move forward with the next step of going out for RFP for the design build project. We'd obviously have to put together a design criteria package and put that out to bid. So that's our first request. The next thing is to continue evaluating the SWA and what potential opportunities we have there, whether that is being a partner with them in certain aspects.

If we build this facility, we may be an asset to them where they could help direct some of that waste from the other municipalities to us. So that's a great opportunity for both them and the county and all our regional partners. Another thing is to continue talking to the SWA to explore the city commission's resolution that you've passed in the past of being against incineration and exploring alternative recycling and disposal opportunities. And then maintain that flexibility that we have with exploring bringing back recycling, whether that's an interim agreement with waste management or looking into C and D recycling and different opportunities that we may have there. So with that, I'll turn it over to the city commission to ask any questions or let us know your opinion.

Thank you. Thank you for your presentation and for the white paper and for all the work that has gone into this. This has been quite a journey over the last number of years. And it's been a difficult journey. And it's one that's required a great deal of patience.

I think it was before COVID that the county's working group, Solid Waste Working Group I know Commissioner Good was part of that, or at least attending those meetings. I'm not quite sure, Commissioner. And it's taken a long time to get the SWA to where it is now and to bring this matter to where certain decisions can begin to be made. For my part, I opposed joining the SWA because it had no strategic plan. It had no master plan.

And it said, but join us anyway, and we're going to charge your residents some money to do this essential function, which no one disagreed with accounting. It's their responsibility to dispose of the waste. By law, city attorney, I believe that the only responsibility cities have is to collect it and to take it to where the county authorizes it. But that's never stopped Pembroke Pines in the past from taking the additional steps. In fact, we have a long and rich history of taking those additional steps in ways that we always felt.

Maybe the county didn't acknowledge it at the time, but they certainly acknowledged the logic behind it. We're smarter than the proposals that were regionally available to us. For many, many years, we had an alternative process that did not burn trash and that created a scenario where we paid in Pembroke Pines a rate much lower than what we would have been exposed to had we joined the county system. It was smart. At some point, those economics turned.

And we started looking for what the next iteration of our journey would be. Would it be to join a regional system, Which in theory, I mean, as practical matter, as a proposition, I don't necessarily oppose. But the way it was presented was that without a plan and without a sense of what people were going to be charged, our prospect was to join this system and that we would be locked in for forty years. And that did not meet my business sense. It did not meet the business sense of this commission.

And we said, no. We'll wait. Maybe we'll join in the future. Maybe we'll have a better idea of our own. But we want to see what participation since it binds us contractually for forty years, we need more facts about what this really is. But we were clear about saying certain things. There were certain hell nos. If it's too expensive, hell no. If it involves incineration, hell no. If it smells, hell no.

If it's going to use or try to reopen the dump in Western BIC, hell no. Because it was closed for a reason, which was the leachate, which poisons the water that close to the Everglades. We've got enough trouble with our water and quality of life issues and all of that other kind of stuff. There has to be a smarter solution. And I think you had mentioned before that we had joined together with Miami Dade to oppose their incineration effort because it was excuse me, Miramar against Miami Dade's incineration plans because we were concerned, as we should, about the quality of life impact.

And I think there was a sense in Miami Dade that Miramar and Pembroke Pines were grandstanding. This proves that we're not. This proves that we're prepared to do the things that are necessary to truly stand up in a way that protects the environment and solves a thorny, difficult problem. I knew that then. And hopefully they'll find out about it soon.

There are a couple of things that are still hell knows to me. This may not smell. I don't care if you've got to build a glass dome over it. I don't care what material you use. It may not smell. That's intolerable. So you guys are going to have to give me a crystal clear, bulletproof guarantee it won't smell. Because the people out there are going to insist on that. I have to be able to tell them that that's the case. Another hell no.

It may not blow up because that would be disruptive. So you have to provide us with those kinds of guarantees. And I'm glad you're writing them down because those hell noes are not going to go away. It's got to be safe. It cannot smell. We've lived out there with the Rooter facility for how long was it, Charlie, that they were in business? About thirty five years, something like that?

Over years.

Over forty years. Guess what? No one even knew it was there. They were wonderful neighbors. We didn't hear them. We didn't see them. We didn't smell them. They did us a wonderful service out in the middle of nowhere where nobody lived, far away from anybody. And we didn't even know it was there. That's the kind of neighbor this has to be. I don't want to smell it. I don't want to hear it. I don't want it blown up. So you all have to provide that guarantee. And you have to procure that guarantee from whatever source you need to.

But it can't be hearsay. It has to be built on experience. Now, I hate to travel on business. I do it because I have to. The city has to be represented. And there's information out there and resources out there that have to be brought home. You pointed to a list. And you said there were examples. I'm sure there's a fuller list. There's many, many, many of these plans.

I'd like you to find the one that is closest to what our use is, that's nearby homes, that's in an urban environment like this. And I want to go out there. I want to see it. And if any other commissioner wants to come with me, we'll find a way to stay in a Motel six. And we'll go out.

Then I want to knock some doors in those communities. And I want to ask those people, what's it like to live around this? I want to know based on people who have lived around this thing that it works. I want to know. So I'd like you to find out where it'd be better if I could do it in English.

But if I have to go somewhere where they don't speak English, I'll bring an interpreter with me. But I need to know based on people actually, families living around a thing like this as we would that this works. And I want to have the comfort of being able to see that, yeah, they're great. You never hear from them. You never spell them.

Did we have one of these plants? I didn't even know it was there. I'd love to hear all those things. So that's the second thing. The third thing is if we can partner with the SWA, if this plan, which I'm Okay moving forward with except for the hell knows, if we can do business with our partners, sure, why not?

Fourth, it has to cost the residents who pay for it much, much less. I'm not going to take shots at anyone's price list. But what I just saw is much more than they're willing to pay. Next, I need this assurance. Are you going to put plastics in this thing or just organics?

May I? Yeah.

So some plastics can be recycled. Some cannot. Okay.

But it

can take plastics.

It can take some kinds of plastics. Those And that's Okay? It is Okay. Okay.

Now, you're also going to put the sludge in it?

Yes. Our hope is to. But that's why we're doing the study with FAU to prove it.

Okay. It can't smell. Right. Okay.

Glass dome. It

can't slow. Pardon? Glass dome. A

glass A dome. No smell on a glass dome, yes.

Now when you sell this, you're going to have the pellets, as I understand it, and the gas, or just the gas?

We're going to have basically the gas, not the pellets.

Oh, so we're off the pellets.

Well, that's the solid. And I don't know what form that will come in, but we'll have to talk about it. But whatever it is, it's to generate revenue to sustain the facility.

Okay. Well, I get it. I get it. So you're not you're not sure yet? What am I hearing? Are you not sure yet whether it's gonna be glass? Let me

ask it.

Mayor, we're going out for an RFP.

Okay. So they're gonna tell us.

See what kind of responses we get from companies.

Fair enough. And some of this stuff, is there going to be like EV gas? Is is that like a possibility? Can we use this gas for our vehicles and so forth? Can there be a gas station there?

Mayor, we're going to have to wait and see what the proposals say.

I don't know. We don't know. All right. Fair enough. And you know what?

Thank you for honestly saying it just like that. I'm for me personally, you're about to hear from my colleagues I'm for giving this an opportunity to convince me that this is a workable solution. The residents of Pembroke Pines, you should know, would like to go back to recycling right away. In my discussions with residents citywide, they'd like to see recycling once a month, not twice a month. They really don't need twice a month.

Some residents do need twice a month. If you really need twice a month or every week, get an additional can or mix it because we're currently mixing it now. But they'd like to go back and they'd like to be taught how to recycle properly. And they'd like to have a pickup at their house. And the condos want it also.

But that's a little bit more complicated because they're not in our program. But they'd like Mr. Dodge to go back to recycling as quickly and as efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. And if it costs people 1.5 or $2 or $3 more a month, even in these very, very difficult times, because it's about recycling, most residents not all most residents will say, Okay. So if we can just figure that piece of it out, if this is really about sludge and garbage by the way, most of our edible waste goes down the garbage disposal.

At least in my house it does. I don't put the only thing that goes in my garbage that's organic is bones, really, and papers, and plastic wrappings, and that kind of thing. So most of it ends up in the sewage treatment plant anyway. I don't know if you have a figure on that. At my house, it would be in high 80%, I would guess.

But I guess other people might have stinkier garbage. I don't know. But we don't at least in my house, we use our garbage disposal. So I'm supposing most of it is going to be transported from the sewage treatment plant to this location and then repurposed. And basically, that's it for me at this juncture.

I want to make sure that I'm crystal clear. I am not convinced on this 100%. But I like the direction that we're heading. And I like that you picked something that is better. And for those who aren't clear, there is no such thing as a 100% environmentally safe way to get rid of garbage.

There just isn't. But right now, we are doing exactly what the cavemen used to do. We get rid of our garbage by burying it or burning it. And in 2026, that's just not a good answer anymore. Here's a new answer that the cavemen people or the tree people could never have even envisioned. And I'm excited about it, but I'm not convinced about it. I'd like to see it proceed, but it has to happen along those lines of the hell no's. Can't smell. It has to be safe. We have to be guaranteed of it.

And personally I want be able to travel to places that have had this for a while along the same lines as us surrounded by houses you've to find one that we can go and visit inexpensively so that we can come home and have this assurance that I know it can work if that's true because I saw it. Vice mayor?

First, I wanted to thank Manager Dodge and you, the members of his team, for providing answers to my questions throughout this process. I did read the document. I came back, had multiple questions. And both administration and also industry experts, because I am the furthest thing from an expert in what the mayor called, what the caveman did, and how we disposed of garbage, this is not an area that, unlike Commissioner Goode, who is an expert in it, I am not. So I appreciate that both folks up here and out in the community who do this for a living answered my questions.

I wanted to put that on record. I do think, based on not just what I have read, not just what I have underlined and dog eared and highlighted in the questions that I have asked, it's certainly a well thought out proposal. Like the mayor, I definitely want to see I mean, he speaks first. So I was going to say much of the same thing in that I'd like to visit. I know there are similar facilities, I understand that.

But there is a community out there, which I visit frequently. They're just off of 190 I'm having a little bit of a cold. I'm sorry when I clear my throat. It's South Of West Pine Soccer Park. And I visit them frequently to make sure that their issues are addressed, everything from drainage to other matters.

And the administration helps address their concerns. So today's a first step. But assuming a few years in advance that this is a go, I will say it will require a great deal of community engagement, specifically with them and surrounding areas, of course. But if we think we're being over communicative, I think we still keep communicating, in other words, because they will have questions. I know there needs to be a and I don't know if you could pull back the slide that actually showed the area.

There. Okay. You see the COPP on the right of COPP recycling facility location? In your estimation, or I don't know if you actually have the number, what is that buffer? That space is a buffer from the facility. What is the buffer from those neighbors right over here on the right?

It's about 500 feet. But that's from the property line. The building is going to be closer to the west. And the circulation for trucks coming in, there's storm water drainage, there's lakes and everything else, that would be to the east of that. So probably it is further. And I don't know, maybe 600, 700 feet. We'd have to look at the site plan when we get there. And you have an opportunity to look at that.

Please invite me when you go out there. I don't know if you could walk in that space.

No, I don't think you can.

GREGORY Yeah. I'm not going to have any rattlesnakes. But I'd like to eyeball it because, again, you see that neighborhood. And those are our constituents, mayor. So we want to make sure that we can look them in the eyes and say, and by the way, invite them to these types of meetings and say, this is something you all do not have to be concerned with infringing on your quality of life.

So I wanted to put that on record in addition to that's not, as the mayor said, a hell no. That's a hell yes. We must have that kind of community engagement. I do think that there are a couple of points. I became a commissioner actually two years this month I'm sorry, two years next month.

And I came in with an open mind on the SWA. I was not here when prior votes were taken. And I understand regional approaches often work. But I've also seen them fail, not just South Florida I'm referring to in other areas. And I'm not specifically mentioning garbage. I'm saying any kind of regional effort in which you're having multiple governments come together under one authority, they don't always work out. Sometimes they do. So I came in with an open mind. And I've spoken with folks in the community. I have this presentation here.

But I do have to say that what I heard and what I read is a stop sign for me in terms of any further consideration at this time of the Solid Waste Authority and our participation in it. I don't like forty year interlocal agreements. I say this often. I'm 43 years old, forty years. That's most of my life.

And those types of long term agreements are very concerning to me. A couple of experts that I spoke with, one of the challenges that I see is, God forbid, the solid waste authority fail. And I'd love Commissioner Goodstaats on that again as the expert. But if they were to fail, it was presented to me that we could be paying significantly more within a decade of the authorities' failure of in excess of $100 maybe $120 $130 per ton. And there's precedent for that having happened is my understanding.

So I'd like this proposal again, I'm Okay with it moving today. But when it's ready to go, I'd like to be able to look at least my 47,000 residents and say that the city of Pembroke Pines is keeping the protection of you all and the rates that you're paying over the long term as the central focus of whatever it is that we're doing, basically as our North Star. And if this meets everything that the mayor said and again, I keep referring to him because he was the commissioner there for twenty years. So if anyone in the city knows the area and knows the viewpoints, it's him. I've learned recently in the last two years working with those constituents.

But I do think that if we can provide that certainty, that confidence to our rate payers for garbage, for recycling, that is a major victory for the city of Pembroke Pines. And I believe it will actually instill even more faith that our residents and businesses have in our municipal administration. I apologize. Just some comments. Mr.

Cooper, I really appreciate that the Sierra Club supports anaerobic digestion. I'm attracted to the idea of solar power in and around the area, especially when it comes to and they've done this throughout the state Florida Power Light with those floating solar that they use in lakes. If there is ever any opportunity, not just with this project, but around the city, that's something I would certainly look at and appreciate. Put me down, as I said and I know, Mr. Attorney, if the commission travels together, there have to be legal notices, etcetera.

But whatever has to be done, if we can visit these facilities in similarly sized communities with a similar profile, not five mile separation between homes and facilities, but something very similar to what we have. That's why I asked the manager the buffer. Put me down. I think we need to do that. With the mitigation, that's going to be very interesting.

Mitigating the mitigation site, I imagine you're not going to bring that in just the final proposal. I imagine there will be updates to the commission as we move through of different possibilities of what we could do with that. Because that's a complex process. It's not just, hey, we're taking that. You're taking this. So I'd appreciate any updates that come throughout that process as we're getting to the finish line. Overall, again, I really appreciate this. I read this on Friday night and again on Saturday. It was riveting material. It made me feel especially uninformed about these issues.

And I really appreciate the thoughtful approach that you all took to this and answering my questions and to I won't mention them by name, but the industry experts that I consulted to have their perspectives. I very much, very much appreciate what you all have done and shared with me. Since it was mentioned, the Miami Dade incinerator no longer while it's not being looked at for the formerly Opa Locka West site, There's a proposal by Florida Power and Light and other, I think, Spaniard business and others that are looking at another waste to energy facility south of that location by about another two and a half miles. But that proposal is coming back. I'm putting it on the radar in case we haven't researched it.

But that's out there. So even though that other battle mayor was concluded, And you're right, I do believe some in the Dade government thought it was a little bit of grandstanding, but we were being very serious. And Mayor Messam from Miramar and his residents were being very serious and saying, hell no, we don't want that 0.6 miles from the city of Miramar and 1.5 miles from the city of Pembroke Pines. So that's unrelated directly to this, but I did want to put that on the record. Again, thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. So I just want to start out just briefly. Thank you, Commissioner Hernandez, excuse me, Vice Mayor, for recognizing my awareness of this particular subject matter. I mean, do have a good knowledge, over thirty years in the industry, as an executive dealing with the solid waste management in a municipal government, actually being a member of the Resource Recovery Technical Advisory Committee and being a chair for a number of years for that, prior to it, sunsetted.

So having said that, I want to make a clear comment. I am really pleased with more so, I'm actually very impressed with this white paper and your presentation. I was concerned when this first was coming out that it would be skewed in a way that would support what it is that you're trying to do. And it is a very thorough and a very fair representation of the pros and the cons for either going with what the SWA is, its background, what it's doing, versus what it is that we're looking to do independent of that with the project. So kudos to staff, unbelievably impressed.

So thank you for all the efforts on that. I do want to just kind of because of how thorough and everything it is, I'm not going to sit here and give a dissertation and go page by page. I promise you. I can speak to it if it's necessary, but I think anybody who reads it and reviews your presentation will clearly understand what is before us tonight for decision. So the Resource Recovery Board let me just kind of give a little bit of background because I'm actually what's going on today isn't much different than what went on nearly forty years ago.

And forty years ago, you know, it was the issue was recognized. There's solid waste disposal issues in Broward County. How are you going to handle it? Oh, we got a solution. But you got to hurry up and sign up.

You got to hurry up and sign up, man. This is the only way to do this. And for some reason, there were a couple of cities that didn't do it, one of them obviously in Pembroke Pines. And if I may ask you, Mr. City Manager, what was the reason for why Pembroke Pines did not join the urgency that was being promoted at the time back in the '70s for joining the resource recovery system?

It was the seated commission at that time that felt that this was being rushed and there wasn't enough review. There wasn't enough information. There was no guarantee as to what the cost would be, very similar to what's happening today. And because of that, our city along with actually, it was four cities explored other options. And that other option we talked about is the facility that's still there today.

It's called Ritter Recycling. And if you look at the original building and not the waste management building right now, waste management purchased it. I had a video I found, and I played it. It looks almost identical to the waste management new facility, with the exception that the new facility only is accepting source separated recyclables. However, the Rooter facility took in all municipal solid waste through a series of conveyor belts and technology.

They source separated it, the ferrous metals from the aluminum, the paper, the cardboard. And at that time, they decided to compost. The issue with the compost that was made was a class A, and it was great. The only problem is the engineering that was done by this Minnesota firm, because the climate in Minnesota is a lot different than Florida, the table, the water table wasn't kind to them. In other words, the tunnels that were built under the compost floor got filled with water so no air could go through.

And that's what caused odors. And that's why it was closed for the compost element, but not the source separation of municipal solid waste. And that

was

studied, I think, for almost three years by those cities of Hallandale Beach. Hollywood was part of it at one time, Pompano Beach, Danube Beach, ourselves. And we had our own interlocal agreement among the four of us that actually decided to do this process rather than join the IRB.

So I guess we didn't jump then. And it was you got to hurry up and sign up. So sort of a little bit similar to what we're dealing with today. Another similarity is I could tell you that when years later after the resource recovery system was in operation and things like that, you know, it was getting to a point where we're coming to the end, the end of the thirty year agreement. And when they were getting to the end of the thirty year agreement, it was like, Okay, so what's the master plan?

What are we going to do after the thirty years is up. And there was never a plan that was presented. And the activity that was being done on a regional level, probably one of the reasons why it did get dissolved, was because there was it was no different than what and maybe it wasn't as good as what was happening with the Pembroke Pines at the time because they were just doing straight up burning material. And they had a couple of recycling programs. But the cost got astronomically high.

I mean, we looked on here. In 2022, the cost was topped out at what, dollars 87? I mean, in 2013, when the resource recovery system was sunsetting, it was over $100 a ton. So I mean, it was incredibly expensive. And yet, you weren't getting any additional benefits than what was happening with this small group of cities.

As a matter of fact, people were talking about they were so angry because they couldn't get out of that arrangement because it was very similar to what we're looking at today if you join the SWA. You have to stay in forty years. There ain't no out. There is absolutely no out unless there's a failure. And I don't know that they would ever let that happen. And we were talking about, can we go talk to Pembroke Pines and see if we can join them? Maybe we could slide some across the line and give it to them, you know? And maybe they'd help us out. But that didn't happen. So what makes it clear is that there was fear back then.

And there was an absence of expertise within some of these municipalities. And what happened with Pembroke Pines is that the expertise was here. And you're looking at the city manager, Charlie Dodge, who very clearly understands what happened then, took a risk, got into a better solution for solid waste disposal. And he's doing it again today. And I think he knows what he's doing.

Because you're talking about fifty years, forty plus in this role here as city manager, and we have our city manager making a recommendation to us through his staff to kind of take a look at another opportunity. And maybe he recognizes history is repeating itself as well. So,

good.

I want to say that what's being presented there's only twice in my entire waste career here that I've seen really progressive action. And one was actually in twenty thirteen, 'fourteen when the sun's setting of the resource recovery system. And you had San Bergeron come on board. And San Bergeron was actually doing a very good job of doing separating a material, was able to reduce the price by more than half of what it was in 2013, and giving a much better service. And I see what's happening today as being another opportunity to be progressive, taking this further than just being disposal in a burn facility or in a landfill.

You know, this whole thing about the biodigester, I mean, you're right. It is new technology. And we're seeing disruptive technology all around us every single day. And we're not fearful of looking at that opportunity for that technology, even though it is a bug farm. But it is a opportunity for us to lead.

What we're doing tonight is, you know, is we're looking at, you know, great options and things like that. And I don't know that just whatever is the decision of the city, you know, if we decide to move forward, you know, with the expiration of the project, I'll call it again, the RFP, it doesn't matter what decision we make because our decision doesn't impact anything that the Solid Waste Authority is doing today. Because the Solid Waste Authority exists or doesn't exist based on 80% of the members of the ILA today, and we are not a member. So if we decide that we want to join, where do we fit into the equation when we're not even a member? So they have to work on 80% of their current membership, not Pembroke Pines.

We're not even a factor. So any decision we make today doesn't change the Solid Waste Authority's trajectory. And I know that they're really trying hard to do all the right things because you've got some really good players in there. But again, as Damir said, there's still a lot of questions left. And they'll get it figured out at some point in time. But that could be many years from now and many years of expense that doesn't need to be done. And maybe not on top of the leading edge and disruptive technologies either.

That's, I think, Washington's dream. So

I do recognize that a lot of things, the uncertainties of the Solid Waste Authority, is really maybe not too much different than some of the uncertainties we have with this biodigester. Like I said, you guys did an excellent job of weighing the pros and the cons on both. I mean, you really did. And when I look at the amount of time, I see us maybe sort of in no different situation than the SWA is today. We have a current solution.

They got a current solution. They're going to use their current solution to initiate their stuff. And the only thing is we might be moving our timeline ahead a little bit more by trying to get an RFP in prior to the end of summer. And if it works, it's going to be years ahead of what the SWA is going to be able to complete. Because even looking at their timelines, even getting transfer stations in, they're five years out.

And we're looking at three or four years out to have a fully operational disposal process. But even still, in the end, because I will tell you the same thing happened with the resource recovery system back in the days, there's an opportunity to join. Again, there will be. There will be a lot of rhetoric about, oh, how bad it might be that you guys can't join. Or if you're going to join, we're going to hold your firstborn you know, hostage.

I don't think that's going to happen because in the old system, when they already had a lot of people, it was almost like begging the new cities that were coming online to join, you know, to join at no cost. Just join. Just don't worry. Be a participant because volume is the key for the SWA. It's the volume that makes the difference.

So we can join probably later if we determine that it's going to blow up, right? Or if it's going to smell or if somebody's hell nos of the mayor come true. So I think that we will have the opportunity to still but what's even more important is I think your recommendation, very well thought out. You've left some really great opportunities, whether it's participating as partners of sorts or doing just there's a lot of different things. When I look at your recommendations and the options that are associated with it, I just find that we got a lot of good things.

I think we're in win win situation, Mr. Mayor. Should we accept this recommendation and go forward? Because I do believe that it will let us be leaders in environmental stewardship. And I think that's what's the most important thing that our residents want from us. I mean, yeah, recycling. Yeah, disposal this, that, the other. But they want us to be environmental stewards. And I think you all did an exceptional job at creating opportunities for us to have that. So Mr. Mayor, I yield the floor at this time. So thank you, sir.

Thank you very much, commissioner. Before I go to Commissioner Rodriguez, you'll also need a plan B, as I'm sure you've thought through. Because anything could happen at this plan. It's down. It needs parts. It has to be turned off for a reason or whatever. And I'm sure that there can be an arrangement on an interim basis, if that should happen, to continue using transfer stations or whatever in the interim.

Well, we have a disposal contract that we can renew.

We're in

the process of bringing that to you. And we're also, as you suggest, we are looking the recycling component. Right. And we hope for maybe the second meeting of May to at least give you a report Wonderful. Of what that would entail.

But the that would take care of the municipal waste. But I'm sure you'll have a plan also for the disposal of the sludge, because that can't build up either.

Well, yes, we do. And there are some options that the county is looking at

as well.

Don't want

to take up time, but there's a

plan B. Oh, yes. Absolutely. Okay.

Thank you very much. Commissioner Rodriguez.

Thank you so much. So if you were here for the conversation on the budget, I started off with thinking outside of the box and making sure that we're innovating and that we're really looking towards the future of all these different technologies, including that of recycling and trash. So I appreciate very much the opportunity to look into this topic and to understand something that I obviously background is communications, not trash. So I appreciated how digestible the white paper was to understand that part. But I come with a slightly different perspective because I want to maybe ask my colleagues and the audience if you would like to raise your hand if you think the effects of climate change, fumes from incinerator, or landfill stop at city boundaries.

I don't think so. That is why I think whenever we talk about trash and recycling, we have to look at it from a regional perspective. My thought is that while we may recycle at 110% if we wanted to, the effects of others not recycling and others not using this technology still affects our residents. I mean, that's why we paid Miramar, or we helped Miramar with their lawyer bills so that they could fight the Miami incinerator. Because the fumes of incineration don't just stop at the county line.

They affect our residents as well. With all honesty, I used to work at the county. I've seen this from the county's perspective and a regional perspective, and coming from a different angle than maybe my colleagues. That's why I like to push back a little bit on some of the presentation that was given regarding the SWA. Sorry.

I have a question on whether we had a representative or a staff member at every SWA meeting, or at least the majority of them.

Mr. Dodge? Yes, we did.

Okay. And I understand that the presentation might have been the first part that Mr. Gomes gave, a presentation based on the people who were in attendance, based on maybe watching the meetings online as I have. But right now, the SWA currently is going to all of these different cities and presenting from their perspectives. You had a lot of questions, as do we, about what the SWA is planning to do.

There was even, I think, the question of why was there such a large distance between what the SWA proposed as our tonnage versus what we have. And frankly, we weren't there. Or if we were there, we weren't there to be part of the conversation to say, hey, this is incorrect. Did we send them a letter saying, hey, the tonnage that you have on here is actually incorrect. We have this tonnage as our estimate?

No. No, because we weren't part of the conversation. We're not sitting at the table.

Well, in fairness, I think that their number includes commercial waste. It includes I mean, it's a different number depending on how you look at it. So you've got condos and other multifamily structures that are not part of the city system. Their number may very well be right. That's not our number in terms of what our program is. We have a different number.

Understood. But I think it kind of highlights a little bit of what I'm trying to mention. I wasn't here on the dais when the decision was made to not join the SWA. I was actually sitting in the audience when there was a town hall by Commissioner Seippel regarding incineration. And I understand the reasons as to why we didn't join.

I get that from the past perspective. But when we then say we didn't join because they didn't have a plan, and now we're saying we won't join because we don't like their plan. Well, common denominator in that is that we were never part of the plan, that we could never participate in that. And when I was sitting in the audience and from the perspective of having worked at the county, I thought, I would really like Pembroke Pines to have a say in this. We have this wonderful plan here about anaerobic digestion and a plan to be innovative and to use new technology and to kind of change our own little world here.

But we don't live just in our own little world. We live in Broward County. And not being able to propose that or be part of the discussions of the SWA leads us to think that we can solve this problem just on our own for just our residents. And that's not the way that I see the regional issue of trash and recycling. And when we see these questions, for one, I would like the SWA to come and present from their perspective.

Because while Mr. Gomes' presentation is great, there were a couple of Swiss cheese holes in it. Because you don't have all the information. And maybe their people and their director might be able to present some of that information for us to make a truly informed decision. We can do that. I think we really should.

Think

I have to look up their number because they've been around for quite some time. And I don't know about you or anybody else, but I'm the mayor of the eleventh largest city in Florida. And they've never once picked up the phone to call me. But I keep hearing how they'd like Pembroke Pines to join. And I got to tell you that if I was doing a plan and I had a customer that really wasn't sure, I'd have invited them in. But we sent somebody. We sent the delegate. We sent our city engineer who was at each and every one of their meetings. And no one here ever said, hell no, we won't work with you. We just said, you don't have a plan, we can't join you right now. So I just wanted to make it clear.

No, I

understand we that. Can have them come in. I'm happy to do that.

But the thing is that if we had that perspective of it being a regional solution, maybe we would have stepped up. Just because somebody doesn't call you doesn't mean you then don't call them back. The phone works both ways.

DELL: Well, had them here commissioner, I understand your point. I want to give you your time. But I can't have they asked us to join.

Okay. So now we are asking them to come and present

They're to us. More than welcome to come. But between the time we made our decision and today, there has been no executive contact between these two organizations because they just decided to turn their back and move along.

Only They people like haven't. To They talk about about it at the League of Cities all the time. I'm there.

Is Beam Fuhr and Mike Ryan, my colleague Beam Fuhr, my friend I consider him a personal friend in addition to his time serving us very ably as a commissioner. And several of the other members who I talked to. Their CEO, I saw his resume. He's brilliant. He's never come to see us. So if they're interested in talking to us, they know where we are. And if you'd like to see them here, I'm happy to invite them.

Let's do them.

GREGORY That's exactly what I'm asking. And I think it's sure, the SWA hasn't called you particularly, but I've been in contact with them about trying to understand the perspective, what is the deadline for joining, all of these things. And I think an example of that for me was during Mr. Gomes' presentation was the idea that, well, if we join the SWA, they tell us what to do. Or if we join the they tell us what to do.

I think that's incorrect because then we become part of the SWA. It's not a ghost entity that decides these rules and that decides these things. No, they have an executive board. They have a board full of our colleagues from other cities that make these decisions. And if we were part of that decision making process, then we wouldn't feel as though it was this imposition as to the rules that we need to follow because we would be the creator of those rules.

We'd be a participant.

We'd be a participant.

If we had hell nos, like no incineration just outside our city borders and other people decided, I'm going to send that to you anyway, we'd have to live with it. And that was not a prospect that the commission and before I believe this commission now would want to revisit. I'm just saying.

I'm just saying

there were reasons we walked away.

Yes, but it's just the same way that we work on it here. It's democratic process.

We're not interested in that form of process.

Mayor, everybody else got to speak without I'm

I apologize to you.

We can do a round two of conversations. But I'd like to get through what I'm Yes, trying ma'am. To

I apologize to you. Go right ahead.

We are a very large city. We would have a say at the SWA, especially if we were bringing innovative technologies such as this one for them to look into and for them to analyze. Because mean, I talk to the people on the executive committee. Yes, it's one vote. But the same way that one of us comes here with a different perspective and can convince the others about what that perspective might mean.

If it's a good enough perspective, people vote for what you bring forward. We do that here all of the time. So I don't see it as an impossibility that that's something that can be done in a regional perspective. It's not an impossible thing to say, hey, let's bring this concept. And actually, I like anaerobic digestion. And I don't like this. And in the end, I believe the strategic plan doesn't mention incineration. They have a plan A that I believe mentioned a couple of different stations. But in that plan A, was incineration part of the plan?

JOSHUA Incineration is not part of the plan. However, I just want to mention that one of the scenarios there's five scenarios one of those scenarios did consider anaerobic digestion. They moved forward with a different plan, which is scenario A.

And one of my questions is, if they analyze anaerobic digestion for their plan, why weren't they able to push forward on it?

That's a question for

the SWA. Those are the kinds of questions that I'd like the SWA to come and provide to us. And then if you can go back, I believe there was a $178 per ton number. It was earlier in the presentation. So from my understanding, because I reached out to a couple people, the 178 number would be a maximum, correct?

Because Hollywood just got a bid for 110.

So the 178 we're referencing here is the waste management contract that they offer to other municipalities.

But it's not 178, from my understanding. And maybe you would like to.

Yeah, so one of the things I mentioned, it fluctuates based on a couple different things. There's a commodity value index that is updated every month. There's also a contamination rate. If a contamination is over 10%, then we have to pay additional charge for the waste management. That includes transmission and disposal.

So just to clarify, it's a one seventy eight maximum, not

Not exactly. It could go up. It could go down.

If I can make a point of clarification, I do believe that Hollywood has its contract not with waste management. Is that correct?

Okay. That could be true. That would be a different Then

it would be with whatever. But there's like a cheaper price out there that we'd I guess we have to see that there's like a range there in my perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. So the one thing we have to consider is disposal rates and also the facility. So if we're taking it to a further facility, that might increase collection costs. So it might be a greater impact even though you have a lower disposal at a different facility.

Okay. That makes sense. And I guess the overall point on this side of what I'm trying to say is that, in my perspective, shutting the doors on doing anything with the SWA doesn't make sense to me because I genuinely believe it's a regional issue. I also think that, let's say, they looked into it and they said, actually, this is not a viable plan for whatever it is the cost, the time, the permits, the blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we see here that there's only one in Ulster Cone, New York that's actually in The US, and that's functioning, correct?

This is not an exhaustive list of all the anaerobic digesters in Indonesia.

Okay. In our scale, can we get an understanding of others then?

Yes,

ma'am. The one that I listed there is because of its pre treatment technology. It was only selected for that reason. I'm going to address the mayor's list and attempt to identify those that make most sense.

I'd like to see because I mean, it's a rather small lesson. I understand what we're looking at is kind of newer technology. But I want to make sure that with how horrible permits are here in The United States, we are actually able to do this at scale for a city of our size. And I see here the tons per year. That makes sense to me.

And this could be comparable. But I do want to make sure that there is obviously a reason, at least at the SWA and maybe in other places, where this wasn't feasible. So I want to understand what are the risks and in more depth where else we would be able to see this. And I'll sign up to go see a trash facility any day, I suppose, with the goals of bringing this forward. But to close out my first point, I really think that this needs to be a regional concept and that we need to participate with our neighbors, with our other municipalities in order to come up with these solutions.

And going back to the budget session, one of the reasons that I want to bring together an intergovernmental affairs person, because we are missing out on a lot of things maybe that we get from other municipalities to bring to the city of Pembroke Pines, or for us to do better for our community as a whole and our region as a whole to bring them these kinds of things. So I'd like, for one, the presentation to come from the SWA, and for two, for us to keep our minds open as to all the different options. And if we can propose this to the SWA as a viable option, I'm sure they would be, at the very least, happy to hear because or open to hearing from us. Because one of the things on here when this project is being proposed is that in the future we would bring in other municipalities and maybe partner with them and make it a more regional approach. But banking on that when not even having to talk to the SWA or other municipalities about this topic is kind of saying, well, everyone's coming to my birthday party, but you haven't even sent out the invitation.

I want to make sure that when we're saying on here in the future part of the scalability of this is for us to invite other municipalities that we've actually had the conversations before we make concrete decisions. I'm Okay with continuing to see the FRQ and finding out pricing because that might have been what stalled other organizations from going on with this because it might be expensive. It might not be. Whatever, I'm Okay with going on to learn more about this and agree with my colleagues to continue that conversation. But simultaneously, we need to continue the conversation with the SWA and talking to them, whether it's meeting I mean, they're public meetings that they have.

So going to present to them or when they come to present to us, explaining to them our perspective makes the most sense to me. Because on here, it says that we would invite them at some point, or that we can make it scalable to that larger regional approach, but then not telling them before we make an executive decision doesn't line up in my perspective.

Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner

Schwartz? I

think wait, Mr. Holmes had.

No. I just wanted to completely agree with the point of inviting them. But I don't think we're at that stage because we have to go through the RFQ process to really figure out what that final plan of what we're building before we could invite someone to

Even participate in that before we do that, I think we should have them in. Commissioner Rodriguez wants to hear from them. I'd like to hear from them. So we can have them again afterwards on more specific topics. But if they want to come and talk to us, that door is always open.

I mean, there's nothing that stops us from planting the seed going to either telling them when they come to us, like, hey, thank you for your presentation. This is kind of what we're thinking. I understand that this document maybe now it is. But when it was first released to us, it was not on the website.

Is it now on website? I'm sure they're watching.

Is it now on the website?

This document can be shared.

I think we need to put it on the website. Because if it's something that the SWA may be interested in, but they don't know that we're doing this because no one's told them

Well, they know. But go ahead, put it on the website.

But they don't know the specifics of this. I guess now they know the presentation. But the white paper holds a lot more information than the presentation. And then I understand that that kind of concludes that part one for me. Part two is why or how are we going to work through the, I guess, requests for recycling that our residents have been asking for as we build up to the plant? Because I think the year's 2,930 from here. We'll be doing recycling prior to that.

Yeah. So we've been engaging waste management. And we're looking at opportunities that we can explore with them with the new recycling facility. And we're going to continue exploring options that we could present to the city commission on how we could potentially move forward with recycling.

Okay. I see it on Nextdoor. I see it on Facebook. I see it kind of everywhere. People are always asking about the recycling. And I'd like to give a concrete answer sooner rather than later because I came onto this dais with the plan. And I've asked the city manager multiple times, what's the update? Where are we doing recycling? And he's thankfully been like, Okay, we're working on it. But I'm getting a little impatient, to be completely

I did state earlier that we were bringing it back to the commission on May 20.

Okay, perfect. So we'll look at that when it comes. And then the last part is when we think about contemplating and maybe it's a little early to ask for this. But when we think about working on a project of this size, of this innovative capacity, and this kind of different vision, I really think we need to have robust community engagement and communication on it. Because let's say we decide, whether it's in partnership with the SWA or completely on our own, to go into the direction of doing something like this, the misconceptions of even something like incineration yeah, it's bad.

But is it as bad as people think it is? Plenty of other places have it. And so there's plenty of misconceptions about trash overall. And I'd like to be able to educate our residents as to what this means for them. Will it be stinky?

Will it not be stinky? How much water will this use? How much electricity will this use? And get in front of any Facebook rumors that may come up because that's the last thing that I want to do, invest however much this may cost, millions upon millions of dollars, and then have something like that town hall and incineration where the rumor mill got so far down the line that no one was able to control it. And that comes from us initially having a good plan about how we're informing our residents about what we're doing regarding recycling and regarding our garbage plan for the future.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Before you go, I'd just like to offer something to Commissioner Rodriguez. So great that you're interested in this to this level. So if I can offer to you a resource. So there are a number of audio recordings of the Solid Waste Working Group in the development of the interlocal agreement that created the SWA. And it's on the Broward League of City website. So it's a really great resource if you have time to plug in and just listen to some of those conversations, I think it will give you even more of a flavor for the things that you talked about today.

Commissioner Schwartz.

Thank you. It's a really good discussion. I have to admit, I think the highlight is seeing John Cooper in the house again. And I thank you for that. Colleagues.

Mr. Cooper brought this city through a very challenging time and restored the confidence of the public based on his work product. So it is with that I've been trying to figure out who's been behind this white paper, who's the author, who's the printer, who's the grammar and spell checker. And having you being a part of it gives me great confidence in being just impartial and leaving the politics out of it. The working group, the SWA, when the prior commission took this on, it was a you're welcome to join us, but there's a fee for that.

You're welcome to come in their house, but you had to buy a ticket. You can have a seat at the table, and we're just going to tell you, we're to feed you some stuff. And you may not like it, And we basically lost all leverage. It wasn't something that the prior commission was willing to entertain. Mr.

Gohms said something early on in his presentation that has just been sticking on me, and that was facts. You mentioned that the SWA provided how much we've been generating, and they're off by 75%. See, that is what the prior commission was concerned about. So before the SWA comes to this building, every single one of those cities and every single one of those numbers needs to be audited. I want to know where they got their information from before they come in front of this commission because I want them to bring facts.

And I'm really curious to know how they came up with our 100,000 I want to know. Scribner error? Maybe it was just an oversight? Maybe four people just added things together incorrectly. I don't know where it is. But I would ask that the city manager get with the executive director of the SWA and get those numbers worked out before anybody comes to this podium. And once they get this worked out and they're able to match everything up, by all means, they're welcome. Mr. Mader?

I'll make contact with the new executive

director I appreciate that, Mr. Dutch.

They arrived at those numbers.

So Pembroke Pines, we've had this independent streak. It's been our culture for now sixty six years. Started a charter school system. We were told good luck. We funded SROs before MSD.

We entered in a waste ILA that predated a guardrail on Flamingo Road. The vision of the prior commissions is what I love about this city because we never forget where we came from. There's a historical perspective in this room, this historical knowledge in this room. And this is the reason why when I said no to joining the work group, I made a motion to prohibit any elected official from serving in a capacity in a work group or on the SWA. Because I want politics out of the most important thing next to first responders.

Waste disposal is the best thing government can do and is public safety 101. You have to have a clean environment. We can talk about smells and obnoxious odors. Let's just talk about just straight out disease and how you dispose of things. It's the one thing I think government can do well, and it should never be privatized.

So I see a great opportunity for Broward, Miami Dade, and Palm Beach to come together. Because right now, it's just we're isolating ourselves in a Broward bubble that the SWA is going to solve Broward's problems. How about we look at it from a South Florida issue? Why are we not having those discussions? I'm for learning more about the impacts of and if you don't mind, would you mind going back to the cities in The United States Of America that has this just real quick.

There we go.

All

right. The ones in The US?

Fulton, Georgia. That's The US, yes. I have to ask.

Okay. Fulton. Else?

I think you want the other one.

US? Yeah, there was a big slide. You Spain in there. It's all on the same one.

Or the table. The table.

Yeah, the table, yeah, just so I can see it real quick.

Look,

I suspect because of the industrial nature, the zoning, the land zoning codes, I suspect this could be unincorporated in county owned property. I suspect that. I also suspect that they have a county manager, a town manager, city mayor that we can invite via Zoom to have these discussions about how did they come up with this process. Perhaps it can start with our city administration to reach out to the professionals, find out how they came about it, how long it took, were there surveys? I do believe, Mr.

Dodge, you had mentioned some years ago that you took a tour.

I did take a tour of the Cordell

The Cordell. Yeah. You also mentioned, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in Washington State. Was it

No, no. The only one I visited, the one was in Cordell Fulton. Hadn't been in operation yet. But Cordell, as the mayor has stated, is not a good example for us because it was in a very rural area, not around residential. So we're going to have to really hunt and see any facility and how close they are. I do know there are some in Europe that are right downtown in the middle of the city. It might not be this process, but we'll search those out.

All right. So how long has it been? Four years, five years that you visited? When I first heard about this visit, I got quite excited about it of the possibilities of tomorrow. What could this actually be?

I do understand that the twenty eighth city SWA, their master plan that they passed is not including incineration, which is great. I believe that they are making their final master plan approval sometime late summer, August, or somewhere around that. This is what I'm hearing. I'm also receiving phone calls from elected officials in the cities that haven't joined the SWA. And they want to know the history of Pembroke Pines.

So colleagues, we are not working in a vacuum like of Hollandao and Deerfield. They're concerned. Hollandao and Deerfield. They're concerned. Want to thank I'm

concerned about what? I'm not following you.

This is all going to work. Like why is Pembroke Pines why didn't we get into it? Why are we waiting? Let get back to my last thoughts.

ALAN DEAL was our partner, right?

No. No, I'm talking about the SWA, the working group. The three cities that there's 28. There's 31 of us. There's three missing. And that's us, Deerfield, and Hollenville, if I'm not mistaken. So I want to thank the Broward League of Cities for the amount of work that they put in to this process. I don't believe this was even possible without their organization to get the ball moving forward. I don't believe this was even possible to do that. And they've worked extremely hard.

One of the things that also I recall years ago, early mid-2000s, when it came to environmental was deep well injection and how controversial that was. And Mayor, if you may recall, this property was actually considered as a potential location at a very small period of time for deep well injection.

And look at how technology

is And look how technology is moving.

Everyone agrees that it's a smart idea. Years later, your concerns from before aren't there anymore, right?

But yet, the latest PFAS, who would have thought this six, seven years ago? It wasn't even on our tongue. Maybe even in our eyeball with contact lenses. But it wasn't We were swimming there. Everyone

was. So

this is a really good conversation. I can't find anything uncomfortable or even disagreeable with this white paper. I can't find anything to say that's anything objectionable. It's an excellent work product, period. And I would love for it to be shared with the public because I do believe it can actually make the changes that we did with charter schools, with SROs.

This is one of these things that a conversation on a Wednesday night in a little sleepy city called Pembroke Pines, Florida could actually create a more of a wider conversation about how can government work better together to solve the things that, quite frankly, if it's going to be forty years from now, there's a high percentage that most of us won't even be alive forty years from now. So we have to get this right. I'm going to be around. I know. We have to get this right.

I'm sorry. I'm

sorry. That's Okay. The pressure that the county has put on this municipality in the past, I get the same feeling with this SWA. I need to have an open mind. I need to trust people. I need to trust what I'm hearing. I need to verify the facts. But I remember a little over a decade ago, county commissioners saying, listen, if you don't join this thing tonight, we're moving on.

Yep. Remember that? I do.

And it's still the worst vote I ever took on this commission. We can't have another 09/11 disaster. We can't. That system failed.

Well, I don't know about that.

That system failed kids.

And

All right, let's stand through it.

SWA has to work. I don't think they are ready yet. They're just not I think they have the structure. I think we have some conversations. I'm going to lean really, really hard into my colleague, Tom Good, because this is his wheelhouse. I'm going to lean into my colleague for guidance. I trust him. I trust Mr. Cooper. We got one shot at getting this right, folks.

One. And that's whether or not we join or not. How it gets put together we're not going to be able to get it back because they are going to move on with us or without us. So I don't want to feel rushed. I welcome them. But they need to bring receipts. They need to bring facts. With that, I yield. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So a couple of things. And if we want a second round, we can stay. But I just want to make this clear. The first thing is I will be here forty years from now because Lisa hates to take out the garbage to the curb. And I just refuse to put her through it. Like it or not, I'm going to have to hang around. You've been eating your vitamins. That's correct. The second thing is the city of Pembroke Pines Commissioner has never enjoyed nine eleven service better than the one it has right now.

And while there were a lot of stories in the past and a lot of good things that happened here in the city, we now have audited verifiable facts about how many calls, how long it took, what took place, who did what, and everything else. And there have been issues in terms of hiring and this and that. And I'm only taking up our time to say because you brought it up. But at the end of the day, the level of service that we have right now at the price that we pay for it, which is zero because it comes out of our county taxes. And that money is now DELL: available to make our fire department and our police department and everything else so much better.

It has never been better. They answer the phone calls, I think, 90% within two seconds or

something It's like P1, P2.

We have P1, and those are measured. Pembroke Pines never measured those. So we're much, much better off. We're also better off in the home consortium. That's the home program consortium. County runs it as a countywide program. Just recently, Commissioner Rodriguez, Commissioner Goode, and I went to the Casa Apartments, which were purchased in part with our home consortium dollars. It's a program that works. There are other examples of county regional programs. This city has never walked away from a regional program.

But when a town hall meeting was called on this subject, in the midst of a scare that was put out no knows who, but it wasn't from this commission about an incinerator is coming, an incinerator is coming. And that town hall was variously described as informational and a blank show. The people were asked, will you take incineration off the table? And that's when the guffaws started happening. The meeting fell apart because folks in Pembroke Pines are adamant.

They do not want to live in the shadow of a smokestack. They just don't. And you know what? I understand that point of view. They don't want it. So we are elected to protect that point of view. They did not have a plan. The plan that they have now can change. They did not have a cost. The cost that we had seen is expensive.

Maybe it turns out to be a bargain after we get our RFP. We'll see. The process that we're using is one they agree with. Perhaps they want to partner with us. Perhaps we'll sign them up. And while the problem is not just regional, the problem is worldwide, There are a lot of folks who can't seem to come to terms with it. We've never shut the door on the SWA. We've never shut the door. That door has always been open. They've chosen not to pursue a customer.

That's Okay. No one here is offended by that. But no one should make it look like we're the ones that walked away from that relationship. They came to us with a business proposition. And we said, no. That's it. It didn't work for us. It didn't work for Pompano. It didn't work for Hallandale. Are those the three?

Yes.

Okay. And that's all there is to it. If anyone on this dais gets a call from an elected official saying, I'm worried and I need facts, that information should be given to the manager so that the manager can respond. Have you gotten a call from anyone, any of your colleagues saying that they're concerned about how we're proceeding? I don't think so, right?

No, no, mayor.

I've never asked you that question. It didn't occur me to ask. Because when city managers have a question, they ask it of their fellow city managers. They get an answer right away. So I think that this is a good conversation.

I think that there's a reason that we got to this place. I'm not at odds with the SWA. If they want to do business with us, that door is always open. We never shut the door to business opportunities in the city. But we just don't agree that what they proposed to us from our perspective and this is not a shot at any of the other 28 cities, each and every one of which I have respect for. But it didn't compute for us. That's it. It just didn't compute. And when we tried to make it compute, the answer was maybe we'll do incineration. We don't know yet.

And that wasn't good enough for Pembroke Pines. So we're our way down another path of exploration. I think it's a great path of exploration. I'm proud of the conversation we had and of everything here. And if there's anything further, Mr. Dodds, have

anything else?

Yes, yes, mayor. I just want to understand that I assume we can move forward with the RFP so we don't waste time. Because we need to make an answer before our Well, office Mr.

Goring, are allowed to draw consensus at a workshop? Or does that question have to be posed at the city commission meeting?

Mayor, I don't