Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay. Good evening. I'd like to call the order of the Infrastructure Planning and Sustainability Committee meeting of September 9th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Council Member Diaz? Absent. Council Member Hines?

Here.

Vice Chair Sadate? Here. And Chair Wolf? Here. All right. Moving on to public comment. I'm just going to check to see, since there's no one in the room, is there anyone online before I read everything? There's nobody. Okay. If you are interested in making public comments, please raise your hand. Okay. And as always, folks come in in the middle and we can always circle back. All right, we're going to jump right into our briefing items. We have one briefing item today, and that is the Solid Waste Management Fleet Alternative Fuels Update. And we have Andrew Torres and Jules Sipes from Environmental Services. Come on down. I should have asked ahead of time. I'm sorry.

Good evening, Chair Walker and members of the committee. My name is Andy Torres. I'm the environmental services department. We're here tonight to present an informational update on Solid Waste Utility's use of alternative fuels and vehicle emission benefits resulting from policy changes enacted under the City's Climate Action Plan. In 2019, the Solid Waste Utility set a goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 25% and we're excited to share those results with you tonight. We have successfully transitioned 72% of our collection and transfer fleet to renewable natural gas, which has allowed us to exceed our emission goals. Reflecting back on some of the significant policy changes that helped us get to where we are today, In 2008, under the Climate Action Plan, there was a recommendation to purchase alternative fuels, vehicles, when they became available. The technology in the solid waste industry was not available at that time, and it wasn't really available probably until about 2012. In 2015, we ran a pilot with one compressed natural gas vehicle and a fueling sled that we purchased temporarily. From the pilot, we learned that we could successfully use compressed natural gas with the collection technology that was required for us to do our jobs. And later, in 2016, under the Environmental Action Plan, there were recommendations and an action specifically called out to convert the solid waste fleet from diesel to renewable natural gas. We were also, as part of that action, requested to put together a 10-year replacement cycle to transition our fleet. And so we're there now. It's been just over 10 years, and we're excited to share the results. from where we came from to where we're at.

Next slide.

So there's also been an evolution in alternative fuels. As you can see here from the table, alternative fuels have evolved to offer higher energy density and lower carbon footprints compared to traditional petroleum. When evaluating alternative fuels, energy content is typically measured in British thermal units, or BTUs, and the environmental impact is quantified in metric tons of CO2 per billion BTU, in other words, MMBTU for short, to provide a direct normalized comparison. As you can see from the table, The cleaner burning fuels are renewable diesel, renewable natural gas, and electricity. To put this into perspective, one gallon of diesel equates to about 22.45 pounds of CO2. In 2025, solid waste collection and transfer fleet drove approximately 1.4 million miles If the fleet was still running on diesel, we would have used approximately 500,000 gallons of diesel, which would produce over 11 million pounds of carbon emissions. So I'm going to transition the next slide over to Joel to talk about more of our current state. That's kind of where we came from. for Joel to share with us where we're at today.

Thank you, Andy. Moving on to this slide, this is showing that evolution that Andy talked about of fueling of our vehicles. So the yellow is that renewable natural diesel for the R89 renewable diesel that we've started to introduce way back in 2014. And then as Andy talked about, you'll see the green for natural gas vehicles starting to come into play. And it was, the first was purchased in 2014. You'll see a little sliver there, but at 2015 and beyond, it's really starting to grow. And then you'll see that our gasoline vehicles have been decreasing over the years. And we fully phased out standard diesel in between 2020 and 2021. And so now our fleet is purely either R99 diesel or renewable natural gas. Some of the small vehicles are gasoline, and then we've also been introducing electric vehicles into the fleet. Next slide, please. So our fueling station currently in solid waste management. This is kind of an overview of what it looks like. In 2024, we began the process of researching renewable natural gas and how it would work in our fleet. It turns out that it was a direct drop-in fuel that could be a direct replacement for just the typical compressed natural gas. We went through the facilitation process, Boston Energy was selected to provide RNG, and they are the ones that provided to us. They produce their RNG from methane capture with dairy-based anaerobic digesters, so they have farms kind of all the way down the west coast, California, Oregon, Washington, and they capture this methane from the manure of cows, and they put it in the pipeline, and it gets shift up to, it goes to PSE because it actually is our provider of gas, but it goes into the pipeline, kind of like an electric grid, and then that's how we get our renewable natural gas. Next slide, please. This slide's going to give a breakdown of our fuel costs over the last two and a half years. So you see at the bottom, it's the blue line, that's our natural gas costs. So when we had just pure compressed natural gas, we were paying about $49,000 a month for fuel costs with the introduction of renewable natural gas. And it's cut that in half because we were able to do what are called ring credits. Those are sold on the federal market. And the company, Moss Energy, handles a lot of that for us. And then we get a portion of that revenue. So it cuts our fuel costs in half even more. The orange line above is showing if we were still running diesel in these vehicles, how much we would be paying per month. So in the last, you'll see that last month there at the end, June 2026, we saved $176,000 just in one month. This graph here, this whole graph represents about $3.3 million over two and a half years. And when I extend it out to 2021, it kind of, it's hard to read on the graph, but it's about $6.5 million saved over that time. Next slide, please. And so looking to the future, as Amy talked about, we transitioned the fleet. We started with the collection vehicles and the long haul trucks that are hauling the most weight, there was no option for those to be compressed natural gas until just recently. So we purchased our first natural gas truck. We've been running it since May of 2026. And you'll see the kind of differences up there. The typical diesel truck will get about three and a half miles per gallon. This CNG truck is slightly less of 308, but you'll see the fuel costs per gallon of fuel. $4.74 is for a 12-month average when you reduce it down to just like the last four months based on how fuel prices have skyrocketed. It's more like $5.69 a gallon. Whereas the natural gas, with our credits and everything, we're only paying about $66 a gallon in a way. The trucks travel around 160 miles a day, so when you break that down, the typical diesel truck costs $212 just in fuel costs a day, whereas a natural gas truck only costs us $34 a day. That number shoots up at basically $160 more a day based on these last few months in diesel prices. And then, yeah, the next slide are then looking to the future even further, the electrification of the fleet. which has begun also. A little bit slower because we're still evaluating what's gonna work best in our operation, but currently we are looking at most of our supervisor vehicles and our work vans around the site are electric, whereas we have 20 of our, we call them the small fleet vehicles, pickups, vans, vehicles like that. We have three of our box delivery trucks are fully electric. Our yard tractor, those stay on our site. They move the trailers around before the long haul tractors take them out. And then we have just taken delivery of our first rear load collection truck, fully electric. So it hasn't quite gone into service yet as we just took delivery and we're getting it ready and we're hoping in the next few weeks to months we can have that out on the road, collecting garbage in the city of Tacoma. Next slide. That's the end of our presentation.

Great. Thank you so much. I'm going to just open it up to questions, but I'll start with you since you're right here. I can't see council over here. That's fine.

I have a question. If you go a couple of slides back to the bar graphs that showed the different vehicle type, I just wanted to check on the bottom. Are we going until like this year?

Yeah, I believe it shows up through 2020.

So my question was, what should we expect in the next years? Like which pieces do we expect to grow? Is it supposed to stay where we are right now?

Great question. So I don't know if it's possible to pull that up. Yeah, I'm working on it. Sorry about that. Okay. So the transfer operation plate, the long haul tractors that Joel was referring to, now that we have 15 liters, access to 15 liter engines from Cummins, we can actually purchase, and we plan to purchase more, transitioning more of the transfer fleet.

So more of the R99 renewable diesel would go down. So the yellow would go down and green would get bigger, do you anticipate?

Renewable natural gas would get bigger, yes it would. And ultimately, and we didn't share this, are going to retain some renewable diesel vehicles in our fleet for emergency and contingency purposes. We're an essential service provider to the hospitals, grocery stores. If for some reason we have an actual disaster when it doesn't happen, but we want to be prepared and having multiple sort of fuel sources is something that helps us be more sustainable during those times of crisis. So we won't completely get rid of renewable diesel. We'll still use it. It is a clean fuel to use.

What is renewable diesel? I don't think I've ever heard of renewable diesel.

Yeah, so it's a plant-derived, all-natural, I don't know the whole chemistry about it. I just know that it's plant-based fuel. Whereas you have like a V20, a V5, V20, those are biodiesels. Those you're taking regular diesel and you're adding typically like a cooking oil, they're turning it into and they're combining them. Those are a lot less stable. So like in winter, I know, well, I wasn't here at the time, but they're having trouble. The fuel like hardens in the winter. Whereas renewable diesel doesn't have any, it's diesel, but it's made from renewable sources.

And my next question, three, can we go a couple of slides forward where we had all the math on the miles per gallon? By the way, I love this. Would love a call out that said that we saved $3.3 million. Yeah, this one. No, you were on the right one. I did a quick calculation. I think I got it right. You're saying that on these long hauls, how many of these long hauls do we have in our fleet? Is it just a handful or is it like?

It's 16, right? It depends on the day of the week, but there's 19 in the fleet, but I think between 11 and 14 or whatever.

Okay. So it's not a small amount because if I did the math, the cost per mile driven is like $1.30 versus 2 cents. Right.

It's amazing.

And that's really what matters because miles is what we put on these trucks, right? Because if I just take $212 divided by $160 versus $34 divided by $160, I think that's kind of what you're going to get. So that's pretty amazing. I think, actually, that might be it. I'm looking at all the notes I put in. I do think it's really funny that we have, you know, farm-derived methane, CNG, you know. There's a lot of jokes I could make about that, but I do think that's really hilarious because now I have an answer to some of my constituents who ask about, like, how are we adding to the environment? Like, hey, we're taking some of the waste from dairy farmers all over the West and using it to collect your garbage. We are, yeah.

Thank you. Council Member Hines, do you have any comments or questions?

Just a couple, and I'll keep it relatively short, seeing as there's a game on here in a few minutes. I don't know why we're having a meeting right now. Anyways, thank you for the presentation. I think Councilor Solly got to a point that I had, which is I guess I'm very happy we converted from diesel to CNG. When you look at diesel prices right now, even my son was like, oh my gosh, diesel is $7 a gallon, and he's 13. Did you say exactly how much we've saved?

if we if our whole fleet was running in diesel versus where we're at now like how much we've probably saved so on on average looking at the total face and we're averaging about one million dollars in savings per unit and so we're at um probably just over six million dollars is that somewhere in that wall yeah since 2021 it's a little over six dollars yeah so i mean Go ahead.

No, I mean, it's not budget dust there. That's actually real money. So I think that's really good.

Yeah. And we didn't share this in the presentation, but just for point of reference, the return on investment, the difference between the diesel truck to the renewable natural gas truck, the ROI is about it's between two and two years. It's two point something years. for an ROI just on the delta for the purchase of the truck. The capital investment is closer to about a $10 million investment. So averaging about $8 million in savings per year, it's about a 10-year payback. And the facility will be around for another 20 years at least probably.

Yeah. No, it's really good. I mean, I think it's a really good indicator of just kind of how doing what's better for the environment actually could save us money in the long term. So I think that's great. I think also just there's a fuel cost associated with this, but also the maintenance costs. Do we see they're easier to maintain? I've heard that CNG vehicles are easier or require less maintenance than, say, a diesel vehicle. Is that true? Or, I mean, are we seeing any kind of cost savings there?

we're seeing because a typical diesel truck has DPF, diesel particulate filters, and then a depth fluid on top of that. So a CNG truck won't have to fill any of those fluids, won't have a filter replaced after three to five years, which are very spendy. I had it in my notes, but a natural gas truck technically has a longer service interval between well changes. We haven't explored that yet because it's easier to keep the fleet consistent for now. We just have the one long haul truck. But yes, there are monetary advantages to the maintenance of the trucks, too. And the fuel doesn't have any heavy metals like a diesel would and stuff like that.

I think that's great. Probably less things leak off of it, too. I mean, there's lots of other important pieces that make these even more environmentally responsive. A question I have, so looking at the presentation about the renewable natural gas that we're using, the power subnets we sell in the PC pipeline, we had a presentation – A little while ago about our renewable gas, natural gas plant that we're running out of the central treatment plant. Do we see any of this transferring over and powering our garbage trucks? I mean, can we draw the straight line? I know we sell the renewable natural gas to PSE and then we buy renewable natural gas from PSE, but can I tell people that their toilets are powering their garbage trucks or are we not able to say that?

So at this time, Council Member Hines, so the vision was there, I think, The vision was to close the loop and be able to use the plant gas. At this time, there are some hurdles that we need to overcome with regards to just the cost of what we need to put into the facility to produce the quality of gas that we need to, to sell back to the grid. And we're not there yet. So we're hopeful, but There is, there are financial impacts that we have to consider if we want to continue to pursue this further. And if Romero wants to chime in there.

No, maybe just to add to the conversation got some behinds what called the renewable gas that we have in the central treatment plant. There was a lot of investment to build that up. And why now we're seeing they would have to purchase natural gas from PSC in order to process So we're still working at this point. The last numbers that I saw was a cut even in terms of investment, what we can sell. I think there may be an opportunity to be in the positive in the next year or so. And in fact, the commitment is to come back to IPS next year to give additional information, whether that continues to be a good investment for the city or not. But we're not seeing at this point that benefit.

All right. So I can't yet say that my toilet is powering my garbage truck.

Probably not.

Someday. I think my only last question, Chair Walker, thank you so much. And great to see Andy and team. You know, are we, I saw some electrification, but I know we've talked about electric garbage trucks or electric, I mean, long haul is a long way away from that. So I guess the plan is we're improving a lot of savings using CNG powered vehicles. still with a long-term vision of electrifying parts of the fleet, or are we thinking the electrification is going to happen in the kind of support vehicles around the garbage truck fleet and the long haul fleet?

So right now, we do have more of the support vehicles, delivery vehicles for containers, and the supervisor fleet that are electrified. We do have one garbage truck. that is an electric truck. We're evaluating the performance of that now. The delta in the environmental benefit from going from renewable natural gas to electricity is much, much, much smaller than the transition from diesel to renewable natural gas or electricity. So that is something we're evaluating. There are also infrastructure costs that are required. for us to electrify the garbage fleet. And we're looking at those opportunities as well, exploring that technology and the obligations that we would have to put forward financially to realize those changes. It is something we're looking at. So the plan isn't to do the wholesale change at this point, because we're seeing really great returns on investment right now from the renewable natural gas. but still exploring the electric options for the fleet.

All right. Well, thank you all. Sorry, my dog.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

Those are my questions, Chair Walker.

Great. Thank you, Council Member. Thank you both for your questions. Great news, all of this. And I don't think people know that we've saved so much money, so I hope we have plans to get it out broader than this little committee?

That is part of my budget submission to council.

Okay.

We'll touch base on some of those.

Okay. Great. And let us know when we can ride in that electric garbage truck. Okay. We'd love to try it out. All right. We just have to go over our topics for upcoming meetings with Marcus.

September 23rd, Combined Committees, Boards, and Commissions Report. October 14 connect Tacoma safe streets and sidewalks update and then the planning Commission work program and then October 28 urban design board interviews planning Commission interviews and the system development targets.

Okay, busy next couple of meetings. Thank you. And I think I noted this last time, but for my committee colleagues, we're going to do that combined CPC reports in this room rather than the council chambers like we've done the last couple of years. It'll be cozy, but I think more informal. And that's what we're going for. Has anyone visited committees, boards or commissions since our last meeting? All right. Any other items of interest? Seeing none, I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

I move to adjourn.

Second.

All those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.