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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Time To Toss RecycLA?

Missed pickups. Mounting garbage. Sky-high fees. Business owners have been complaining for months that the city’s waste management franchise system, part of a green initiative called RecycLA, has been more trash than treasure since it rolled out last summer. Now, San Fernando Valley Councilman Mitch Englander is looking for a way to dump the system. “Since the franchises are exclusive, there is no competition that might otherwise compel better service,” Englander told the Business Journal. “That is why, in my view, the problems are endemic to the program and it will take major reform in order to correct these issues.” Englander filed a motion Feb. 13 that asks the city attorney’s office to review the RecycLA contract and report to the council on the steps necessary to exit the program. But haulers have pushed back on the move, saying the situation has improved and will continue to do so. “We had a rough transition, but let’s make this program work,” Doug Corcoran, director of public sector services for Southern California at Waste Management, said. Waste Management holds the service contracts for all businesses and multi-family apartments in the west and southeast portions of the Valley. “People will be very happy eventually but there’s some angry people now,” he added. “I get it.” Down in dumps For businesses like Gelb Group, a real estate company that manages more than 1.2 million square feet of commercial space in the San Fernando Valley, the issues that the new trash system has created go beyond minor nuisances. “This is the biggest problem our business has faced in the six months since (the program) started,” Gelb Group founder Rickey Gelb said. His properties comprise between 35 and 40 trash pickup locations, most of which are under Waste Management’s jurisdiction; tenants from all of them have called his firm to complain about missed pickups, which have resulted in mounds of trash swelling around the bins. For some restaurant occupants, the rubbish has been a point of concern with regulators. “The health inspectors come out and it’s messy,” Gelb said. If the bins are too heavy, the drivers say they will come back later but leave trash around the bin, where it attracts vermin, Gelb said. Perhaps more frustrating than the missed pickups is the price hike, which has left businesses paying several times more for what so far has been worse service. Gelb Group’s properties are often billed incorrectly – and when the charges are correct, they are substantially higher on account of new fees. “We had a couple of small properties that had two pickups a week, so the cost was between $80 and $100 a month,” Gelb said. “Now it’s around $400 to $500 a month.” The numbers get bigger at large properties. At one location, the cost jumped from $600 a month to $2,400, Gelb said. The fees that have been causing such an uproar were mandated by the city in the franchise contracts, Waste Management’s Corcoran said. “Those fees were actually not a hauler invention – they came down to the haulers from the city,” he explained. “We went back and forth with the city on them, because some of them just aren’t intuitive to the customer.” Haulers previously charged for things like “scouting” – driving a smaller truck into tight areas to pull out bins so a larger truck could pick them up – along with recycling. Both fees were cut to make way for the new charges, which theoretically make up for revenue lost now that recycling is free. “It has certainly created some very emotional reactions,” Corcoran said. “It seems like there are some customers who get hit really hard because of the structure of that contract.” Trash the program? At press time the City Council was waiting for a response from the city attorney. The idea of abandoning the program altogether has received mixed support from other council members; some, like Councilman Paul Krekorian, who represents the east San Fernando Valley, seconded Englander’s motion to gauge the necessary steps to do so but said in media interviews that they were not necessarily in favor of an exit. Gelb is open to the idea of rescinding the program, or at least reestablishing it so haulers’ charges are more transparent. “It would be great if (Englander could cancel) or reimplement the program where you have good service or bring rates down to something reasonable, or justify why the rates have to be this high,” Gelb said. In the meantime, the haulers are hoping for a chance to meet with city officials to propose ways to improve service without scrapping RecycLA altogether. “We’ve got some pretty good suggestions that we’d like the city to consider,” Corcoran said. “Ultimately we’re in the service business – what the customer says and feels is the primary driver for how we behave.” If the trash franchise system were dismantled, the resulting chaos would make problems much worse for everyone, he maintained. “We’re over the hump, and now it’s time to tweak and optimize this program so it works for everybody,” Corcoran said. “The transition would seem like a happy dream compared to the outcome if they just blew up the program at this point.” The number of complaints has fallen since January, Corcoran said, as new drivers complete their training and get used to their routes. “The trend of missed pickups and problems is plummeting,” he said. “There will still be a few that we’ll have to give our special attention to, but, for the most part, this program has transitioned and will level out for everybody.”

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