With residents fuming over the absence of curbside recycling, Jacksonville is taking steps to solve its long-standing solid waste problems.
It's creating a committee to study the issue.
In a memorandum Monday, City Council President Sam Newby established the special committee on solid waste to "perform an in-depth and comprehensive examination" of missed waste pickups, which led to the suspension of recycling four months ago.
The goal is to make "recommendations to the full City Council" by June 30.
Whether that means recycling will resume afterward — and when — is unclear. Newby's memo didn't say, and his office did not respond to emails.
The memo did outline the causes behind Jacksonville's continued struggle to collect yard waste, making Duval the only large county in Florida to suspend curbside recycling for an extended period of time.
Here's a rundown of the problems:
Driver shortage
Of the city's three contracted waste haulers, two have faced severe driver shortages. Advanced Disposal, which manages Jacksonville's Westside, and Waste Pro USA, which handles the Southeast, are collectively down three dozen drivers from the full staffing needed to handle the volume of waste pickups in their areas.
The city's third contractor, Meridian Waste, operates in the North and East portions of Jacksonville. Meridian is the city's new contractor and took over the contract of Republic Services for a significantly higher rate, with federal COVID-19 relief funds going toward temporary bonus rates.
Meridian's current contract nets it $22.44 per pickup site, which is set to drop to $16.42 per site in a few months.
Both rates are significantly higher than the $14.33 per site given to Waste Pro and the $10.65 per site earned by Advanced Disposal.
Although the special committee is supposed to address contract disparities, the matter has already been discussed in community meetings set up by council member Matt Carlucci, with solutions proposed by Brian Hughes, chief administrative officer for Mayor Lenny Curry's administration, and the city's Solid Waste Division Chief Will Williams.
According to Hughes, rate reviews will take place this month with waste contractors, which will likely result in contracts being adjusted to be more equitable and address the driver shortage.
The updated contracts would go to the full City Council well before the proposed deadline of the special committee's report.
Waste fees
The contract solution also could worsen another problem unless the solid waste fees paid by residents and businesses increase to match. Jacksonville is over $20 million in the red for its solid waste fund.
The city hasn't raised its solid waste fees for residents since 2010. Taxpayers pay $12.65 per month, or $151.80 annually, about 70% to 80% of the program's operating cost, which increases the amount of debt the city takes on each year to loan cash from its general fund to the waste fund to meet the gap.
Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach, which make their own independent contracts with waste haulers, have had continuous waste services in the meantime.
Jacksonville's own municipal code requires the waste fund — and all department fees — to increase each year revenue falls below 85% of operating costs, but the city has waived the annual review.
That's partly led to city's shortage of drivers, which can only be paid what Jacksonville's inadequate waste contracts can afford, based on what can be spent from it's debt-ridden waste fund.
Hauling efficiency
At the height of the trash crisis, Jacksonville waste haulers were missing over 4,000 collections weekly in September, mostly yard waste, which made up the majority of failed pickups.
Since the elimination of recycling, missed collections have been reduced significantly, at one point dropping to just 506 failed pickups split almost evenly between garbage and yard waste in December.
That number isn't zero, however, and residents continue to complain about missed garbage and yard waste stewing on front lawns for weeks.
Incensed residents at community and city council meetings have described incidents of garbage trucks driving right by houses with piles of garbage out front and not stopping to pick it up.
The reason isn't that driver are jerks or don't see the trash. The problem is there's no room in their truck.
Jacksonville has just one place to drop off garbage, and that's the Trail Ridge Landfill on the far Westside of the city. That means a driver who's halfway through his route in Sandalwood in east Jax has to make a 37-mile trek out to the landfill to drop off the haul before making the 45-minute drive back to resume pickup.
With a shortage of drivers, that means more and more garbage gets left out during the workday.
One solution, shot down repeatedly in City Council, might help alleviate the problem: a waste transfer station.
A way station in a more central location in the city would allow drivers to drop off their waste hauls there and return to their routes quicker, while dedicated haulers go to and from the landfill and the transfer site.
So far, City Council has been unable to find a location suitable for a waste transfer station, after a previous endeavor to create a site in Mandarin was killed after residents pushed back.
One of the committee tasks established by Newby would be to "provide a status on the implementation of a solid waste transfer station" and consider ways to convert waste to energy to circumvent hauls to the landfill.
Recycling shortfalls
Since ending recycling pickup, the city has resorted to drop-off sites. These locations distributed throughout Jacksonville allow residents to place approved materials, stored in clean paper bags, in labeled receptacles for later pickup.
The resulting drop-off in recycling has been stark. The first week of December saw the city pick up less than 80 tons of recycling. That same week in 2020, the city picked up 1,000 tons.
But even if recycling returned to normal tomorrow, the city has been dealing with significant shortfalls in the cost of its recycling program for years, with expenses sometimes doubling revenue.
For the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the city made $1,142,702 off the the sale of recyclable materials, against the $2,649,073 cost of processing those materials in the first place.
For the current fiscal year, the city has budgeted expenses at $2.8 million and projected revenue at $1.5 million.
The special committee will evaluate what products "should no longer be recycled due to their declining or negative value" in an attempt to staunch the city's bleeding coffers.
Currently the city accepts most paper (that's not shredded); plastics numbered 1-3, 5 and 7; cleaned out cartons and glass; as well as steel and aluminum containers.
Many locations have stopped accepting glass as recyclable material, including the city of St. Augustine late last year, because of the high cost of processing and low resale value.
Councilman Ron Salem, the finance chair, will also chair the special committee. Councilwoman Joyce Morgan will serve as his vice chair, with council members Matt Carlucci, Randy White and Reggie Gaffney rounding out the committee.
As of Monday, no scheduled date for the first meeting has been set on the city's website.
Newby's full memo can be found at this link.
