TRASHTALK, CONT. - In a couple of recent diatribes on these pages, Jack Humphreville has enthusiastically barked the talking points of expensive lobbyists like Cerrell & Associates, waste hauler special interests like the LA County Disposal Association and Athens Services, and big businesses and landlords across the city. All under the guise of exposing dirty deeds.
As a threshold matter, let’s just say this, Jack: Shame on you for so willingly playing the pawn of special interests (haulers, landlords and lobbyists don’t qualify?) and boiling a crucial long-term policy conversation down to a counter-productive, insult-laced, ideologically-driven rant.
On a substantive front, let’s address some of your (and your lobbyist friends’) claims. You obliquely point to “studies” showing that rates are 60% higher in exclusive cities, with no citation or attribution.
Well, the only “study” that says this is the AECOM report that Angelenos for a Clean Environment (ACE), an astro-turf coalition of business, landlord and hauling interests, sheepishly released on the day the Board of Public Works approved an exclusive franchise. Presumably, that’s also where you got your whopper $150 million cost increase claim.
There are some striking flaws with the AECOM report that you failed to mention. The report bases the majority of its findings, including the ones you trumpet, on a very limited and select set of data. In fact, a fundamental component of their report is a set of “blind’ rate sheets provided by an unidentified universe of waste haulers. Waste haulers, coincidentally, make up the LA County Disposal Association.
And it was the LA County Disposal Association, together with its lobbying firm Cerrell & Associates, who actually commissioned the report. So, the AECOM report used unidentifiable and unverified rate data provided by the self-interested haulers who actually commissioned the study in the first place. See any problem with the veracity of that approach?
In contrast, the Don’t Waste LA coalition, a group of over 30 organizations advocating for sanity and fairness in LA’s commercial/multifamily waste hauling system, tried to do a serious rate survey – and it proved nearly impossible. That’s because in the current “Wild West” system, haulers are resistant to disclosing their actual rates.
When they do grudgingly share rate sheets, those rates have little to do with what’s actually charged or paid. They’re base rates – and they only serve as starting points for the constellation of negotiations that happen with every account. As a consequence, we’re left with an uneven rate system that benefits big landlords and big businesses at the expense of small landlords and small businesses.
The cost of trash is going up – regardless of the system. Fuel costs, landfilling costs, truck costs…are all going up. In a “Wild West,” nothing prevents those increased costs from being passed to customers, particularly those with less time, information, or leverage – like small businesses and landlords.
In an exclusive system, responsible franchisees get economies of scale and efficiencies otherwise unavailable – and they can spread those increased costs over time and market share. After reviewing the rates of all 55 of LA County’s exclusive franchise cities, we found that the average rates are actually lower than the highest rate-payers in this city.
You also choose to ignore the findings of HF&H Consulting, California’s gold-standard consulting firm in waste matters. HF&H has completed studies and waste system designs in hundreds of California jurisdictions – and is a highly regarded firm. The City of Los Angeles hired them to do an analysis – and they said that exclusive systems provide the smallest environmental footprint (in terms of emissions, street impacts, overlapping truck routes, etc.), the most ambitious recycling potential, the best protection against rogue haulers, and the most cost-efficient system for the city.
We may be at 65% diversion, but we still send over 3 million tons of waste to landfills each year. And many Angelenos are tired of 5-6 different haulers servicing adjacent properties multiple times per week on the same city block.
Even LA County acknowledged explicitly in its staff report on the issue that exclusive franchising was the best route to reaching the County’s goals. But they ended up with a non-exclusive, glorified permit system because the hauling community balked at the idea of exclusive franchising - and pressured them to maintain a system that was more big-business, big-landlord friendly.
LA City’s leaders have shown the vision and the backbone to stop the waste hauling community from dictating our city’s waste future.
This is a complicated issue – and you’ve done a disservice by using it as a vehicle for your personal attacks. I’d personally welcome the opportunity to debate the issue publicly with you, whether via pod-cast or in the community. Just let me know when and where.
(Greg Good is the Director of LAANE’s Don’t Waste LA Project. He can be reached at [email protected]) -cw
Tags: LAANE, Jack Humphreville, Don’t Waste LA, trash, trash collection, La County Disposal Association, waste haulers
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 27
Pub: Apr 3, 2012