It’s still unclear if trash will be picked up in St. Paul starting April 1

With five days left before St Paul is slated to fully launch its first single-carrier municipal waste pickup, it remains to be seen if City Council action blocking FCC Environmental’s use and development of land at 540 Randolph Ave. will plunge the city “into crisis” or not, as the mayor claimed a week ago. 

The zoning dispute heated up when the City Council approved an appeal by the neighborhood group West Seventh/Fort Road Federation, effectively blocking the proposed solid waste truck dispatch center and maintenance facility planned for the site. 

After the council’s March 19 action, Mayor Melvin Carter sent a strongly worded email urging the the council urging the council to reverse its decision, noting that state law required the city to provide trash services. Staff were directed to “immediately identify every feasible option to address this public health emergency,” and Carter said he had not “ruled out declaring a state of emergency.”  

FCC Environmental did not respond to MinnPost’s request for comment for this story, but Carter said in his email that he had spoken to the leadership of FCC Environmental “to relay my commitment to finding a remedy to maintain the City’s obligation under our seven-year agreement.” 

“Beyond the legal obligation we have under state law to provide trash services, breach of contract would expose taxpayers to costly litigation, and interrupt trash hauling service for St. Paul households,” Carter wrote.

Additionally, in a call last week, Public Works Director Sean Kershaw was unable to say what alternative options are available in the interim if FCC Environmental needed to find a new site. 

“We’re looking at a range of options that would get us to providing trash services by April 1,” Kershaw said.

What the alternatives might be and whether they could mitigate the crisis situation the mayor fears remains unclear. On Wednesday, a city spokesperson said in an email to MinnPost that, “The city is still assessing all possible options to ensure that service delivery is not interrupted on April 1.” 

While the situation remains fluid, Kershaw was able to clarify some misinformation about waste pickup. For example, he said “there’s been a confusion of the difference between a fueling site and an operating site that’s important to correct.” As of November, FCC Environmental already began recycling pickup for buildings with five or more units, and many have cited that they’re using an “alternative fueling site.” 

That “alternative fueling site” is currently a Kwik Trip, Kershaw clarified, which he said is “clearly” not sustainable when operations expand, emphasizing the need for the company to have its own fueling site. 

Notably, Carter’s window to veto the council’s decision has lapsed. He has seven days after council action to file a veto.

So what now? 

Earlier this week, MinnPost’s Cityscape columnist Bill Lindeke called the back-and-forth between the mayor and council a “municipal game of chicken.” That’s not unlike the situation that unfolded during the city’s last budget process. 

That description of the trash dispute felt accurate to St. Paul City Council President Rebecca Noecker when MinnPost spoke with her Wednesday. 

The site was never planned to be finished by the April 1 start date, Noecker said. The council president said she doesn’t believe the council’s action drove trash service in the city into jeopardy. “If the council’s action last week had been the last step in the regulatory appeals or approvals, maybe you could make that argument,” she said. 

FCC Environmental’s plan for the site was to start operations there, then build out, though the city has said the company needs the site to store trucks and operate from as they build. The company planned to invest over $25 million to develop the new St. Paul facility, which would include a compressed natural gas station, space for more than 30 CNG-fueled collection trucks, fully electric pickups for route managers, and an electric box truck for bulk and appliance pick up. 

It’s worth noting that the council is looking at another issue in the coming weeks — rent stabilization — that played a role in development options for the Randolph Avenue site. The owner of the property said in January that he had been planning to build housing on the site, but the city’s housing policy had made it “no longer economically viable.” 

Noecker is one of three council members who signed onto a proposal to amend the city’s rent stabilization to only include buildings built before 2004. This was a proposal brought forward during Carter’s budget address last summer, though some owners of older properties have called it the “worst of both worlds.”

But Noecker noted the Randolph Avenue site is a perfect example of a location where housing development must remain viable to developers. 

The neighborhood has dreams about what the riverfront property could be, and none of them include a site for garbage trucks, West Seventh/Fort Road Federation Executive Director Julia McColley told MinnPost. She added that the proposed FCC site also does not align with long-standing citywide, neighborhood and river corridor plans, which are outlined on the federation’s website. 

“It’s all kind of a larger vision that just hasn’t come to fruition, and to lose another piece of that vision indefinitely felt like a really hard blow,” McColley said.