St. Paul enters into citywide trash hauling negotiations. Public Works to service difficult routes. - St. Paul Pioneer Press

St. Paul enters into citywide trash hauling negotiations. Public Works to service difficult routes. - Twin Cities

No longer enamored of efforts to help residents keep their longstanding trash hauler, St. Paul will enter into contract negotiations for citywide garbage collection this month with FCC Environmental Services, a Texas-based company that operates throughout Europe and 35 countries.

That’s not the only change that city residents will see to trash services when a new contract takes effect next year. It’s unknown currently what the new costs may be.

And, frustrated by missed trash and recycling pick-ups on residential alleys, St. Paul Public Works plans to buy five garbage trucks and service 10% of the city itself using a crew of city employees. The hope is to make service more reliable on streets where alley plowing — which is coordinated in St. Paul by volunteer “alley captains” — tends to fall apart, especially low-income areas of the East Side.

The goal, in turn, is to net better trash and recycling rates for everyone citywide. When the city first issued a request for proposals for recycling services, a quote from Eureka Recycling — the sole respondent — came back more than double previous rates, with the given explanation that too many St. Paul alleys were too narrow and unplowed to navigate in winter.

“It was incredible how often in the conversations with haulers they’d say ‘Your alleys are the problem,’ not their trucks, not their customer service,” said St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw, in an interview this week.

Five garbage trucks at $2.1 million

The St. Paul City Council on Wednesday is expected to approve the purchase of the five garbage collection trucks, at a cost of $2.1 million. Between late 2023 and late 2025, Public Works will have added some 18 new employees dedicated to trash and recycling, including a solid waste manager, sanitation workers, customer service representatives and others in the area of truck facilities.

“I am personally supportive, and I also look forward to the discussion at council,” said Council President Mitra Jalali on Friday.

The city plans to begin negotiating a solid waste contract with FCC Environmental later this month, with the expectation that it take effect April 1, 2025.

The city’s trash and recycling contracts were extended from their listed sunset dates after previous requests for proposals drew lackluster responses. Organized trash collection with a consortium of haulers launched in St. Paul in September 2018 under a five-year contract that was extended for 18 months beginning last fall.

Part of the goal five years ago was to protect family-owned trash hauling operations by assigning particular haulers to routes and neighborhoods. The plan backfired, offering greater incentive for global players like Republic Services and Waste Management to buy out smaller legacy companies, their only avenue toward increasing market share.

After trying again last November with an altered approach, the city drew nine competitive responses to its requests for proposals for garbage and recycling collection, a healthy showing by most standards.

Meanwhile, assuming negotiations go well, a more competitive recycling contract with Eureka Recycling would begin this Nov. 1.

“I think it will be a fairly short negotiation,” said Katie Drews, co-president and chief executive officer of Eureka, on Friday. “We’re already pretty aligned on most of the contract. We think this is going to be an easy and quick process. We’ve been collecting St. Paul’s recycling for about 20 years.”

Three companies to handle trash, recycling and mattresses

FCC Environmental will handle solid waste collection, yard waste and bulky items such as sofas, as well as recycling for multi-unit dwellings such as apartment buildings. Under a separate contract, Eureka will pick up recycling at single-family homes.

Yet a third contract with the Minneapolis-based nonprofit known as Emerge Enterprises will employ former prison inmates to collect and recycle mattresses, box springs and metal bed frames, screw by screw and coil by coil.

“It’s a big, frustrating part of the waste stream,” Kershaw said.

To test the waters, Emerge, which is based in North Minneapolis and the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, worked with the city on a pilot program that was a “phenomenal success,” Kershaw said. “They’ve greatly exceeded goals.”

New, more targeted approach

St. Paul Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher said the new, more targeted approach toward recycling and solid waste collection was informed by a citizen advisory committee, which issued its final report in June of 2022.

Based in large part on those recommendations, the city now handles cart management and customer service calls, rather than leaving those calls to individual trash haulers. Billing will soon be moved in-house, as well.

Having the city act as the immediate intermediary between everyday residents and the private consortium of trash haulers that service St. Paul has improved accountability, she said, and owning a handful of municipal garbage collection trucks will make things even better.

Soon enough, when a private hauler skips a city street, “we’ll now have a resource where we can do it and charge them for us having to provide the resource,” Tincher said.

“We tend to think of it as waste collection, but what we really should be guided by is a goal of how we make a greener St. Paul — how do we achieve waste reduction,” she added. “We’re always looking at how do we reduce illegal dumping.”

Negotiations will determine costs

Andrea Ledger, the city’s chief procurement officer and interim director of the city’s Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity, said it was too soon to tell what trash and recycling rates will total for property owners, as those will be key aspects of negotiations.

“On the contract side, we can’t talk about costs yet,” Ledger said.

The city, in its request for proposals, laid out wide-ranging evaluation criteria, from labor and workforce history to customer service and price structure. The RFPs asked for multiple references for each vendor and their ability to integrate with St. Paul’s online customer service portal.

Another key request from residents: cart sharing. Low-waste and zero-waste households have long asked for the right to share carts with neighbors, if not entirely ditch trash service, which is currently mandated by the city. It remains to be seen exactly how that will be structured, but cart sharing was included in a priority list laid out by Public Works in December 2022.

Kershaw said with the city taking a stronger lead on trash and recycling services, he expected neighborhood drop-off programs will improve over time. With training, garbage truck drivers could double as snow plow drivers. Handling customer service calls and difficult routes in-house means faster responses when collections are skipped.

Respondents to last November’s requests for proposals included Waste Management, the Neighborhood Recycling Corporation/Eureka, Allied Waste, FCC Environmental, ACJ Today, Highland Sanitation, LRS, Aspen Waste and Emerge Enterprises.

Tincher said she was hopeful that the city’s decision to remove some of the narrowest, most difficult-to-navigate alleys from the equation would lead to competitive rates from the private sector.

“Their argument to us is ‘When we’re in the suburbs, it’s so much easier to get around,’ but you’re driving farther to get (the same amount of trash),” Tincher said. “A lot of it didn’t make sense to us.”