Point Reyes Light - December 2, 2004
Only 10 percent reply to county's trash transfer-station poll
By Jacob Resneck
More than 700 West Marin households (out of 7,000 polled) had responded by Monday’s deadline to a county trash survey.
The survey asked households if they would be willing to pay more to have their garbage picked up each week, as well as require all households to have pickup service, in order to finance a Waste Management-run trash-dropoff site in West Marin.
The coast has been without a dropoff site for bulky trash since 1997 when the landfill in Point Reyes Station was forced to close. With Marin’s only remaining landfill a long way off, north of Novato, scofflaws here immediately took to dumping large waste (old refrigerators, bedsprings, couches etc.) on roadsides.
Similar trash began showing up in merchants’ Dumpsters. So much was dumped at recycling centers that all six in West Marin closed. (Toby’s Feed Barn has recently opened a facility for recycling cans and bottles that have California Redemption value.)
Nowhere, CA, 93913
Unfortunately, the county’s survey forms had a non-existent zipcode and lacked the necessary bar code for business mail-backs. Initially the Postal Service said many of the forms would become dead letters. However, at the request of county government, the Postal Service subsequently said it would deliver the forms to the Civic Center.
Also complicating the survey was heavy criticism of the poll from other people in the garbage industry, who said the survey presented West Marin households with a single false alternative: pay Waste Management from $5 to $8 more per month for garbage-pickup service and require all households to become Waste Management customers if they were to get a Waste Management dropoff site in West Marin.
The Texas-based, international garbage conglomerate also owns the Redwood Landfill north of Novato. And it has a county franchise to pick up garbage throughout West Marin, except in Bolinas and Stinson Beach. Waste Management has separate franchises with those towns for pickup service.
The county will keep accepting any surveys still trickling in despite the official deadline, which had been put back once. "Most people had a lot of comments," Jeff Rawles, chief of the county’s waste division told The Light.
Requiring mandatory pickup service would give Waste Management approximately 1,000 new customers in West Marin. Its franchise with county government runs until 2019. Stinson Beach’s contract runs until 2009. Bolinas’ contract with the haulier expires in 2012.
‘Should open business to other hauliers’
Parttime Inverness resident Bill McGowan, a former recycling consultant for Sutta Company, the third-largest recycling firm in the state, said he was surprised that the county wasn’t going to give other hauliers a chance to bid on the contract or seek out cheaper alternatives.
"Waste Management’s solution, just like any large garbage company, is to get the county to expand and extend their franchise," he said.
"If they move to make the franchise mandatory, they should reopen the bid to other hauliers. I mean, they’ve changed the condition of the contract. Otherwise how will they know they won’t get a better deal?"
McGowan said he agreed that West Marin needs a transfer station but recommended a "Material Recovery Facility."
"What that is," he explained, "is basically a giant concrete floor with a roof. And people to pick through the garbage."
Vice President Leonard Stefanelli of the San Francisco-based garbage haulier Richmond Sanitary has repeatedly argued that his firm could provide a transfer station for less money than the one proposed by Waste Management. Furthermore, Stefanelli argues that he approached the county as early as 1998, a year after the forced closure of the West Marin Sanitary Landfill, about constructing a transfer station, but that the county snubbed his proposal.
Chief of the county’s waste division Jeff Rawles said he didn’t see why any bidding would have to be reopened.
"The contract is exclusively based," Rawles said. "And [Waste Management, Inc.] has the franchise agreement."
West Marin ‘not rural’
Jim Landa, head of municipal relations for Waste Management, said that hauling garbage out of West Marin, with its low-population density and steep roads, is neither cheap nor easy.
"West Marin is hard to service and spread out," Landa told The Light. "It’s probably one of the most difficult, with the mountainous roads." Yet, the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board, charged with regulating landfills and assisting rural areas with garbage collection, said that West Marin does not qualify for rural assistance as it’s within a metropolitan area. The Waste Board levies $1.40 per ton of waste disposed, with Marin County paying more than $500,000 in the last fiscal year. Rural assistance subsidizes the fees qualifying counties and incorporated towns pay to the Waste Board, thereby moderating rates paid by residents.
Waste Board Spokeswoman Roni Java said that West Marin is probably not eligible for rural assistance because of its proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area. Java said that, in order to map rural areas, the Waste Board gets its data from the state’s department of finance, which in turns gets its data from the US census.
"According to the state Department of Finance, we can’t consider you rural," she said. Under the same formula, the coastal hamlet of Fort Ross in northern Sonoma County is not rural either. But 15 miles up Highway 1, north of the Mendocino county line, Gualala and Anchor Bay are considered "rural." Likewise, the tiny town of Rumsey in western Yolo County is not considered "rural" because it lies in the same county of Davis, which is considered a suburb of Sacramento.
When told of these bizarre inconsistencies and West Marin’s problem of being boxed-in by mountainous roads, which aren’t accounted for in census figures, Java replied, "Well, yes. That’s a very interesting puzzle," but said that the Waste Board is bound by the legislation that created it and is inflexible about what communities it can consider "rural."
Landa of Waste Management said he wasn’t surprised by the Waste Board’s outlook. "They’re looking at Marin County [as a whole]. So, it’s the furthest thing from their mind that it could be considered rural."
Rawles said he did not want to comment on the state’s classification methods, and repeated that any transfer station in West Marin would be difficult and expensive to build because of the environmental regulation requirements.
"If we’re going to do a transfer station, it’s going to be very difficult," Rawles said. "If you’re going to do anything that has to do with garbage, it’s very expensive."
Slight increase for trash rates
In a separate issue, county supervisors at their Dec. 7 meeting are set to vote on a 2.7 percent increase in garbage fees for Waste Management’s existing West Marin customers (excluding Bolinas and Stinson Beach).
Waste Management has asked for a 1.22 percent increase for cost-of-living inflation that it says is the first such increase in two years. In addition, the haulier seeks an additional 1.5 percent for a new service in which customers can arrange for bulky items like appliances and furniture to be picked up by special arrangement.
Last month, Bolinas Public Utility District and Stinson Beach County Water District both approved an approximate 1 percent rate increase that Waste Management said was necessary to cover rising fuel costs.