Trash plan might be garbage

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This article was published 24/02/2010 (5941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Replacing garbage cans with rolling garbage carts in northwest Winnipeg may have been a mistake, public works chairman Bill Clement says as city council prepares to change a waste-collection plan introduced just three weeks ago.

The mounting cost of using automated trucks to empty rolling garbage carts in northwest Winnipeg is about to negate the purported savings of the contract, thanks to changes that come before council today.

In the fall, when a divided council voted in favour of switching to cart collection at 42,500 homes north of the Assiniboine River and west of the Red River, BFI Canada won the contract by submitting a low bid of $1.9 million a year.

Today, council is poised to approve, augment or change the service no less than three ways. A plan to allow northwest Winnipeg homeowners to pay more for larger or additional carts will have no financial impact, as residents who want to supersize their trash carts will be required to pay annual fees.

But a separate plan to collect yard waste from northwest Winnipeg homes during the spring and fall will cost another $232,000 a year. And a third council vote — on renegotiating the BFI Canada contract to allow cart pickup on both sides of back lanes — could cost taxpayers up to $500,000 more a year, according to a report published by the water and waste department Tuesday. It’s more likely that alteration will wind up in the $100,000 range. But since the cheapest bid to collect northwest Winnipeg’s waste manually was $2.05 million a year, Clement (Charleswood-Tuxedo) now angrily concedes the cart-collection plan did not roll out as planned.

"Had we known we would be spending money on a couple of other areas and the savings are not what they are going to be, we might not have gone this way," Clement said of the October council vote, which saw opposition councillors complain the garbage plan was being rushed through city council.

While the conservative Clement has little time for council’s centre-left opposition, he now agrees council was given little time to weigh its options.

"We only had a couple of weeks to deal with this. We basically were told we had to do a deal," he said. "Some of us are pretty disappointed with the way this has played out."

Clement said he plans to hold his nose today and vote in favour of the changes to northwest Winnipeg’s garbage-collection service, but will not support a plan to enter into a new city-wide recycling contract that will see blue boxes replaced with 240-litre rolling carts in September. The 7.5-year contract may not allow the city enough flexibility to work out a comprehensive waste-minimization plan, he said.

North Kildonan Coun. Jeff Browaty, another council conservative, also plans to vote against the recycling contract, which means it’s possible the plan will fail on the floor of council. The fate of the new recycling contract depends on the will of Winnipeg’s six opposition councillors, most of whom are upset by the absence of a waste-collection plan that would include better incentives to divert more trash from landfills, such as some form of curbside organic-waste pickup.

When the northwest garbage-cart plan was originally announced, several councillors on executive policy committee lambasted the administration for failing to keep councillors apprised of the significant changes coming to garbage pickup. "You guys don’t have to get elected," Clement told water and waste officials at the time.

Opposition councillors, meanwhile, complained the city was making ad-hoc changes to deal with the pending expiration of contracts instead of putting together a waste-collection plan that encompassed garbage, recycling and organic waste.

The water and waste department responded by launching a public-consultation campaign about changes to Winnipeg’s recycling plans last fall. But now, even Mayor Sam Katz has conceded the city must stop making ad-hoc changes.

Today’s votes about garbage and recycling are slated to take place after a council debate about $3.4 million in city funding for a Christian youth centre, another council proposal that has faced harsh criticism due to its emergence as a walk-on report at the end of a Feb. 17 executive policy committee meeting.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

 

Religion on agenda

While some city councillors are upset about garbage, other Winnipeg politicians are concerned with a higher power today.

In what’s bound to be an acrimonious debate, council will decide whether to spend $3.4 million on a 50,000-square-foot Christian youth centre at the northwest corner of Higgins Avenue and Main Street. Non-profit organization Youth for Christ is in line to receive $3.2 million in federal funds to help build its $11.7-million "Youth Centre for Excellence" if council votes in favour.

The city’s contribution to the centre, which was announced and approved at the end of an executive policy committee meeting Feb. 17, has provoked howls of outrage from councillors — including some who support the project — because few details of the plan have been presented to council.

Fort Rouge Coun. Jenny Gerbasi has also expressed concern about the exclusion of other inner-city social-service organizations and the evangelical nature of Youth for Christ, which tracks conversion statistics in its annual report.

It is expected council will approve the funding despite the nasty tone of the debate. Last week, Winnipeg Centre MP Pat Martin traded barbs with senior Manitoba MP Vic Toews over the centre.

– Kives