Joint Water and Climate Policy Meeting - Aug 03, 2026

um welcome everyone welcome back we were on break so for us it's a welcome back anyway i'm sure for most of you you've been here all along um but anyway we are um happy to move forward with the agenda as presented unless there are any changes if not i'll hear a motion to adopt the agenda awesome a motion a second is there any comments from the public about the motion hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed like sign motion carries we have an agenda we also have some minutes did everyone have a chance to review those minutes are there any changes or comments if not i'll take a motion to approve the minutes move to approve second you have a motion a second to approve the minutes are there any comments hearing none all those in favor say aye aye any opposed like sign all right we now have minutes and we have our first item is actually a voting item so we needed um we needed to have quorum so thank you all for being here um we have our citizen climate advisory committee and um we are the lucky folks who get to recommend the members of this committee so i will turn it over to jenison so she can explain i think we have a little bit of a complicated thing so typically what we do with the commission when we have multiples we'll if we've got like four seats we'll pick our top four and then assign them and then um but i'll let you kind of explain our scenario and then we can go from there thank you madam chair yes so uh we have a strong applicant pool for the five vacancies that exist on the climate citizen climate advisory committee so we have three citizen at large three-year terms one citizen at large two-year term and then one alternate one year term and i did update the selection table from what is published in the agenda because originally i did not include applicants who had applied only for the two-year citizen at large or the alternate in the first selection table um but i was advised to include all of the applicants in each of the tables so what i printed out and what you have before you has on each page all of the applicants are listed and they're in order by the uh seven applicants who applied for the three-year term are listed first and they're they're not alphabetical and that's because i i put them in the order that they applied that's fine to be objective then uh the the one applicant for the two-year term and then the three applicants who had applied for the alternate and okay so in your agenda you can see who applied for which position in case you're interested in that that may be something related to their schedule so it might be worth considering um which they applied for even though they're all on your little chart um okay with that i guess clerk do you want to call roll call or votes and then is there anybody here oh yeah do we have anybody here that's applied for the committee that wants to speak to us come on up to the one of the microphones next to jenison and share you can give us a little bit about yourself and why you're interested in the position my name is richard devereaux i've been a long-term resident of unincorporated alachua county for ever um this past year i have served on ccac as the one year alternate and uh be more than happy to continue in that capacity um i didn't really on that matter have anything else to say okay um but i would appreciate a pay raise excellent thank you sir is there anyone else who's applied that would like to speak to the committee all right madam clerk do you mind calling roll call and everyone can give i guess we'll give your um we'll do the three your top three for the um three-year term ending in 2029 and then we'll go to the next one in the next one if that's okay with everyone okay we have uh commissioner anna previous um let's see uh citizen yeah john lawson jyoti parma and cody gusto commissioner james bingall that's actually what i had on my commissioner mary helen wheeler um sarisha budu jyoti parma and richard devereaux commissioner mary alford he wanted alternate he wanted altered alternate um so richard and cody and sage all applied for alternate okay um uh i will go with parmer um lamey and uh walkenshaw yeah do you want to do our top five and see if it falls i just want us do we have oh that's right just someone didn't apply so um you want me if we can double okay so i have uh four for parmar okay uh two for lawson two for gusto one for lamey one for voodoo and one for devereaux so i guess we have a clear winner we have two clear alternates do we want to go between the ones that for this i guess we have three clear yeah okay we've got three so um do i hear a motion for john lawson god parmer and cody gusto for our three-year terms so moved second okay the motion in a second are there any comments or questions about that hearing none all those in favor say aye aye any opposed like sign okay next we have our two-year appointment we had one asking for that that was austin britain but everybody i believe qualifies potentially for that position as well um can we take a roll call again please can we just go through these that we've got you can cross off vacation just tell me tell me which ones that we just mark off now uh you know farmer lawson and gusto yep lawson it's like a law farmer and walkinson um is it this okay i do want to note um gusto only applied for the yes i wanted to make sure that's okay with the board because he didn't actually apply for the regular one i guess we'll see if he wants it if he doesn't want it we can come back at our next meeting okay um and this one we just had one applicant apply for the two-year term that is austin britain but all the others do also potentially qualify um and if they were interested in a three-year term i'm assuming they can also serve a two-year term so um everyone's okay we can go ahead and do a roll call commissioner uh austin britain commissioner alford um sarisha budu commissioner engel to me if the only person applied for this position was austin britain i'm probably just going to go with austin britain commissioner willard i'm confused about what you just said they that i'm sarisha budu is who i was going to okay we've got a tie it's two two and then i want to throw their weight behind either austin or sersha okay sarisha had applied for one of the board positions that we had recently and i can't remember if that was which one it was but it had to do relate to this too so that's that's yeah same same i remembered her from another application james are you willing to make the motion for sarisha budu for the two-year term sure okay we have a motion for sarisha budu do i have a second trigger okay we have a motion and a second for sarisha budu for the two-year term ending 2028 all those in favor say aye aye any opposed like sign motion carries and now we have our alternate position we have uh cody's already been given a position we have two applicants for the alternate richard devereau and sage sarah but again the others would also qualify with got um parmer john lawson cody gusto and sarisha already having positions i'd like to make a motion for richard devereau second okay we have a motion for richard devereau as the alternate all those in favor say aye aye any opposed like sign motion carries welcome richard as our guest is our alternate thank you for serving sorry we can't raise your salary okay um thank you all for that rather complicated but i think we did it with plums thank you all right next up is alachua county solid waste resource and recovery update and this is thank you gus for being here to share with us um how things are going with our waste and recovery good afternoon everybody gus almost solid waste director um this presentation is going to look really really familiar for my county commissioners it's exactly pretty much the same one i gave you guys back in june although i had some meetings since then so there's a little bit of updates i did meet with your advisory group uh early this month got their input uh planning to schedule e-pack soon and i'll be having private meetings with members of the community so my whole purpose with this was to get the conversation started yes it's taking place yeah i'm getting phone calls good so that was good so basically what this is is a it's a two-part presentation the first one i'm going to talk about some immediate needs and actions that the county has to take and the second one is more like a long term and i'm talking long term visions and decisions we're going to have to make in the future i'm sorry eastman isn't here so real quick by the numbers of how garbage moves around the county you probably already know this but you know it all starts at the curbside and there you know each one of us generates about six pounds per day per person just for comparison the florida number is nine and if you were to look the united states number is five that being said everybody calculates these numbers a little bit differently so they could be apples and oranges i did double check and the six and the nine for us and the state are calculated the same way and that includes commercial and cnd so it's not just what we put there but what the community put we take all the amount of waste and divide it out by the population that's where that six comes from does that include the recycling and yard waste no it's just silly waste yeah the uh so all the six pounds per person per day they go to the county transfer station that equates to about 800 tons per day that we have to move uh since our trucks only take about 22 tons per trip that equates to about 23 trips per day so it's a constant travel from here to new river which is about 33 miles from us um so that's what we do right now and that's what we've been doing using since 1989. so what is new well what's new is that uh we're in the last two years of our current 10-year agreement with new river that agreement expires in december of 2028 uh but we've been using them since we closed the uh landfill in archer it's the only place we use since we opened the transfer station so we have a long long relationship and a very good one i mean they've been good to us we've been good to them um and the current agreement had the option for an extension a five plus five so we indicated to them yes we're interested in extending the agreement they said there were two we started the negotiations um they gave us their proposal and i'll kind of go into the numbers in the next slide and i made the recommendation to the board in june that we should go there and to our rfp to see what else was available and the reason i made that recommendation these are the the numbers they proposed to us so right now we've been paying we are paying thirty dollars per ton that's an amazingly low number nobody's paying that and the reason we're playing so low is because it's a long contract so that's what you tend to get at the end of your contract you're doing really well so we expected them to go up in price which they did and those are the numbers they're proposing you know 47 uh 2029 and all the way to 50.87 by 2033 the big difference is we weren't in there thinking we were just going to extend the current agreement and negotiate a new rate under the current agreement um we pay the same rate as baker bradford union county those are the three cars that own new river so under our current agreement we pay the same under their new proposal they're getting rid of that clause and while our prices go up there stays flat at 30 dollars per ton so that's why i recommended that we do an rfp uh that rfp should be out in the street by september so we should be getting response responses early next year just based on conversations that i've been having i'm expecting three maybe four bits to get and then we'll see what we get uh one thing that i'm fairly certain is the best we're going to get is a five plus five and we may end up going back to new river i mean they're not out of the question yet we're just trying to see what's there but the reality is even with new river it's going to be a five plus five so we're buying time in 10 years it's going to be very difficult to find a place to take our garbage out of the county so that's why i thought it would be a good idea to start the conversation now because it's going to be a long and difficult conversation with the community so this is where we uh we start thinking what's going to happen in 10 years 12 years actually after we get this contract and i used to call these options but they're not really options they're strategies and the difference is we can do several of them we don't have to pick a b or c we can do a b and c if necessary uh so the first strategy is baloo forest some of you you know where that is uh years ago the county did a study and they looked for the what they considered at the time the best place to build a landfill in a natural county and they looked at geology transportation environmental values they look at the whole thing and they come up with this piece of property so we went ahead and bought that piece of property and if you look at the county comprehensive plan it says if you want to build a landfill in a larger county this is the place you should consider first as we already did it used to be called site echo or site something now it's called baloo forest and nobody wants a landfill in baloo forest yeah so i understand it's not going to be very popular but that is one of the strategies we can be looking at the second one is you know the closed landfill in archer there's still some air space there so we can do what is called uh landfill mining uh basically you kind of open the cell get whatever is usable either recyclable or dirt a lot of what's going into a landfill is dirt because you have to do the daily cover so there's a lot of dirt that you can be just reuse and regain that space and then you kind of move from cell to cell and do this process uh the biggest advantage is this is not very common it will be very difficult to permit it will be a challenge but it's a strategy uh probably the biggest plus is oh you should do it yep i'm seeing it over in the bottom there there you go okay this cell here that's the only line cell that we have in the landfill all these cells over here they're online so if we were to do this landfill mining process that will give us the opportunity to go back and put a liner so that's a plus but there's a lot of challenges with this kind of approach besides landfilling you know we talked about this before there are other ways to manage garbage you know you can use biological processes anaerobic digestion or composting composting is picking up in the county and we're going to have a presentation of what the city's been doing in addition to what the city's been doing there's you know life source you're familiar with them they are they're currently taking all the county and city yard waste and they're building a facility in the city of newberry and it's moving along so there should be an operation pretty soon and they're mostly are using our yard waste and gru biosolids to make their compost but they also have the ability to bring food waste into that and other kind of organic materials anaerobic digesters you know we tried to get one of the eco loop didn't work out and i'm not aware of any commercial one in the county i know some farms and ag operations may have some for their purposes but that's another option there's the whole universe of chemical recycling there are different processes but the bottom line is you take garbage and you make this material called syngas and then from syngas you can either make more plastic you can make fuel you can make all kind of different things i know that the landfill in palatka is going to be doing a pilot study to study this kind of process it's a very small study i think it's like one ton per day so it wouldn't make a change for us but that leaves some we're gonna have some data in the real world in our area with this technology and then there's the other avenue which is called refuse derived fuel basically you take garbage and you make fuel pellets and you typically sell those to cement plants and there's a lot of interest in this area to do this kind of stuff because there's a lot of cement plants around us so we constantly get calls about you guys do this uh currently the cone plant prohibits the use of plastics and tires as a fuel source so there are no complications with the biological processing there may be some issues with the chemical recycling depending on what they do with the same gas as an end product and they refuse the right fuel is definitely currently prohibited by the and then here's the other big one you know we we have a zero waste plan we in the city we have a zero waste plan we we talk about circular economy all the time and we're doing things here and things there but we could be doing a lot better uh the challenge for us here is you know we're looking at four different things production reduction reuse and repair recycling and composting recycling and composting i'm not going to say it's easy but we can do it and we can manage it and we can put numbers to it you know it is it is something manageable once you go into the reuse and repair universe and i've been talking to the repurpose project and all the different players it's almost impossible to put a number to it we know we can do more but it's very difficult to measure your success once you get into reduction and production that is really out of our control because it's our national trends and things like that and that's why we tend to kind of focus on the ones that we sort of can manage which is recycling and composting so my main purpose for this is uh you know we're going to have that contract we're going to have an answer early next year and that's going to change how we do different things but i firmly believe that that we're bound time and in a 10 to 12 year window we have to do one of these things a mixture of these things do more of this stuff uh i do think that a landfill is no matter what we do is still going to be part of the solution so we're not going to i don't think we're going to circle or zero waste our way out of this a life who's going to be there and if you really really really and this is my main message if you really really care about zero waste you own your own landfill because that's now you know what it really means because a lot of the benefits from zero waste i know a lot of the savings they're not savings to a direct consumer they're savings on the much bigger picture and the landfill is part of the bigger i have so much to say about this i um i did get a lot of uh feedback from city of archer after our last conversation as as you might have guessed and i feel like um while i see the advantages and i i feel like there would need to be a lot of discussion education and compensation honestly for the city of archer that um uh in in much bigger than the whatever thirty dollars per resident that they did a long time ago yeah i don't even know about that yeah that that's what that's what they told me that they they did a compensation for the residents and it was thirty dollars a person which comes nowhere close to addressing people's property value changes and smells and traffic and all of that um but i i think the bigger conversation here is that this needs to be a conversation with the entire county because this is really um if we look at that uh six pounds per person per day you know we're we're 17 less than the national average right and so there needs to be if people don't want a landfill in the lashwood county or if they um don't want us to uh look at places like the southwest landfill then then the citizens need to understand the impacts of their decisions every day about what they put in their trash and how they choose to buy things and how um we choose our industries and we keep those industries responsible for the waste that they produce and so i feel like a big whole part of this conversation needs to be uh community education and community conversations and community outreach which as i'm sure you know but i feel like that needs to be said and it needs to be part of our strategic plan as we go forward with figuring out what we're going to do because honestly you know we can make all these decisions but the impact of those decisions is totally resting on the decisions that the residents make in our community to tackle to what mary is just saying here gus and i've talked about this quite a bit and i would really like to see us have some kind of a community summit like we've had with yara environmental summit where we are pulling gfl and waste pro and florence and community members uh repurpose projects so we can all sit down together because i know that waste pro and gfl both pick up furniture that's very heavy things that could be reused easily and that would help cut down on some of the tonnage you know that we're sending out but if we could somehow figure it you know you all have talked about uh i know some of the sites we have in the outlying areas already have a place where you can put your reusable stuff out rather than put it in the dumpster but if you're in a residential community and the trucks are coming by to pick up it's real easy just to throw stuff into the huge commercial dumpsters when you're cleaning our house and i've seen this you know big beautiful china cabinets and you know bookcases thrown into one of those dumpsters and hauled off if there was some way that we could have a communication system set up that we could design at a summit where when people when gfl or waste pro or whoever is picking up stuff is called to say i have this heavy duty stuff for you to pick up that we could also then engage with repurpose or our own recycle facility a big tent or something we put out at the repurpose project where all of that big furniture is taken there and then is accessed by you know some of our our good will for when we funded a truck so that repurpose could do just that you can call them and they will come and pick up your big heavy furniture and supplies when you're moving but not everybody knows how to do that so if we could somehow bring gfl and in and waste pro into that so if the calls come into them they could be in touch with repurpose right or they could and if and there's only a limit to what repurpose can take even though they've expanded so we may need to think about the possibility you know of you know the the big covered areas that we're putting over our parks you know and our kids that that there's a covered dry space that those things could be taken and you know i've shared that with you i buzz his ear all the time you know about things that we can what we could do because the ego loop out there you know it's you know it's it's sitting there if we could put just an industrial cover over it you know that we could take these things and have the sorting done there repurpose could pick what they could get from there but that's where our trucks would take those things rather than putting them in the big bins to be carried off and that would take care of the tonnage it was also take care of some of the space that we are trying to accommodate i mean to that point and i love working with the repurpose project i just met with them recently i mean they are not the only game in town there's a lot of other people so one of the challenges let's say we were to put this big tent you know we have to come up with a system equitable system so everybody sure but that could all be worked out right but i just want to be a friend is when everybody says i'm gonna do you know let's say you know 30 of the garbage is organics that's kind of the number we hear 30 that's a big number okay let's figure out we can take that out which is noticeable let's say we do let's say 10 is bulky material usable furniture okay or up to 40. 10 is recyclable that misses the system 50 that's still 400 tons a day that we need to find something to do well i'm just saying in addition to right so i don't i just want to make sure people understand that all this stuff is great we should do it all but that's not going to get us out of a big position i hear you and i think that that message is a message that is creating a defeatist attitude in our community that continues to have the reason why we still have six pounds okay because if we keep saying like well we're always going to have garbage in the garbage can well then we're always going to have garbage in the garbage can because people are like well we're just going to have it anyway so i hear you and i think like you said well production and reduction like we can't even have an impact on that that's not true we're an institutional procurer we buy thousands of tons of crap every single year as a county and we could build into our contracts the expectation that things are recyclable repairable you know breakdownable that you know and we've started that there's been some work i know with sustainable procurement there's been some work to build some of that into our contracts and i think we could do even more of that with the things that we find are the most voluminous if you will of ways in the county and be sort of a model for how you push the production side and the reduction side by buying things that might be more expensive on the upfront but then they're repairable you know or they're they last longer or they're made out of recyclable materials so they're building an economy for recycled materials and influencing that so i do think we have opportunity in the production and the reduction space as a procurer of stuff right i mean yeah at the county level we sure do but this is the citizens yeah yeah i mean it's at this at the at the county level but also by educating people by having you know like she's to mary's point like helping people understand the importance of those things and i and and i know it's a long-term proposition to talk to people about things like reuse and repair but you have to have the reuse and repair economy which i think repurpose project and um reuse project and some of the the folks and that's what i was going to ask you is how are things going with those grants you know we gave grants to two individuals i believe we gave grants to three groups the purpose project got one um all-time compost you got the second one and then uh patrick changed the name of his company and i don't remember the name right now so that's the third grant uh i gotta get with patrick irby or patrick to see where we are with those okay i do have we do have some data on full-time compost and i know repurpose project they build what they want to build i'm not up to speed with what patrick's been doing okay um because i do i mean i heard you say you know 30 of our waste stream is nothing to sneeze at that's a huge chunk of our waste it would vastly reduce the amount that we're trucking and reduce the amount that's going in landfills and that's very heavy because most of it is wet um and so the opportunity to do that i think is really critical and i know commercial waste is probably a huge component of that like it's restaurants it is the biggest component right and um so that's why i was excited to learn from the city how that work was going because i know that they had that push um and uh but i do think that focusing on those big hunks that are doable and getting our citizens behind it and getting people in a movement together you know it's much like we're a tree city and everyone like you know by and large in games i mean yes there are people cutting out trees and people are doing things without their permits whatever but like as a community we really value our trees we respect our trees we fight for our trees and i think similarly if we if we begin to define this place as a place that focuses on circular economy that cares about composting and recycling and reuse like i think we can get a a broader scale buy-in some of that is also the economics of it and having economic development plugged into it and i know we've done some work to try to get people with the eco loop but hopefully um with the broadening of that we can get more potential sure economic opportunities i don't know what you have seen i'm interested to know what your the outlook is in the sort of recycling industries around production of materials you know things that are made from recycled materials okay so for those of you and you probably already know this we do not recycle anything at the transfer station we collect materials we separate it we build them and we try to sell them for somebody else to make a product recycling is hard i mean i'm sure you read the newspapers communities around us communities in the the country recycling is not picking up people are giving up on recycling yeah it is driving across the country you don't have to i mean just go out across the counties around us people are you know nobody recycle glass we're we're an oddity recycling glass and it's just people thought that we're going to make money in recycling that is just not the case i mean somebody's making money it's not the local government we're spending money recycling so long answer it is not the brightest future out there that could change but but right now it is very difficult to sell those commodities that's what we look at we're just trying to sell these things if nobody wants to buy them we store them but that is the reality and as far as the uh the landfill yeah maybe i'm wrong maybe we can do it to zero waste but i can tell you one thing every single call that i got since i gave this presentation was about you're going to build a landfill that gets people's attention and maybe that's what we need to get people's attention i know she's talking about like a tent but like if we did a materials recovery facility that's been an ongoing conversation about the idea of that at the eco loop what is the current state of that conversation um i don't have anybody who's gonna pay to do a private merc i'm sure there's a lot of people who will jump at the uh opportunity of operating a county builder so nobody's going to put their money into it if we build one yeah we'll get people willing to operate it but nobody's putting money into that i'm still getting some nibbles on cnd construction and demolition because there is some money to be made there but on the kind of murph you're talking about for furnitures and usable products and stuff like that i'm not aware of anybody who's interested in building one well i guess it's a business i guess i would just put a plug in at least from my perspective and i don't know how my colleagues feel but i feel like if we're if we are going to do a murph and it's going to i would hope that it would be a comprehensive murph so that the people who are making money on the cnd they can use that money to operate the remaining parts i would hate to separate out the cnd and let somebody make money on that and then leave us stuck with the remaining stuff with no money to be made on materials recovery potentially or very little money i mean there's there's money to be made but it's really kind of covering costs right i think the purpose project has shown that you can make money i mean they're operating a successful business but it's very much i think cost recovery you know they're they're paying their salaries and they're covering the cost of operation but i don't think they're they're not getting rich on you know selling used couches and buttons and things like that so but just just to continue with the economy being what it is though there may be people more interested in buying like this right but with waste pro and gfl dana and kevin both are really good people to work with they like each other and repurpose project and you know it would just be a good time i think for us to all sit down and share information because the thing that's going on in palatka is a university professor that i was you know pointing to the university from time to time you know that there are projects that are going on there that are not university related they're private projects that each of these people are working on and we could include those folks in a sit down and talk with everybody who's doing every kind of recycling possible in the area um even nationally you know i mean or regionally have somebody who can share what's happening so that we can come up with a plan and that everybody understands and accepts um i that might get the attention of the public if they know we really are doing something dynamic and something unique to the country yeah that would give us bragging rights i'm just saying um the uh having us sit down together so we know what the possibilities are not just expecting gus and his team to come up with all the ideas you know and try to make them work because you know even the the idea of of having a place to drop off heavy duty stuff is not included in one of the options so i don't know if it's just because it's just going to be too hard to to manage you know where we take a bigger commitment from the county right you know to make that work or or not so so there is a very very developed vibrant reuse economy in this county that goes far beyond the repurpose project yeah right i mean you can i agree you can just good well facebook marketplace you don't even have to leave your house yes you go to facebook marketplace take a picture put say curbside pickup and there's going to be a race that is impossible to measure but it's happening so it's there it can always be better but i mean there's a lot of reuse recovery donations that is happening right now the trick is you know there's no way to measure that well if there's some way to make it all work together you know so that it becomes a thing you know rather than this group doing this and this group yeah yeah yeah that's what each person is doing their own thing right like i put stuff on the curbside all the stuff i don't report that to anybody i just do it there's like there's like 15 different facebook pages people giving away things every day and sometimes it's crazy stuff like i have 75 caps from my milk cartons and somebody picks them up for an art project it's really interesting you'd be shocked of the stuff people throw away because you know i'm there every day well i just you go why don't you throw this away you can't you just put it but you're it's also shocking the things that people give away and reuse oh yeah and i think that there's there's both of those things that's why i feel like education is like the biggest thing that we can do yeah but it has sometimes having one big thing isn't more efficient than having a bunch of of smaller things that are all working i'll give you a great example a couple of months ago a pastor he was a call he had 20 pews you know those church pews he's like how much to get rid of this stuff i said well you know you're gonna have to pay me or you can't donate it well i already tried to donate it to people nobody wants it oh just give it to me i'll put it in facebook marketplace they'll be going in a day they were going in a day two weeks later that person was selling them a facebook that's a different study yeah yeah that's part of the circular economy exactly but see that's part of the network i'm talking about so you know who to call because i watched gfl go and pick up two very nice dressers and toss it into their truck and i said where is that going to the landfill but it could be over to the warehouse or wherever it is rather than yeah or or that person that takes to call somebody that person could have just put a facebook market but they don't always know and don't always know that and and and a lot of that's online and there are a whole lot of folks who don't use online a lot of folks who are still i'm being facetious using the rotary phone and a phone book you know i mean that's the generation i came up in and my phone fights with me all the time you know so i just i just feel like if there was some kind of networking that we were doing here so that you know and gfl news and repurpose and all these other goodwill you know knows who to call and when and how so even if i don't know how to tell gfl that there's something i need picked up you know gfl will see it and automatically contact for me like you did well the the the the what i understand is that the critical need in that system doesn't exist and that's the materials recovery facility until that exists there isn't a place for them to take it and they're not going to drive half of it to goodwill and half of it to hospice attic well that's what i'm saying right so that's exactly the materials recovery facility is that one-stop shop and it's necessary i i'm with you on that especially in the town where there's a university and there are people coming and going out at university all the time and stuff being left and done exactly and that's exactly the biggest problem we have this week is we have one semester ending another semester starting and this always for me i was over 44 i bought new furniture because i grew up in gainesville and you could just drive around this time of year and pick up whatever you needed i had i remember i had a post-doc come come live with me for a few years and she got here and she's like where's the best place to buy furniture i said you got here just the right time everybody's packing their stuff up she drove around and she's still using furniture she picked up in gainesville right and so i you know to the biggest problem we're having right now is we've got a whole week of rain right and so all that stuff's going to be ruined and issues with dumpster diving you know i don't know what their rules about you know picking up stuff off the side we're picking up stuff where their apartment complexes that's okay well just no but you understand well we have a grant we just gave a grant to a company that's what patrick's company is doing and repurposed are both looking at how they can work with the move out of the college campuses with the big product you know like the apartments and the places where lots of students are moving out not the individual houses as much that's more a repurposed project and what you're saying getting education out and um so i guess uh just to put a bow on this go ahead i want to put a bow on this in the next 15 minutes so i'm going to give it to you and then mary you can have the floor again two quick questions um one you were talking about like kind of kicking this can down the road in 10 or 15 or 20 is that because that new river is no longer going to be an option or is that because it's going to be priced out of what's realistic so it would take us at least 10 years to build a landfill maybe less than that between the permitting so so we're buying time if we go that route new river may be an option but one of the reasons they they're doing the pricing system they're doing i mean one they want to make money well they're running out of space just like everybody else so for them to be a viable option in the future they will have to build more sales that cost money sure we provide money but we provide a lot of garbage we're 69 of what they take um second question i had was um i lived in panama city we actually had a power plant to burn garbage um gotcha um but there was a lot of problems with that traditionally um i didn't know where the technology was to is there a way to start doing that that does make sense and is a reasonable thing to do or is it still kind of uh are you backing up by trying to do so i don't think that technology has moved that far as a matter of fact i just learned that miami is going to put their their plans to rebuild their own energy plan on whole so that kind of tells me that that's not the way to go okay i mean as some of the commissions here i'm i'm i like the refuse derived fuel it just makes a lot of sense to me you're taking garbage and you're making cement and that cement plant is going to burn something if it's not garbage it's going to be tires or it's going to be cold but they're going to burn something to make the cement sure it's against the com plan that makes sense to me the traditional power generating thing i it's done when they do it in lee county i believe they have one of those i know they're one in bay county yeah so so it's it's and they have one in miami until until it burns uh not my favorite thing i guess you know the and the reason that we continuously reinforce not doing it is because waste isn't waste until it's wasted and once you burn it you're never getting it back and i mean we're talking about landfill mining now right and and in the future when we've mined out all of the oil and we don't have any more oil for plastics we're going to need to find plastic somewhere and we're probably going to dig it out of landfills and i'm not saying that's the best ideal scenario in an ideal scenario we would stop using so much oil or we would start using you know products that were less intensive than oil and we would be reused things that could be reused to begin with but my point is like putting something into a pellet and burning it so that it now is in our air and ash in our ground and we're breathing that pollution and we're never getting it back and we're not ever using that product again like it's gone forever right instead of something that we mine out of the earth and turned into something and that could be potentially can turn into something else and into something else into something else once we've burned it it's gone it's never coming back to us as a resource like we've used up that resource and we've polluted our air in the process and so to me it just doesn't make sense and i think it's also an easy way to continuously be a linear economy right because you don't see the results of the impact you're having on the planet because you're just taking a resource you use it once you throw it in the garbage somebody burns it it goes away you don't have to think about it instead of us dealing with the problem of the fact that we're creating all this waste and we need to come up with better ways to create the resources we need for our lives that can be circular rather than just throwing it off and externalizing the cost somewhere else right externalizing it to our land externalizing it to our air and you know do i love the fact that i have to wrestle with can we put a landfill in london county no but i i like less the idea that we cause somebody else's problem or we contribute more to climate change or we you know get rid of the limited resources that we have on this planet by burning the trash that we have just because we think it's trash right now because we've become an economy of like individually wrapped easily usable you know throw away kind of one use type of stuff but i don't think we'll always be that way and i think someday we would look back on burning trash and be really sorry that we did that because we're going to be like i cannot believe we burned those things that are so potentially usable now yeah and i think that's why we continuously say no like i mean it's come before the county commission i think at least three times at least three times yeah at least once while i've been on the dais and i think twice while when hutch and byerly were still here and and all three times the vote's been not to allow for burning of trash in alachua county so i don't know if it'll ever change but i think that's why you know um mary you had something to say yeah so i i did want to make the point while i think it's easy to talk about furniture and things like that because we see it right it's not in the can but really it's that's that's one of the easier things i think to solve i think the harder problems are all the things that are inside the can i um i'm curious are there any um so what is gru doing with their biosolids right now they have a contract with life soils and they're gonna make compost compost and so you know they dewater that yeah they get them a lot drier than they used to get them to the right right and so my question is do you know of any municipal waste situations where municipal waste that would be composted also goes through that process of dewatering in order to minimize the cost of transport and or would that even make sense for us i mean if we ended up putting it all in the same place is my question no i mean the way to deal with organics is the way the whole town of those guys are doing you got to get them before it gets to me yeah you don't want it mixed into the trash you don't want it what mixed into the trash well obviously yeah yeah no that's my whole point it's like you take that and dewater it with um if we're going to compost it if it um i'll talk to you about it later i have i know in some places and that wouldn't work here in order to reduce costs they mix the yard waste with the organic waste well and and i've been to places that do that this is more i'm talking about the compostable uh part of garbage okay so um i'm not sure you know that's the big part of that is the whole separation of it and then the transport of it and then um obviously the processing part of it i'm just thinking out loud yeah but i do think that um you know while talking about the furniture and all of that and repair and all of that is is i feel like that's the easy part of the conversation not that everybody's doing it but i feel like that's that's something that people can grasp the harder part to me is um that rest of the other four and a half pounds or five and a half pounds of waste per person per day that we need to figure out how to get people to think differently about and that's that's i think that's the hard part of the conversation so so my plan is like i said in january i should have a better sense of who's bidding and which direction we're going uh whoever we pick is going to have a big impact at least two of the landfill that i'm expecting to be they're even farther away than new river so if we end up going that direction then we may get out of the transportation business that's changed what we do at the county level so a lot of things are going to change january february yeah that's the short term once we get that thing signed then it's back to this and the long-term conversation so quickly to um transition that mary gave us a great transition because we have a we have a composting conversation coming up the residential multi-family food waste program with the city so i'd love to hear what they have to say but i will say i do think that that 30 percent of compostable waste while some of it is challenging to get out of the waste is like should be a major target for us because it's doable we know how to compost and composting is not rocket science it's pretty straightforward um the hard part is the logistics and the and the education of people and like not getting it not getting it contaminated um but i will say the university did look into something like you're talking about of putting a biodigester at our wastewater treatment facility on campus and so we were going to and the idea was that we were going to bring food waste there and de-water our you don't have to de-water the food waste necessarily it actually the better thing is to have the food waste transported and then put into the system with the biosolids it just have to be divided there's so much water but the food waste yeah anyways yeah but it was it was it was uh it it ultimately didn't end up working out but it was something the university contemplated for a while well yeah i actually think i worked on some of the initial parts of that project a million years ago or projects similar to that but i i feel like there's biosolids are super controversial because of so many reasons yeah you know people don't know when they go out and they buy black cow that's what they're buying anyway so anyway all right with that we will transition it over to hear from the city about what they're doing right now regarding composting um with the residential and multi-family food waste program maybe we'll get some ideas about what we can do to expand that project county-wide good afternoon hi tom how are you doing well thanks for being here i'm the solid waste manager for the city gangesville and it's always interesting to listen to reuse projects which of course we're in the the middle of our lease transition plans and uh and reuse plans but i wanted to give y'all an overview about what we've been doing for the last few years in the way of food waste we've been uh we started about five years ago in the in the planning stages and fortunately we're able to progress with a pilot program so um you can just do this arrow or i can do it for you okay so i wanted to go over the program's purpose the uh pilot program participation in the surveys the cost diversion and data findings that we did find out during the program uh the lessons we learned during the residential program which uh there were several being and we were hands-on when we were doing it to um between our residents and our uh for the beat path who was our contractor at the time a multi-family and commercial program update which is now we're in the enforcement stage of our our food waste program in the city and what we're planning on looking at doing in the future because there are several options that are available um so we've been we've been making some great strides over the last couple years been doing a lot of research a lot of other municipalities and i feel like we've got a few good directions to go awesome but we'll get started i would say the uh the purpose of our program was basically uh we have a 2040 zero waste goal in the city and seeing what we can do to reduce the the amount of times going to the landfills uh so we implicated uh implemented a small uh starting off with 200 homes pilot program started with the usa uh usda grant of about 50 000 it allowed us to buy these five gallon buckets which have the sealable lid that went along with them so the residents could while they were storing it they wouldn't have the uh the vector issues and insect issues we also gave each one of them one of these indoor recycling containers so they could get it from their kitchen out to their backyard to be able to put these five gallon buckets to be placed curbside so uh the program it was let's say being funded with a lot of usda money it was matched by the city's uh the city funding and we were looking to find a program that was we could go to a larger scale that had a cost benefit factor that we could that we could uh make it where it was cost neutral both on the uh diverted uh co2 uh regular methane now the landfill and uh and we pretty much got our answer over a four-year period and then measuring the satisfaction for our residents the participation rate and what they were willing to pay this program started off as a no cost it was the entire four years um so we uh got a lot of good feedback got a lot of participation uh a heavy participation for a for a pilot program but uh we started off with in 2022 with about 200 homes we were paying 15 a house we had trouble finding a vendor who would actually collect it so uh but we did we found a small local company we had three full-time employees collecting twice a week in some target areas we doubled the program the next year to 400 with that we are pounds per home at seven a little over seven and a quarter it seemed to remain constant throughout that it expanded again to the 673 units that's when we took in the duck pond area and tom petty park area in addition to our original area which was over uh basically west side of gainesville 16th avenue corridor where we felt like we would get the highest participation we kind of followed the same path as we did with curbside recycling back in the late 80s to try to target those people that would be most likely to uh to participate in the program and through the course of the four years we uh diverted 87 tons uh with an average participation rate of 62 percent we sent out a survey did one last june and one in october as the program was starting to wind down uh we had over a 50 percent uh return on our survey uh so which is extremely high for just doing a survey monkey that a lot of people were very interested in the program those that were participating were 94 of them were satisfied with the you know service uh 80 percent were willing to pay some something for the service and 48 percent was uh at five dollars per house per month was what they were willing to pay i spoke to a lot of folks when i was out there you know would you take it to drop off centers will you go back to backyard composting something that we could get an idea of what they're going to do after the program question so that 48 does that include the 22 and the seven or is that so that was okay so like 70 something percent of people would be willing to pay something right okay thank you so uh and five dollars was about yeah it was uh and we did have some folks that that didn't reply on that one way or the other so a lot of them thought we ought to pay them so it's uh five percent so uh because it is um so we kind of moved on our participation rate what i found when i when i first got into the project last may was we weren't getting the participation counts that we needed consistently so from june through the end of the program in december every monday and tuesday i would drive by every house and count who was putting it out and who wasn't and uh it ended up i had about even though it was a no-cost program i had about 25 of the participants weren't participating so that was kind of eye-opening in itself we did have some that one thing about food waste it's it's something that needs to go curbside it's uh it composts in the bucket but it um it will blow the lid off of it after a while so uh anyway we had uh over that entire period i was looking at about 62 percent of those 673 residents putting it out between one and two times a week uh a month i compared it with biocycle survey a couple years ago of other pro uh pilot programs different parts of the country ours was very high i was gonna say it's pretty high it was and that you know it was partially because of it was a no-cost program which a lot of these were also no cost ours was extremely targeted that which we felt like really boosted our participation rate up also so it was uh it was interesting to see that we had basically the same uh the same program it's just i think a lot of theirs were more expanded over a larger group and uh ours was a fairly tight the spatial route do any of those other programs they looked at not have a cost but have a more of a stick than a carrot like if there's organic material in their trash if they're mandated recycling or composting programs none of the ones that i these i found that were really mandated uh there i didn't really get into that area since it was uh you know basically based on pilot programs okay but these all these programs did evolve into different types of programs whether they be drop-off centers uh whether they expanded their curbside whether it's uh and drop-off center seems to be the most economical way to open it up to the most amount of residential folks with a lot of music keypad entry so the contamination isn't there one thing that was interesting about this is was in the low amount of contaminants that were in it the the participants were told that you know it was food waste only i didn't really run into any problems as far as compostable plates forks other things that could have been in there like we see in curbside recycling right where uh that the contamination was less than a half a percent i would say overall great so when we started looking at the cost and the diversion and what we found out during the program say that we had this past year we had almost 30 tons diverted um our average cost price our pilot program price was about four thousand dollars a ton part of that was based on what our contractor was we were charging 19.40 because this they would not only were they dumping it they would go and they would rinse the bucket they'd swap the bucket out take it back dump it in their pile rinse it out return it so it was it was a swap that uh i think added a lot of cost to it labor and uh so and then you could actually subtract about 25 percent off that because those people weren't participating all so so i guess the overall would have been lower uh if we looked at all you know all the program participants and uh versus the disposal rate uh just taking the landfill at 65 a ton sorry it doesn't work that way i apologize you'll get a chance to ask the question at the end yeah all right now the problem some of the problems we found was our metrics didn't start at the beginning of the program we weren't getting the feedback from our caller that we needed on the amount of tons that they were doing the amount of stops they were picking up so that's the first thing i addressed when i said when i got involved in is we need to find out who's participating see what kind of trends we have to be able to say well these are some of the reason that either is or isn't working instead of just coming out saying well we managed to divert 87 uh 87 times the second one is we needed to find out how much it all weighed because this person that was picking up wasn't weighing it before he was you know before he was processing it so if it's if it's not recorded the metrics on how much you don't know how much the success of the program is so we went through three different occasions and i you know we picked up weighed them on the back of the truck how much each bucket played uh twice and then at the close of the event when we picked the buckets up i took them back to public works had uh 192 containers dumped them all into you know went to weight each one of them and we ended up getting 400 uh 1492 pounds out of that so that's where we came up with our average weight from the participant per uh per resident um and that was for that week all right uh and then we we we had an active role as far as uh who was enrolled in the program how to contact them so we were sending out emails to let them know that it's the program's going well this is what we're you know the results were fine and keep on we had some contractor issues we tried to straighten that out by contacting them tell the residents they still need to put a curbside rule the city's still picking it up all the way until the end of uh last year um the other control was is when we needed to write the specs we need to make sure we know how much it weighs on what they pick up and the participation rate uh which allowed us the this the last six months of the program to be able to track the cost per enrolled house another model used in different parts of the country is to do a co-collection system where you provide a 96 gallon part you let the resident go ahead and mix all of his grass twigs and all that into one container and their food waste so you're providing not only food waste collection but you're also providing another added service to uh to the residents by not having to bag it bag up your yard trash and leaves in either in paper bags so it's uh it's widely accepted across it's very economical you do it on a subscription program some some municipalities to us you know citywide as uh as part of the service but we looked at it as being a subscription service where uh at ten dollars a month you would get a cart the service and you could put all your yard waste and your food waste in one container the only issues we found with that is we have to have a dep certified land uh processing plant to take it to and uh at this point we only have one and it is only food waste only so that's something we can look down the road is uh possibly turning a cart system into part of the pay-as-you-throw system which would encourage folks to go ahead and input all your smaller horticultural waste into a container along with the food waste um of course the equipment needed is just your traditional 64 96 gallon cart um just like the like we do with garbage and wheeled out to the curb for weekly service again uh part of the lessons we learned on that is we had a very high satisfaction rate among the participants it was convenient reliable that they were basically done with the routes by noon that that same day we didn't have any lag of time or breakdowns it was a small operation and uh the residents valued the service that we were providing since it was first opportunity for the for the residents actually to get involved in this program which was uh it was great to see that a lot of good conversation between the participants again we come down it's route density and participation drives the cost more stops we can get that are participating the lower the cost will be uh our processing fee is going to be running about fifty dollars a ton uh we lose a lot of that weight every ton of food waste that is collected is based after it's dehydrated it's going to break down to about 500 pounds of a highly valued done soil additives okay i guess we'll just pause there before you go into multicolor to see is there any questions from the commission about the residential program i guess one question yes go ahead just very quickly do do i think you mentioned it up here that you would encourage people to do composting in their own yard okay and and that's part of the education and the way that that's been done so it doesn't have to go to the again and for years the city and the county would give away free pieces wire they're about 10 foot long i got one you could go ahead and put it in and compost it in back okay so uh i do it at home that way i live out the country and uh if the deer don't eat it then uh you compost it but i get a lot of a lot larger animals like food waste too right so all my watermelons and uh i have six acres so it's a it's i conduct my own little experiments just on different ways how i can make sure um i get to the most reuse out of it since i don't really plan a garden anymore but but here in town even even just somebody's garden space or off in the corner somewhere of that lot you know i don't know if there's any concerns about neighbors the neighbors and having drunk out there not heard anything like that so well good good because raccoons need eat too right that isn't you you go ahead and put your food waste in it you cover it up with a few leaves sure it's safe commissioner alfred uh did you have and um so i've heard a couple of complaints that the rat population in gainesville has grown in the last few years and um i don't know if that's really true or people are just different people see them but i know certain neighborhoods have a problem did when you collected the containers were there and was there any evidence of uh rats or other things trying to get in or chewing on them or being that it was a five gallon bucket with a sealed lid there was uh i didn't hear of any issues as far as that goes okay good that's why i encourage people when they do do their backyard compost if they will throw the leaves and some other material on top of it yeah and turn it frequently like anything that's outside that you can you can try yeah yeah i just i was curious because um that's i know that some of those neighborhoods you've listed have had rat problems in the past so okay that's good um my question was um i guess i'm just interested in this like you know again 30 of our waste stream is organics probably in residential it's a pretty similar and probably majority of that is food waste you know there might be some coffee filters or you know paper that's also compostable it's counted in that but i would imagine that a majority of that is food waste has there been any conversations about uh city wide like like we did with recycling like actually having this just be part of the residential collection system with an expectation that it be done well after we sunsetted the pilot program we already put an it in out on the street for either uh it was actually five uh four different levels okay seven hundred to twenty five twenty five hundred to five thousand five to ten and doing in the entire city okay um so it was uh we only received two submissions uh we started looking at the pricing of it we had one vendor that was had never done the full of the house count in the city but had some other experience in other municipalities when we turned around and looked it was going to add about 35 1.3 million dollars to our garbage bills and looking at the weights that we were collecting in the pilot program versus the return on the investment of course with the um if we determine with the rate increase already coming in for collection we decided that we weren't going to pursue that path at this point and that's when we started looking at some of the co-collection options to uh to be able to expand it and uh so it's uh and we've looked at others and i'll show uh some drop off center locations also but after the results of the idn it looked like it was going to run nine dollars and 63 cents per house and we really didn't feel like out of 29 000 residents if we were actually going to be able to recoup that and um the cost benefit factor at this point just wasn't there um okay thank you all right only we have a zero waste initiative that includes um food waste as far as mandatory for multi-family and and food establishments so with our food establishments and restaurants uh we're starting to look at commercial establishments that have to have composting services food waste services if they meet both the venomous if well they don't if they're under the venomous and they don't create a cubic uh one cubic yard per week the problem that we're facing at this point after we're starting to get into it is being able to to be able to estimate that one cubic yard per week because it's all in black bags and it's all scattered throughout the wake stream so first we have to quantify if they're if they're mandated to do it and we did find that the public's is the uh walmart's went with organics who actually have three cubic yard dumpsters uh so they met the the criteria of the ordinances uh they're picked up two to three times a week at every public's in town and organics has also been picking up walmart for the last 10 or 10 or 12 years so on our biggest generators uh they're already combined with the ordinance and a lot of that is just uh right off the produce table and author and we're public's is transitioning where they're starting to get into some meat products uh where it was strictly uh vegetative waste uh for i guess the last two three years since they've been bringing the program into into place um is there a is there an option on places that uh produce a lot of food waste that's packaged well there is going to be an option uh oh the gas can choose processing our food waste now from these establishment it's going to invest into getting a deep packaging machine so that's going to also bring in a lot of the smaller ones the the organics the public's in the walmart's are pretty much deep packaging on site but it will be able to bring in a lot of those uh those producers that will be you know that have half a truckload that's already been pre-packaged that they'll need to uh to pull out of the containers can i ask a question yep so one of our challenges of course with food waste is also that that we have hungry people that need food that is not necessarily um reached the point of waste yet how are places like public's and walmart balancing um food distribution of of expired products and almost expired products versus um just throwing things away where's that power how are they do you have a feel for how they're navigating that line because i know that they do donate food to right of the mining and places like that it does and public's has been doing it for 20 years um they basically roll it out and you know it's already packaged and it's loaded up for reuse walmart i haven't heard them have taken that that step but that is a in our hierarchy of what we would like to see uh is redistributed uh to uh to uh food pantries and then of course it's uh it kind of works way down where composting it was our preferred last alternative right right so it's uh there is that hierarchy and that's uh now being able to capture those tonnages to actually quantify the amount that they're actually uh reusing is is uh that's really not just not capable of it would be interesting to sort of compare the percentages of uh walmart who isn't doing that same redistribution to publics to sort of get a feel for how much food is um maybe being composted that could be used in a different way well i will say two things one is that just because it ends up at feeding florida doesn't mean that it doesn't get composted oh absolutely number one number two i totally agree with that yes but uh number two i will say is that i think that one of the things that needs to be remembered or like we all need to remember is we're thinking about ways in which we reuse food is that just because it's going to like feeding florida or a food pantry doesn't mean that there shouldn't be or doesn't need to be a tipping fee because they still have to process that food and handle that food and get that food to people and they have to have cooler storage and oh i'm well aware right so it's like i think that it's been like this thing where like publics is in the walmarts of the world have been like oh it's a philanthropy i can donate it i get to write it off i get a win-win i don't pay my tipping fees but now a lot of these philanthropies are getting overrun and overwhelmed with getting all this donation material and not having the staff to be able to handle it and process it and the storage capacity to to deal with it so right i think it's it's a little bit of a give and take with that pushing of it going into the the free food economy no no i completely agree with you there but i was just curious how that how that works right what the balance is and how they're um you know if it varied from store to store or manager to manager how how they're figuring that out because i do know that some of that food does end up in places where it's desperately needed and and some of it's just garbage and um you know some of it ends up with pig farmers where they don't even bother to take the plastic off before they give it to the pigs which is another problem but it's seen that also yeah it's uh well one thing that one of the models that seem different between publics and walmart is walmart will mark down their bakery items public basically when it gets close to the expiration they donate it yeah so it's uh they're they keep it you know the product is it's fairly it is it is not out of date at the time public pushes it out and it's really pushing that day when walmart that makes that makes sense that makes sense i know of a few businesses in a town who have people they call who go and get those outdated items and then because and load up their cars and then they take them out into the community too so there are a few of those businesses that do that you're dealing directly with the community so is there a you're saying that uh ones that generate more than a cubic yard a week is there a requirement of that business to demonstrate that they're generating less than is that what your goal is is that they put all their waste into a one yard can for a week and well we we're trying to get them to start to get a 35 gallon cart which is basically one sixth of a yard yeah so when you look at you know you take just a traditional garbage can the what we're having to use to be able to actually enforce our ordinances do they generate six cans a week um if they've got a six yard dumpster and score four days a week it really makes it difficult to personally witness how much they're throwing out um so that's that is one of the things that we've struggled with in all the inspections that we've made why did you guys choose that it de minimis like like they don't have to participate well we do have i did several when i was the solid waste inspector i would did several of the you know restaurants inspections and let's say i went to pdq and most of the restaurants will tell me the same thing says we do everything we can not determine to generate any waste because when we're throwing it out the back door we're losing money yeah and actually that manager showed me two weeks where he has to take a photograph of everything he throws out because they use it his kpis are based on what he's tossing out uh we have a pizza place that's on northwest 34th that gets everything from a commissary and basically plastic bags of the inspector that went in there a couple weeks ago says well what do you do with your tomato cans it's all pre-packaged when it comes in because he would gone through the dumpster and says well i've got to be doing something with it they never generated it to begin with so it's uh you know we do have a lot of companies out there both national and local that have sustainability uh policies right that um they will go to the nth degree to make sure that it doesn't go in those containers uh we have apartment complexes that uh have done everything they possibly can to provide um that it different ways to recycle give it away uh so it's uh it's kind of an you take in and when we get into enforcement we have to take each business each part of the complex as a standalone to build our model from there okay go back to the corn covered plastic that they're feeding pigs is that is that is that in i mean would that be reportable too just look at the amount of plastic that's in the meat you buy and well i i don't buy a whole lot that's why we're just puzzled well there was uh back in off newberry road and kind of back behind the oak small in that area there's a lot of a lot of property back there and i remember going back there years ago we'd go back to pick up the garbage from the residential house and they had a pig farm back there and they were literally would back up to it and throw a whole truckload of bread out and wouldn't take the bags off of it and there were just hundreds and hundreds of bags that were through there and uh and you know you would think it's that has to be some type of animal cruelty of course that's what i was thinking yeah yeah but it's not you know and one thing i would say about wards market it's not regulated uh wards market has a farmer that comes by and picks it and he's it's not only he's sustainable by uh putting food waste and not putting in his garbage he's also selective on who he allows to take it to make sure that it's being fed to you okay you mainly do to life i did not know that was a thing so it's uh and every time a truck drives by me and it's like full of uh of bread and in plastic containers i think back of all that plastic blowing around that pen okay so now you're in the enforcement stage of this process all right uh all right there's with commercial establishments we of course they have to have you know they got their dumpster they got it if there's a dependence amount 15 of any type of recyclables in it uh be cardboard cans bottles and glass they have to provide us it has to be source separated on site if it's more than the venomous amount they have to have a food waste container on site uh basically they got to have a container that is you know uh doesn't have holes it doesn't create uh sanitary issues um we also part of this is our multi-family because we divided it in two different compartments we do food waste established restaurants and we do multi-family complexes multi-family complexes are mandated to provide food waste that is containers that is convenient as garbage it's as convenient as recycling so we have started the enforcement side of that here first of july where we have to have all three components of multi-family multi-family residents don't have a choice as far as what type of services are provided to them the city commission directed us to go ahead and take those steps mandated we have uh right at 33 000 apartment units in in the city 364 of those units are more than 25 units so uh per location so we opened it up where they we mandate it it's not if you want it the only exception we've given so far is a multi-story complexes where it says that food waste has to be as convenient as recycled if they have shoots we say you don't have to have it at that point you need to have and set it up in your trash room if you have valet services where they pick up your uh you know your garbage is recyclable at the door you need you know you need to provide food waste service uh we have a mandate that says all those units have to have one of these type of containers for an individual unit they also have to have a recycling for traditional recycling at each one of them so it's uh and we have on our website different manufacturers and distributors where they can purchase it so we started with the larger apartment complexes part of the proof and accountability is that you provide a contract that you have it with the franchise uh food waste collector um it does allow if you can prove and i have a couple places that say we take it to our farm and we we do it at that point anytime i drive by there there's food in their food waste containers so it's uh it all depends on the location um and they got visual proof that they're actually participating in in that type of diversion program um we do have the only exception uh exemptions we're allowing at this point is food waste collection on multi-floored apartments again it has they still have to have a food waste receptacle on the premise okay so like say we're setting it up with the ordinance dictates what you have to have the solid waste inspectors are now going to each one of those sites we started with we just finished the first 52 apartment complexes we started at those largest ones starting at 509 units and we're working down to the smaller units um we've issued over 100 notices violations we are turning around and we've we give them 21 days to comply and uh with all our zero waste ordinance whether it be garbage is recycling recycling is convenient it's garbage whether they're uh they have signage out saying what's recyclable and what's not or on the food waste side we're allowing a little more time time because we're finding third and fourth parties having a hauler that can set up the service having a manufacturer that can provide the bins that we're allowing to go ahead and go past that 21 days for another 21 days if they can show us a receipt of where they've ordered the food waste bins and the recycling containers so it's uh right now we're getting ready to be into the uh the citation portion of it our ordinance allows us to issue an initial 125 dollar citation for non-compliance of being into zero waste initiatives the second citation if it's not compliant within 30 days is a mandatory court appearance so of course court appearances now are done by zoom uh a lot of the judges that we encounter because it's traffic court it takes educating also the judge to find out what exactly the intent of our ordinance is and what the requirements are so we've been taking a lot of cases to these uh to these magistrates for the last couple years it's just we've expanded it because we we had this this 2040 goal and when it was 2015 it would seem like forever and now we're down to a countdown to see if we can get there as it was mentioned before we do have our recycling numbers are going down where we used to have 400 to 425 tons per month on our curbside we're down to about 285 tons now and it's it's glass is our biggest recycled product on that at 42 percent cardboard's at 21 garbage is at 10 percent that rakes one two and three on the curbside program so it is getting very expensive to process it because it has to be sorted at the county's facility and it's time and energy so fortunately we haven't experienced the contamination that we were expecting in food waste at this point we do just because it is multi-family that is open to the public we're expecting some some issues down the road we have uh and we're of course in it across the board whether it be student oriented traditional apartments condominium section 8 housing and each one of those has a different evaluation um we have some of them that are we've only got about six right now out of the 364 apartment units that are compliant all the way across the board we only had probably 20 um hotel was offering it to these to these multi-family gfl is now starting to offer it i was told that carger properties which is the largest uh property management company in the city is transitioning to getting food waste that they're 30 28 different units um so we've spent two years on the education side inspectors were going in there saying you're going to have to do all these requirements we had a possible 56 violations that you could actually get on between food establishments a lot of them were easy we need you to get an email blast out to all your residents once a year and tell them how to recycle traditional recyclables how you need to to recycle food waste um that you needed multi-family had to go twice twice a week about a third of those most of them were compliant to begin with they were just day-to-day businesses um but now we're starting to get down so we're getting in the weeds now between food waste and between a lot of recycling initiatives one of our uh proposals to our commission is that every multi-family property has a cardboard dumpster you can't put cardboard in a 96 gallon card of any quantity yes thank you so that one's uh that hopefully is going to go before commission here uh soon and i think that would be one way that we can reduce some of the contamination that we're seeing um so it's it's all these little things all these small components that we're putting together and tracking our data we have our haulers have to report how many traditional recycles are uh food waste collectors they need to tell us the tonnage since it all goes across the scales and that's what we'll use for the metrics to find out are these programs success uh get an idea of what the impact is going to be on the commercial businesses of the multi-families but i think you know when it comes down to the residents of those properties they're going to yield the benefit of at least having the opportunity to be able to recycle food waste and just traditionally commissioner alford for uh commercial restaurants is there any sort of oil and grease recycling available that's required has been for years in fact it's it's most of them are getting rebates back on their on the cooking oil of course all of them anybody has a has a fryer is basically mandated by ddr to be able to capture it every once in a while we will find someone who has one that's overflowing then we we usually call one of the um inspectors over at watchwood county to meet us on site and we've got i worked with uh mr moran on many of those cases and uh so it's one of those things it's a health and safety issue and it's especially when it's headed straight towards stormwater where where is the recycling facility for that how far does it go i'm just curious well there's a there's been when griffith and griffith industry's been in hampton about hampton okay 20 miles north of the air for the last 50 years okay so that is uh that's where the majority of it goes okay i knew that it was happening i didn't i actually did not realize it was mandated so that's good yeah dpvr and fdax both require if you've got oil like any kind of oil cooking on site that you have to have at disposal well i knew you had to do that and if you are a food truck you have to have a commissary that offers it okay good okay and fortunately the watchwood county hazardous waste they will take any five gallon container of the use cooking oil and i think they gave quite a bit out yeah more than you need that i was curious there okay so as far as on the multi-family enforcement rollout we have a checklist signage uh that we we we've been using for the last two years getting everybody prepped for this time uh i think a lot of businesses were didn't think we were going to evolve around it we gave every opportunity it wasn't because they weren't given educational materials and old sites inspections uh the inspectors go around and use the um consistent ordinances uh explained to the to the uh multi-family units about what they need to do what the correction period is and uh and if that goes if we can't get compliance then it will go to the notice of violation um and identify what needs to be done we use that 21 day initial correction period and then on a case by case basis look at extending it if necessary again we started with the larger complexes i think we're down to those that are less than uh 275 units now and then we'll continue to work down to those smaller units um so it's uh we're getting a lot more results now that we're starting the issue of the notices yeah and uh we have a great ordinance that basically has covered nearly every aspect of food waste and food waste collection and our other recycling initiatives okay on our next steps um he said we've pretty much reconciled what our pilot program was we went ahead and did the evaluation of the itn for a city-wide collection uh we're trying to decide what are the best ways to go as far as voluntary being community drop-off centers being able to offer a co-collected system through through the haulers which uh they seem to be some you know interested in getting into the business um so we're and we're and we're trying to educate exactly we we don't need the same contamination issues that we're having with our curbside recycling at this point um as far as our where it we've only been able to designate one location we're hoping that life soils could possibly move to get their food waste processing so we have another place of it that we take it to but at this point gaskins is the one who's who's handling it seems to be doing a great job i've been out there a couple times and seen they've got enough material out there that they can go ahead and mix the food waste in with a lot of the uh the chip material that they have out there and are producing a high quality product and again we're doing we're tracking just the compliance and just we're even though we're issuing a lot of notices violation which was the attention getter we're getting quicker follow-up compliance than i expected and uh so we're just keep on the larger the complex sometimes the the higher up the ladder the approval ladder it has to be um i don't need that you have these buckets on site i just need to see a receipt that they're on their way so we're just looking for compliance on those on that end keep that around so we can it doesn't have to be that one right it has to be a a collection bin with a lid i was curious what was on the front it's just some general information what needs to go on it and we have that same information on all of our um five gallon buckets and our initial curbside program great and we're mandating that they put those at the at the multi-family location so folks will know what was supposed to go in and what's not okay any other questions anybody else's yeah you are letting them put food waste paper in there huh and it really hasn't been abused that much you know i've i've always been skeptical as far as seeing what actually is going to show up and then of course um emptying a lot of those buckets popping them off and just seeing how much was in it because uh some of them might only have a half a dozen eggshells and half a head of lettuce the other one would be filled to the top 25 pounds uh especially during this time of the growing season yeah yeah yeah every day i throw one on my counter all right one thing about i'd like to just one point this picture here is a is the new river uh landfill gas capturing recapture system they have run almost a billion square feet of landfill gases through it 500 000 gallons of gasoline that they've only yearly basis it's pumped into a tico pipeline so whatever we're catching on you're not catching on the front end we feel like we're catching on the back that's one of the reasons that we negotiated our our residential waste stream to go to new river was because it was cost driven also it's 21 000 tons a year but it was also knowing that we have a chance to catch that methane gas on the back end and uh they went through a a lot of a lot of expense to get this permitted it's a nationally recognized landfill and recapture system and it weighed heavily on us to try to get all of our residential waste at least to end up at their facility yeah i mean that's definitely one of the reasons why i'm hopeful that we can negotiate a successful contract with new river again but i hear you all right are there any other questions from the commission for tom if not i'd open up to the public if anybody has any questions they can come to the microphone up here and introduce themselves if you have a question did it get answered you sure okay okay any other sure come on up introduce yourself you have three minutes or so come on i'm going to uh take off my citizen volunteer advisory committee hat put on a different one just a couple minutes will you say stay your name for the record oh i'm sorry richard devereau of town compost is my employer in gainesville for the sake of full disclosure i work for one of the companies offering food composting hosting and collecting services here in the city of gainesville and i realize commissioner engels here from the city commission the ordinance that we've been discussing or heard about really applies to within the city limits of gainesville so for those of you with the county um just food for thought oh yeah mr douglas has clearly outlined the city's very recent effort to begin enforcement of the ordinance uh particularly multi-family properties uh since 2024 mid 2024 my boots have been on the ground i believe i've visited every single multi-family property within the city limits of gainesville that have 100 units or more back in mid 2024 as a company that offers a service a lot of property managers were looking at me saying ordinance what ordinance and their next comment was when the city comes knocking on my door about this leave me a business card and i will call you so we've continued our efforts um quite frankly up until the past two weeks i've been like the maytag repairman sitting at my desk watching my phone grow cobwebs now eight days a week 25 hours a day um working to meet the demand from multi-family properties about what do you guys do and how much is going to cost you but given this is a relatively new phenomenon and with mr douglas here i'll bring these up we do exchange information at time to time this is what i have encountered um the food waste ordinance per se doesn't stipulate for multi-family properties any frequency of collection within the food waste ordinance itself however there are other ordinances containing multi-family properties that specify multi-family property must be collected a minimum of two times per week so with the properties i'm visiting with now for a point of information that's a question that's coming up that perhaps needs more clarification second issue is um the number of collection sites at a multi-family property and as mr douglas said this food waste collection is to be as convenient and as accessible as garbage or recycling so a multi-family property that has two separate locations on property dumpsters bins recycling for food waste collection to be as convenient and as accessible sorry it would need to be at both it would need to be at both okay for smaller properties with one dumpster a couple dumpsters not a big deal i visited properly late last week they actually have nine different collection sites scattered throughout their complex as a business the more bins you got the more often i come the more it's going to cost you so again at some properties there's been a little bit of consternation over well just because i got nine dumpsters do you mean i have to have nine collection points so that's just another point of information um thirdly and i think you've already addressed this uh we've had properties multi-level eleven seven stories a trash room on each floor um chaos uh panic over i gotta have one of these food waste collection bins on every floor in every trash room but i think that's been resolved has it not okay and the fourth point i want to make and i'll be quiet we have already encountered or discovered and i believe maybe at the solid waste inspection level may have seen it we're already seeing the show and tell compliance people we strive when we approach a multi-family property to check all the boxes the city says you got to have this that's part of our service the city said you need to have this that's part of our service very comprehensive i've already encountered more than one property in gainesville with someone else's food waste collection bin on site in the back of the parking lot with no signage no nothing except scrawled onto the black lid of the food waste collection bin literally by hand with a white marker or a white grease crayon c-o-m-p-o-s-t that's not really in keeping with the design of the ordinance in all its various stipulations so it remains to be seen how pervasive that becomes but i'm concerned that with multifamily properties here mr douglas here's my contract i'm signed up with abc company yeah i got a food based collection bin in the back of my parking lot um hypothetically that really doesn't meet the intent of the ordinance for the zero waste initiative so i just hope everybody will get on board with doing all the right things to make this as effective as possible thank you just two points on that uh three um our ordinance does mandate that all recycled containers garbage containers and food waste be uh decal with the information about what's supposed to go into it we have issued every hauler including oak town a notice of violation for not having the the right decal on the right container so that is that is one of part of our education is that everything has to be labeled and i've got like seven or eight different labels not only on food waste or recyclable whether it's single stream or dual stream whether it's garbage only uh so we've pretty much addressed that when the inspector gets to a location that doesn't have a food waste container at every dumpster location it's not compliant with being as as accessible as recycling so they will be issued to notice a violation for that so it's one of those things that we've we've pretty much covered in the in our initiative all the signage all the locations all the designated material all the exceptions and exemptions that are that are permitted and then uh you know and actually the food waste on multi-floor was not a was not an exemption i happened to be in a meeting with the city manager and two commissioners and they said this needs to be one you know we were looking at it as becoming a self you know a health and safety issue potentially so we've uh we've resolved that one but other than that they were very uh lack of spaces is another exemption i had a five acre property so they didn't pepper in for a food waste container and then i said well maybe you need designated parking space because i can find a locational just about every property except those with zero lot lines and those are usually inside the building is where the dumpster is so we're constantly trying to define those loopholes and they can do our interpretation of what the ordinance is the meaning of the ordinance uh feel like it's fairly straightforward but when somebody doesn't need to want to go through the expense or the uh the aggravation because it can become a property management issue yeah so i invite anybody who does have any issues that they don't think is their complex we need to uh we need to hear from you and then we'll make a site visit great and then i guess my i do have a question and then i'll turn back on mary and she has one more it sounds like um and that is is there uh um like a rotation rotating inspection period are you like looking at the properties on some kind of iterative basis okay yes well we did that for for two years we were making multiple businesses and we were telling them until we got to the point and that's why richard's phone is ringing because on july the first we went into a full enforcement mode out of education right and that's when we really started getting so i guess that's when those those compost bins will get caused during those inspection periods uh mary did you have any other questions since you seem to be a little uh first on the subject do you know of any communities that have ordinances that require uh bread products be unwrapped before being disposed of for animal feed no i don't but it's a i would fully support it because i have seen that and actually it's twofold when you get to the place where it has to be processed somebody's got to take it off and if they i'm sure there's a lot of food waste that is delivered to locations that they're going to throw in the garbage just because they don't have the ability to define it yeah yeah i i think that's something we should um consider it mostly be well not just because the animals but because of microplastics environment every other thing but yeah um yeah we do have one more public comment and then we're gonna this i guess what if we're done with this topic i will say total once i get thomas douglas's contact information is there um if anybody has any questions you can always contact him at the city and we will turn it into public comment so now it's your turn please introduce your system my name is that where you can have a seat right here i'm here for another reason but this this is a great topic um my question is simple is is there an incentive you can offer to these multi-family people family housing managers rather than only giving them a citation or whatever but making it as you guys were talking about education that this is important and making them compete different different management companies we won this award this year for composting the most in gamesville just a thought but to make some sort of positive incentive is this public comment forever i mean we're just this just this no yeah if you have other public comments please um my name is valerie dickhouse i live at 5107 southwest 47th street in gamesville i've been a resident of gamesville for 47 years and i live in a small division don't be nervous it's just us um called rice lands and we're off archer road and i-75 we've been there for 60 years at least i was the kid that moved in when other residents were living there and um recently we've been encroached upon by the city they h the hospital was built off of i-75 and they developed their land and they bought a piece of property that was right on the front of our property going into ricelands and they sold it to the city for the fire station number nine well prior to the development of this when my children came from saint pete they would come into our neighborhood and say oh we're in the cave of gainesville the temperature would drop 20 degrees when you went in off of archer road now they have decimated the entire acreage not one single glass grass blade is left gainesville sun has an article today on the front page um main street has a great article on july 30th we were told as citizens that they would remove brush and leave trees they showed us the plans we didn't know that trees were supposed to be on the plans we have never done this before we were told that they would be left and of course they were going to make it into a park-like setting so what would you expect trees right well the mayor says we'll give you back trees we'll plant 120 trees for you we'll give you a privacy fence we had if they had left up 10 feet of buffer now our neighbors ci-75 h the hospital and the fire station is in their backyard they clear cut the trees all the way to their property lines there was no friendly buffer there was no given good neighborly conduct which used to be in the rules of development in gainesville we are no longer tree city usa we need to get it back they clear cut heritage oak trees and then they find themselves one million dollar 976 000 something like that and so the mayor says to me oh yeah we can put back trees we have lots of money in the mitigation fund at the the ground breaking for the fire station i also overheard him say they had a tent set up they had to have a tent set up because it was hot out there really really hot everyone crowded under the tent and i heard you can wrap up your comments the mayor say give me the shade i love the shade so i'm coming to the county because that's we are supposed to be friends with the county the county is supposed to help us and i think maybe had we come to them before maybe they would have helped us in working with the city i just want more working together and not just waking up monday morning and having everything done i recommend that you drive out and look at it and experience it for yourself and it's happening in other places around gamesville thank you okay are there any other public comments i will say on the i mean this is a joint committee so it's a city and county i will say on the county's portion we've really been working to revamp and increase our protections for trees um and even in our own projects sort of hold our feet to the fire including the most recent um extension of of 123rd to like actually protect some trees on that that cost a lot of money and took a lot of time to do but i think in the end was worth it and so i guess i would just encourage my colleagues to look at our most recent update to our tree code and if there's anything in there that our staff can help your staff to adopt or to think about i'm sure they would be happy to come and do a presentation about what we've done but i also know that sometimes i'm not saying this was a good idea in that for instance or not because i know nothing about it but sometimes unfortunately because of the way development happens these days it seems like developers find it more convenient to clear all the trees and then come back in and plant new trees rather than trying to protect the existing trees and i think what they don't realize is how much ecological value they lose besides just the trees with the top soil that's lost with all of the understory plants that are lost as well when they do that so we've been trying ourselves as the county to think of other ways that we can protect lot level trees and and ecosystems i don't know that we've come up with the right solution yet but it is something we're wrestling with and maybe as our staff continue to think on those issues of the ways that we can do that it can be brought to this committee for our consideration and conversation and with that i'll turn it over to mary and then commissioner wheeler yeah i think i think one of the things that we need to consider doing county and city is to keep a record of the contractors that do not comply with our tree ordinances and let them compete differently for our contracts because i i feel like it sounds like this one did they just paid the mitigation well exactly that's my point we need to remember that and not give them another contract because they are not while they might meet the letter of the law they're not meeting the intent of how we want to work in our county so that's the solution that i would like to work towards right now and i would like to say that any time that we have property lines butting up against each other city to county because this is in the county that we need to be kind of included in the conversation about how that development is going to happen so that at least the residents that are in the county feel like that they have someone that they can this is in the county yeah yeah it's it's the property the properties in the city the neighbors are in the county oh and this is the problem the buffer you know we require buffers yeah and and because that was city property we didn't have any say on it but it would have been really nice to have an opinion you know as we watch the development happen and that's because that's pretty significant development right there yeah the hospital and the fire station and impacting neighbors in the county that we generally try to speak for yeah um because and another thing too this happened so very quickly uh over it was that virtually overnight so it was really unfortunate shock it's shocking it's it shocks the psyche and the hearts of people who feel like they're in the country and then all of a sudden are not yeah and exposed absolutely so i you know we can we can look at that and and i the last picture that i saw uh from miss dickhouse was a large live oak that was perfectly healthy that would you know had been cut and slashed i mean it's the body is still there it's huge and that's the sort of thing that you know we would have required to stay okay thank you uh commissioner yeah two things um one i'd say it's just to hear it's good to hear the response we're getting on uh the enforcement of uh of our food waste program on the side of something we've been working for a while and to hear from the industry the thumbs are ringing now i think it's definitely a uh a benefit it's good to hear that um second on the issue that our trees have come up that's uh i think we've got a pretty good history in gainesville and i think you drive around things i forget how green it is here until i go somewhere else and then come back um but we've definitely been two or three projects lately that have caused some confusion or trouble on uh on that so i definitely want to take a look at the processes we're using and what needs to be tightened up like i said i don't know um i've not had a chance to dig into it enough to know if this was our processes weren't followed we need to look at better enforcement of those policies or if you know the the process has changed and needs to be re-evaluated but um but it's something we'll definitely be looking at moving forward yeah thank you we appreciate that i do think if there is a chance to also to put in a good word as commissioner wheeler said of like when it when it's like you know on our borders of the incorporated unincorporated area if there's a chance for your you know development folks to reach out to our growth management folks just so we can understand what's coming and and have that conversation with our neighbors or look at opportunities to support you know the inclusion of buffers or the protection of trees we definitely would like to be included in that conversation absolutely this is an important project um the fire station going in solves a lot of long-standing problems we've had a fire department working out of a trailer for a while it's a very necessary thing and i think the community was pretty happy that the project was happening and then the way it was handled and like you know the the way everything came about what should have been just kind of happy all the way around has caused problems i don't think we can do better than that yeah thank you are there any other member comments one thing i'd like to say is i appreciate the time that you allowed me to come and talk with you i knew we had a hard stop so if it sounded like i was talking extremely fast i wasn't trying to get everything i could in while i had an opportunity no you were great thank you we appreciate you and this was really comprehensive and helpful to understand because i knew it was coming and it was happening but i didn't really it's really great to have the timeline and understand and so that we can also be your eyes and ears on the ground as we're working with the multi-family and hopefully maybe we can expand the the program county-wide once you've got the kinks worked out for us so and i do encourage you to look at the city's uh lease transition plan that we have as far as the reuse and all of our apartment complexes of more than 50 units right now we have it based basically on just the move out period the high move out period but we're hoping to expand that and we can start getting um the ordinances that we're applying to being able to residents know where reuse centers are to make them available possibly expand into more book giveaways textile collection areas some other those fringe recyclables that uh areas that we haven't gotten into in the past and expand our program while we've got a chance and uh we'll definitely keep uh keep your prices the success that we're having and hopefully and we'll see richard's weights go up considerably in the uh for his july report that's fantastic thank you any other member comments no just glad to see you i was wondering where you went all right our next meeting date is october 5th so we've got a little bit of time and and we have current agenda items for that that are in development we do not currently so suggesting maybe not right now but if you have ideas or you have questions that you want answered with regards to our water sheds our climate action plan works that the city in the county are doing in the areas of sustainability generally speaking i would say feel free to email stacy and um or email her and she can reach out to me and we'll make sure very quickly post springs what is it looking like right now is it still shut down or terrible yes i was out on thursday and friday but i believe it's still shut down we i was just looking at rainfall that we got in the area we might see it come up some there's a little bit of a lag time normally from when we get rain and when we see a response okay so you know we're keeping an eye on the data but it's really going to take the flow we did some sampling that it did meet some of the criteria that could potentially open it but since flow wasn't really leaving the spring run it didn't feel safe for public health even in the last drought i don't remember it being so stagnant i mean it went down to a triple i don't know if we closed the swim area um at that point in time i mean it was managed differently i see um it wasn't the county managing it in 2012. right a lot more water use and a lot more development in those areas you know pulling water so all right well if there aren't any other comments then i will say we are adjourned