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For those members of the public that have joined us by way of Zoom or teleconference, please select star nine to virtually raise your hand if you would like to speak or select the raise hand feature on your device. For those member of the public that have joined us by way of zoom or teleconference please dial star 9 on your phone or select raise hand from your device to let us know that you would like to provide a comment. Thank you.

All right, we're ready. Madam Clerk, whenever you are.

If you could give us just one quick moment while we start recording, Mayor.

Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Let me go ahead and call this meeting to order. Welcome everybody to a special meeting of the Santa Ana City Council for June 22, 2021. Let me just begin by saying thank you to my colleagues, both who are present and on the line. We know that this is time away from them, but we wanted to be as transparent as possible and make this available to the public, have an open discussion, learn as much more information as we possibly can so we can make an informed decision. I also want to thank staff for helping prepare this and also to those who will be speaking to this item as well.

Thank you in advance for lending some time so our residents and the council become better informed. So let me just begin with some quick housekeeping. So this meeting is taking place with in-person attendance by teleconference via Zoom. The public can access the meeting via the Santa Ana YouTube channel or the city's website. As always, please bear with us. There may be some technical difficulties that may disrupt the flow of the meeting as we go through this. And I'll go ahead and call on our clerk of the council to call roll.

Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Becerra?

Here.

Councilmember Hernandez? had an emergency so he will not be present. Councilmember Lopez? Here. Councilmember Mendoza? Here. Councilmember Fan? Here. Mayor Pro Tempeñalosa? Happily present.

Mayor Sarmiento? Here. So we're going to begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you'll all please rise and join me by placing your right hand over your heart and repeating after me.

David Penaloza

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thanks, everybody. And let me go ahead and just preface tonight by letting you know we're going to kind of change this up a little bit. normally during our regular council meetings we have public comment that precedes staff presentation but tonight we're going to do staff presentations first and then invite the public to comment if there's anything that they'd like to address the City Council with so with that we only have one item on tonight's special meeting calendar and that is the solid waste contract and this is going to be a study session for that so I'm going to turn it over to the

city manager and her staff to go ahead and make the presentation and thank you

Mayor. So tonight leading the workshop is our own executive director of Public Works, Neil Saba. His team and the consultants and your ad hoc committee and the proposers that are here tonight have been working on this for quite some time and we're very excited to share the information with you. So with that I'm going to turn it over to executive director Saba.

Good evening Mayor, Mayor Potem, members of the City Council. Tonight we have for you a presentation and a work-study session in regards to the solid waste request for proposal before I begin I would like to thank you and all members of the City Council on the enter on your continued support and all of the members of the ad hoc committee and mayor pro tem panel Osa council members fan and Mendoza on their continued support I would like to also acknowledge our solid waste consultant HF and H and our Public Works staff Christy Kendick

Margaret Mercer and Yasmeen Vasquez for their hard work all throughout as a result of the RFP we received four solid proposals proposals all four are well qualified to serve the city we will be making recommendations to you but it It will be up to you to select what is best for Santa Ana. With that, I would like to start my presentation with a timeline.

Our timeline tonight is the work study session from June 23rd to August 16th. staff will welcome council members questions inquiries about the entire process and the agreements with all four hollers so we welcome your participation and questions on all of these items that over concern to you on

July director so if you can speak a little closer to the mic I think that

way everybody in the audience is that can you guys hear okay on July 20th 21 we will hold a public hearing and adopt a resolution of intent to grant solid waste franchise to any one of the four hollers or proposals on August 6 17 2021 we will hold a public hearing and adopt a resolution to grant solid waste franchise an agreement to one of the four proposals and authorize staff to proceed with Proposition 218 process. On July 1, 2022, we're hoping that the services under new contract

will begin. Our agenda for tonight is staff presentations followed by proposer's presentations, public comments, and then council questions.

Before I begin, I would like to just get the information out in terms of containers used in the solid waste industry. we use carts, and those range in size from 35, 64, and 96 gallons. What we call bins look like those steel bins with a black cover. They range in size from one to six cubic yards. We also have roll-off boxes of various sizes that look like this picture.

The RFP request for proposal key services for residential included the following. Three-card automated residential collection service, senior and mobile home load generator discount, walkout service for disabled residents at no charge, holiday tree collections, on-call bulky item collections, on-call universal waste collection, residential used oil and oil filter collection program, temporary refuse BEND service, Sharps mail back collection program.

Remember, this is for residential. For the multi-family and commercial and industrial users, we included Bend collection service, cart collection service for businesses with no room for bends, source separated recyclables and organics collection service, temporary bend service, permanent and temporary roll-off box service, on-call bulky item collection for multifamily.

More to come on that. I know that this item is of a great concern to you, so there will be more information on the bulky items for multifamily coming up. We also asked for a multifamily bin customer holiday tree collection.

For government operations, we requested a city facility refuse, refuse, recycling, organics, and e-waste collection service, construction and demolition debris collection service from city government operations, refuse, recycling, and organic collection service for city events, parkway cleanup following quarterly garage sales, Weekly alley cleanup. The weekly alley cleanup, as of today, we have biweekly or twice a month. We have requested the increase in that service to be weekly.

Grant administration service and battery recycling program in city facilities. For the community, we asked for 300 roll-off boxes per year for neighborhood cleanups, annual household hazardous waste drop-off events, annual shredding event, annual compost giveaway event, environmental ambassador program, one full-time recycling coordinator, and funding of the Santa Ana Green Quarterly Newsletter.

The contract terms include the following. 10-year term begin July 1, 2022, with mutual option to extend the agreement to up to five years and additional option to extend for up to 36 months at the sole discretion of the city. We also included in the contract also a minimum recycling requirement, what we call minimum diversion rate. We also requested administrative, vehicle impact, NPDES, and franchise fees.

Trenial contract compliance audit and funding for same is in the terms. All carts shall be at the start of the service, shall be new, I'm sorry, at the start of the service and in compliance with SB 1383. All route collection vehicles shall be model year 2021 and at the start of the agreement. We also requested education and outreach program implementation and also a faithful performance bond and letter of credit.

The rates are allowed to be adjusted on an annual basis. For residential, multifamily, and commercial service, there will be three factors that would affect the rates, the service component, the fuel component, and the Orange County landfill system component. All these are universal to all haulers, no change, and they are indexed by the CPI, which is the Consumer Price Index, and the PPI, which is the Producer Price Index.

index. For the roll-off box service, same thing. Those rates can be adjusted based on service component, fuel component, and tonnage. Again, they are linked to the consumer price index and the producer price index. Other services also can be adjusted on an average annual percentage change in the consumer price index for all urban consumers, all items, less food and energy. That's the index for that.

Like I mentioned, we received four solid proposals. And next session or next section, I will be talking about the rates coming up. So the proposed rates range from $17.55 to $23. Those are for the residential monthly rate, I may want to add. $17.55 ranging to $23.71. The data in front of you is ranked from low to high.

Today's rate for such a service is $22.57. The service level in this situation with the residential is one refuse cart once per week, one recycling cart once per week, and one organic cart once per week.

The projected residential rate for the first five years looks like this. The range, first year from 1755 to 2295. Year five, 2035 to 2689. And these are adjusted, like we mentioned earlier, by the Consumer Price Index. And in this case, we have also asked for clean city initiatives that have a factor in those increases. And we'll talk about that in a minute.

This table assumes 2.5% CPI.

The projected residential rates for the clean city initiatives, This is what city staff has asked for to enhance our service to maintain a clean city ranges from the increase in year two between 1% to 4 and 0.14% in year Two in year three the range goes from four point two percent to 19.99% and In year four for one of the haulers is two and twenty two and a quarter percent All these data is really assorted by the,

alphabetically by the Holler's name.

In all, the increases for the first five years look like this. Year two, it could be between 0.46 to 3.5 or 3.5 to 4.6 in year one. Year five, we're looking at 2.5%, which is just the CPI assumed. The data is in alphabetical order by firm name.

Leaving the residential rates alone, now we are going into the commercial cart service. The service cost ranges from $85 per month to $250 per month. Equivalent service right now is $133.20. The level of service for that example is one refuse cart once per week, one organic cart once per week, and one recycling cart once per week. And that's just an example, by the way. There's a permutation and combination of these services

that it is a menu that a commercial customer can select from.

The three-cubic-yard temporary bend service cost ranges from $95 to $151.76. The data is ranked from low to high. Current customer rate is $97.50, which does not include disposal cost. So for us right now, it's $97.50, but there is a disposal cost attached to that service, and the numbers that you're seeing right now does not have the disposal cost attached to it or needed.

For an example for commercial, I'm sorry.

Am I ahead of myself?

Okay, sorry about this. A multifamily residential service, that's the multifamily service right now, or the proposed cost ranges from $562.31 to $630.69. And again, the data is ranked from low to high. The equivalent service rate for fiscal year 2022 is $448.64.

The level of service in this example is a three yard refuse bin twice per year, per week, I'm sorry, three yards recycling bin once per week and one organic cart once per week.

Another example for commercial bin service, the pricing range from $424.92 to $459.98. The data is ranked from low to high. Equivalent service is at $388.19. The level of service in this case is a three-yard refuse bin once per week, three-yard recycling bin once per week, and two-yard organic bin once per week.

The roll-off box rate comparison ranges from $496.62 to $667.88. The data is ranked from low to high based on the total amount. Existing customer rate today is $584.31. cents. Three cubic yard temporary bin mixed CND. CND stands for construction and demolition

material. The price ranges from $95 to $175. Again, the data is ranked from low to high. The existing customer rate for fiscal year 21-22 is $145.21.

Mixed construction and demolition up to 8-ton service. The pricing ranges from $594.74 to $679.62. The existing customer rate at this time is $635.18. And again, the data is ranked from low to high, and this applies to any size roll-off box up to 8 tons.

Mixed construction and demolition processing per ton over 8 tons. The pricing ranges from $63.50 to $104.73. Again, the data is ranked from low to high. Existing customer rate is $64.28.

For construction and demolition service. Construction and demolition C&D service are included in the proposed exclusive solid waste agreement. Current C&D agreements expire on June 30, 2022, same time as the current solid waste agreement. The City does not believe there are continuation rights for the current C&D providers.

Should continuation rights exist, current C&D providers may provide concurrent service for up to five years as required by Public Resources Code, Section 49.520.

The billing. The city will continue to do its bi-monthly billing for the residential curbside service. The contractor, or the proposer in this case, will do the monthly billing for commercial, multifamily, an industrial cart, bin, roll-off box, temporary service, C&D services, and other charges.

Next, I'm going to touch on the revenue to proposers.

The first-year rate revenue to proposal looks like this. It ranges from $57 million to $59 million, and the data is ranked from low to high, and it assumes exclusive construction and demolition services in the agreement. The 10-year forecast ranges from $676 million to $702 million.

This includes the proposed rate increase for years 2 and 4 and an estimated annual CPI increase of 2.5%, assuming exclusive construction and demolition service.

Equipment specifications. All proposals are going to provide us with CNG vehicles, some compressed national gas, some renewable natural gas, model year equipment, new carts, and new bins except for one that will continue to use existing bins. Again, the listing is alphabetically arranged.

Through the process, we did a reference check, and that is the data. The overall rating ranged from 4.1 to 2.9, one being unsatisfactory, five being exceptional. And the data is ranked from high to low.

Proposal offered enhancement. Now, each of the four proposals elected to provide the city with their own enhancement. This is above and beyond what the city has asked.

The listing here is alphabetical. Athens Services offered a 10 free bulky items pickup per quarter per dwelling unit for multifamily resident and $48 per item for items exceeding $10 per quarter. Free illegal dumping pickup, education and outreach recycling program, procure compost on behalf of the city, displaced employees will receive equal or higher wages, six environmental managers to oversee trash hauling,

and all clean city initiatives will be performed in-house.

CRNR environmental services offer the following. Provide three full-time recycling coordinators, part-time internship for Santa Ana students, lightweight RNG powered collection vehicles with RFID residential car tags, provide two trucks and two crew dedicated to collection of illegally dumped items, four bulky item pickups per year per multifamily unit, up to four items per pickup, a partner with a third party to support community organization,

offered to provide street sweeping when a current contract expires. Qualified employee will be provided with offered letters of employment. Clean City Initiatives Services will be in cooperation with Goodwill Industries. Republic Services offered the following. Three full-time recycling coordinators, $200,000 per year to select community events. representatives to join Kiwana's Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce and OC Human

Relations Commission will provide donation of a $10,000 per year to sponsor city events work with Illumination Foundation to provide 150 new lockable carts school tutoring support collect illegally dumped items within 24 to 48 hours, procure compost and RNG to assist city in meeting compliance, 10 free bulky items, pick up per quarter per dwelling unit for multifamily residents, work with city to prepare a viable plan for acquiring and integrating

displaced qualified workers, a clean city initiatives will be performed by Republic and subcontractor, three-party diversion tracking through the recyclist, and the piloting of an electric refuse vehicle pilot program.

Waste management offered the following. Two full-time recycling coordinators, third-party diversion tracking through the use of the recyclist, We'll collect illegally dumped items within 48 hours of notification, unlimited bulky items pickup to multifamily properties through on-call scheduling or designated collection days, and we'll utilize the same truck used for servicing illegal dumping. will procure renewable natural gas on behalf of the city. The use of RFID-equipped carts will continue to use old pens,

and clean city initiatives will be performed by a subcontractor.

As you know, we have also had an ad hoc committee that met five times. Thank you, Council Members and Mayor Potem for that. It was a lively committee, and we appreciate your participation. It was great. Thank you for that. The committee requested various items and information that we provided that ranged from wage and employment information all the way to description of proposals, emergency preparedness, information regarding vehicles and accidents.

So there was 10 items that we took note of, and we sent those inquiries to the proposals, and we got the answer to all of them, and we shared that information with the ad hoc committee. Over note, through the ad hoc committee inquiries, the additional wage and employment information was provided, which we thought we wanted to share that with you.

The average hourly wage ranged from $25.18 to $26.91. The average wage, payroll, taxes, and employee benefits ranged from $38 to $35. dollars, employee representative represented by collective bargaining agreement. Four of the haulers of the proposals have representation, one doesn't. Average tenure of drivers range from 10 to 23 years. And the question was

will the hauler or the proposal provide a preferential employment opportunities to qualified City of Santa Ana residents? The answer was yes from all of them.

Right now I would like to share with you our success in requesting a clean city initiatives. Give you a little background on that. It was requested by the mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, and the council members. The initiative was directed and guided by our city manager and our executive management team. It was supported by all proposers. It provided a comprehensive right-of-way cleaning. It was developed by city staff and refined by our consultant FH&H. It targets heavily traveled locations, industrial and business districts, and hotspots.

Service locations can and will vary based on city right-of-way cleaning needs. This is, after all, a 10-year program where the service will vary over the years, so we have some flexibility there. Most of the services will be provided six days per week, not five, six. All proposals responded and will be able to provide that service to be phased, or the services are to be phased over 24-month period.

What are the services? A clean city initiative service enhancement. Number one, we asked for a site-specific litter cleaning and bulky item removal. This is a proactive service where we're not waiting for someone to complain. We are asking them to drive the city and look for bulky items to be picked up and cleaned. So it's not on a call basis. It can be, but it's a proactive where we wanted to drive the city basically and look for those areas, hot spots mostly. We also asked for a right-of-way trash container service and cleaning.

Those are separate and different than the ones that are provided at the bus shelter. So we're adding more trash cans throughout the right-of-way, up to 250 of them. We also requested that they use and utilize our work order app. So there will be communication between city staff and the hauler and also from the residents to the hauler directly to do some cleaning and pick up of items and things of that nature. We also requested that a sidewalk litter and debris cleaning service, that's the hardscape. We are targeting about 30 miles a week of cleaning of sidewalk curb and gutter.

We also have requested that they provide a power washing of our sidewalks, about 15 miles a week of that. Porter service was also requested. and we also requested that a washing and sanitizing of all bins once per year be provided to those customers that request. And we also requested that they provide us with a clean business initiative program.

Now these services have some cost to them and we went over that just before this. The rate adjustment arranged for these services from 1% from the first year, 1 to 4.14, and the first year from 99% to 4.2. The second year and for one proposal, the third year will add to 2.25%.

These rates increases are in addition to the standard annual consumer price index rate increases and only apply to years two through four of the 10-year agreement.

Next steps.

between June 23rd tomorrow and August 16 I welcome you to reach out to staff to us to talk about these agreements issues you may have question you may have so we can answer those and give you a perspective on what we're up against and answer your questions on July 20 again we will hold a public hearing and adopt a resolution of intent to grant a solid waste franchise to any one of the four proposals on August 17 is when you select the hauler on August 17 we will

hold a public hearing and adopt a resolution to grant a solid waste franchise and agreement to one of the four proposals in the same time you would authorize us to pursue a proposition 218 process which is the 45-day notification, we set the rates, we hold the hearing, and adopt our new rates for July 1, 2022. That concludes my presentation. Now we can transition into the proposals presentations. We have asked all four proposals to provide us with a seven-minute pre-recorded presentation about their services and

and why they are best for Santana.

How'd you guys select who goes first? Draw straws or flip? It is alphabetical. Just kidding, just kidding. Alphabetical works. So I just wanted to remind the public and the proposers and everybody else, this is a study session, so we're not gonna be making any decisions tonight, but this is an opportunity for you to field some of the questions from the members of the council and any other additional information you can provide, in addition to what's in your presentation, what's been presented by staff, but just to remind everybody, this is simply more of an exchange of information so we can make a better and more informed decision.

And again, I forgot to thank the members of the ad hoc committee for serving and getting additional information. We know that it is a lot to absorb, so to the extent that that allows us to take a deeper dive, it certainly does help us. This is a significant, substantial contract that we will be entering into, so we appreciate the work and the time that was devoted and dedicated to this. So I'm not sure if staff's ready to go. You let me know.

We're ready.

We'll turn it back over to you all.

Perfect. So we're going to go in alphabetical order, and the first video presentation will be from Athens.

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Ramirez, Vice President of Government Affairs at Athens Services. I'm very excited to share with you more about our company and how we can be the best partner for the city of Santa Ana. Established in 1957, Athens Services is a local family-owned business and for the past 11 years, we have been providing street-sweeping services in Santa Ana. We are not new in this community and we have been waiting for the opportunity to become your waste and recycling partner, which is why we structured our proposal to put money back into the wallets of your residents.

Our proposed rate is the lowest rate, lower than what your residents are currently paying. That is a savings of nearly $60 a year compared to your current rates. Athens is different from the others in many ways. As a local company with our headquarters here in Orange County, we can make decisions and respond quickly to your needs. We own and operate all of our facilities, including three material recovery facilities and a composting facility, all that can service the City of Santa Ana. We have invested millions of dollars in technologies that keep us leading in sustainability.

And when the technology is available to use electricity to power a collection vehicle, we will be the first to use it. Athens focuses on creating a safe, healthy and happy environment for all of our diverse employees. As a family-owned and operated company, we recognize that excellent service is a direct result of our great employees and all of their hard work. This is why we pride ourselves on offering the best benefits and compensation in the industry. Our drivers are paid very competitive wages and receive full medical coverage for themselves and their families at absolutely no cost to them.

This is the main reason why since 1957 we have never experienced a work stoppage, a true testament to our dedicated and happy employees at Athens Services. At Ate me liked the system of them. If you have a problem, they try to help you. They try to see the workers by us. It's something that we don't see. The owners go and they come and they come and they come together with the workers. And here, the owners know themselves, they present to one and talk to them. and everything.

It's nice because the owners spend their time to come with us to live as a family.

This is the place to start. Yeah, very good company. Hi, I'm Christina Duong and I am the Director of Business Analytics at Athens. I've been with the company for over 14 years. During my time at Athens, I've been involved in various aspects of our business from post-collection to compliance, helping the company continue to grow. We are very excited for the opportunity for the city of Santa Ana to join the Athens family. We are very excited to be the Santa Ana, the family of the family of Athens. As a member of the Athens team for the last six years, I have seen our company evolve and grow.

This exponential growth has been achieved through empowering our employees. We drive change in the waste industry and how it operates. We look at other ways we can provide value in a community beyond waste collection. And we took this approach in the city of Santa Ana by providing six environmental managers. We can help the city address their environmental justice concerns through this approach. My name is Daniela Ojeda, and I am the government affairs manager that will be assigned to support the city of Santa Ana. I will be responsible for working with the community to implement outreach and environmental programs.

Essentially, I will work with city staff and community groups and associations in order to keep Santa Ana clean and environmentally healthy. So I will not be doing this alone. One thing that is unique about the Athens proposal is that we will assign environmental managers to each of the city's wards. Managers like Bailey. These managers will support city staff and help facilitate the services that Athens will be providing the city. For example, they will work with customers and the city staff in order to identify abandoned bulky items and get them removed quickly. They are basically an extra pair of eyes in the city's neighborhoods.

In addition to them, I will also work with recycle coordinators who will conduct outreach and education to our customers. Santa Ana is looking at their waste hauling franchise in a new way, taking a more holistic approach to combat other issues in the community. Included in our proposal is our Porter services, such as power washing your sidewalks, curbs, and gutters, as well as litter cleanup. And we do this all with our own employees. We do not subcontract any of our services, which means consistency, quality, and control for all the services provided under this contract.

So you might be wondering, how can we offer all of these services and still reduce your rates? Well, Athens is privately owned. We focus on Main Street, not Wall Street. We do not have any stockholder obligations, which helps us to keep our costs down. We look at contracts like Santa Ana's as a long-term investment, and we invest in the communities we serve. This is why we're proposing to build a facility in the City of Santa Ana. This location will be transformed into a state-of-the-art facility that will house our equipment used to service the city.

This location will generate sales tax revenues for the city and create jobs for residents. and we will provide employment opportunities to Santa Ana residents first. We are very committed to supporting your community and have allocated $200,000 annually to do so. We will partner with workforce development organizations, provide internships, and establish an environmental scholarship fund. In addition, we will provide ongoing recycling workshops, educational tours of our facilities, provide compost giveaways, and engage with all of your community organizations.

You've had a chance to hear from our team, and you know we will only use Athens employees in your city. And most importantly, we offer the absolute lowest rate. For the last 11 years, you've experienced our excellent service. We are ready, willing, and fully capable of becoming your new waste and recycling provider. As your trusted partner, you know you can count on us to get the job done. Now, let's move forward together.

The next video we will see will be from CRNR.

Imagine a world where zero waste is sent to landfills. where communities are able to conserve 100% of their resources, and operating a large-scale business is actually good for the environment. This is the mission CRNR has been working toward for nearly 60 years, and we are closer to achieving all of our goals than ever before. In 1970, CRNR opened one of the nation's first industrial recycling facilities and revolutionized the industry with our three-cart collection system. Today, we service over a half a million homes and businesses

with industry-leading technology advancements. CRNR recovers over a quarter of a million tons of recyclables each year. Our state-of-the-art composting process takes green waste and produces a rich soil amendment for organic farms and gardens. Our $100 million anaerobic digester converts organic waste into renewable natural gas to fuel our fleet and connects directly to California's pipeline to supply renewable energy to homes and businesses. And we are proud to be the first California company to turn unrecoverable waste into bioenergy

that can replace coal at industrial facilities. CRNR is on the road to zero waste. Our technologies are reducing millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases from our climate, with a fleet that will be carbon negative by 2028. We are offsetting fossil fuels by locally producing clean, renewable energy, and keeping hundreds of thousands of tons of waste out of our landfills each year. CR&R's entire team is committed to leaving our communities, our state, and our planet a better one for the next generation.

From humble beginnings in 1963, with one contract and a bold vision, to one of the nation's largest family-owned solid waste management companies, with more than 55 contracts, 1,000 trucks, 2,000 employees, and world-class technologies only available from CRNR.

Join us.

you've heard from us now we want you to hear from our partners and the community what an honor to work with business leaders community leaders friends and neighbors helping our children grow helping our neighborhoods stay clean and healthy and that means good leadership good management and good stewardship. Bill Taramina, the Taraminas, are essentially synonymous with the Boys and Girls Club in Anaheim. Mike Silva and the Ronnenbergs, of course. These individuals roll up their sleeves and make it happen. They just care about leaving this world

a little bit better than the way we found it. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is so grateful to CRNR for making investments in technologies that help reduce diesel fuel and coal usage to clean the air in our community. Breathing healthy air is so important to children with cystic fibrosis and we commend CRNR for their leadership in environmental sustainability and as long-time members of our board. Thank you for the opportunity to reiterate how CRNR can provide unmatched technology, service, and benefits for Santa Ana. CRNR was honored to receive the

number one proposal ranking from Santa Ana City experts for being an Orange County based and Orange County founded organization with the most Orange County facilities and contracts as well as being privately owned. CRNR's landfill diversion results were 33% higher than all other proposers. CRNR offers an unmatched illegal dumping mitigation strategy with two full-time crews and innovative tracking software as well as bulky item removal service for single and multifamily residences, disaster recovery storage containers, and automated community litter carts and for being an undisputed industry-leading innovator,

which has enabled us to achieve the lowest carbon footprint. CRNR is ready to serve Santa Ana, and we make the following commitments to you. Because CRNR has the lowest carbon footprint, Santa Ana will become the environmental leader in Orange County. Your solid waste management system will be in full compliance with all city, county, state, and federal regulations. The Paris Climate Agreement. The City's Greenhouse Gas Action Plan, reducing Santa Ana's carbon footprint by more than 1.5 million tons.

CRNR will partner with Orange County Goodwill to create new career opportunities in Santa Ana for individuals with disabilities and barriers to employment. CRNR will also expand its existing union workforce of 200 members by offering 100% of your incumbents' union employees a job on our team. We will provide a union wage and pension, health, dental, vision, and life insurance, as well as paid holidays and vacation. CRNR will also be supplying annual passes for employees to Santa Ana's three most famous institutions, the Bowers Museum, Discovery Cube, and the Santa Ana Zoo.

And we will provide over $1 million per year in direct donations and services, because we are committed to making the world a brighter place. CR&R will generate more than $500,000 in local sales tax revenue by buying all of our new fleet equipment from Santa Ana businesses. CR&R will provide Santa Ana a seamless transition by leveraging the experience we gained when supporting 17 of our other current Southern California customers with switching contractors. On behalf of over 2,000 CRNR employees, we would be honored to add Santa Ana to our list of satisfied Orange County municipalities.

Hello, my name is Martin Lopez. Where are you from? I'm from Santa Ana. You're from Santa Ana? Santa Ana. And how long have you worked for CRNR? I've worked for over 35 years. What do you love about CRNR? Oh, I love everything, everything because they support me and my wife and my four children. I hope CRNR is selected to service the city of Santana. Thank you.

Okay, and then the next one that follows is Republic Services.

We are Republic Services, a team of committed workers proudly representing Republic and the communities we serve. We are passionate about our customers and will be ready from day one to serve the city of Santa Ana.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor and City Council members. I'm Dave Hauser, Market Vice President for Republic Services in Southern California. First, I want to thank you for the incredible privilege to be considered as your solid ways and recycling partnering. Before You is not just a waste services contract, it's a core municipal function that touches the life of every resident and business. Together we'll depart from what you've had in the past into a new community-driven partnership. So why are we different? Because of our unparalleled existing infrastructure, our unmatched environmental leadership, our commitment

into your community and our relationship with labor and transition expertise. Let's dive into these four values that differentiate RIPOA.

Our local city art facilities are the largest and most comprehensive in Orange County. With 10,000 ton per day capacity at our Anaheim and Honey Beach facility, we guarantee Santa Ana will have long term capacity as well as environmental and regulatory compliance. With both facilities within 8 miles from city center, you can rest assured that Santa Ana's waste, recyclables, and organics will be serviced in the most efficient manner possible. No other solid waste provider in Orange County has its capacity.

The city does not need to worry about building a new disposal facility inside a Santa Ana neighborhood, because we are ready to accept all the materials today.

We're different because of our environmental leadership. We are the only solid waste provider committing to the City of Santa Ana, the first completely electric zero emission refuse vehicle in year one of the contract. Compared to other proposers, our RNG vehicles will be commuting one of the lowest travel mileages, reducing air emissions, and doing our part to help improve the City of Santa Ana's air quality. We are the only hauler to win the 2020 Organics Recycler of the Year

by the National Waste and Recycling Association for our innovative technologies to process and compost organics. I love my dream job at Republic Services as a recycling coordinator. I'm passionate about public education to diverse communities and presenting to schools.

As your dedicated municipal manager, I'm excited to become part of the Santa Ana community. We're proud to offer the community a free multifamily bulk item pickup program of 10 items per unit per quarter. Power washing and alley cleanups. $200,000 annually to local charities. $10,000 for city events. Educational school visits. Paid student internships. And $7,000 in student scholarships. A local hire initiative to recruit employees.

Republic commits to using a local point of sale for a multi-million dollar investment, which would generate sales tax revenue for the city and support your general fund. We'll be accessible at a local office inside the city, providing personalized care with multilingual Spanish and Vietnamese capabilities to best serve the diverse residents and businesses. In addition to our Rise platform that notifies customers about real-time activity and our mobile app that allows customers to request a service,

we'll integrate our systems with your My Santa Ana app for an effortless customer service experience. You're choosing the best partner for the community. Don't take our word for it. Take a look at the many recommendation letters submitted to you tonight from our municipal partners.

We will provide an effortless, seamless, and low-risk transition because I know every nook and cranny of the city. I was raised in Santa Ana and served as Solid Waste District Manager in Santa Ana for many years. I built Santa Ana's current routes running today. Upon award, we are ready to order 134,000 residential carts, 12,000 metal bins, and 78 brand-new RNG vehicles. We will begin recruiting immediately. When I was a driver, I served side-by-side with Santa Ana current drivers. They know me and trust me and they will be welcomed into a company that respects them

and values them. Republic is certified as a great place to work and is ranked by Forbes as one of the best employers for women in LGBTQ equality amongst many other awards. With our combined transition experience, our local facilities, and our represented employees, we guarantee the complex process will be delivered seamlessly every step of the way. You have my personal commitment.

and give the best of us for our customers.

including 77 current employees that are Santa Ana residents. You have my personal commitment to take care of your community and our home. Estamos listos. Chumptoy sang sang. Estamos listos.

okay now our final presentation tonight will be by waste management

greetings council members and staff thank you for allowing us the time to present our proposal for the city's solid waste hauling contract. My name is Ashley Brunier, and I will be one of your guys throughout this presentation. I'm the public sector manager for Orange County, and I am accompanied by our Santa Ana district manager, Joel Robledo. Thanks, Ashley. I began my career at waste management 34 years ago, and I'm also a product of Santa Ana. I was raised on Gunther Street and graduated from Santiago High School. As a Santa Ana native, I'm proud to serve the community I grew up in, and I speak for the entire team

when I say we are committed to the community and its people.

Since its humble beginnings in 1886, Santa Ana has taken a position of leadership in all aspects, creating a vision that celebrates its past and looks forward to its future. With over 50 years of service, we have been with the city through substantial changes. With the new service proposal and upcoming changes in state law, we are confident in our ability to smoothly transition residents and businesses. services. At WM, we believe you are not only seeking a simple service provider, we believe you are seeking a community partner to raise the quality of life for every resident in

business. We have a proven, reliable, and consistent record, and our in-depth knowledge of the City's history will help us support your goals for the future. Our company culture is rooted in commitments to sustainability, our customers, and our people. Our site proudly supports our employees and has a great relationship with the local union. We believe our employees are our greatest assets and if we take care of them they will take care of our customers, our communities, our environment, and each other. The objectives defined in your RFP show us that you're committed to the welfare of the people who live here.

We are too. Not only do we work in the city but many of our team members call it home. Oscar, Juan, Eladio, and Carlos exemplify just a few. They know that their work better is the communities in which they, their family, and their friends live. While our employees are the cornerstone of our operations, the services we provide are second to none. Our commitment to you is to continue our industry-leading customer service as well as provide new enhancements. Let's take a look at how waste management will fulfill these expectations.

WM's facilities are award-winning, fully permitted, and have available capacity to meet the needs of the city. The city is serviced out of our Santa Ana Holland Yard, located just off Grand Avenue. Just north in Orange is our MRF and CORE where we take all of the City's source-separated recyclables and commercial food waste. To comply with SB 1383, the City's residential food waste will be delivered to our state-of-the-art Azusa Transfer Station and then transferred for composting.

When it comes to compliance with current and upcoming state recycling laws, we understand that a massive education and outreach campaign will be needed early on, and we're ready to assist. We will hire two dedicated recycling coordinators in addition to the already dedicated staff, as well as pay for the City's third-party consultant to help achieve these efforts. WM is committed to providing diverse educational materials and multi-language support to increase participation and teach customers how to recycle right. And as always, we are delighted to continue performing community outreach and tours throughout

the life of the contract.

Learned from nationwide experience, we bring best practices in diversion so we can face and overcome the challenges of SB 1383 together. Our history with the processing of the City's recycling material means that no other hauler comes close to understanding the City's waste character and collection dynamics. We continue to invest in technology to help capture recyclable materials and reduce contamination. Our proposal offers monthly waste characterization reports to help the City better understand its composition and diversion progress.

Whether on the streets, at events, at City Council, or in your community, our people are trained to be customer service ambassadors. We use the most advanced call center technology and techniques to optimize our service and communication quality, but we never lose our local presence and local touch.

Safety is a core principle at Waste Management. Through campaigns such as 100 Days of Summer Safety, Mission to Zero, and Waste Watch, our teams work to foster an environment of learning and growth that help us reach our safety goals both on the job and in your community. Additionally, as your incumbent, our drivers have an intimate knowledge of your streets. Whether it's knowing school hours or traffic patterns downtown, we have insight into each route to provide the safest possible service.

Our commitment to safety doesn't end when we leave our sites. Each one of our trucks is fitted with drive cam, backup and side cameras, as well as onboard computing systems. We also have a comprehensive preventive maintenance program for vehicles and equipment. Our maintenance team performs regular quality control audits and self-inspections. Before and after each shift, drivers are required to conduct a standardized safety and maintenance check. We agree that this contract should be more than just a waste hauling contract and that we can

help improve the quality of life for all residents and businesses. We are confident in saying that no one is more acquainted with each of your streets, alleyways, and buildings and from this we have developed a keen sense of areas within the city that are prone to illegal dumping. With this knowledge, we have included within our proposal a no-charge, unlimited bulky item collection program for multi-family properties. In addition, we are excited to collaborate with you on the Clean City initiative. We have and hope to continue to be more than just a trash

service provider, as we are a true community partner. We roll up our sleeves and help the community by volunteering at events and hosting neighborhood cleanups. Over the years, we have supported and donated to over 104 local organizations and nonprofits.

We are responsible stewards of the environment, leaders in sustainability, and we will continue to protect the health and well-being of our employees and neighbors. This is reflected in the services we provide your residents, our facilities, the conditions under which employees work, the implementation of our sustainability initiatives, and our interactions with those in your community. We may be a large company, but when it comes to delivering our services, we are a local business. This is a significant contract for both WM and the city, and as your long-term partner,

we are strongly invested. I speak on behalf of all of us here at Waste Management Orange County when we say thank you for the opportunity.

Great. I think that was the last proposer, right?

Yes.

I feel like I'm at the Academy Awards, and we were looking at some four really cool films.

And a winner.

Right? Sorry we don't have that card with us. So this is the moment for us to go ahead and have members of the public come and address the council. I have some cards for those of you who are here in person in chambers, but we also have some people that may be on the line that will address us. So I'll go ahead and call on those of you that are here first, and then I'll turn it over to the clerk of the council so she can field the calls from those that are waiting online. Let me begin with Elizabeth Ramirez, followed by Cord Lea.

Oh, you're here for questions. Got it. How about Cord? Here for questions. I like that. Take note, everybody. Mike Silva.

And you have three minutes to speak. You're under no pressure to fill those three minutes.

If you can do it in less time. All right. Good evening, council. I'm Mike Silva. I'm the senior vice president for CRNR and civil engineer. And I actually am a resident of Santa Ana. I reside in Floral Park with my wife, Denise. With my Q&A today is Crystal Denning, our regional vice president, and Bill Higginbotham, if you have other questions. I'm going to read my comments real quick here. You guys saw our video. Hopefully it illustrated our rich history and our capabilities and commitments to the City of Santa Ana. CNR has been working towards this moment for almost 60 years. We're based in Stanton.

We've been the first at most facilities around. We were the first major recycler in Orange County. We were the first to implement the three-cart system in the City of Temecula almost 30 years ago. We built the first MRF in Orange County. We built the first solid waste processing facility in the nation. And then we just finished the first high-solid anaerobic digestion facility, where we take the green waste and food waste and we convert it into renewable natural gas. We're also the first company to put that into the California pipeline. No one else has done that so far. We're working on two more new projects.

We have the contract for the Catalina Island. And over there, we're working with USC, and they're growing kelp, and we're converting that to natural gas also through the digester. And we're also working with the ball company to convert water bottles and cups into aluminum so they become 100% recyclable and reduce marine waste. All these are created to create a circular economy, mitigate global warming, and conserve our natural resources. All of our programs and technologies comply with all the new regulatory issues of our time, but I think they also comply with a lot of the social issues we discuss,

environmental justice and employee protections. All of our proposed services are performed in-house from truck repair and painting to cart delivery and tracking. We have a sustainability division that now exceeds 20 full-time representatives. And we've executed numerous transitions over the years, and 100% of those municipalities are still our clients today. We've never lost a client in 60 years. Our $1 million in community investment will be $500,000 in cash donations managed by our strategic partner, the Taramina family, and over $600,000 in in-kind services.

We have evolved from a recycling company to a solid waste management company to an environmental management company, and we're laser-focused on eliminating landfills and running our fleet on 100% fossil-free renewable fuels. As you consider who to partner with, please ask yourself the same question that drives CRNR every day on our team. Are we doing everything within our power to leave our communities, our state, and our planet better for the next generation? As previously discussed with city staff, we are always available for facility tours and meetings.

We are confident that we can jointly make Santa Ana the greenest municipality in the county and the county's environmental leader. We appreciate the time tonight and are open to questions. Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Mike. Crystal, do you just want to say ditto or is there something you wanted to add? Got it. Thank you. Thanks. Jose de Leon, followed by Randy Alonso.

good afternoon Mary Sarmiento and council members my name is Jose de Leon and I'm an assistant general manager for Athens services I was born and raised in the city of Santana and I currently reside here Wilshire Square I run the day-to-day operations for our Salt Lake yard in city of industry our team ensures that 150 drivers leave our yard every single day and return back to the yard every day and back to their family safety. As an employee of Athens I can tell you that working for our family-owned business is something special. We're a very large team but feels more like a family. You hear the word family.

You heard it on our videos. At Athens it's all about our employees, whether it's the office employees or shop employees or the backbone of our company, our drivers. I have witnessed firsthand the quality of service that we provide to our customers from city events such as cleanups compost giveaways or even small gestures like pictures with children during the holidays birthdays we're involved with all that at this doesn't just strive to be the best we are the best for that reason i am excited that at the service is being considered for my city the city of santana thank you for the opportunity to

speak. Let's have a good night. Thank you Jose. Randy Alonso followed by Jesus El Toro.

Good evening Mayor Sarmiento and council members. My name is Randy Alonso. I have been a commercial driver for Athens Services for five years and going and let me just say it's been an honor to have to serve Santa Ana if everything is right and look forward to servicing in

the future hopefully thank you thank you Jesus El Toro followed by Vincent Badney followed by Alvaro Padilla

good afternoon mayor's Sarmiento and council members my name is is the total and I've been a Athens driver for the last 10 years why do I like working for Athens. As you heard on the video, it's a family-owned business established in 1957 and is well managed. Provides excellent service and one of the few companies that

offer same-day service for employees excellent benefits and very competitive wages me being the only provider I'm able to get my family through and and hopefully get my kids through college. And as a customer, because I live in Bell Gardens, they've been servicing Bell Gardens for the last 19 years. Their service is excellent. When requested, they respond right away.

Contracts are always met. Alley's in my neighborhood are always kept clean.

That's about it, thank you for your time.

Thank you for those comments. Vincent Vadney, followed by Alvaro Padilla, followed by Tania Castaneda.

Good evening, Mayor Sarmiento and Council Members. My name is Vincent Vadney and I am the current street sweeping supervisor for the city of Santa Ana.

Over the past 11 years that we've been privileged to service the city, I've actually had my own personal privilege to service you guys and the community since 2016, so about five, six years now.

And through those years, I've been able to build with Public Works. I feel a great working relationship, and I believe at the same time they would attest to that and confirm that. And I pride ourselves on being responsive, taking care of any matter, whether a resident call or anything above that, very seriously and try to take care of it in a timely manner.

also being the the street supervisor here we run all hours of the night we run every street so I've seen every nook and cranny of this city which has given us the the benefit of knowing where these hot zones are, what can benefit the city moving forward if we are able to be your waste hauler moving forward. And I look forward to moving forward with you guys and being able to offer that service and growing our team within the city and providing that great leadership and that great responsiveness towards your city. So I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Alvaro Padilla followed by Tania Castaneda followed by Dave Hauser.

Hi good afternoon Mayor Sarmiento and council members of the beautiful city of Santana. My name is Alvaro Padilla and I'm a proud employee of the Athens family. I'm a member of the Athens family. I've been working with Athens Services for 25 years. I turned 25 years last month. So working for Athens Services has been one of the highest points of my life. I'm proudly said that I work for a company that embrace and welcome diversity. Proud said I'm a driver that

I work for a company that recognize and value hard work. I can proudly say that I work for a company that considered the drivers one of the best assets. So for all that, I would be grateful. It made me proud to be here representing Athens and I hope you guys give us the opportunity to make you feel proud and all the customers that we have you guys have the service from after services thank you thank you for that Tanya Castaneda

followed by Dave Hauser followed by Joanna Beltran Ramos testing testing

we're good good evening Honorable Mayor and Honorable Council members I'm Tanya Cassinia, municipal manager with Republic Services. Joined tonight with our market vice president Dave Hauser, operations manager Steve Lopez and our wonderful Senate and residents and drivers and employees of Republic Services among the various awards. If you wouldn't mind staying enough just to greet the honorable council real quick with a quick hello.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thank you.

We just wanted to show our appreciation tonight to the council for all your hard work and your vision. We're honored to be a part of that vision, and we're here to answer any questions you have. So thank you for allowing us the opportunity to help you achieve your vision for a clean city. Thank you.

Thank you for those comments. Dave, do you want to just be ready for questions? Thanks for that. Joanna Beltran Ramos?

Hello. Good evening, honorable mayor and council members. My name is Joanna Beltran Ramos, proud Sanana Ward 5 resident in the Salvador Park neighborhood. I'm born and raised Sanana resident and I'm a Republic Services Operations Supervisor. As a resident, thank you for serving our community and making Santa Ana the future of Orange County. This solid waste agreement is a great step forward to a new Santa Ana, as I see many new faces.

Joining me tonight is my fellow Santa Ana resident and supervisor, Rudy Valladares, and drivers that live in various wards of the city. I had the honor to serve in Santa Ana for seven years with your current hauler, and as my home, I know Santa Ana very well. I chose to further my career in Republic Services, a company that gives me the opportunity to speak and lead. At Republic, we value the diversity of our workers and the diversity of our communities. One-third of our supervisors are female. I love this company, and I love Santa Ana. And on behalf of my employees and neighbors, I ask for your vote in July. Thank you.

Thank you for those comments. Ashley Brunier followed by Doug Corcoran.

Thank you Ashley. Doug you as well? Thanks. Jesse Hernandez?

can you speak in Spanish and then we translate it if you like, if you feel better.

Yes, good evening.

I live here in Santa Ana for 45 years and I've seen the enormous development of this city. and thanks to the government through the years here in the city here in Flower and all that is around what is Civic Center and now they are now they are enormous so I feel proud of living in the city of Santana with all this time thanks again to all the government and we believe that Hernandez, Becerra, Peñalosa, Pans, Sambiento and all the staff Lopez, they will follow all this

development in the United States. I am very proud. I am very proud of working in Republic Services for 41 years. I have also seen the development of this company. We work together in union. Thank God and thank you for serving us, and we are doing better to our communities, because we work with joy, with joy and with much enthusiasm. We also have a security program that helps us to keep us out of accidents and, and also, we can return to our home, because the company provides the best equipment, as we have seen in the video, we have the best equipment,

cars from LNG, CNG, probably in the future, we have the electric vehicles. Además de eso, creo yo que nos tratan con respeto y con cariño, eso nos ayuda a dar lo mejor a nuestras comodidades, a varias ciudades que servimos. Y estamos listos para servir a la ciudad de Santana con el mejor esfuerzo. Creo yo que lo vamos a hacer poniendo el mismo esfuerzo que hemos tenido durante muchos años.

Muchos años. Todos trabajamos en equipo, en unión, y vamos a seguir haciendo lo mejor para la ciudad de Santana y servir y dar el mejor servicio a las comunidades. Muchas gracias.

Gracias.

Yes. Hello, my name is Arruye Pagavares. I've been supervisor, I'm sorry, Jesse Hernandez. I've been here for 45 years, and I just wanted to thank everyone who has governed here. I've seen this area from flower to civic center. The buildings, the development has been enormous, and I'm very proud of all the work that those who've governed in here have made over the years, and I wanted to thank all of the about Republic Homes we continue to provide the best service we all work together in unity I have been with Republic Homes

for 41 years and I'm very grateful to God here we are we share a lot of joy a lot of enthusiasm in the work that we provide and we are here ready to serve we have a safety program here where we we are able to prevent accidents we're able to return healthy and safe to our homes we have used electric vehicles we are treated with respect we are ready to serve the city of Santa Ana with the same efforts that we've been able to do we work in unity and we are ready to

keep giving our best service to the city of Santa Ana. Thank you. Courtney Calderon.

Hi, I'm gonna speak in English. I had originally said that I want to translate it. I'll speak in English and sorry if I stumble over my words or like speak too fast I get nervous when I speak in front of people and while I know that this is a study session nothing is being decided right now I do want to remind you guys whose money you're using to pay for this contract because while there are four companies behind me that are trying to get a contract it's the people's money and the quality jobs they like to placate that they are born and raised in Santa Ana great how have the quality jobs that you have provided for our

Santa Ana residents been. They're literally tokenizing our people. The people behind us deserve quality jobs whose medical insurance is not tied to their jobs. So how many of the people in the business suits behind me are your campaign donors and actually financed so that you can sit in the seats of your city? It's great to see that the Chamber of Commerce runs the city.

Okay, Mayor? So when they're saying that it's required by code, that's regulation. That's things that you guys decide. So stop saying that you guys can't do things when it comes to the quality of life that our Santa Ana residents are dealing with. Okay? And Vicente, please at least look at me in the face. Okay? Because I supported you. I want more accountability. I want you to like follow up the things that you campaigned on with action. And if not, then at least be willing to say who you work for. Because if the paycheck you get from them is bigger than the one that you get from your residents, we know who you work for.

And that goes for you too. All of you all.

Thank you for those comments. And Madam Clerk, I think we have some comments on the phone.

Yes, we do. Thank you, Mayor. And before I open up that line, I did want to also announce that we did receive written communication. We received four in support of Athens Services, 15 Republic Services, two Santa Ana residents commented requesting that council award the city's trash service to a new hauler that will have the best interest of residents in mind. And with that, the line for conference calls and Zoom has been open since 440. The line is now closed.

The public has been informed to call by 5 p.m. on the agenda city meetings website and email sent to the subscribers. To request to speak on the special meeting agenda item regarding solid waste, please dial star 9 from your phone or select raise hand from Zoom.

Zoom ID Dora Castro, if you would please select the unmute feature on your device.

Thank you. You have three minutes. Yes, we could hear you. You have three minutes. Thank you.

Okay, perfect. Good evening, Mayor Sarmiento and council members. My name is Dora Castro, and I'm a franchise liaison contract specialist at Athens Services. I have been with Athens for 21 and over the years I have grown and developed in different roles. Part of this growth has allowed me to become a key team member of the transition team, working with various departments to fully execute the vision of the city. I have been involved with all of our transitions, working closely with city staff, ensuring a seamless transition and continuing to provide ongoing support. I am also the leader trainer,

I'm sorry, the lead trainer for our customer service team, ensuring that they are familiar with all aspects of the contract and ready to welcome and provide exceptional service to our new customers. I am also the chair of the business ambassadors for one of our cities and volunteer many hours on behalf of Athens services in our communities which includes a number of events and outreach to residents and city council. Working for Athens is not just a job to me it's a passion and an opportunity to make a difference in our communities by showing

our customers how valuable they are as a customer service professional we are trained to listen to the customer's needs address the concerns and follow through with action these beliefs are what keeps me at Athens as I believe in the premise of customers first I am part of a team that is empowered to act on behalf of the customer to ensure satisfaction and build relationships by way of putting people first providing the best possible service all while being sensitive to to the environment. Athens empowers me to perform my job with a commitment to excellence and a can do attitude. I have seen firsthand the great quality of service

we provide to our customers. This is not only from our collection side, all departments have opportunities to get involved with our communities through our outreach efforts. Everyone at Athens is valued, heard, and has a voice. Our customers are not just in numbers to us, we provide every customer with personalized service. For these reasons, I strongly recommend Athens Services and respectfully ask that you consider selecting Athens Services to be the City of Santa Ana's residential and commercial solid waste service provider. Thank you for the opportunity and to speak and your time.

Thank you.

Zoom ID, Ron Herrera, if you would please select the microphone icon on your device. Thank you. You may proceed.

Distinguished Mayor and City Council members, my name is Ron Herrera, Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 396 for the past 20 years and President of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. We are a labor union with a proud history that includes representing thousands of sanitation workers throughout Southern California, including Orange County. This includes workers at Waste Management, Republic Services, and CRNR Stanton and San Juan Capistrano. As you know, Waste Management has been the current incumbent hauler here in the city of Santa Ana for decades.

Our members work and live in your communities. Through their hard work and this city contract, they have been able to raise their families and even put their children through college. As this city council considers who to contract for waste hauling services, this council must continue to prioritize contracting a union waste hauler that provides its workforce with a vehicle to the middle class and can provide quality services to city residents.

I encourage our city leaders to pursue the least disruptive option for both Teamster members and Santa Ana residents who depend on quality waste collection services. The city of Santa Ana must prioritize the selection of a company where workers have a voice on the job, safe working conditions, earn good wages, have a pension, and full family health care. And I emphasize full family health care for themselves and their families. That's why the city of Santa Ana has done for decades.

You all have been a model city in the U.S. for decades, promoting good governance and supporting good union jobs. For that, the Teamsters Union and our members are grateful. It's shameful that a company like Athens only provides full family healthcare for its drivers and not the rest of its workforce. The great city of Santa Ana has done better and can continue to do better. As a city where a significant percentage of your constituents are working class immigrants

of color. It is important to select a hauler that provides good jobs, respects your communities, and creates a bright future for workers like you have now.

15 seconds left.

Senate has always been a great partner to the Teamsters and its members, and I urge you to please select a company that treats its workers with respect, not a company that puts profits over or workers, select waste management, Republic services-Thank you, your time is up.

Thank you.

Zoom ID, Robert Podlesny, if you would please select the microphone icon. Thank you.

Thank you and fantastic work on my last name. So appreciate that. Good evening members of the city council and all of the disposal companies represented here tonight. Thank you not only for the opportunity to speak, but for your service to the community. I think a lot of times this is a thankless role and so I appreciate you doing the due diligence to this RFP to select the best vendor. I came on a number of months ago to communicate my displeasure with CRNR in a number of different areas for which I have a voice and a presence in the community. I not only echo that but have done quite a bit of research

just given the issues I've had with different disposal companies throughout Southern California and just wanted to come on to express my vote and my delight in being able to push Athens services. I think that having finally opened up a facility in one of their locations, it's a breath of fresh air. As a business owner, as a resident, and as a member of the community, they've gone above and beyond not only to service my business where other providers here tonight haven't, but they've never left me high and dry. So I appreciate all the time that you've put into this. I know that it's not an easy decision to make,

but I think that you'll find that my experience is echoed by a number of individuals here and by those drivers and individuals and employees who've come out to speak tonight. So I'd urge all the members of the city council to vote for Athens and appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thank you.

Zoom ID, Hoiyn Ip, if you would please select the microphone icon. Thank you.

you may proceed with your comment good evening council i'm hoi and yip a member of the sierra club so first i always want to thank council for so much work you do it's always exciting to be a senate and a council member and also a honor contract is a huge project so i want to thank staff for doing that. During the presentation there was a lot of numbers. That was a lot of numbers for me to digest. So I don't have any recommendation for any hauler. I just have a few

questions that I want to raise. I hope council will take them into consideration. Well first I just say that Santa Ana really understands environmental justice. And we know that often people want to save a dime to sacrifice environmental justice. So this is an opportunity we need to address it. Maybe two months ago I sent you a letter from the Sierra Club SB 1383 implementation. By now, I believe council deeply understands SB 1383 is about environmental justice.

So I just got a text from a resident. She said she asked me to ask you why for several months by now her trash can and a green can all go into the same truck. That is wrong. And so on the other hand, in staff's presentation, it says the new contract will be effective in July 2022. So I wonder what's going to happen between now and then, and also the January 1st date when SB 1383 is becoming effective.

Another question I have is that when you consider the hauler, I hope you would require them to provide the proof of how they track secondary markets. We know some companies are still shipping plastic waste to Asia. That is not for environmental justice. Recently, Polo Auto renewed a contract that was controversial because they actually renewed a contract with a company that couldn't approve how they track secondary market.

it. Lastly, during that presentation said three of the companies use CNG fuel trucks. CNG is fossil fuel. But one of the three companies here said it's actually zero emission vehicle. I just want you to clarify that. It's not zero.

15 seconds left.

Thank you. I'm done. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

Zoom ID, Cuberto Garcia, if you would please select the microphone icon.

Cuberto Garcia, if you would please select the microphone icon on your device.

Persona en el Zoom con el nombre Cuberto García. Si puede marcar el sonido en el aparato en el cual está usando Zoom.

You may proceed with your comment. You have successfully unmuted yourself.

Thank you, you've successfully unmuted yourself. You may proceed with your comment.

Okay, Mayor, that looks like that was the last comment.

Great, thank you for that, Madam Clerk. Let me go ahead and bring it back to the Council. And so, there isn't really a, you know, a specific format on how we do this. I think this is more of an opportunity for members of the Council to ask questions of staff and ask questions of maybe the principals and staffs of the proposers present. So, you know, to the extent that, you know, each council member may have a specific area of inquiry, you're free to do so. We're going to try to keep ourselves limited in our time.

We can go and do this maybe on a couple of rounds if there is more questions and maybe sometimes answers provoke additional questions. So maybe we do it this way and we'll try to keep it as informal as possible. Again, as I said, we're not going to be making any decisions tonight, but this is more of an exchange, hopefully, of information and of ideas. And, you know, this is as open and transparent the process as we possibly can try to make it. I know that, unfortunately, you know, others don't do as much as we do. We try to bring people in in person. We try to bring people in virtually by phone.

So to the extent that I think we try to go above and beyond on multiple opportunities to have not only members of the council, but members of the public and residents be able to comment and observe what's happening. So this is literally being done in the light of day. So that's something we should all be proud of. So let me go ahead and bring it back to the council and see if there's any questions if anybody would like to start.

I think we do we not have councilmember Hernandez with us I believe on on the phone or is he with

us as well that is correct I'm councilmember Hernandez had an emergency last minute so he

got participating so the only person on the line that we may have is councilmember Mendoza correct

Perfect. Excellent. Don't all jump at once. I know it was a lot of information. We can call it an early night if you'd like to. So go ahead, Mayor Pro Temp.

David PenalozaItem 1

Thank you, Mayor Sarmiento. I just wanted to take up the opportunity to thank my colleagues for allowing me to serve on this ad hoc committee to go through this process. It's definitely been a very enlightening and learning experience for me personally. Just, you know, as a child, just growing up, you always wonder where does your trash go when it leaves your front yard. And it was nice to kind of learn this whole process of what happens. So very happy to see that. Very happy to, you know, I served on the ad hoc along with Councilmember Mendoza and Councilmember Fan, who I mean we you know just collaboratively tried to to think of

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everything and and and we were in a we're in the business to provide a service a service to our residents and you know it's it's trying to get that service you know everything from into their palm of their hands using the app which is one thing that we asked for to just at the same time keeping in mind doing this and keeping in mind the the working conditions of the the drivers the working conditions of the people sorting this trash the environmental

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impacts that any of these trash haulers will have on our city it was a lot it was definitely definitely something that we discussed in length and I'm happy to see a lot of these things addressed with numerous numerous a couple of the of the hollers but with that said I just had a couple questions for for director Saba by the which of course thank you for putting this presentation together you and your staff I know you have also been working on overdrive last couple of months years actually to put this together so thank you for for your work

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on your end one question that I had in regards to just simple layout of the presentation I know you you state you had year one through five listed on there and during the ad hoc meetings we were presented years one through ten and I know that there was a slight difference it wasn't extremely different but was there a reason why six through ten wasn't included in this presentation

for everyone else to see we felt that one through five is appropriate at this time because Proposition 218 requires that we declare and be upfront with this pricing from year 1 to 5. Years 1 through 10 would look the same from year 5 to year 10. We'll probably be looking the same because the only increases would be the consumer price index and those indices that I've listed. So the increases would be based on those for all hollers so that the numbers would be

the same kind of the increases would be the same okay I think just me personally

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I'm not speaking for anyone else but I would like to see you know when that's presented before the full council I personally like to see the full 10-year

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timeframe of this not not I mean even if it stays the same or it's not much different it would be nice just for for transparency sake and the public sake to see what that projection looks like over the next 10 years because this is something that comes out of our residents pockets and they are paying for this so it'd be nice for them to see what this looks like you know staff and and maybe the the trash haulers understand what the consumer price index means and what percentage increases are coming but you know to put it just in plain black and white for our residents would be appreciated

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So that's just my one ask for now. And I'll leave it at that for now. I'm just happy to see that a lot of the things we did ask for collectively in this ad hoc are being considered and agreed to by many of them. So that's it for now. I'll turn it over to the mayor.

Great. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Let me go ahead and turn it over to Councilmember Fan.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thanks, Mayor. Will each of the representatives please just come up? Or I guess I can start with one at a time. Maybe that's easier.

Or just sit in the front, because I'm sure a bunch of us will have questions.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Simon says. Well, first, I do want to thank staff and our consultant on this, because I know that we asked for a lot. We kept coming back for more information, and I'm so excited that we did because I don't think any of us up here, at least speaking for myself, are worried that any of the four haulers are capable of picking up trash, but we are very focused on ensuring that we have community benefits to our residents. We are going to be a big, big contract. So I will start just in alphabetical order. That's how I have my notes. So I'll start with Athens.

Hi. Cor Lally, I'm Executive Vice President of Athens for Operations. Elizabeth Ramirez, Vice President of Government Affairs.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Awesome. Thank you. So thank you for your presentation. A few questions, and whoever wants to take it as we go along. So the first is, you know, obviously with each of the contractors, I Google you, I try to find information. And the first thing I am really curious about is this, I think it was 2012. So it might be a little while ago, but it's a lawsuit with the city of Montebello regarding the waste contract. I mean there was a lot of controversy over that if you can help explain to me how that Ended and what the situation was because I believe it had to do with a violation of

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Ethics rules and conflicts of interest. So can you just explain that to me? I

Didn't answer that we did do a summary in our RFP response. This is with the city of Montebello We had signed an extended contract with them they passed the measure that required all contracts to go out to bid and there was a conflict because we had the contract prior we did get it resolved it was ruled in absence favor and we were currently the hauler there okay so you

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are the hauler there okay great that's helpful to know I really do appreciate you know you saying that there's no work stoppage with Athens or in that you don't subcontract your services so I know it's you doing the work the other question I had was I think in your video you did talk about having location with whether it was extending or expanding a location in Santa Ana or a facility that would hire residents. Can you explain that to me? Well we offered two options. We

wanted to work with the city to develop a yard locally if that's the preference. We will have a office in Santa Ana regardless. Alternatively we have identified a yard within three three miles of here that we can spin up a yard

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within six months. Okay so one option is in Santa Ana one is not. Yes. Great. But

We will have a yard for sales tax and we can purchase everything through the city.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Sorry, will you say that last part again?

We will have a yard or a office in Santa Ana and we will purchase all of our equipment through Santa Ana.

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Got it. That's a point of sale. Got it, got it. Well, I think I might have made comments before, maybe it wasn't the ad hoc. But, you know, I'm personally not interested in having more trash facilities in the city of Santa Ana or anything like that. In my opinion, it kind of continues to perpetuate this stereotype that Santa Ana is a place that is not very desirable. So that is just my personal opinion. I don't know what my colleagues think, but I wanted to let you know that.

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The other is, okay, so during some of your responses, you mentioned that you don't believe electric collection vehicles are currently feasible, but that you are interested in pursuing that once it is an available or proven technology. Can you explain that a little bit more to me? Because I think in the UK, at least one of the cities is already using all electric

vehicle trash hauling. I can. The Mack truck that we saw in the video is an example. There's two in beta test right now. We're waiting to see the results of that. One of the challenges with electric vehicles right now is the capacity tends to be about half of what a CNG vehicle is. So we're waiting to be able to have a vehicle that can do multiple turns a day. Currently, we'd need about two to three trucks for every truck for CNG. Great because you know at

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least for me if you watch any of our previous meetings and last two or three there is a concern regarding climate issues and the quicker we can move to something that is renewable is for me more important. The last thing I wanted to I guess I have a question about is so Athens does not have a facility here at

Orange County correct? We have our corporate office in Irvine but we do not

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

have an office here. Okay do you have any recycling or any other trash facilities

here in Orange County? We do not we have partnerships with all of them. Okay and

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so if your haulers are picking up trash here in Orange County where does it go?

Well the black or the waste goes to Bowerman Landfill. We also have multiple options for recycling and we have internal capacity for all recycling and green waste. So where does your recycling go? Recycling would we negotiate with a local hauler or we can take it to our city of industry transfer station as well as the green waste. Okay and go to Tierra Verde. I'm sorry. Sorry? The green waste would go to Tierra Verde.

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Okay and so it would be a partnership with either local facilities or in city of industry. Correct. What do you anticipate to be the percentage that would go to a city of industry versus local

facilities? I don't anticipate any to be honest with you. There's quite a few recyclers around here and we expect to be able to negotiate a contract but we do have our own facilities

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okay and how far would the travel be from here to the city of industry uh it is 36 miles i believe okay would that affect our contract in any way if you are not able to no we've committed to take care of the recyclables great so that's all the questions i have for now thank you thank you Oh, for Athens anyway. Okay. We have CRNR.

Mike Silva, Senior Vice President. Crystal Denning, Regional Vice President.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Hi, welcome. All right, so my questions with CRNR is, again, Google's our best friend, and of course staff. and I you know for many of us up here worker safety is really paramount a lot of trash haulers and employees live in the city of Santa Ana as well as you know we are a very walk heavy city we have a lot of pedestrians and public transit users so a couple things first Ms. Ophelia Sanchez you know she passed away at a CRNR facility with it under an accident what have you done to improve

facility safety I believe that's our Colton facility yeah so basically she was a traffic director up there and so we've now reinstituted our training and we've doubled our safety department we have now four people full-time that was actually unfortunately ruled employee negligence or her own fault I hate to say that it's not a good thing for someone that passed but yeah it was an unfortunate accident but we've retrained everybody and that should not happen again you know we had the backup all everything was working backup alarms Cal OSHA everything was signed off she was in the wrong place unfortunately

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

got it so when you say employee negligence it was in part I guess you'd

say it's her own fault I say that that's not a I don't know what the right term

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for that is but no that's helpful just you know we have a lot of people the public's listening and we just want to make sure that we understand those terms The other question I wanted to ask was another case involving the death of young Brock McCann who was a pedestrian. I believe he was four and this involved a collision with a trash hauling truck and so can you talk a little bit about what your facility or your training has done to improve driver

safety or pedestrian safety? Yeah I believe that's the one in Newport Beach. Again unfortunately it was ruled pedestrians that there it was their fault. Our guy was making a right-hand turn and he literally drove underneath our truck. We have since added I guess you'd call them I can't think of what the right word is. It's like backup alarms. You have those on the front and back of obviously the newer Collision avoidance systems is what we've implemented to our fleet. Very much a tragedy that happened Fortunately something that could happen in any community and that's why we take all these additional

steps. We've instituted a collision avoidance system. We've reinforced other safety measures that we do on an ongoing basis. At the end of the day, we want to make sure all of our employees come home safe and we're providing safe service in our community.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Was that case settled?

Was that again?

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Was the case settled? Yes. Oh, it was. Okay.

Yes.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thank you. I do want to mention I was really impressed by the way that you turned green waste into energy. I think that's always a really fantastic thing.

It's the only game in town right now.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Awesome. And I also want to commend you on pursuing a fleet carbon negative, you know, going carbon negative by 2028. I think that's a really aggressive agenda, but also extremely necessary, especially when we see what's going on in the world today.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, so the other thing I wanted to understand was, you know, you have your LA employees are unionized, but not the ones here in Orange County. Is that correct?

No. We are a union in San Juan Capistrano and our Stanton yard and our Riverside yard just voted the union in. They're negotiating that contract right now and LA is, that's a union yard. We have one non-union yard in Garden Grove.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay and are your driver's union?

What's that?

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Are your driver's union?

Yeah the drivers for this city are union, yes. Okay. They'll come out of our Stanton yard.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Got it, got it. 100%.

So we're going to take on all the other drivers if we're fortunate to get picked. We're in the same Teamsters union as you heard Ron Herrera talk about. We're in the exact same union as everybody else.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Got it. So that means that if you were awarded the contract, your employee servicing Santa Ana would be unionized.

100%.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great. That's fantastic to hear. I do also want to also commend you, at least from the video, stating that you would buy local but also never lost a client in six years. I think that's that's quite commendable and with that I will go on to the next hauler.

Can I clarify one? I think you made a great comment about the electric trucks and I just want to reiterate what they're saying. We find it to be unproven at this point in time but I will say this, a truck on RNG is actually cleaner than electric. The grid is actually dirtier than our RNG and we're going through that certification with CARB right now. So we're actually, our fleet that will be in San Ano will be carbon negative the first day. The video is talking about my entire fleet of 1,000 trucks, but the trucks that we put in to Santa Ana the first day will be carbon negative the very first day because we make our own fuel.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great. So actually, if you can clarify that. So I just want to, I guess, RNG is renewable natural gas, and that comes from the anaerobic natural gas that you create from the recovery of waste, of green waste, versus compressed natural gas which is still pumping from the ground and using it even though it's compressed methane essentially which for those who don't know still creates a ozone effects so that's really helpful to know so all of your trucks right now

are RNG that is correct yeah we buy all of our fuel from clean energy and all of its RNG we make about a third of it ourselves and we buy the other two

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

thirds and the RNG uses from your own facility one more time the art like the the natural gas you use for your cars are from your own facility?

Yes, for this facility, yes.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great, thank you so much. Appreciate that.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Will Republic, please? Will the real Republic please end up?

Dave Hauser, Market Vice President. Tanya Castaneda, Municipal Manager.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great. Hi. So, all right. So a few questions for you. My question has to do with some of the labor practices and relationships that you've had, again, with Google and all that other stuff. I am curious about the labor relationships at the Anaheim Trash Processing Facility. I mean, I believe that there was a vote to authorize a strike. Whatever happened to that? Or if I'm mistaken, you just let me know.

Yeah, I'm not aware of that. I think we had, about a year or so ago, we had a little sympathy strike for a day or two in support of Teamsters in Massachusetts. But that was just a very small event. and most of our drivers actually preferred to get back on route and make sure they could take care of their customers on those days. So it was just a very short period of time.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, and with that, I guess sympathy strike, you might call it, did it result in a stoppage of work?

Just for a few hours. Some of the individuals did some picketing outside the front, and then they went to work after that.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, and I am not sure if this is more toward Nabil or for y'all, but in our slides there was a the chart about the satisfaction rating. I know that we received a lot of supportive letters regarding your services, but there was a ratings chart that listed Republic at I think 2.9 out of 5. Can you kind of expand on that and explain what that is?

Sure, Council Member. This is a survey that our consultants done, and they, it looks like I can't go back to the chart itself, but there was a response and a questionnaire that we got the ratings from, and that's the result of it.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Was it anonymous? Or did you, I mean, were the responses anonymous or did you just...

I'll have to refer to our consultant who really conducted that survey if you want me to.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay.

Sure, Laith is here. Go ahead, Laith.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

I might have more questions, but I wanted to...

Good afternoon.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

You're so tall in person.

I only see him on Zoom, so it's just this much. I've seen only video for a long time. Thank you, Zett, HF&H Consultants. We called the primary contract manager in each of the cities that was using the different companies to talk to someone that really understood what was happening and that managed those agreements in the different cities. We have a 15- or 20-minute questionnaire. We start with questions about collection and then recycling programs and working with the city staff, customer service, And then we conclude at the end of the survey with on an overall basis, now that they've

considered all those elements, how you rank the performance of the company with that scale from one to five.

And it's not anonymous. We're doing the interviews. But we tell them when we report back, we're going to aggregate their data so that one particular jurisdiction doesn't get any negative feedback from any of the companies.

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So if it's possible, I know if we can aggregate it or just share clips of comments, I think would be really helpful for me personally to see that, if possible, without listing anyone's names, titles, and cities.

I don't know that we have written comments on the telephone survey, but what we could do if it would be helpful is in some of the sub-areas we could break out the aggregated data if the sub scores are of use yeah I think that would be helpful for me

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thank you and okay so back to Republic you know again we got those letters of support from other local electeds who obviously are using Republic and their facilities but maybe there is a disconnect between some of the electeds and the contract managers. I don't know. So we'd like to see that data and obviously have another opportunity to get some of that information.

Yeah, if I could weigh in on it. We were shocked to see the results of that as compared to some of the other haulers. I think we had presented all our references for all our Los Angeles and Orange County cities and lots of names and lots of phone numbers. So we're not quite sure how it was tallied. So we'd be interested to see that as well. But we did provide the 15 letters for you today to take a look at from happy customers who appreciate a good partnership with Republic. We provide great service. We have great facilities, as you know. And we were a little shocked by it as well.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thanks. My other question is actually regarding the RNG vehicle here in Santa Ana. So I think during previous presentations or conversations, you've mentioned one, our all-electric prototype. But in this presentation, you mentioned that there was going to be 100% RNG with 78 new RNG vehicles. Will all of your fleet in San Ana be RNG?

Our fleet will be CNG, driven off fossil fuel still, like you mentioned. And then we will have the electric vehicle for a prototype. And those are being worked on now. there's a Peterbilt version and a Mack version right and we'll have that in our hands and we'll be working here with that as a from an R&D basis to see we can work out the kinks to that there is a time a time amount right that the truck is able to function and it's running out of the energy right energy source so there's still a lot of work to do there but it'll be exciting to have it here in Santa Ana so we can work together to see if we can get that

pulled off it'd be the first of its kind in Southern California well in

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California period great and so I know you have both a facility in Anaheim and Huntington Beach. You're not looking to expand anything else in Santa Ana, correct? That's correct, yes. Okay, and so you have capacity to do all the services now with the existing facilities and it won't affect our city? Yeah, we do. We

have two collection yards in Huntington Beach and Anaheim that can accommodate all the fleet and then we have the post collection capability between the two, 10,000 tons per day, which we utilize about 60-odd percent of that volume now so we'll have plenty of capacity for that. Great. For everything, all your different materials that we collect. Thank you.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So that's all the questions I have. Thank you. Thank you. I guess the last one's

waste management. Good evening Mr. Mayor and the City Council. My name is Doug Corcoran I work for waste management which with me is Ashley Grunier we also have Walter Roberts our senior district manager with us Darrell Cotto our director of operations Dana Becker our financial analyst I missed anybody back there oh Joel's there I didn't even see Joel and Joel Robledo's here too he's our district operations manager in Santa Ana great thank you so a few questions

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

First is regarding the mixed green waste and trash. I know that that was happening due to COVID and there were some discussions with the city. I actually got sent a video from a resident asking about that. There was unfortunately not a lot of communications to our residents, so there was a lot of confusion. So are we still doing, is Waste Management still doing that, or are we finally back to separating green and trash?

It's still all being picked up together right now.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So can you explain why?

Yeah, I'll give you some background on that.

So at the beginning of the... Give me one second. I think we, Council Member Mendoza, is that, you may be, your mic may be on, so if you can turn it on mute until you're called on, we're getting a little bit of noise.

Council member? Thanks. I was wondering what that was. Okay. So in 2020, the rules around what you could do with green waste changed. And previous to that, green waste was being used as alternative daily cover. Well, that became prohibited in 2020. So we discussed with the city rate adjustment because the composting process is significantly more expensive than just spreading it out as alternative daily cover.

At that time, we came up with a rate and we had a plan for a two-step rate increase over a couple of years. but at the city at the time was reluctant felt maybe it would be better to wait because you already had a an RFP that was on the street that was going to address that and rather than hit the residents with a price increase and then another price increase and then again perhaps a price increase with with a new contract they opted to not separate that green waste for a while cleared it with Cal Recycle as far as I know with the understanding that the new contract

would be taking care of that and in fact the new contract does take care of that great so I just

want to confirm that it was on us correct councilmember fan the item was brought before the city council staff was recommending compliance but the council opted to bypass on the rate increase it

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

was on the last council. That's true. Okay and that's fine you know I want to clarify that because there's different perceptions out there in the world. When I went to visit my HOA meeting the first thing they thought when they found out as a council member is like oh my gosh our trash. So it's important I think to share that information. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is you know a lot of these benefits that you're proposing under these this proposals you know are really great I really appreciate that I guess my question

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really comes with you know how long have you had some of these benefits for the city because you know obviously you've been our trash hauler for almost as long as I've been alive for about 30 years and I'm not sure you know whether we've seen a ton of these benefits. Is it just because no one on the council asked for it, or is it only because we're going out competitive now that you're proposing these community benefits?

I guess I probably need to get an understanding of which benefits. Some of them, for example, neighborhood cleanups have been a part of the contract for quite a while, and that's a benefit going forward as well. Just general recycling, organic services, that's been a part of the contract. That will be part of the new contract as well. There are some new benefits regarding outreach and education. I think in your presentation you identified that we were going to add two recycling coordinators. It actually supplements our current staff, which is two, plus three to

five third-party recycling coordinators that are out there on our behalf. At this time, the city is paying their bill. That'll come to waste management. We've agreed to accept that. So we've had recycling coordinators. The benefits are expanded. The reason behind that really is SB 1383, which has effectively changed the landscape for our business and requires a lot more in the way of diversion, a lot more in the way of outreach, education, and all of that. So that comes with the new contract.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, thank you. And my other question is actually regarding a subcontractor that you use. Wear Disposal is local in the city?

Yes.

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So do you propose to use them going forward?

We are proposing to use them at this time, yeah, we are.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, great. So what is your relationship with Wear in the sense that, you know, we do have some residents, concerned about some of the facilities. I don't know if it's where disposal that's using it as a facility or if it's just a property that they own, but we've had a lot of residential complaints or community complaints regarding the way that that is being run. Have you addressed this with them, being obviously a major contractor with the city and we want to make sure we have good relationships?

We have, and you're right, it actually is two areas. One is properties that they own that are being leased to other businesses. It has nothing to do with this contract or any of our services. And one is their Madison Materials facility, which is a construction and demolition processing facility. So we learned about this as time went on and we got, you know, we began talking with the community and also with folks in the city that this was, that there were concerns about that facility and just about where's other properties in general.

So we essentially began to pressure them and to explain to them that, look, if you can't be in compliance, if you're going to be a problem with the neighbors, we're not going to work with you. That's going to be in the contract going forward. And we are prepared if they're not responsive enough to go ahead and basically cut them loose and handle the C&D processing over at our facility on construction circle in Irvine. Now, I know that I've learned because we've been out with the community, we've walked the neighborhood, we've spoken with people there, we've been talking with code enforcement,

we've really been chasing it all the way down to get to the bottom of what the issues are. And they're not new. They've been out there for a while and there's been a little bit of conflict and all of that. I actually think in a way we might be the best opportunity to take care of that stuff because they've been there, have continued to have some issues, but in just the short time between when we expressed an interest in working with them, them as a local Santa Ana business with folks that live here in the city, which we thought was an awesome idea, to be honest with you.

But just in the period of time that we've considered working with them to today, they've already begun to reach out themselves. They're willing to work with us. they are also going to have code enforcement come out, they're meeting with them, they're going to get a list, basically inventory of things to clean the place up, clean up the operation, look at the other yards, and basically just become good neighbors. If they're successful, everybody wins. If they're not successful and they hold back, well, then everybody but them wins with waste management because we'll handle it in another way.

So we think we've got that covered pretty well.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thanks. I really appreciate the detailed response. I'm appreciative that WM is using local Santa Ana business, but I think it's really important that whoever you subcontract with treats the city well and treats residents well and are good neighbors as part of the community benefit that we're demanding here. And so I hope to see that through this process, that behavior or those relationships or conflicts are resolved and improved. And with that, thank you so much.

Okay, thank you.

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I do just want to make a very brief comment about some of the videos generally. I have to say I do appreciate some of the production value, but I'm going to go ahead and say that it was pretty appalling to see some of the tokenism that was used in the videos. I'm going to straight say that outright. Y'all, this is not a campaign. You do not need to pander to us. We are interested in looking at the, you know, the substance of the video and what you were promoting. and so if there is any presentation at the next council meeting or next council meetings, I do expect that, you know, that particular issue is addressed.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

And if you're not sure what I'm talking about, I suggest you speak to some of your, you know, employees or residents who can better, you know, explain that to you. Thanks.

Great. Thank you, Council Member Fan. Well said. Let me go ahead and call on Council Member Mendoza, who I believe is waiting to address some of the proposers. Council Member Mendoza, are you on?

Yes, I'm here. Thank you, Mayor Sarmiento. I just want to thank the four companies for their extensive work and for the various videos that they've submitted. And also with the staff, they've done a lot of work as well in bringing this information to us so that we can decide on what's going to be the best for our city. And the question that I have is for Director Saba. I don't have any questions for the four particular companies

that have already received much, much information. And with the aforementioned questions answered, I think we have much information that has been cleared up questions that I had. But my number one, oh, before that, I want to say I do appreciate that the companies do, that they include participation and collaboration and doing something for the community, as well as for servicing the trash collection.

And so it is of particular interest to me that the four companies are engaged and are willing to participate in making the community better by the donations and participating in sponsoring city events. and the question that I have for Director Saba is that in regards to I know that it's been a practice not with these particular companies but with in general that the

that the bidding is low and so what's that what's included in the contract that would protect the city and protect our residents from any price hiking in the future.

Supposedly, if a company is chosen, the one who has submitted the lowest bid, etc., and then in the future, they submit requests for increases in the contract. So how do we protect our citizens and ourselves and the city from such price hiking in the future?

Good evening, Councilmember Mendoza.

All rates are subject to the Consumer Price Index and the other index, so the prices will increase based on those. In addition to the first two, three years, there will be increases due to the clean city initiatives.

However, there is no provision really to increase those prices unless an extraordinary circumstance arises during those 10 years. Then it is up to the city really to entertain adjustment of these prices. But as we are in here today, the price or the rates will be adjusted based on those indices that I listed on the slides.

Thank you. I don't have any further questions or comments.

Great. Thank you, Council Member Mendoza. You can be on call in case any other questions come up that you may have. Let me see if anybody else here has any questions. Councilmember Becerra.

Phil BacerraItem 1

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to thank all the haulers who came in and made their presentations this evening. I appreciate it. I also want to thank my colleague, Councilmember Fan, for saying what she said because it's true. I mean, really, if any of you have paid attention to the meetings, I know you have. And the reality is I want to get down to the basics. You guys want to be good partners in the community? Do a good job. That's how you win brownie points with these folks. Okay? So let's just cut to it. Tell us what you're going to do.

Phil BacerraItem 1

Tell us you're going to do it for a reasonable rate. And I think you'll make a lot of us up here happy. Okay? With that being said, I want to really express my appreciation to staff because I really don't have any questions for the haulers tonight. You guys have done a fantastic job of presenting the information, asking the right questions of the proposers, and bringing everything forward.

Phil BacerraItem 1

I do have a question though for staff and that is under city government operations you mentioned grant administration and maybe I missed the description on that but are we expecting the hauler that we select to seek out grants as far as anything related to their services here in the city or how does that work?

Yes, we would partner with them on applying for grants, and it's a fee for service. So there is a price that is attached to that service. So as part of the RFP, they have told us what the price will be on an hourly basis when we ask them to help us with grant applications and such.

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Okay. And I assume that they'll also partner with our lobbyists then as well, because I know that in the calls that I've had with our lobbyists on our ad hoc regarding legislation, that's been an issue is to make sure that our folks are bringing resources back to us. And I would just hate to see us not coordinate. So I'm hoping that that's whoever is selected would be coordinating with our lobbyists. We'll make sure of that. Okay, perfect. You know, there's a lot of great things that were said tonight. you know as far as labor environment the happiness of our of the workers you know

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I really appreciate that the one thing though that I will say as far as for what Santa Ana is doing and and our hauler the the potential hauler that is selected will have to embrace us and that is the clean city initiative and I think this is something that you know we throw the word transformative around a lot and I think it's important to recognize that Santa Ana's requests that we put out there is something that will be transformative and I think that whoever you know as one of my colleagues said I think all the haulers that have submitted bids are definitely folks that can deliver I think it's

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going to be a very tough choice for us here on the stias but I appreciate the fact that you guys all hung in there knowing that we have such high demands of you because our residents deserve that. So I just want to thank all of you for hanging in there. But at the end of the day, I'm very proud that this council and our staff followed through on the request of our ad hoc to make sure that we go above and beyond serving our residents. It's not just about picking up the trash. It's about making sure that this city is clean and beautiful. So thank you, Nabil. Thank Thank you, Christine, and thank you to the ad hoc that did that.

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Again, I wish I had more questions. Typically, I would, but in this particular case, thank you, Nabil. I think all my questions have been answered. So thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Great. Thank you for those comments. I think everybody has spoken. Council Member Lopez, do you have any questions at this time? And I know, Mayor Pro Tem, we may go back for another round if people have some more questions. Let me just go ahead and make a few comments. and a lot of them are for staff as well but I first wanted to begin by just thanking all of you who are you know looking to partner with the city because I see this more than just a contract right I see this as a real relationship anytime you do a multi-year contract this extensive it does you know bind us

and bond us in ways that you're gonna get to know our community you're gonna to get to know our residents and our families in a very intimate way probably as much as any other member of our employee staff so it is a very sensitive and you know important role that you'll be playing for me I know that you know a lot of the objective questions that I had were were asked and answered yeah I don't want to grill I think councilmember fan did a nice job of being able to ask specific questions. I do have some specific questions of you. And for full disclosure,

I want to make sure that everybody knows I've met with, I think, each and every one of you on a personal meeting, so I appreciate your time in answering some of my individual questions that I had. And so a lot of those were answered in those meetings. But again, what we want to make sure is that this process, and that's, I think, the goal of this council, is as open and transparent as possible, which is why we're all here. So I, you know, do want to begin by saying that all of you can do this work. I mean, I don't see any of you for being unable or not having the capacity

to be able to service the city. Something I know that always makes our public works director very nervous is when I say, not only can one of you do it, but a couple of you can do it together, or a few. If we look at models in other cities, they've been able to either bifurcate or do them in teams, I think to me, Santa Ana is large enough that that could happen. You know, I've always wanted us to look at that, and maybe before our last session, we take a look at what that cost would be, because I know the burden falls on our administrative

staff and our public work staff to be able to audit, monitor, you know, these contracts going forward. So I know that the labor really falls on them. But maybe there's a way, you know, Director Saba, we can incorporate a cost recovery for that. You know, I think that there are cities much smaller than us that have multiple vendors that do their service hauling. That doesn't mean we're going to do it. I'm just saying let's, you know, consider that because, again, for me, as many things that are happening this year, this is a once in a moment, once in a decade, you know, decision that we're going to make.

And it's a significant decision. And so I see that this council has been asked to do a few things, and I see this as one element of things that we're doing. So we're also in the process of, you know, appropriating monies that we're getting from the federal government as part of the stimulus bill. So that's about close to $130 million that we will be allocating and addressing needs of the city. we also know that there's a surplus in Sacramento and those monies are going to be used to hopefully help us address our houseless issue and many other issues that we have with people that are struggling so we know we're gonna have

two buckets of injections of monies that we will hopefully be using very responsibly to make sure that the quality of life of our residents is improved but your role whoever or whomever and maybe it's it's it's two of you, maybe it's one of you, you're that third piece of that, I think, that tripod, right? Because to me, having a clean city, which I've lived here all my life, my family has been here for 65 years, has always been a challenge. And so the whole idea and the paradigm of being able to go out and do trash collection the way we've been doing has to change and it has to evolve.

So I hope that this is that moment where it does, and hopefully this becomes an example for other communities where picking up bins is a simple exercise, but keeping a city clean and healthy is a complete departure from what we're doing. And that's what we're asking you to do. And, you know, we hope that you don't take it the wrong way. We just think that, you know, and, you know, I won't speak for all of my colleagues, but I'm sure that they'll concur. We believe our residents deserve better. We believe that they deserve premium service, right, because unfortunately we've all struggled with that challenge.

And, you know, I know the matrix that was included here on slide 31, which shows the revenue over the 10-year period. You know, we're talking about, you know, $600, $700 million over a 10-year period. It is a gargantuan amount, right? and so I think it's completely fair and warranted that we ask you to do more than just pick up bins and I hope that you understand that that it's coming from a good place that we expect that our residents that live have lived not only this past year in challenging times but years prior right have been

challenged as well so we want to make sure that you understand that so you know let me just you know and a lot of my questions are for staff and I may have one or two for some of the proposers but I appreciate what you director Saba and your team has done with respect to the to the what do we call it the clean city initiatives right so these are sort of added or additional values and additional expectations that we see that these haulers will have above and beyond what what has been the normal practice I saw that there is an

increment of fee you know fees and costs as a result of that right yes maybe when you come back to us i mean i see it's in there but it's not as you know maybe we can include it in sort of a table of what that you know what what that will do to the ultimate fee of that vendor so when we add that column of you know initiatives that we call clean city initiatives we're able to see how those adjustments are made um and i know that they're in there and they're they're just in in my mind And if we can sort of put them together and we see that addition, that would be helpful.

So let me ask you, I know that we have, in my opinion, sort of two incumbents here. I mean, we certainly have appreciated and thank Waste Management for being our vendor for so many years. And we appreciate you working with us. They're certainly the incumbent on this trash hauling contract. But I do think that Athens is also sort of a pseudo incumbent because they do our street sweeping and they've been doing that for, you know, six or seven years. Normally, incumbency is a benefit. Sometimes it's a curse, right? Because, you know, you try to maybe say, well, we didn't do this because something else or we were prevented.

So I guess, you know, I want to make sure that, you know, we're trying to be as objective as possible. But the one benefit, I guess, or maybe a detriment of being an incumbent is that my question is to staff. What's your experience been with the two incumbents, Waste and Athens, with respect to the work delivery and the work performance?

Thank you, Mayor. As far as the street sweeping, we've been very pleased with the service that Athens has been providing for us in the past six or seven years in terms of street sweeping and their contractual compliance. And same with waste management. We have been working with waste management with their existing contract, and they have been complying with the elements of the contract that has existed for so many years.

So there haven't been any, you know, service interruptions or real difficult, you know, litigation matters that have evolved as a result of those two contracts?

There hasn't.

Okay. So I know for, you know, for, and this is to waste, and it's not to pick on you because you're the incumbent. It's just, you're the incumbent. So, you know, in the event that you were to lose this contract and it were to go to a, you know, one of the competitors, you know, would you pursue litigation against the city as a result of that contract being lost?

We would not.

I like short answers, too.

Good work and work, Matt.

Thank you. I know that that's happened in other communities, and that's happened, you know, hopefully not as common, but we certainly want to make sure we, you know, we all respect the process, and we know that we're not going to be making a decision and then seeing, you know, litigation come at us as a result.

and for for Athens I guess you know one of the questions I had was I know we've spoken a lot about labor right and so Santa Ana is a is a blue-collar city it's a working family friendly city and we certainly do you know try to do our best to make sure that we we we we honor those goals so talk to me about whether or not you'd be able to you know allow for there to be a labor piece so an ability to to um you know have a bargaining unit or uh you know or unionize here in the city if you were

given this waste hauling contract honorable mayor and council i'm really glad you asked that question i did want to clarify earlier um athens services does have a portion of its employees that are in City of LA that are represented by 396. We're working on a CBA. Additionally, I have a letter right here dated April 12th that we wrote to the 396 offering labor peace in Santa Ana. We support our employees right to vote and we will

continue to do so. Great. Do your street sweepers, are they unionized? They're not. They're not. Not the ones in Santa Ana, are any of them unionized? No. Great. Thank you. So for Republic, just because I want to be an equal opportunity questioner here. Again, I only have a couple questions.

questions. Have you had any contracts for cities in the past with municipal government that haven't had their – where you haven't had your contract renewed?

We have had a few that went out for RFPs in the last couple of years, about three years ago city of hawaiian gardens as well as norwalk got it and so when they've gone out to bid on

those contracts where you were the incumbent have you ever lost a contract yeah we did lose those

two yeah we bid on them we made a competitive bid process uh and another hauler was selected got it any particular reason no just they reach a point where they in some cases there's not in those cases but in some cases cities have just a general feeling that these large contracts need to go to RFPs at specific times right or they just need to get it out to bid to level the playing field or to see if their incumbents prices are fair right so that can be the situation sometimes got it thank you for

that thank you for those that's all I had for CRNR just a quick question on and And the only reason why I know this is because my mother is a resident of the City of Orange, so I know that at one time they were serviced by a different vendor in the City of Orange, and then I believe a few years ago, or some years ago, the contract went to CR&R. Talk to me about that relationship and talk to me about, you know, a rate increase that

happens relatively soon after that contract was bid for you, successfully bid.

I can talk a little bit about that. CRNR did take over the contract for the City of Orange and servicing more over ten years. Can you raise your voice just a little bit? Let me move a little bit closer. CRNR did take over that contract. It's been servicing the City of Orange for over ten years. There hasn't been anything in terms of additional rate increases. Most recently there was a renegotiation, but a lot of that had to do with what we're all facing right now is with SB 1383. The expansion of organics programs, introduction of new programs to be able to – what we need to

do for compliance with SB 13E3. But that's the most recent one I've been aware of, being my history with CRNR.

Great. Thank you for that. That's all I had for you. And so, again, I just had some, you know, a couple of specific questions. I think, you know, I don't want to repeat what council members have already asked about.

So, Director Saba, just sort of in closing here, can you tell us why it's so important that we make a decision relatively soon? Because I think we're looking at a tight timeline. And I'll tell you that we've looked at this contract now, not only with this council, but with previous councils. Iterations of, I think, three or four different makeups of council. And I know that we've struggled to be able to get to this point. We finally have a council that's sort of, you know, put together. It's consistent. Nobody is coming or going, at least for a while.

And that's been, you know, that's been sort of the problem in the past is that we've had, you know, people leaving and then to get everybody up to speed, which is why I think we've been so assertive in making sure everybody is informed forming an ad hoc having multiple opportunities to discuss this this contract with everybody because it's a lot to digest but tell me what why

it's so important that this timeline be respected sure thank you mayor as as you recall some of our hollers mentioned SB 1383 became effective earlier this year and because it became effective we were required to do more more than just recycling and what we're doing right now 18 1383 is a big I want to say compliance bill that we need to comply with we are not in compliance with it

1383 right now and we are on or under a compliance order through Cal recycle to comply with the all of the regulations that relates to solid waste however Cal recycle was nice to us knowing that we are going through this RFP process and they have gave it gave given us an extension until July 1 2022 that we would become in compliance with all solid waste regulations. So we do have a close time frame to bring ourselves into compliance, and this contract would do that.

If we don't meet compliance by July 1, 2022, we will be out of compliance, and CalRecycle will be able to fine us and take us to court, whatever it is, but we won't be in compliance. And that's the last thing I want for Santa Ana. So therefore we really want to keep on track. Now like I mentioned, we're hoping that we would come back to you to award the contract on August 17, 2021. This will give the haulers to transition by the equipment, the trucks, the bins, the carts, everything else, and get ready to design the routes so they'll be able to service Santa Ana on

on day one of July 1, 2022. If we don't award this contract on the date of August 17, then we won't be able to meet those deadlines, and we would be under a compliance order from CalRecycle. It's important that we keep on track.

Great. Thank you for that summary. So it just begs the question that this is something that we've come to this moment that we have to make a decision. And I have full confidence in this council that they have the ability, they've received the information, their deliberative, you know, the deliberative process of having an ad hoc, having a study session, having multiple times to understand.

The significance of the contract, I think, is certainly, you know, something that we've all met. Just in closing, I want to let you know some of the things I really do like that all of you have agreed to do. I really like the Porter service because that's something that we, you know, haven't had. and I think it because it's such a large city because now we are a city council that that has six council members that represent six individual districts and those districts are different we call them wards but there's their areas and districts in the town so to the extent that it is very important to have

somebody or some team that's responsible and responsive is is important and to the extent that you all can do that independently or with our support that's helpful I really like the idea of the bulky items and how you all have stepped up to take care of those we we realize that you know unfortunately we have a city where look it's probably the fourth most densely populated city in the country and so you have debris as a result of that I mean it's just a lot it's it's not that our residents are any less clean and I don't like that sort of stigma that the city city has we just have a very large population you know

close to 350,000 people living within 27 and a half square miles so our families are very clean it's just we just generate a lot of debris as a result of many families and so we have you know rights of way that aren't left unkept like alleys like bus stops different things that we want you to help us with and I even I think I received something today we all received something from one of the neighborhoods that raised money to buy their own trash bins and they're hoping that you all can help them you know change those out and I think that's fair so all those things you know but for me I just want you to know I

want to be able to save our residents as much money as they can coming out of this pandemic things are very difficult for people families are struggling and so rates matter it's not all about rates it doesn't go to that lowest common denominator because it's multifaceted multi elements but rates are not something that can be ignored you know rates that are affordable rates that are reasonable for premium service is really the formula if you want to be successful here with us in town so those are my comments I'll go ahead and you know end with that I'll go back to the council if there's any additional comments and

David PenalozaItem 1

anybody may have. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you Mayor Sarmiento. First I just want to say that I'm just happy that all our cracked sidewalks will be power washed which is nice to hear in the city. There's lots of them. But with that said I want to thank Councilmember Sarmiento and Councilmember Pham because they brought up excellent points. I know that during the ad hoc one of the the main asks of myself as well as councilmember fans was that the the footprint of whoever is awarded this contract is who's gonna

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have the smallest footprint in the city because our city as we as you know we're not we're not the city of Irvine that was planned from the ground up I mean we we know very complex and and and and just interesting city in the way that it's laid out and just the the hazard components that exist because of that we have and I've said this numerous times we have crematoriums in the middle of neighborhoods I mean that that's how our city has has has had the short end of the stick when it comes to planning breathing in toxins and just the the

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environmental injustices that exist and one thing was I I want to see who's gonna have the smallest footprint in the city because we are dealing with trash and I know that there were some there were two in particular I think I heard Athens as well as Republic service and full disclosure as well I've met with all four of them all four of them you know thank you for your time and thank you for for showing me your facilities those that did but I don't know who wants to come up first Athens maybe to just get clarity on where the the these

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potential possible facilities would be in the city and and what kind of

facilities well after listening to your comments we would like to have an office for the residents to be able to visit and hold recycling events but also we've identified a yard in Anaheim that will fit all the trucks it's about four miles away so it wouldn't be in your city we did put that proposal if you did want to work on a blighted area or something that you suggested but we're more than happy to build the yard just right outside the city and I do have to say too it's important for us to have a physical location in the community especially with our outreach team that we're proposing to provide the community

so we have our environmental managers that will provide direct service or coordinate our services that we're proposing under this contract and And they'll be working out of the local Senate and office as well.

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So thank you for that clarity. And in office with people, I mean, that's always, you know, that's fine. When I'm talking footprint, I'm talking, you know, a potential MRF or trash sorter or of that kind, you know, in the city, which is something that I personally don't want to see, just because of, I can't think of an area where we could have something like that, because of how dense and built out our city is. but I know that some had mentioned increased you know having some kind of facility in the city which I'm happy to hear that it's not and while you're up

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Athens I when we met a week or two ago I know that you mentioned that a little under 30% of your workforce is is union workforce is that correct correct so I I mean, that would translate to seven out of 10 are not union workforce. Is there a reason behind that? I mean, is there anything that?

It really, you know, it's our employees' right to choose. So we are, like we mentioned before, we are collectively working with the unions in our LA area. And we welcome labor peace here in Santa Ana. And as Cord mentioned, we did reach out to the unions and ask for a labor peace agreement if we do get awarded this contract. So there's no, it's our employees have been very treated very well and I think they have just elected not to unionize at this point. We're then happy to you know engage if that's that's the wish of the council. Okay thank you for that.

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That's it for now. Thank you. And the Republic Service, I and if the other I don't believe the other two mentioned having a facility in the city and I know that Republic Service did, are we still considering having some kind of sorting facility in the city or some kind of warehouse in the city? No, we will not.

We'll have our existing Anaheim facility and our existing Huntington Beach facility to be able to handle all the requirements. We will have a local office. So the beautiful thing about our Anaheim facility that's a one-stop shop, we're going to take everything there less than eight miles away. Both Huntington Beach and Anaheim are easily accessible. So when you need efficiencies, emergencies, we're right next to the city, but it's far away enough so it's not an issue for your local residents. It's in an industrial area. It's been there a long time. As you're aware, permitting any new facilities takes 15-plus years.

We're ready to go, so it's all-inclusive of all your recycling, your green waste construction and demolition, carpet, mattress, and your recyclables. So no need to add anything within. You can preserve your green spaces, preserve your beautiful neighborhoods. we'll go ahead and process it all for you further away but efficient with the community.

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So no additional footprint of any kind in the city?

Correct. No disposal facilities in the facility, no murphs, no more trash areas. But we will be present at a local office so residents can come in, businesses can come in and engage with us, interact with us one-on-one, and we'd love to work with you on what would be the prime location for an office that's most convenient for the community. But that's just a customer service office. Okay. Yeah, I think another thing to consider too is the travel time, right? So I think it's important for the city to check with all the haulers. I think you're going down the right path. Where are all the trucks going to be located?

The travel time, you know, even though they are cleaner burning fuel vehicles, right? They still leave a footprint. They still have traffic, right? There's still safety considerations with haulers traveling long distances. So it's a good question for you to ask. I think.

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Yeah, and I think I believe when I toured your facility, that was one of the questions I also had was, you know, I come from the private sector and very business mindset. So I'm also thinking, you know, how does a business like yourself, you know, how do you make it work with having a facility in Huntington Beach and having one in Orange and to be able to provide that service for the residents of Santa Ana in an efficient manner? I mean, how do you juggle that? And I believe it was that you were considering looking at properties in Santa Ana, but I wasn't really told what for. Would it just be for staging of trucks?

No, we are not considering that at all. What we would probably do is have one of the lines of business, like the residential collection trucks out of one yard, and maybe the recycling and the commercial trucks out of the other yard. So there would be a real clean differentiation there. We have no intention of having a facility.

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Okay. Thank you for that. Last question just in regards to your workforce as well. I believe you guys stated that most or all your drivers are part of the Teamsters? We are. We are. Okay. And Santa Ana residents mostly?

Yeah, we have 77 residents of Santa Ana that work out of our Anaheim facility right now.

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So there's Santa Ana residents that already work in your facility, but they service, obviously, other cities. Yeah, other cities. Okay.

And we have a great rapport with the Teamsters and worked with them for years throughout Orange County and Los Angeles County. And you know, a classic example of that would be through the pandemic, right, we had to work with our municipal jurisdictions as well as the Teamsters to make sure we could continue to service but keep all the employees safe, right, and we were able to accomplish that without co-mainline or anything like that.

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Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for that. That is it for now. Okay, thank you. That's it.

Thank you.

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And next, I had one question in regards to CRNR. So if CRNR wants to approach the microphone.

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And just in general, I wanted to ask what kind of quick turnaround or service do you have for your residents that you already do, like cities of Orange, I believe, and was it Stanton? Was the other one? The ones that we service around here? Yeah.

We service all the adjacent cities. service Tustin, Orange, Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. Okay so in regards to just

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let's say I'm a resident with that you know has CRNR and my cart, street cart breaks, one of the wheels falls off or the lid. I mean what what how quickly do you guys fix it? Well we swap it out and pre pandemic 48 hours.

Right now everybody in this room is having a tough time getting enough drivers so now it's within seven days but by the time we start servicing you guys will be within

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48 hours okay and and the reason why i ask a specific question is because and and i not just to pick on crnr i know that i personally uh ran into an issue with waste management uh when it comes to replacing a cart and uh just and and i understand it was during the pandemic so i'm full aware of that that a lot of drivers everyone across the board the industry was was short on drivers because of what was happening. But I did hear today from someone that's not associated to any city-related elected official up here, lobbyist, nothing to do with,

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that would not even know that we're going through a trash, waste, solid waste contract. They live in the city of Orange, and they asked me to go to dinner today, and I was like, I can't have this going on. And he's like, oh, we see R&R is our trash hauler. And I had a it took me about six months to get my cart replaced. The lid was broken and and, you know, it took me a while to get it replaced. You know, numerous phone calls. So I just want to ask. That's why I was asking that question. And it wasn't the last year during the pandemic. So, you know, if that's something that you would say

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could possibly have occurred, the resident would take six months for their... Man, I find that one impossible.

Six months. We don't... Most of us don't repair carts. We swap them out. We take them back to our cart. Yeah, we do an exchange. So to exchange carts is pretty simple. So I would say that was a... Fell through the cracks problem. I can't imagine six months. Yeah, without knowing the nature of what the issue was. But that's out of the ordinary. We want to make sure that the car, especially what type of exchange it is, it's a broken lid, broken wheel, where it's not usable, that's a repair that's prioritized.

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Okay. Thank you for that. In regards to kind of reference something that Councilmember Phan brought up earlier to the two deaths that occurred, one was the traffic controller, you said? Yes, sir. At the truck yard? Yes, sir. And the other was out on the street, correct? Yes, sir. I just personally, you know, as a, as a, you know, when you're in a position of leadership like yourselves, you know, and you're asked these questions, I don't think it's appropriate to not try to take responsibility regardless of how, you know, who was at fault.

David PenalozaItem 1

It just, I didn't like the response that I saw personally just saying, hey, you know what, it was, hate to say, it was their fault. Because things like this happen and when you're in a position of leadership, you should take personal responsibility if you're the person in charge, regardless of who was at fault.

Yeah, I just wanted to give you the legal decision that the investigators made. We take responsibility for all of our employees, all of our accidents, all of our customers. That's all our fault. We know that. I just didn't want you to think that it was a fault from a legal standpoint. That's all. I'd like to add to that as well. You know, we all know all this being haulers in this industry. It's a dangerous industry. There's national statistics that show that and what we do and what we all work on is striving for safety every day for in our communities and our employees.

We have rules in place things that need to be observed and the whole reason is to ensure our employees are going home safe every day. They're critical rules. They're critical rules because we want to make sure that they are safe. So those are things we're always constantly reinforcing. We have zero tolerance for those things if they're not being used. So it's not a matter of an at fault. We just want to make sure that everybody's abiding by rules, that we are safe within our community and also for our employees.

David PenalozaItem 1

Okay, because if you look at a case of a traffic controller at your truck yard getting run over and we sit up here and call that, It was, you know, if we have, I believe, what was the vice president? Yes, sir. Of the company saying, well, you know, it was employee negligence. You know, I could say, you know, it was company negligence in lack of training or proper training or, you know, doubling down on that training as years go on. I mean, there's just going to be constant reinforcement training of what's happening. This is just my thought. Just food for thought there. I understand. And that's it for now. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

David PenalozaItem 1

And with waste management, I, if they're here, I had a thought, lost the train of thought. I had it and it went away.

David PenalozaItem 1

But if, and I want to allude a little bit to what Councilmember Sarmiento said, Mayor Sarmiento, I'm sorry.

David PenalozaItem 1

It's two years ago.

David PenalozaItem 1

Hypothetically speaking, if waste management would lose that contract, how does that work in regards to the transition period with another hauler?

David PenalozaItem 1

What's happening here if we were to go down that route?

So what happens in a transition from one hauler to another just generally, and for us, is we'd sit down with the city, the other hauler. We'd go through all of the, like, what the routes are, what's out there, what they need to know. Because our objective would be if we're no longer going to be the hauler, we don't want to go out on a bad note. You know, we want to go out on a high note. at least you know we can hold our heads high and feel good about the that was passed on to somebody who we've done everything we could to make them

successful especially in a city like Santa Ana where we've been for so long you know we out of the group here we're the only ones with something to actually lose right and so for us that loss is not just a contract that loss is 50 years of relationship. People who work for us grew up here in the city and grew up on the trucks and management grew up here on the trucks and all that. So it's much more to us and we would not treat that like okay that's it done, we're gone. I mean we would work closely with the city and I think your staff probably knows that too. We've worked

closely with them through thick and thin through everything we would not want to leave you we'd want to do everything we could to make sure that the transition was smooth you know because like i said it's relationships we know these people you know we know the customers and we don't want them to suffer anything unnecessarily that's what we would do well thank you for that um and again

David PenalozaItem 1

we're talking hypotheticals here just kind of thinking out loud and throwing questions out so

David PenalozaItem 1

But that's it for now. Just want to, you know, you guys are the incumbents. I want to thank you for just the constant community engagement that you guys have been doing that I've seen. You can't deny that. But thank you. And that's it for now. Mr. Mayor, I do have one final question for staff, if I may. I know I've spoken for a while. but um director Saba also alluding to to a question Mayor Sarmiento mentioned earlier when it comes to the relationships that staff has had with the two incumbents whether it's Athens as our street sweeping or waste management

David PenalozaItem 1

I know that so street sweeping service for example and I know that that's not we're not discussing street sweeping service so I don't want to get into the the contract of that but I know that currently our street sweepers or our industrial parts of the city do not get street swept only residential correct from conversations that I've had with you in the past

thank you mayor mayor pretend I believe they are swept but not as often as residential streets, but I'll have to confirm that for you. I know they are swept, but I will get back to you on the frequency of how often industrial and commercial streets are swept. But the residential they're doing, they are being done on a weekly basis. And they are posted. You know, industrial streets, they're not posted for street sweeping. And some of them are swept at night. But I will get back to you on that.

David PenalozaItem 1

Did you have a comment, Madam City Manager? I see you all kind of thinking. No? And with, just with staff, with any of the four potential haulers, how do we, I know that city staff is limited. I know that our resources are limited. How do we hold any one of them, whether it's Athens or CRNR or Waste Management or Republic Service, how do we hold either one of them accountable for any of these things that we're requesting of them?

David PenalozaItem 1

I know that I've heard of instances with the incumbents. I'm not going to specify which one because it's not about that right now. of having a service that they haven't been doing in the last couple of years, but we didn't really know or that they should have been doing it, and it wasn't done. I mean, how do we – I mean, this is a lot that we're requesting of any – like, we have all set up here. Any four of these companies could pick up the trash. There's no doubt about it. I'm pretty sure they all can.

David PenalozaItem 1

But when it comes to the clean city initiatives and just everything from, I just, from personal experience sitting on this dais my short time recently with settlements that we've had with private companies, whether it's our railroads, there are things that they agree to, but then we don't see, we don't see if they maybe get done for a couple months and then they kind of fizzle out or they're not done as frequently as we thought it was. How do we hold these companies accountable? Is it city staff that's doing that?

I believe that proper staffing, monitoring, and follow-up, and communication with any of the haulers will accomplish what you're looking for. just we need to review or start with a solid agreement like what we have here and start fresh and have the staffing to follow up and monitor the progress and

communicate with it with it with the holler and and the provider to make sure that services are being done. We need to follow up and just communicate with the halls and having the right staff.

David PenalozaItem 1

So when you say proper staffing, is that internally within public works?

I believe so. It will be in public works that we will have. We will have a proper staff to follow up and manage the agreement. It's called project management, and that's what we'll have. In fact, if you look at some of the elements of this contract, we will have funding to actually allow us to staff to monitor these activities out of this contract.

David PenalozaItem 1

Because it's a lot. And I know that all four haulers have agreed to some type of everything we've asked for. But it is a lot. And I'm not saying that they can't do it. but I'm just saying, you know, how are we going to hold whoever it is, any one of the fours accountable that make sure that all those little bullet points on the two pages that they're being addressed. I agree. It will be all on us. That's something that I'm going to sit here and ask and ask and just really emphasize on the importance of, you know, making sure that those things are being carried out because our residents are paying a premium to live here

David PenalozaItem 1

and just to get the basic services. And this is critical that these things are carried out. One final thing, and I'll be quiet, is just, you know, I want to emphasize to all four that personally, one of my asks during the ad hoc was just the integration with our city app. I just, maybe it's because I'm a millennial, but I don't like talking on the phone. I don't like having to call somebody. You shouldn't, in the times that we're in, in 2021, with how accessible everything is in the palm of your hands,

David PenalozaItem 1

we shouldn't have to sit on the phone for 30 minutes to get a trash can replaced or get a large mattress picked up from my sidewalk. You know, I should be able to do it quickly from the palm of my hand and not waste time doing it. I mean, providing that service and making it easy for our residents to ask for that service is going to go a long, long way as we move forward. With that said, Mayor Sarmiento, that is it.

Great. Thank you for that. I know Council Member Fan has another question. Council Member Lopez, are you good?

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

No.

Great. Just checking. Council Member Fan, go ahead.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem, for asking the question about enforcement. That is very helpful because that kind of leads into my next question. Director Saba, you had mentioned that we're on a pretty strict timeline, and I'd understand because there's a lot of lead time necessary.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

But let's say we do award the contract on time, and the hauler is gearing up and whatnot, and if they are not on time, what happens then? Are they going to pay the fees? Are we going to pay the fees, the fines?

That's when I turn to John Farnham.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Well then, he almost got away with it tonight.

Thank you for your question, Councilmember Fan. I believe that has already been observed tonight, the current responsibility for, or in the city when it elected to bypass the most recent rate adjustment, that meant that would most likely be on the city those costs were we to incur them so I guess let me

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

clarify you know we have a deadline August something or other and that's what all the haulers understand you know you will not get a contract until August something or other and you have 11 months to gear up so if they're after they're awarded and they do not meet the deadline we're on the hook

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

If I'm not being clear, you just tell me.

No, my understanding is that the services are to begin on July 1st, 2022. So at the time their obligations are triggered under the contract, and it's those obligations that serve to bring us into compliance and they are not met, then it would most likely be, or our position would be that it would be on them and not the city.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So I would like to, if it's not in the RFP, and I don't know if there's anything in the RFP, but I want to make sure that if they are not meeting the requirements as listed, that they understand that it's their obligation and it's not on the city or the residents to pay those fines. Is that possible?

We can certainly work with staff to pursue that.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, but I hope the answer is yes.

It would be a yes.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thank you.

Again, Councilmember, you know, with the four providers that we have, we are confident that any one of them will be able to transition into the service if need to and provide Santa Ana the service on July 1st, 2022. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here asking you to consider any of the four. So we're confident that we'll be able to provide that service. You know, you can't unforeseen certifications, that's a different issue, but we're confident that any of the four will be able to transition in serving San Ana.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Yeah, I know. I'm just saying, you know, worst case scenario, somebody's delaying, they're trying to get some new RNG trucks and it's not happening, or, you know, there's another steel shortage or something from China, you know, that we are not on the hook for failure to comply. The other question is actually kind of for all of the haulers. And so I guess I'll start with Republic because you were on my mind.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So I wanted to ask you because actually Texas was just in the news. but you serve the city, not the city, the state. So you provide services in the state of Texas, correct?

Correct.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Okay, so obviously they had the crazy snowstorm, snowmageddon, whatever you want to call it. And I guess I really want to know what your response was with that epic emergency services and whether it included the areas where power was out.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Obviously, climate change and effects to our city and these kinds of large natural disasters are likely and possible here. So if you can talk a little bit about that and explain to me how you ensure that you provide adequate services.

Yeah, we have a group of employees that are identified way ahead of time. We have a whole list. We call it our SOS group, right? So it's hundreds of drivers, technicians, container welders, all the people you would need to come into a situation because we often have hurricanes down right in the southeast, fires which we've had here in California. I can't speak specifically to what they did in Texas, but that group will be called upon and they'll immediately be mobilized. And everything's all set up already. We have a whole group of people that just sit around and say,

what if a hurricane hits, what's day one, what's day two, what's day three, day four? So that's something we do because of our size we're able to do and help out in any kind of disaster.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Have you ever dealt with situations that result, I guess, fire emergencies? You know, we obviously have, we've been lucky not to have a fire situation here in the city, but or earthquakes, any of those examples?

Recently we had the evacuations up north, right, in the Bay Area, and there still are solid waste needs, you know, because those fires kind of jump around and they'll take different paths. So we do a lot of coordination with the local authorities to see what's available to get in and out of safely to continue to make sure we can get safely in there and get out of there. But, yeah, it's a tricky situation because normally they just want everybody out, including everybody, including essential worker garbage people. But at some point when it's weeks and weeks, you've got to get back in there

and get the garbage out of there at some point. I don't know if that answered your question or not.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Yeah, no, that did. I am worried about, again, emergency situations because we're obviously an earthquake-prone area, and it's good to know that you've had experience responding to them.

And we could provide the city with, if needed, an earthquake plan specifically for the city and what we could do to be sure that we'd be able to call upon all that army of people to come in and give a hand.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Thanks. And I did also have a question because if I understand correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that you transitioned hauling services in L.A.?

We did. We did. In that particular city, there is multiple haulers, to the mayor's comments earlier. And it was a significant transition, about 10 times the size of Santa Ana. So it took a lot of effort. I think things we learned during that process was to get out in front of it early with communication to the residents, the businesses of what to expect and the changes that are coming up, as well as if there's rates, right, that are going to impact them, if rates are going to go up or they're going to go even or they're going to be – They just need to know, because they don't like,

most a lot of business people do not like to be surprised if something's happening that they didn't put in their budget. And another component of it is just take your time through that transition, because we kind of had to rush through it, the city, you said, hey, we gotta get 75,000 customers converted over in six months, and that was a big ask. And because we all were operating everywhere across Los Angeles, so we had to vacate from areas where we didn't get our zone, and we had to have the other haulers enter those areas, So it was a very difficult transition for everybody. Take your time in a big city like this.

You saw the numbers, 130,000 carts, 12,000 containers, 70-some trucks, right? Those are big numbers. And we'll sit down with city staff as well as anybody, all the stakeholders, and figure out what a really good implementation plan is. Make sure it's smooth, take our time, and everyone's informed of what's coming up.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

And was that transition on time?

Yeah, that transition was on time. Yes. The beautiful thing about the city of Santa Ana is that you do have that year. So we immediately started talking to our procurement team. They're all waiting for us to give them a call right now to see the status of the award, and we let them know it'll happen in July. But with that year, there's a lot of runway. We already have trucks order that will be pulled off the line. We get ahead of a lot of our orders. So everything that you need, we'll be able to deliver. Order, create a big purchasing order by October. Have things delivered, rolled out.

with a comprehensive timeline six months later. Work with staff as staff wants us to be accessible whether it's weekly or monthly. Work with the neighborhood leaders and a lot of your ward representatives and your ward community leaders really getting ahead and being accessible to everybody that is a stakeholder in this process. Yeah, that August date I would agree with you is a very, it would be a tight date, right? Because what Tanya's mentioning is we have all the trucks in the manufacturing line ready to be the day we get awarded right we're gonna tell them start making them right they're gonna be able to punch them all

out the more you push that back the more difficult it's gonna be to execute on

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

that July first date so to clarify that comment great thank you so I actually have the same two questions for the other haulers if that's okay so three haulers so maybe if one from each team can come up and explain you know how you've addressed emergencies so maybe Athens and then CRNR and then waste management so we can give a couple examples of specifically earthquakes and fires that's what I'm most worried about here unfortunately I haven't ever

fortunately haven't had to deal with any earthquakes but I can give you the example of COVID recently and you know early in the pandemic we didn't really know what was going on but we formed an emergency team we met every morning at 6 a.m. We segregated our drivers. We had multiple yards, multiple vehicles. We prioritized hospitals and critical infrastructure first. We did an alternate routing plan if we did have a lot of people that were going to be out. We didn't miss a single day for any of our customers, but we have teams, we have emergency plans in place. We have multiple yards that we can pull from and we

have additional vehicles. So if one yard is affected, we have multiple others. Yeah, and like you said, we did not have any disruption to our collection service. We continued service uninterrupted as well as our bulky pickup during this time and we saw a huge increase in residential waste While everyone had the stay-at-home order. So we were successful in maintaining continuity of service in all of our cities

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great and can you talk a little bit about you know, my second question was about a city that you've transitioned Anytime recently in the last five years

Yeah, I can speak to Norwalk. And Norwalk was actually, we have a white paper route, but we transitioned that city in 78 days. And you can speak to them. I believe they're one of the references that they called. They're exceptionally happy with our service. We pre-routed the city. We rolled out the cans on time. We didn't miss a beat. We put almost double the supervisors in the city to start to make sure we handle everything. And they're a very happy customer right now. And I think, too, what was successful for us was our outreach and education program.

So we have a large team of recycling coordinators throughout the company, but we mobilize them for any transition that we have. So we do extensive outreach and education. We meet with local community groups. We have a huge mailing effort to make sure that our customers are subscribing to the correct level of service. And that's something that we would do here in Santa Ana as well. We would mobilize our all of our recycling coordinators during the transition, but after the transition has occurred, we do have nine outreach team members that will be in the city.

that's a combination of our environmental managers and our recycling coordinators. Anytime a transition occurs it is crucial that communication with the customer and with the city and with the hauler happens on a regular basis.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great and actually so are all of your cities here in Southern California? Yes. Okay all right thank you. I think next is CRNR.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So if you can answer the disaster preparedness and an example of what you've done.

Yes. Okay, so we haven't had an earthquake, thank goodness, lately. But we were involved in all the major fires in Riverside County the last couple, three years. So we had to deliver roll-off boxes and storage containers. One of our other divisions is Holloway Storage that we referenced in our RFI. So we have the most storage containers in Southern California. So those are very useful to have on site and we've proposed that to the city to already place those at various facilities throughout the city already. We have numerous containers in our infrastructure

So we're able to mobilize deliver those that they're needed for supplies storage of supplies Whatever may be in the areas where there's impacted by a disaster We have that support that we can do for this and then we also have a total of ten facilities in Orange County whether it's a truck yard a welding facility fabrication I believe we have the most facilities in the county but not Santa Ana right no except for my

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

house that's a facility it's in Floral Park it probably is the size of one

I think I can put two trucks here the other question was a transition if you

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

can give an example of a city you recently transitioned in that experience

and the timeliness. Okay I'll give you the overview and Crystal can give you the details. But you saw in the video we've done 17 transitions. Every single one of those is still a client of ours. The most recent ones at Orange County I made a list while I was sitting there. Newport was from the city itself. We took that over. Tustin, Lake Forest, Orange, Rancho Santa Marguerite, La Habra. Then one kind of a random one kind of interesting was Avalon because we had to barge everything over and everything off. So that was an exciting transition but Crystal can give you more details on Orange.

And the technology on the trucks used to service. And just to add all that also is the trucks on Catalina also on Avalon run on propane gas. So there's a whole transition experience on actually providing new technology and services for that area as well. Orange. Orange was one we collaborated with the city. This was prior to my time being on board. But that was a transition that happened within two weeks. So we collaborated. Outrage education. I can speak about one of the most recent ones was City of Lake Forest that I worked with. There was a lot of education outreach we did ahead. We worked with our sustainability team members.

We had dedicated sustainability members. I personally was out in the community as well. Meetings with the chamber, business communities, informing them what was going to change in terms of their services, outreach to associations, some of the larger associations, department communities, explaining what's transitioning. Some of the new requirements at the time were AB 341 and mandatory recycling, explaining those programs. There's a lot of things we did even before day one to provide information on pricing, what we could do to help with rates, what we could do to implement programs.

So a lot of those things are addressed from the get-go. So we were ready, we collaborated in terms of timeline, communication. We had weekly updates with staff that would go to council on weekly updates about where we're at in terms of transition process, what's occurring, any questions, anything coming back through feedback, and coordinated and collaborated in all the education pieces. So all of that we worked together and had ongoing meetings with staff and also outreach to the community. It's been some of our successful strategies in terms of working through a transition. And we recognize each community is unique.

There's going to be certain associations, different aspects of the community. So we look at tailoring the program to fit what that community is to structure our strategy in terms of transition.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great. And what's your largest city? Largest city that we have?

Well the largest transition or for just that you have the largest two cities is orange and Temecula Got it. Okay. Both of those both of those were transitions

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Yes, great. Thank you. Thank you

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

All right waste you're up

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

So first yeah, if you can address the disaster preparedness and response

Yes, thank you, Councilmember. Likewise, we've had a lot of fires recently in Orange County over the last couple years. We've seen an increase in Silverado fires and the Canyon fires specifically. So we've worked very closely with county staff in those events. We've basically had daily meetings with county staff as well as in-person meetings. Our route supervisors and operations staff meet with the fire deputies and fire chiefs in the areas to see which areas were impacted, which areas were not accessible, basically doing daily out dials to communicate to customers if their area was inaccessible due to

safety reasons. We work closely with our dispatch and we have a communication method where we either email, text or call the customer depending on their preferences to keep them notified and informed. And as well we provided roll off boxes and the dumpster needs as well to increase to take over that debris that was left open from fires and mudslides. And then I believe you have additional... Thanks. Thanks, Ashley.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Oh, are you going to continue with the disaster response? Okay, great.

Yes, Doug Corcoran. So in addition to the activities that Ashley just described, one of the things that we do immediately is we reach out to CalRecycle and also the counties to get emergency waivers for facilities. Because one of the things that happens whenever you have a big natural disaster is there's a ton of material that needs to get moved quickly. And it often is potentially overwhelms the system that exists for transfer and landfills and recycling and everything.

So we immediately get in touch with the state, get waivers to increase the daily caps on those things temporarily so that we can get the cleanup done as quickly as possible. It's critical when you work with the authorities. So that's number one. And as Ashley said, over in the Silverado fires, we work very closely with them. We also recently were integral to the recovery from the Woolsey fires up in the L.A. and Ventura County areas. We also have a team, nationwide team, of very experienced and very proficient drivers across a variety of lines of business.

We call them the green team. They're standing by at the ready. They have their regular jobs, but whenever we have an emergency around the country, they will come in at whatever numbers we need them to supplement the team that's on the ground there. That team has come into L.A. to help with recovery from the Woolsey fires, has gone up north to help with the recovery for those fires. Down in New Orleans for hurricanes, Florida for hurricanes, they're very proficient, very knowledgeable about all of those activities.

I was actually, I don't know, maybe there's a few of us in the room that were on the job during the Northridge earthquake. And I was actually working up there in the Northridge area at that time. And again, we just pulled from resources. That is probably the best thing we have when it comes to responding to natural disasters. is we have a vast network of facilities. We have a vast network of operating facilities and hauling yards around the area, and then we have that nationwide support group that we can pull from. So we're ready. I think we do a good job with that.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

That's really great to hear. The other question, obviously it's not a transition here. I'm not interested in that, clearly. However, do you have any examples in which you have, you know, a city has gone out to bid and you have re-won the contract and what that experience was like?

We do. We recently, we actually have transition experience too, but in Manhattan Beach we just recently started a new contract there dealing with adding SB 1383, adding some other features that the city in particular wanted to see. And so we work closely with that city. We actually, although we're the incumbent, we would treat this change as a transition because effectively it's a transition. It doesn't matter who the hauler is, there's a big transition. We don't have to learn the streets, we don't have to learn the neighborhoods or the particular needs of specific customers,

you know, other than just on a regular basis that we do that. But we already have that knowledge. But the services are different and the education is different. And so that's how we were treated. We're not taking anything for granted. We go right in this as a full transition.

And in terms of Manhattan Beach, we took over the billing. They had done the billing for years and years and years, completely transformed the service downtown in their beach area, which had been a certain way for many, many years. And as far as I know, I get good reports from there all the time, I'm very close to staff, very close to the business community, and we're in constant contact with the residential communities out there.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Great. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thai Viet PhanItem 1

Mayor, that's all the questions I have. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Council Member. So seeing and hearing no other questions or comments from the council, I want to just thank all of the, you know, principals that represented the proposers today. Thank you for coming in. You're actually lucky because we've been on this trend that we've been going until midnight and beyond. So consider this early and we're letting you off the hook. But thank you for spending your evening with us and sharing and fielding questions and sharing information on questions that we had. Thank you, staff, for preparing us to be able to ask some informed questions.

I think seeing nothing else, we will bid you all a good night, and this council meeting will be adjourned until Tuesday, July 6, 2021. Good night.

Recording stopped.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.