2021-09-22 EMC minutes draft - Laserfiche WebLink

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Director Mansour said that for the people who have seen the presentation, it is a lengthy meeting. He hopes that everyone would get a chance to see the video, despite the technical difficulties.The meeting was intended to address some of ourchallenges, solutions, and priorities that the Department is working on. One of the triggers for the request for the presentation was because we have modified some of the transfer station days. Instead of seven days they were reduced to four days because of what is going on with the Delta variant Countywide. A lot of people don’t understand that our Department is intertwined with so many other departments, just to provide the service. We are not a stand-alone department. Our equipment needs to be maintained by Public Works, which maintains the entire County fleet. So if one thing goes down, you have the domino effect that takes place, and delays happen. So the meeting was about our priorities. As you all know, the public health and safety and our employee safety are our No. 1 priorities that we have.Our second priority is environmental protection, and meeting regulatory compliance, policies and procedures, state, federal, and local laws. Our third priority is fiscal responsibility, and trying to deliveraffordable services. These are the major cores of our existence as an environmental department, and we need to deliver. And the only way to deliver is to be able to identify the challenges so we can knock them down and figure out a way to deliver the services that you all want. And the first challenge is COVID-19. It’s moving in too many different directions. Last year’s virus is not this year’s virus. Today’s COVID-19 regulations are being mandated by the State. You have to have vaccinations. You cannot go to State or County buildings, you cannot come to work unless you provide testing results, et cetera. We didn’t have that last year. So things are changing, and having that impacts our services. The other challenge is the funding as you have hit on it multiple times. The funding will continue to be a challenge. We presented the cost per transfer station. We have 22 transfer stations. The cost goes up and down based on the location, and the service that is being provided at each transfer station. It’s a very detailed Excel sheet, but our accounting people have been working on it since I started that information in January and February. They were able to get me a spreadsheet that accumulates all the expenses in identifying the cost per ton at each transfer station. We have the highest cost at $476 . Others varied from $177 per ton to $60 per ton. Our attention needs to be paid at the transfer stations with the high cost. More than $100 per ton is considered very high. He had asked the Commission when he first started to look at the enterprise fund versus the assessment fees versus user fees, to look at business models because the current business model is costly. As he stated to the Committee, if they opted to continue using the existing business model, it’s going to be expensive and it’s going to be reflected in our budget going forward in the next year, because we need to address the actual costs of doing business. We cannot sugarcoat it. And in addition to that, a lot of people kept calling me and said we have not laid off people. We used to get this service, why are not getting it now? His answer is that for so many years in the past, somehow the inflation was not included in our budgets as we moved forward. So we cannot continue moving forward as a department without accounting for inflation. Cost of living goes up, but if we don’t include that in our budget, it becomes a 11