2010-11-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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were also looking to get a contract to do recycling. They didn't get the contract with the county. Therefore, when they didn't get the contract with the county, they didn't do the job. O'HARA: Well, why not make it a condition of the contract for DEM, the contract, that the scrap metal recycler has to accept large vehicles like buses? LEONARD: Well, that's certainly an avenue. But the value of these buses is almost nil. The recycling value is when they sell the buses to these folks, they already take out generally the motor, which is the heaviest component to it and the most steel. And then they'll recycle that. But the rest of the bus is made out of plastics and aluminum, and the scrap value of those buses is almost nil. So the cost of transporting the bus, to break it down the labor to break it down, it's going to be a cost to us for doing that. So that's the reason probably it hasn't been approached at this point. Okay, going along with that, when we talk about scrap buses and such, we have a real serious problem with automobiles. We have lots of derelict automobiles just thrown on peoples' property, left alongside the road, and such. And we have an abandoned vehicle program, and we collect some money for that every time somebody registers, but there's not enough money to take care of all the derelict vehicles out there. And again, that's one of the things that's probably one of the highest complaints that I get is junkyards. So we go out and cite people and they have to clean up all these derelict vehicles. So the recommendation here is to charge $ISO salvage fee for every automobile that somebody buys, somebody if you haven't had this fee on the car paid before, the next time you register you would pay for it, meaning that that car always has an intrinsic value of $150. It costs about $100 to take it over to the salvage folks and such, and so it has value. Right now, when somebody decides to just leave their car somewhere or dump it somewhere, it's just a piece of trash. But if it had a $150 value, then anybody would before they throw it away, go jeez, you know, if we just take this down to the salvage yard we get 150 bucks. CHAIR: It's like a HI -5 for a car. LEONARD: Perfect example, that's right. So it's a big HI -5. But it's a value there I think that would encourage people to take cars. It would also mean that if there's a bunch of derelict cars on somebody's property, and then we institute this program, that between what we charge now with the abandoned vehicle program and the derelict salvage fee, that eventually somebody would say, there's ten cars there. That's $1,500. Let me take those in and trade them in. So anyway, that's the idea between on the auto salvage fees, is to get these cars out of these communities. And remember, when people take a junk car and they don't want it anymore and they throw it on somebody's property, there's still oil, there's still gasoline, and it eventually deteriorates out of those holding containers and gets into the ecosystem. O'HARA: A logistics question on that one. If we were to implement this, say 2011 we decide to start doing this, and every automobile that gets registered has to put the salvage fee down, but the junk cars that are out in the fields have not been paid down. They have not paid this salvage fee. LEONARD: Correct. 10