Vail to take a closer look at municipalizing waste collection in town

While members of Vail Town Council are hesitant to fully embrace the idea of a municipalized waste collection program, the town has decided it will take the next step in what could lead to such a program by kicking off a 6-month noticing period.

During a discussion at the Vail Town Council’s regular meeting on Tuesday, the council heard from town staff, which presented reasons to adopt such a program, and community members who were largely opposed.

Municipalization of the town’s waste services cannot occur without first sending out a notice of intent to all private entities currently offering waste services within the town, a move Mayor Travis Coggin described as “the beginning of a conversation.” That notice must occur at least six months prior to any changing of town code.

“I’m in favor of starting a six-month process to having this conversation and seeing where it leads,” Coggin said.

The Town Council voted in favor of issuing that notice on Tuesday, with Coggin, Pete Seibert, Jonathan Staufer and Reid Phillips in favor, and Dave Chapin and Sam Biszantz opposed.

Support Local Journalism

Donate

The next steps in the process, in addition to the notice, include putting together a public engagement plan.

“I’m sure we will be talking to you soon,” Coggin said to the many community members in attendance.

Many of those in attendance spoke out against the concept of a single hauler or municipalized system, but in favor of Vail Valley Waste, owned by long-time locals Byron Harrington and Ted Johnson.

The words communism and socialism came up often in the public comments, with locals equating municipalized systems like those used in Gypsum to being un-American.

“The town’s been built on capitalism and competition,” Buck Allen said of Vail. “This proposal grants a monopoly. That’s the opposite of competition and free enterprise … basically this proposal is a product of central planning, didn’t work too well with the Soviet Union, I don’t know why it would work in Vail.”

Police Chief Ryan Kenney said a lot of the emails he read were from people who were unhappy with customer service from waste carriers.

“I just want to remind everyone that the town would now be the representative of their customer service,” he said. “If there’s issues with a vendor, the town would be very involved with those issues. We’ve had very frank conversations with all three companies about the level of service, what we will accept and what we won’t accept, and if there’s issues with customer service, we would look to terminate that contract and move on to another vendor.”

Chapin, in voting against initiating the six-month discussion period, said he wasn’t sure the town of Vail should take on those customer service responsibilities.

“So now we’re gonna have a customer service department at the town of Vail that’s gonna deal with trash complaints?” he said. “I don’t know that we need to be creating more departments around here.”

In proposing the idea, town manager Russ Forrest said the advantage of switching to a single-hauler municipalized system would be to reduce truck traffic through neighborhoods and reduce the cost of trash pickup.

To get more information on what a single-contract system might look like, the town put out a request for proposal a few months ago and received proposals from all three of the current waste haulers — Vail Valley Waste, Vail Honeywagon and Apex Waste Solutions.

“There is some pretty considerable savings that were realized though this RFP process,” Forrest said.

The town said the price range offered by the haulers in their proposals would result in savings for residents on their monthly waste hauling service price between 67% and 77% over the rate for their current service today “because like any utility, if the hauler can be efficient at collecting at all households in a town and have a predictable service level, economies of scale and volume allow for a lower price than in a competitive market as Vail currently has,” Forrest said.

Coggin and Forrest stressed that the RFP process was just for information — it was not performed to select one of the three companies that responded. Many who showed up suggested the RFP would result in the elimination of Vail Valley Waste or Vail Honeywagon, including Staufer.

“I do have a huge problem with handing a monopoly to a $50 billion a year company over two locally-owned companies,” he said.

Coggin said they’re far from selecting a vendor at this point.

“We’re not in a position right now to hand anything over to anyone,” he said. “We’re at the beginning of a conversation.”