Why did New Orleans nearly let French Quarter trash pickups cease? Residents want answers. The City Council stepped in Thursday in an effort to prevent a potential garbage crisis in the French Quarter and Central Business District, passing an emergency measure that will allow the Cantrell administration to sign a one-year deal with its current hauler to keep the area clean.
But the fact that New Orleans nearly lost its downtown garbage hauler — without public warning and on the eve of the city’s holiday tourist rush — left neighborhood groups and the head of the council’s public works committee demanding answers on how the “imminent threat to life and property” arrived in the first place.
The council voted 6-0 to approve the motion, sponsored by City Council member Freddie King on behalf of the administration, that allows the city to sign a one-year deal with Kellermeyer Bergensons Services LLC, or KBS, to keep hauling trash, sweeping streets and pressure washing sidewalks downtown. The company subcontracts with the Ramelli Group for trash pickup.
The cost of the contract will rise to $4.4 million, up approximately $500,000 from the current contracted amount.
According to council documents, city officials knew in July that KBS had rejected City Hall’s request to extend their contract for another year, meaning that the neighborhoods would be without sanitation services after Dec. 22.
That didn’t sit well with City Council member Oliver Thomas, who, as chairman of the public works committee, oversees garbage-hauling services across the city.
Following the vote, he said he was “disappointed” that he’d been given no advanced warning of the impending crisis.
“I don’t understand, if we’ve been on notice with this possibility since July, why would we wait until our busiest season — to put the French Quarter and our downtown area in jeopardy?” Thomas said.
Thomas said he plans to call on sanitation department director Matt Torri during the committee’s January meeting to provide “an explanation so that it doesn’t happen again.”
Speaking after the council vote, Torri said that the emergency procurement process was necessary because the city was “handcuffed” by its 9-year-old contract with KBS.
The initial deal didn’t include what’s known as an escalation clause, which means that the city could not amend the contract to increase its payment to KBS, Torri said. Re-bids of trash contracts that cover the rest of the city over the past year resulted in sharp increases in the rate the city will pay contractors, which haulers say reflect increases in their costs.
KBS has received close to the $3.9 million amount agreed upon in 2014 every year since it began its work in 2015, and council documents said that the company would need a higher payout in order to extend its deal for another year. KBS did not respond to a request for comment.
Torri argued that putting out a public bid for the contract in July, when the city first learned that KBS was opting out of providing service, would have left the city vulnerable to a trash pile-up too. He estimated the city’s procurement process would take between six and 10 months.
But there was no particular reason why the city waited until the month the contract was set to expire to request the council motion.
After receiving KBS’ notice in July, it wasn’t until October that the city “went back to KBS formally,” Torri said.
“There was this period of time where we were trying to figure out what could we do,” said Torri, explaining the delay. “We were working under the hopeful assumption that KBS would still sign that amendment for that last year.”
It’s not clear why the city couldn’t have started the process earlier than July if its procurement process can take nearly a year.
But the delay meant that the city needed to launch the emergency procurement with the contract’s expiration date fast approaching. The sanitation department obtained three informal quotes from contractors, of which the KBS proposal was the lowest, according to the motion.
Thomas said the sanitation department should have preempted this issue before KBS filed its notice in July.
“The thing that should have been done is to get ahead of it, not behind it, period,” said Thomas. “The remedy is, when you’re a year out at least, you start taking a look at these contracts, especially these contracts that are important for our community.”
Neighborhood groups echoed Thomas’ concerns. Erin Holmes, executive director of Vieux Carré Property Owners, Residents & Associates, said that she didn’t learn about the impending crisis until she saw the motion set to come before council.
“I was very concerned as to why it was coming out in December, that within a week or so we weren’t going to have any trash collection,” said Holmes. “What happened in the previous 5 months that made it so last minute?”
Holmes said that concerns about the quality of recent sidewalk cleanings had neighborhood leaders hoping that the city would put the contract out for bid again a year ago. But the hauler’s contract was quietly extended.
“To bring it up at the 11th hour is really unfair to us residents,” said Glade Bilby, president of the French Quarter Citizens group and a commissioner on the French Quarter Management District’s board.
Meanwhile, Torri cautioned that when the city does bid out the contract next year, its going to come with a hefty price increase.
“This is 10 years later. The market has changed dramatically,” said Torri.
After rebidding its other major trash contracts in the last couple years, the city is facing nearly doubled costs for trash pickup.
Currently, the city uses general fund revenues to make up the difference between the costs of sanitation service and the revenues generated by sanitation fees, Torri said.
But with New Orleans likely to sign yet another far pricier trash contract after the emergency contract expires, Torri said public officials will have to re-evaluate the city’s spending on trash.
“The city collectively will have to make a decision on whether or not they continue to fund that deficit or whether they look at raising fees,” said Torri. “As we go forward, we’ll just see how that evolves.”