TAMMY TEFFT
WESTFIELD – The Legislative & Ordinance Committee of the City Council will review a resolution submitted by Mayor Daniel M. Knapik to lease 13,000 trash containers needed to launch the city’s single-stream recycling program.
The City Council voted at its Aug. 21 meeting to send the resolution authorizing the city to enter into the five-year-lease-to-own to the L&O for further review. The L&O is slated to meet tonight at 6 p.m. in the City Council Chambers to discuss the issue.
The lease, with Municipal Capital Markets Group, Inc., will enable the city to convert the present 96-gallon solid waste containers into recycling containers. Resident will be given a new 65-gallon container for their trash.
The funding for the lease-to-own agreement is currently in the Department of Public Works budget, so no appropriation was submitted to the council as part of the lease agreement.
The single-stream recycling plan is intended to increase the volume of material recycled and reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills or incinerators. The city receives some revenue for recycled materials, but it is the cost-avoidance aspect of reducing the volume of solid waste which makes single-stream attractive.
The city’s program will convert residents’ current 96-gallon trash barrel into a single-stream recycling barrel, eliminating the need for bins now used to recycle cans and bottles and paper, bins which do not have wheels and are awkward to carry to the curb.
The city will purchase new 65-gallon trash barrels with less volume than the current barrels to encourage residents to recycle more material.
City Purchasing Department director Tammy Tefft said yesterday that the annual cost of the five-year lease is $116,899.63, but added there may be other costs to implement the single-stream recycling program.
A team, comprised of Community Development Director Peter J. Miller Jr., City Purchaser Tammy Tefft, Health Director Joe Rouse, and Sanitarian Barry Searle, who has fostered the city’s recycling initiatives to date, and Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Public Works Casey Berube have been working on the recycling program.
Tefft said that a proposal to replace the lids of the current 96-gallon containers with a yellow lid was scrapped because of the significant cost.
“The team found that the yellow lid proposal was cost-prohibitive,” Tefft said. “The cost of replacing the present lids with the yellow lids was $200,000. The cost-effective route that the team is taking now is to put a decal on the lids of the existing containers.”
