Garbage. How often do you think about it? Well, at this meeting of council, the topic is unavoidable because not only is this special meeting and workshop of city council all about solid waste collection, it actually takes place in the building where all the solid waste is collected. There are some real changes coming to your local blue box in the next couple of years, and this meeting will help give you a heads up!
NOTE #1: This is a council orientation and education workshop, so that means that there are no delegates for this meeting.
NOTE #2: This meeting will take place at the Administrative Building Boardroom of the Waste Resource Innovation Centre at 6 pm. It’s presently unclear if you will be able to watch the meeting online.
Transition Plan Overview and Safety Overview – You may be aware that Ontario municipalities are in the process of moving to a producer-responsible model to govern recycling as opposed to a municipality-responsible model. That means “the companies that originate products and packaging destined to become waste are tasked with managing material through their full lifecycle, from retail through to waste collection and recycling into new products.” This meeting will help lay the proverbial take for what that’s going to like.
This presentation will cover six areas: Staff transition, service transition, customer service transition, communication and community engagement, asset transition, and monitoring and evaluation. Obviously, there’s still a lot of things to discuss before the change over this time next year; CUPE is still involved with discussions around the impact on City staff, customer service is getting ready to answer queries, timelines are being finalized, assets are being tabulated, and staff are preparing the metrics of how they’ll evaluate success.
After this, there will be a separate workshop meeting about the impacts downtown in April, and there will be a staff report on Solid Waste Resources and Engineering at Committee of the Whole in June.
CLOSED MEETING:
This is a weird mobile closed session as council will be taken on a tour of centre to see the Material Recovery Facility, the cart storage area, the public drop off, the Gate 1 scalehouse and the transfer station. How can they do this? Section 239(3.1) of the Municipal Act for a meeting is held for the purpose of educating or training the members.
Guelph Politico 