There's good news for residents who are eagerly awaiting news about this year's spring clean-up.
Residential tipping fees at the Deloro Landfill are being waived from Monday, May 29 to Friday, June 9.
While it's not the typical curbside pick-up, the change was made because the best bid for that work came in at $377,987 more than what the city budgeted for the contract this year.
In addition to waiving the tipping fees, staff are looking at a hybrid work plan for the future. Some of the options council members asked to be explored are helping people who don't have the ability to bring items to the dump, allowing residents to put vintage pieces or items that could be repurposed curbside for residents driving by to pick up, and changing the time of the year that the program is delivered.
The only item approved at the May 16 Timmins council meeting is waiving the tipping fees at the main landfill, Deloro, on Pine Street South. It's not known if bins will be put at the German Township landfill or other sites in the city.
For the 2023 spring clean-up tender, the city received two bids. New Look & Garden Services submitted a bid for $39,800 and Environmental 360 Solutions set its price at $447,987.
This year, the city's budget for the contract is $70,000, which is more than the $64,453 overall that it cost the city for the work in 2022. Environmental 360 Solutions did last year's work for $63,150, which means this year's bid is up 609 per cent.
When city staff met with New Look & Garden Services, Public Works and Environmental Services director Ken Krcel said they learned the low bid wasn't compliant.
“This contract specifically calls for rear-packer garbage trucks to pick up the spring clean-up debris on the streets. The reason we ask for those trucks is that they have the ability to compact the garbage, which takes up a lot of volume. Garbage is very loose in density and rear-packer garbage trucks put lots of volume into a small area and compresses it into less garbage, which means you can go a lot further on the street with a truck and collect a lot more garbage before having to dump,” he said.
The low bid proposal was to use pickup trucks and a dump trailers.
“We do not feel that can be done,” said Krcel.
Environmental 360's pitch is to use six dump trucks and two front loaders with four labourers to do the work.
The annual curbside collection is a chance for residents to throw out bulky items for free. It was cancelled due to COVID-19 for a couple of years and returned to the local streets last year. When the curbside collection was cancelled during the pandemic, tipping fees were waived at the Deloro Landfill to allow residents a chance to drop off bulky items still.
The city is asking residents who have put items curbside to remove them.
Council members all spoke in favour of keeping the service and offered ways to offer a "hybrid" service.
“I will say it is one of the more valued, talked about services every budget period because we’ve for years debated whether or not we have a spring clean-up without having this bid price in front of us. And council members usually hear from the residents in terms of how important that is to them,” said Coun. Steve Black.
If spring is a busy time for staff to help out, he suggested considering another week later on in the year or combining a curbside collection and waiving tipping fees to reduce the amount of material being picked up in town.
Coun. Kristin Murray wants to engage the public to ask residents what they want moving forward.
"‘Cause I’m thinking of members of the community that are not able to access the dump for various reasons and then I worry about us not having the spring clean-up and waiving dump fees because it means potentially repurposable items will make their way to the dump. And I’ve talked at length about the dump and its life cycle and the fact that it will cost us millions of dollars,” she said.
With a hybrid option, she asked if there could be a week timeline for people to put items on the curb for people to forage for vintage items,
Doing the work in-house with the help of a contactor or summer students was brought up by Coun. John Curley.
“We can do it in-house if you want, it just means we’re not doing anything else," said Krcel.
"So the waste management department doesn’t have the capacity. We don’t have rear-packer trucks anymore so the only way we could do this is to use traditional dump trucks with loaders, have our staff pick up the debris, put it in the buckets of the loaders, fill up the trucks, have the trucks run with loose debris — because we can’t compact it — to the landfill site."
He estimated the cost to do the curbside pick-up internally would be $200,000 to $312,000.