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Show Cedar Hills Renews Contract with Waste Management by Harlow Clark If the nod is supposed to go to the low bidder, how do you determine who the low bidder is, especially when the bids are fairly close? For Cedar Hills' city council coun-cil March 1 the answer depended on whether or not the city wanted to own the garbage cans involved. City staff recommended the contract go to Waste Management Manage-ment based on "a virtually spotless spot-less last nine years of service" lowering the price per can from $5.69 to $4.50. But if the city wanted to own the cans, Allied Waste's bid was lower. Both Council Members Mem-bers Jim Perry and Ken Kirk asked about the cost of maintaining main-taining the cans. The representative from Waste Management said, "We spend about $.08 of every dollar on can maintenance." mainte-nance." He also said manufacturers manu-facturers take a lot of care to ensure the parts from different dif-ferent brands are not interchangeable. inter-changeable. It protects their brands. Coming in late to the meeting, meet-ing, Council Member Marisa Wright asked what the advantage advan-tage was to the city in owning the cans. Mayor Eric Richardson Richard-son said that whoever owns the cans has an advantage in already having them in place. "I suspect both Waste Management and Allied Waste win more repeat "Cedar" continued on Page 7 "Cedar" continued from Page 6 bids than they lose for cities where they own the cans." He added that if the city owns the cans, it levels the playing field. Council Member Scott Jackman clarified that that means the city gets lower bids. Kirk, who had missed the previous meeting, asked what the concern had been with opt-out opt-out recycling. The mayor explained ex-plained that he had misread the council's interest in an opt-out program and hadn't included it in the request for proposal (RFP), so the bids onJy listed the costs for an opt-in recycling plan. "To their credit and integrity, in-tegrity, they've both refused to rebid." (The third bidder, Ace Disposal, had no representative at either meeting.) Jackman asked about having a 3-year contract with a 2-year extension, but the mayor said, "That changes the terms of amortization." Jackman moved to award the bid to Waste Management on a 3-year contract with a 2-year extension, authorizing the mayor to negotiate opt-out prices. The motion failed. Jackman made the motion again without the 3-year contract, con-tract, and City Manager Konrad Hildebrandt questioned whether it's legal to award the bid with conditions that weren't in the RFP. Kirk moved to award the contract as bid to Waste Management, Man-agement, and it passed, but first he said that citizens are saying, 'Wait, why should I give this company my recyclables when they're making a profit off them, and pay them to pick it up?' "I don't have any problem with that," Wright said. "They incur the costs of collection." Kirk replied that he still predicts recycling will eventually eventu-ally be free because it's catching on. Asked about his motion afterward, Kirk said, "I'm not interested in owning the cans. If I were I'd have moved for Allied." |