Speaker 1: 3.0511.0511 counselor's book and Baker offer the following order for a hearing to utilize federal COVID recovery funds to construct municipal composting infrastructure.
Speaker 0: Thank you. The chair recognizes counsel book. Counsel book. You have the floor.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. President. And if I could suspend Rule 12 and I'd counsel Lara.
Speaker 0: Please. Mr. Clarke, please add council as an original co-sponsor.
Speaker 5: Great. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to put this before the council today in partnership with Councilors Baker and Laura. I talk today in the Budget Breakfast about sort of the types of criteria that I think we need to be thinking about when we think about the ARPA funds. Right. So is it addressing something urgent? Are we are we being a part of a systemic solution? And then are we creating anything permanent or is this kind of taking on something that the public can manage? Is it a public good that we're investing in? And does it create and support good jobs? And so really file this today to put it in the hopper alongside other things, a proposal that I think ticks those boxes and should be part of our ARPA conversations. Folks who came to our Waste Management hearing a few weeks ago will have heard the exciting news that the city is launching a 10,000 person composting pilot citywide. And obviously our ambition is that the city will eventually compost citywide for all in the way that Seattle and a number of other cities do. But the reality is that scaling up to do that is something that is very costly. It's a long term investment and in sort of growing city services profile. Right. And currently our approach to that has been one of contracting. But when you kind of imagine growing that contract to the city scale, it's potentially very expensive over the long term and the people of Boston are never going to stop generating compostable food waste . So, you know, it's a sort of long term thing. And I think that Councilor Baker has really led the way, and I'll let him speak about it more and emphasizing the fact that, you know, if we as a city invest it in municipal compost infrastructure, this is something where we could grow good city jobs and be more efficient over the long term and contracting this out. It's an area I mean, frankly, I think that when you think about waste management in the places where the city could build the infrastructure, in an ideal world, we would then become the hub even for neighboring municipalities. Folks who are too small to plausibly do this themselves would say, Oh, that Boston's running that composting infrastructure and could pay in in order for us to handle it. So I think kind of we're at this juncture where we know this is a direction we're traveling. It's essential for our climate plans. And the question is, are we going to travel this direction via private contracting and sort of end up stuck there? Or are we going to do some upfront investment in infrastructure and kind of pave the way for real good city public jobs that will do this critical thing that are that our folks want to see done and that, frankly, our our food, our zero waste plan requires to be done. So excited to talk about this. I know that the department's already started putting out our fees thinking about this stuff, but it's kind of one of those things where at over one time money is there or it's not. When you talk about facilities, I also want to note and there's a reference in the in the hearing order to this that. Another thing that came up at the hearing was the creation of a center for hard to recycle materials known as a charm. And that would be kind of the other physical infrastructure piece as we talk about the growth of e-waste and a bunch of these other things in the city, people I'm sure have heard about the hazardous waste days and the long, long lines, and it's another kind of unsustainable thing that we do. So really excited to put this in conversation with the other filings from the administration on the American Rescue Plan funds, as I mentioned earlier. And, you know, our plan in the coming months will be to have hearings on their proposals in kind of topic areas and then also mix in the council proposals. So we'll just encourage other folks to also come with things that you'd like to have discussed. But this is one for me and several colleagues. So thank you to my co-sponsors. And thank you, Mr. President.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Bork. The chair recognizes Counselor Baker. Counsel Baker, you have the floor.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you, Counsel Bork, for filing this and allowing me to come alongside with you. I because of my background, I was in the printing department, which we ended up contracting out in 2010. I lost my job, which ended up landing me here. So good, bad, I don't know. But if you equate this with what we spend in tipping costs, which is how they refer to what it costs us to dump our trash and also our recycling over the years, every year that's going to go up by millions of dollars, and there's no way that we will ever be able to control that. We're at the beginning of something that's actually not new. We used to collect composed back. I wouldn't even put a date on it because it was before my time. And, you know, this is something we can do if we build the infrastructure. And I don't want to make the Vegas analogy again, but we need to be able to build something that we can point to with this money here, like we don't want to in two years say, okay, 800 million gone. What do we have? What did we do? We didn't do anything. So, Kenzie, thank you again for bringing this up. This is a great, great thing I think here. And to be talking about building city infrastructure and city jobs, which goes contrary to to what the municipal thinking has been in the last 20 years. Oh, we got a contract that oh, we have to just, you know, get rid of the employees, get rid of the employees. It's more difficult to to get a city contract and pay for your family on a city contract. Then if you have a good city, stable job, and if in the beginning of this, like council BLOCK said, again, we could become this the hub for the whole area, taking people, taking people's compost and then selling it back to them as as good material to to, to plant with another printing department. Fact we bought a, a, a web press that at one point we printed all of it. It was just one job we did on it. We printed all that, the tickets for the parking tickets for the city of Boston, but also 11 surrounding communities. I see the same sort of thing happening here. We're we're actually generating I think we can probably generate money with this. So I'm so excited about this right here. And I'm so excited about people really thinking about composting in a real way, not just, okay, it's in the bucket and it's out there. We don't know what it's about. I mean, this is this is real here. And I appreciate it because it is real. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilor Baker. The chair recognizes council of our council. Ora, you have the floor.
Speaker 2: Thank you, President Flynn. And thank you to my co-sponsors. I'm really looking forward to working on this issue together. I don't think anybody on the city council or watching us from home is unfamiliar with Councilor Baker's impassioned speeches, and I'm very happy to be on the agreeable end of the day. I think that the COVID 19 pandemic has offered us a unique opportunity to access capital the and capital funding that's going to be necessary for us to create more locally run infrastructure. For me, the city's composting program is just the beginning of that. I think that if we commit to building more city run infrastructure, it's going to be more community control. The program. Really ultimately will serve and will be owned by the city that's going to be operating it. This is going to make sure that we're putting our tax dollars to good use by putting servicing our constituents over profit making and ensuring that our focus is particularly on meeting the community's needs. I'm sure that the companies that we contract with do good work, but the City Council is responsible for operating in the public interest. Local control is going to be local presence. It's going to be local regulations. It's going to be local jobs. And as the chair of the Environmental Justice Resiliency and Parks Committee, I see this locally run infrastructure and utilities as well as one path that's going to get us closer to being a climate resilient city. And so I'm happy to co-sponsor this.
Speaker 0: Thank you, counsel. Laura. I would also I wouldn't like to add as as we have this discussion also part of it should also include, um, I hate to bring this up again, but pest control, it's, it's a major, it's a major problem in our city and every neighborhood of Boston. But when we're doing composting, we also have to make sure that we have a public awareness campaign of of educating people of exactly what you need to do. Same thing with recycling, same thing with taking out the barrel. It's not as simple as just taking a barrel out to the street. There are certain times you have to do it, certain places where you have to put the barrel, where you have to put the recycling. So public awareness has to be a critical part of it. And I think as we move forward in the budget process, we we have to make sure that we have the funding in place for. Code Enforcement for Inspectional services for public works when they're dealing with these quality of life nuts and bolts issues. So just want to say thank you to my colleagues, council board counsel Baker and Council Elvira. Would anyone else like to speak on this or would anyone else like to get their name? Please raise your hand. Mr. Quirk, please add Councilor Braid and Council. Royal Council. Flower City Council. Allusion. Councilor me here. Councilor Murphy Council. We're all in the chair. Docket 0511 will be referred to. 205112 referred to the Committee on Boston's COVID 19 recovery. Um. Mr. Clarke, please. We talk.
Speaker 1: 05120512. Councilors were all in clarity after the following order for a hearing regarding allocating ARPA funds to a homeownership voucher program.
Order for a hearing to utilize federal COVID recovery funds to construct municipal composting infrastructure.
On motion of Councilors Bok and Baker, Rule 12 was invoked to include Councilor Lara as co-sponsor.
President Flynn in the Chair.