Greater Sudbury Mayor Marianne Matichuk says the city may be spending too much to pay contractors to run the city's landfill sites.
Meeting on May 28, Matichuk said she spent the weekend going over the contract “line by line,” after councillors were told at an earlier meeting costs were going up by $1.8 million a year over the life of the three-year contract. The city has options to renew the deal for two more years after that.
Chantal Mathieu, director of environmental services, told city council at its May 14 meeting costs were surging because the city was getting tougher in enforcing all terms and conditions of the contract. For example, odours must be controlled, staff can't smoke on site and provincial regulations must be strictly followed.
That led to higher bids for the work, Mathieu said.
But at Tuesday's council meeting, Matichuk questioned some provisions in the contract, in particular the requirements that the winning bidder only use new or almost new vehicles.
“And some of it is, I think, over and above what we really need,” Matichuk said. “That's going to be costing us a lot of money at the city, if we're going to be requiring people to have brand new equipment, or relatively new equipment.
“I think there are serious savings that could happen just by having a this standard (requiring) new or relatively new equipment.”
She said there are many city vehicles that are more than a decade old, and they're still reliable. The effect of requiring contractors to use newer vehicles is to drive up costs, she said.
“We are purchasing equipment for these contractors using taxpayers' dollars,” she said, adding that “serious and huge savings” could result in a review of these contracts.
“I would really like to see this looked at so we're not having this Cadillac version at the city ... I think we can do this better, cheaper.”
Ward 1 Coun. Joe Cimino agreed, and wondered if savings could also be found in the city's snowplow budget. In particular, he asked for information on the size of the vehicles contractors use. Sometimes huge trucks designed for highway use are being used on smaller city streets, when smaller and more efficient ones would do.
Ward 2 Coun. Jacques Barbeau, who chairs the city's operations committee, said having another look could lead to reduced costs.
“There's got to be a reason why the landfill contract is so much higher than the last go around,” Barbeau said. “Let's get those facts.”
Tony Cecutti, the city's general manager of infrastructure, said requiring new vehicles is a way of ensuring the city can count on having the trucks available when they need them, a particularly important consideration in the snowplow budget.
“We need these vehicles to be reliable and dependable,” Cecutti said. “As the contract wears on, if you start with a vehicle that's five years old, by the time it gets to be 10 years old, then it will be very difficult to rely on that vehicle.”
The alternative, he said, would be to include a series of performance benchmarks in the contracts, which is a far more complicated and less reliable way of ensuring performance.
“They are very difficult to manage,” he said.
However, he said he would address the issue as part of a report already in the works on the city's winter maintenance budget. Questions about the landfill contract will be addressed in a separate report.
“It's an interesting discussion,” Cecutti said. “It's a complex discussion. And I'm certainly willing to discuss it at more length in the form of a report.”
