The Town of Banff is investigating what it would need in terms of capital investment and staffing requirements to truck its own municipal solid waste to the landfill.
Currently, as a member of the Bow Valley Waste Management Commission, Banff’s garbage is shipped with that of Canmore and Lake Louise collectively by Boot Trucking to the West Dried Meat Lake Regional Landfill located near Camrose.
However, with the contract up for renewal or termination at the end of 2015, Banff operations manager Paul Godfrey said it is a good practice to review the value on the contract and compare it to what it would cost to bring that service in-house.
“The town of Banff is always seeking to reduce costs to ratepayers and this just demonstrates a continued effort of that,” Godfrey said. “With the contract set to expire at the end of the year, this provides us with that opportunity and opportunities like this are few and far between.
“We are going to take the opportunity to look at the costs and see what options are available to us.”
He said with the current contract in place, Banff has the details of those costs and can compare them to what it would cost for the municipality to collect and transport garbage.
“We would like to know if we were to do it in-house what that look like,” Godfrey said, adding if council chose to move in a new direction for providing the service it would likely be offered to Canmore as well.
“We would reach out to Canmore as well if they wanted to participate in this and there would be an opportunity to do so.”
BVWMC chief administrative officer Andrew Calder has requested all members of the commission that are part of the hauling contract to advise the board whether or not they are interested in extending the contract for another two years, an option available to them, by the end of July.
The other option available to the board, according to a staff report considered on Wednesday (June 17) at its regular meeting, is re-tendering the entire regional contract again.
The three-year contract with Boot Trucking set to expire this year was put out to tender originally in a competitive process.
“We are now at the stage where we can extend that contract if our members want to do that and if not, we have to look at other options,” Calder said.
He explained the transportation contract is separate from the tipping fee contract with the landfill – although both comprise the cost of removing municipal solid waste from the Bow Valley.
“It varies depending on how much waste is generated in the valley,” Calder said. “It is a very significant expense certainly, and that is why we have clubbed together for the service in the past. It usually brings some cost benefits if we tender it as a whole body rather than individually.”
In late 2014, Banff council voted to run its own water and wastewater utilities instead of contracting the service to Epcor after spending three years negotiating a contract with them.
A cost analysis comparing the private sector with in-house options showed Banff could possibly save $350,000 annually to have the work done by Town staff.
