Fort Totten trash transfer station
WASTE MISMANAGEMENT D.C.’s trash transfer stations are in drastic need of repair. Low fees to use them are depriving the system of millions of dollars. By Cuneyt Dil Photographs by Darrow Montgomery Sanitation workers get no break from the pandemic. The epitome of essential, they show up in the morning light to collect waste and garbage from our homes, offices, and street corners. Trucks from the District’s Department of Public Works pick up trash from single-family homes and small multifamily dwellings, and private companies collect waste from apartment buildings, offices, and commercial properties. All that trash ends up passing through the District’s massive garbage collection facilities, known as trash transfer stations. But every time a private waste hauler pulls up to dump trash at one of the District’s two trash transfer stations—cavernous warehouses where city workers process waste and move it to trucks that haul the garbage to incinerators or landfills—D.C. loses money. For the past decade, every ton of garbage in every private trash truck on city streets has cost D.C. up to $36 more than it should. Taxpayer losses in 2018 alone totaled $8,585,484, according to an 18-month investigation of the waste system. In total, the District has lost nearly $53.8 million since 2010, thanks to drastically undercharging private trash haulers for access to the city’s public transfer stations. For years, top District leaders have known and downplayed the fact that the District does not recoup its costs from its business with private haulers, according to a review of internal documents, public testimony, and interviews with officials. Several directors of the Department of Public Works did nothing to stop the bleeding and even denied in public that the city was ever losing money. Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who chairs the D.C. Council committee overseeing DPW, at times acknowledged the losses during the last two years, but did not seek legislative fixes until this spring.
This investigation calculated the first-ever accounting of how much the District has lost in processing trash for private waste haulers. The economics of trash hauling and disposal are complicated, but the reason the District loses money is simple: It costs more for DPW to process the waste that enters its public transfer stations than the agency charges private trash haulers in usage fees. In other words, the District is getting ripped off. The losses stem from two separate sources. First, between 2010 and late 2019, the District charged about $50 to take in a ton of trash at its public transfer stations, but its expenses were upward of $86 to process that ton of trash and haul it to an incinerator in Lorton, Virginia, according to a review of city documents. District taxpayers bore the $36 difference per ton, which quickly added up to millions. Even after a $10 hike in the fee last year, the District still loses money today. Second, since 2002, D.C. has been losing even more money because of settlement agreements with the country’s two largest trash haulers, agreements that boost the bottom lines of Waste Management, Inc. and Republic Services, Inc. The settlement agreements handed the two corporations a significant discount to use the city’s trash transfer stations, estimated to be savings worth about $25-perton from 2010 onwards. “It’s a subsidy to some of the largest trash haulers in the country, plain and simple,” says Neil Seldman, co-founder of the Districtbased Institute for Local Self-Reliance. As director of the environmental group’s Waste to Wealth Initiative, Seldman has studied and testified about D.C.’s trash and recycling operations since the 1990s. “This is a prima facie case of malfeasance,” he says. Based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, court
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settlements, interviews, and public testimony, this investigation found: • The taxpayer losses were raised to leaders at DPW for years. Since early 2018, Cheh has periodically brought up the issue with DPW directors at public hearings. But as the chair of the committee with oversight over the agency, Cheh never sought a study of the problem. Early this year, she accepted the word of current DPW Director Chris Geldart, who claimed, without citing data, that the settlement agreements weren’t leading to losses. In the District’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget, she, for the first time, proposed a hike in the transfer station fees to stem part of the losses. • An outside report from 2016 that was acquired through a public records request told the city administrator’s office to consider ending its agreement with Republic Services when it expired at the end of 2018 due to continued losses. The District has continued to renew the agreement since its initial term ended in 2013. • The bargain rates for private trash companies are more than just a loss for taxpayers. The District’s low fee to use its public transfer stations have incentivized trucks from neighboring counties to drive truckloads of waste into the city. D.C. stands out in the region for allowing the import of trash into its public stations from beyond its borders. • Geldart admits dismay with the District importing trash, but the city has not examined the scope of the problem. It is currently unknown how many tons of trash the city accepts from neighboring counties each year. One estimate from a city-commissioned 2011 report said it could be tens of thousands of tons annually. “It’s a huge environmental problem,” says Chris Weiss, director of the D.C. Environmen-
tal Network. “Think about all the trucks coming through the District—the diesel exhaust, the wear and tear on our roads.” Geldart knows that D.C. serves as a regional dumping ground. “You can see the trucks that come in that haven’t picked up trash in the District of Columbia,” Geldart said in an interview last year. “It’s less expensive for them to dump here.” The District’s low fees for private haulers have not only cost taxpayers millions of dollars. They have also impoverished D.C.’s trash processing system. One of the two city-owned transfer stations is “in dire need of being torn down,” according to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s most recent budget request, and “presents a safety hazard to the employees.” Yet the facility on Benning Road NE will have to function for another five years before it can be rebuilt with larger capacity. D.C. also faces the potential of millions of dollars in fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for stormwater pollution from the facility, Geldart revealed at a D.C. Council hearing in May. In his May budget testimony, City Administrator Rashad Young said the transfer station will need to be held together “with a little bit of bubble gum and tape.” Seldman believes the troubled system is primarily a result of the low fees for private haulers. “Not only are we not getting basic operating costs in the transaction, but we’re not getting maintenance and replacement costs back,” he says. “Any city should do that.” The 2002 settlement agreements were negotiated to give Waste Management and Republic Services low flat fees in exchange for the two companies closing some of their privately owned transfer stations in the city. Private stations near residential neighborhoods were nuisances that city and neighborhood leaders
