On November 20th, the Redlands City Council will hold a public hearing to discuss the trash rate hike for the repair of Redlands streets. TKE was the engineering firm contracted to make the determination that the Redlands city trash trucks have damaged our streets. The city staff is reasoning that because of this report the citizens should pay more for trash service unless they can muster the unlikely number of 11,000 + parcel owners to write protest letters.
Once again it seems that citizens have been bamboozled by our out of town staff members that appear to be playing politics for our elected officials.
Isn't this just a game to force citizens to pay for years of mismanagement and lack of proper maintenance of our city's streets? The city staff try to not dirty their hands and hired yet another "contractor" to write the report blaming city trash trucks for road deterioration. Why couldn't Redlands engineering staff do the work? If the city trash trucks did the most damage to city streets then the roads in front of the dump and city yards should be in the worse shape. Is this true?
TKE was contracted with the city in 2007 and has made over a half of million dollars from the City of Redlands. Does TKE just produce determinations as guided by city staff to keep the gravy train flowing? Was the study really a comprehensive study? How did TKE win bids for all of these jobs? How does TKE keep a contract for five years? Was the work competitively bid to allow other engineering firms to compete? Or is this contract just an example of how the city is really doing business cutting out local small businesses from having a chance to fairly and competitively bid on local contracts? The consulting contract and spreadsheet of funds paid to TKE are included below.
What happen to state gas tax money that the city receives for road maintenance and repair? How many times do citizens have to pay for street repairs? Many other trucks and heavy vehicles drive our city streets everyday so why aren't they being taxed for road repairs?
The proposed trash rate hike seems like another ruse sponsored by the city of Redlands.
What gravy train does Amanda Frye want to keep flowing? Was her post really a comprehensive critique of the trash rate hike? Why does she have an interest in having TKE lose the bids for these jobs? What does she stand to gain by placing pressure on the city to drop TKE after five years of service?
WTF is a Bopifas anyway, do you care to know more about the financial situation in Redlands and are you even a Redlands resident or businessperson that has some stake in seeing that we are paying a fair cost for City services? Let me guess, another out-of-towner who's only stake is that you're being paid to keep a lid on this mess, just like our glorious City Manager himself. Go west young man (maybe Pasadena or Upland w/ TKE, I'll bet?) Thank you Amanda for posting this information... BTW, how's about school buses, today I didn't see one trash truck go by on my street, but I saw at least half-a-dozen fully loaded school busses pass my house! Under the City's glorious PARIS system, the same logic should hold true for damage cased by school busses and Martinez should charge the Redlands School District for damage caused to all the City streets that they utilize by his permission (gave RUSD trash contract to Republic as gift). No more free rides for these school-age kids, they are wrecking our roads!
BTW, Ms. Frye, perhaps you should have voted for those evil "Nazi like" Tea Party candidates, Lane Schneider and Don Wallace, who opposed the 40% trash fee hike.
BTW: I'm a Redlands resident. I plan on living here a long time. Enjoy!
Think you know more about what the City Council has in mind with this additional $4M a year that will be amassed in revenues (surely $4M is at least 4-times what Redlands spends yearly on new trash trucks and vehicle maintenance), having spent considerable time on the City's Planning Commission. Spending it near the future WalMart Supercenter seems more like what the City has in mind, then spending the new funds on residential neighborhoods, most of which haven't seen any kind of street maintenance since they were built in the 1970's and '80's. That is the real distinction here, these additional revenues are actually to pay for street maintenance (just like the Measure I Gas Tax money), but TKE and City staff are intentionally staying away from that fact. Instead, they are talking about "damage" and "repair" of the streets caused by only one type of vehicle, a trash truck, when properly maintained streets that have also been designed correctly in the first place, can withstand this type of anticipated use, without falling apart.
http://www.cityofredlands.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/MUED/FINAL%20STAMPED%20Final%20Vehicle%20Damage%20Report%209-18-12.pdf http://www.cityofredlands.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/MUED/RCA%20PARIS%209.18.12.-%20%283%29.pdf
One little problem Nabar, it's called a NEXUS, and your JUNK SCIENCE linking street deterioration directly to trash collection costs is ludicrous... ever heard of the SNIFF-TEST for determining whether or not your JUNK SCIENCE is just GARBAGE, (or not) and complies with the requirements of State law? Sorry Nabar, you and your TKE consultant's (MT is there anybody home over there in Upland w/o JP?) PARIS PROJECT STINKS and fails the sniff-test, because the City fails to meet the nexus criterion for Prop 218... next will be Howard Jarvis calling, just like with the RGNC challenging the lame Super Duper Wally World approval in the Closed Session, ATTORNEY'S RULE ('nuff said). P.S. The public all realize that the City Council has already PREDETERMINED before the meeting's public hearing to approve CM Nabar's JUNK SCIENCE, the only thing that could stop this if we can muster-up 11,000 votes against. Q: Why doesn't the City consider putting out a pre-postage paid mail-in ballot like they do for CFD voting, and at the same time, the City's public operations would help out the US postal service? A: They would get 22,000 NO VOTES on this obvious scam job of a fee/tax increase.
Martinez says that Job 1 was to fix "budget and financial state". METHOD: Increase water, sewer, and garbage rates; Reduce city performance; Early retirement for high salaries; fire low salaries; Ignore increased healthcare and pension liabilities; Issue millions of dollars of bonds; Increase HQ salaries and Public Relations (substitute slogans for service - "A City That Works"); increase the basic cost structure of the city. RESULT: Redlands appears to have fallen off the fiscal cliff - no value-added businesses, reduced bond rating, and declining property values. All with passive nodding approval of bobble-heads on City Council.
It's ALL theoretic logic with data cherry-picked from a civil engineering text. There's nothing specific to relate it to Redlands. We used to call this a "dry lab report". Students submit these. It's totally unacceptable in the real world. It's known as CRAP! or worse. Martinez seems to think it's a "scientific" analysis. At best Martinez has a thinking disorder. At worst ............
"Residential streets will have volumes of approx 200 vehicles per day, one refuse, (one) recycle, and (one) greenwaste trash truck each week..." Most streets have homes on BOTH sides of the street and these three trucks go to and fro. The PDA Report does not account for the density of homes to which these trucks service so the duration of the force applied onto the pavement per distance traversed should have been factored into their approach. For example, if there were 60 homes per mile of street (120 if both sides are accounted), that would differ from a mile of street that has only 10 homes (20 both sides). While the distance covered is the same, the actual damage to the pavement is a product of some constant (k) x duration (time), and force (mass, vertical accel). Also while "empty" versus "full" was described, was the starting point of these trucks versus end-point of these trucks taken into account such that the near terminal part of the route may have higher degradation rate than the initial part of the route. See also page 7... Delivery truck in the residential streets had a 38.5% impact - highest among all cited vehicle types. On Collector streets, City bus, school bus, delivery truck, and commercial truck accounted for much more than all of the other vehicles. Arterial streets - Commercial truck 42%. Did anyone mention this last night at RCC? (3 minutes is insufficient)
With any computer modeling the old adage GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT always holds true, especially involving ILLEGAL TRASH RATE HIKES, but Nabar wants to take it a step further and sell the "combined refuse enterprise" to Republic, but only after he gets the new fee hike approved by City Council. He already sole-sourced a contract to Republic, his hauler buddies from Colton, $1M/ yr. of capacity in the City owned CA St. landfill and has gotten the Council to sell the adjacent buffer groves to a developer to turn it into a Material Recovery Facility (MRF), thus to position Republic to becoming the City's private trash contractor once the public sector hits the fiscal wall/ falls of the fiscal cliff. Hey Nabar, did you get a chance to destroy the records on that police investigation into the ex-City employee from Solid Waste that was diverting trash from the old Hersey's warehouse, for his own private resale/ gain at garage sales... it isn't a coincidence, is it, that now he's the General Manger over at Republic!? Big question, did DA Mikey help you with this little cover-up too??