-------------------- Dear [council member]:
It is my understanding that you will be soon considering the Minneapolis Recycling Contract. I ask that you select Eureka Recycling for this contract, over the competing companies of Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) and Recycle America Alliance (subsidiary of Waste Management Inc., WMI). I ask this as a citizen of Minneapolis, with no interest or relationship of any sort to any of the companies involved.
I believe an objective evaluation of this contract, using the best interests of the city as the paramount factor, leaves no other choice than to select Eureka Recycling. Any other choice for this contract will send a signal that your decision was not based upon proper public service and good government. Following are reasons why this decision is crystal clear:
1. From a revenue point of view, Eureka Recycling’s proposal offered the best price overall in the first and second rounds of analysis. Because Eureka’s best pricing proposal was made public, BFI was able to change theirs to match. BFI and WMI have both been convicted of price fixing in the past. WMI’s proposal provides less revenue to the city.
2. While staff has raised some questions about Eureka’s financial stability, I believe those concerns are misplaced. The risk of economic loss to the city is far greater with WMI or BFI through lawsuits and environmental damage. I find the questions about Eureka’s financial stability without discussion of the large potential liabilities associated with WMI and BFI to be suspect. They appear to be manipulation on the part of the competitors in an effort to discredit Eureka.
3. WMI is the single most fined company for breaking environmental laws in the U.S. They have been convicted in federal court of price fixing. They have been accused of threatening the lives of public officials in Louisiana. The list of illegal and anti-social behavior goes on and on, page after page, year after year, location after location. This should be the last company any city would want to do business with. BFI is only slightly better, with a “rap sheet” almost as long, having paid millions of dollars in fines for price fixing and additional millions of dollars in fines for environmental violations. Eureka, by contrast, is clean as a whistle.
4. Eureka is a local company, while WMI and BFI are multi-national. Supporting local businesses is always good economic sense. One of the primary reasons for this is an economic concept called the average propensity to consume. This number is a measure of the fraction of an additional dollar earned which will be spent on consumption. In 1999, this figure was .976. What this means is, on average, for each additional dollar spent at a local business, $.976 will be spent back into the community. The money spent back into the community is also re-spent at the same average rate. Economists estimate that for each $20 spent in such a fashion, by the time the money has run its course, amounts to $833 in generated economic activity. Your choice is whether you want that $833 per $20 spent to be local, or if instead you would prefer to send that $20 to the bottom lines and executive salaries of two companies which are not located here. This phenomena is a major reason why local spending leads to better local economies and more local living-wage jobs, and why spending at large, national and multi-national companies tends to result in funneling upward of money and thus the concentration of more wealth into fewer hands. Choosing Eureka means that you are choosing to both pick the best company from a strictly annual city revenue point of view, and also the best company to improve the local economy, which will improve the city’s financial and social situations in somewhat harder to measure but very real ways. This is not a factor that can rightly be ignored by the city council, even if, as Susan Young claims, such considerations are outside of her purview.
5. I have not heard any citizens clamoring for the city to choose WMI or BFI. I have, on the other hand, heard numerous citizens calling for Eureka to be the contractor for recycling. Who were you elected to represent?
6. I believe city council members would all agree the recycling of materials which can be recycled is important, and that to place recyclables into a landfill or to burn them is highly undesirable. Yet by observation by others and me, we know that the recycling collection workers often mix and combine the very materials which have been carefully separated according to city guidelines. BFI holds the current recycling contract, and thus, should by all rights be complaining loudly that they are receiving mixed materials which they cannot recycle to their highest and best use, and at the highest profit. But they are not making such complaints, which leads one to suspect that they are simply dumping them in landfills they already own. At a minimum, BFI is not recycling them to their best and highest use, as purchasers of such mixed materials pay less for them, and may themselves be using them for non-recycled purposes (for example, covering landfills with ground glass is called recovery, but it is essentially the same as just burying the bottles in the first place).
In conclusion, I think it is abundantly obvious that Eureka is the only viable choice. Eureka provides the single best over-all economic return to the city of Minneapolis. Waste Management/Recycle America and Browning-Ferris both pose large risks, economically and environmentally. Please vote to award the Minneapolis recycling contract to Eureka Recycling.
Sincerely, Chris Johnson
--------------------------- Fulton
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