Bloomington, Ill., Opts for Changes Instead of Privatization

After much debate and consideration, the City Council of Bloomington, Ill., voted to not further pursue the options of outsourcing or privatization of waste collection services.

Currently, the city of Bloomington, which is in Central Illinois, provides services to residential customers—all single-family residences—and it optionally provides service to multi-unit apartments with six or fewer units. Services include collection of bulk and brush, garbage, single stream recycling and leaves. The city also operates a drop-off facility.

The conversation started at the beginning of the budget process in fall 2017. “As the city looked to bridge a $2.9 million gap in our general fund, the solid waste enterprise fund was showing a $1.1 million projection from the general fund,” says Jim Karch, director of public works for the city of Bloomington. Because the fees never fully paid for the services provided, a subsidy was needed from the general fund.

In a presentation to the City Council, Karch said that the goal was to outline benefits and challenges of different available options. “The presentation did not provide the recommendation from staff to not outsource, nor did it provide the recommendation to outsource. It provided education on the different options and the pros and cons, and it covered some of the definitions,” says Karch. “I think there are a lot of issues and concerns regarding how you define contracting out or divestiture. A lot of people say ‘privatization’ and it covers a few things.”

On February 12, the decision was made by the City Council to not launch a Request for Proposal process and seek bids for service. Instead, the leaders chose to seek further information about potential options.  

The decision wasn’t unanimous. There were some members of the City Council who wanted to at least get some pricing, even if the decision wasn’t to outsource, and there were some members who wanted to receive additional information. The majority of the City Council, however, elected to keep the service in-house and to look at increasing the fees and decreasing the service.

In a WGLT.org article about the vote, Alderman Scott Black discussed the decision, stating waste collection should be managed by the city. “I think there's a definite value and public good for our city being accountable for taking care of that issue,” said Black in the article.

Having control of customer service was another major factor in the decision. “A high customer service meant quite bit to the council because it didn’t want to release that control,” says Karch. “Our services are really well-received by the public. We receive a lot of compliments from our citizens on the cleanliness of the community and the responsiveness of our department, and I think that made a difference to our council. Our council put an importance upon the community and the services and how they are provided over the potential to save funds. There wasn’t even a guarantee that they could save funds if we got rid of our equipment, carts and employees. There is data out there from [other cities and counties in Illinois] showing that there’s an interest from those that outsourced to bring the services back in-house.”

On February 26, the City Council made a decision regarding service and price changes. The changes will include free collection in the spring and fall and a $25 per bucket fee for requests outside of that for bulk waste. There were no changes in the brush collection, and the City Council decided to increase the fee for the 65- and 95-gallon carts by $4 per month and make no change to the 35-gallon cart monthly fee.

The city will continue to look at options such as routing optimization, enhancing technology, subcontracting some of the transfer of materials in a more cost-effective way and other measures to increase efficiency.