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Ann Arbor, Mich., City Council Votes 10-1 to Negotiate Interim Contract with Recycle Ann Arbor
Recycle Ann Arbor would replace Waste Management if a contract is administered.
2 Min Read
Ryan Stanton/The Ann Arbor News
In 2016, officials of the City of Ann Arbor, Mich., raised concerns about ReCommunity, its former recycling plant operator. Those concerns led the city to terminate its contract with ReCommunity and Resource Recovery Systems.
Shortly after the termination, ReCommunity and Resource Recovery Systems filed a complaint in federal court against the City of Ann Arbor for damages arising from the city’s termination of its recycling contract with ReCommunity.
While the complaint was being looked into, the City Council of Ann Arbor approved a $295,690 emergency purchase order for Waste Management to provide its services to the city for at least six weeks. When the six weeks was nearly up, the City Council approved a $588,734 extended agreement, which allowed Waste Management to continue its short-term operation of the city’s recycling plant and waste transfer station.
Now, the City Council has voted 10-1 to direct the city administrator to negotiate an interim contract with Recycle Ann Arbor by March 31.
MLive has more details:
The Ann Arbor City Council is making it clear it wants Recycle Ann Arbor, a local nonprofit with deep roots in the community, to handle the city's recycling operations instead of Texas-based Waste Management Inc.
The council voted 10-1 Monday night, March 6, to direct the city administrator to negotiate an interim contract with Recycle Ann Arbor by March 31, indicating a preference for the nonprofit's proposed method of loosely loading the city's unsorted recyclable materials onto trailers at the city's recycling plant off Platt Road before they're hauled to a facility in Cincinnati for processing.
That differs from Waste Management's approach, which involves compacting unsorted glass, plastic, metal and paper into bales before trucking them to facilities in Akron and Saginaw for processing, as the company is doing for the city now under a short-term agreement while Ann Arbor's plant is inoperable.
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