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Usually some of the agenda items will have a period where members of the public may briefly speak to Council.
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AGENDA
SPECIAL MEETING OF THE AMES CITY COUNCIL
The Ames City Council meeting is at 6 p.m. at City Hall. The regular council meeting agenda includes the following. Note that you can generally click on individual agenda items below to get the full staff report or other explanation.
Note: I just returned from a trip to visit family, so this newsletter will be a little incomplete. Links are present and should work though, for the items I wasn't able to summarize.
- 27. FY 2023-24 Year-End Sustainability Report.
- 29.
Motion directing staff regarding solid waste collection & disposal strategy
Over the past year or more, Council and Staff have been studying our residential solid waste (trash) disposal systems, and it is clear than an overhaul is needed. (We are not discussing any changes to commercial or industrial solid waste collection.) For many years, Ames residents were told just to throw everything away, and that garbage would be sorted and then recycled or incinerated. It turns out that wasn’t exactly true, and it has led us down a course that now needs to be changed, for a couple of reasons.
First, while SOME of our garbage was getting sorted, and SOME of that sorted material was getting incinerated, some of it was going unsorted straight to the landfill in Boone. When there is too much garbage, or when the power plant or Resource Recovery plant are undergoing repairs and maintenance, all of our unsorted materials (including metals and glass) are being landfilled, which happens more frequently than most people know. This “just throw it away and the City will sort it for you” messaging gave people a false sense that any recycling thrown away would be sorted out and recycled. This is still something I hear from residents to this day. I think if people knew how much of their garbage ended up in landfill in our current system, they would be very surprised and disappointed.
The second issue is that in order to incinerate those materials which can be burned, a lot of natural gas is required. Our power plant can NOT incinerate just garbage…in fact, to incinerate our waste, it requires a ratio of 90% natural gas to 10% garbage. Since the price of natural gas is climbing, this requires the City to use natural gas when we could instead purchase potentially greener and cheaper energy off the grid.
For these reasons, we are considering moving to a more traditional system in which residents would be asked to sort recyclables from non-recyclables before pick-up, and then those materials would be hauled to a transfer station before going on to be recycled or landfilled. At this point, I often hear the argument that recycling doesn’t happen like people think it does, and that most plastics don’t even get recycled. This is not news to us. We would ask people to recycle items for which there IS some value in recycling…metals, glass, cardboard/paper, and certain plastics still do have value as recyclable materials.
We are also considering ‘organizing’ our solid waste collection in Ames. Under our current system, any one of 7 or 8 providers can pick up garbage from anywhere in town, leading to situations where one small residential street could see 7 garbage trucks per week. This is hugely inefficient, and leads to increased traffic and road repair costs, not to mention the carbon output of the vehicles themselves. Under an organized system, Ames could be split into zones, and bids could be sought from any of the providers to service each zone. Since recycling is proposed to be part of the equation, any service provider bidding on a zone would need to be able to provide trash AND recycling pick-up. If we pursue organized collection, we wouldn’t let one bidder win all the zones, as it is healthy to keep some competition going among the haulers.
Long story short, our current system is not sustainable financially nor ecologically, and we as residents need to be more aware of our responsibility as individuals for our solid waste. We don't take these decisions lightly either, we know it will impact small business (some of the haulers) and residents greatly. - 30. Staff Report on Infill Development Standards, including Pocket Neighborhoods and Townhome Dwelling Type.
- 31. Request from the Alcoholic Beverages Division to provide a response regarding the status of the Class C Retail License - Celaya, 217 South Duff.
- 38. Hearing on Zoning Text Amendment to Allow For 20% Alternative Design Adjustments to General and Base Zone.
- 39. Hearing on Zoning Text Amendment on Updates to Chapter 9 Flood Plain Zoning Regulations.
Communications to Council: The following items are requests and communications to Council that aren't published on the agenda, so we won't deliberate them substantially. This includes staff reports and communications or requests from constituents and developers. Typically, Council will ask city staff for more information, put the item on a future agenda for deliberation and possible action, or just accept the communication, taking no further action.
- Campustown.
- Fellows Leadership.
- EUORAB.
- Solid Waste Collection and Disposal.
- Public Works-Welch Ave Tree Trenches.
Thanks for reading,
Bronwyn Beatty-Hansen
Ames City Council, Ward 1
