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The residential sold waste collection franchise provides collection services for landfill-bound garbage, mixed recycling, glass recycling and organics composting from single-family through fourplex dwellings, serving approximately 157,000 households across the city from a variety of different communities citywide.

The residential franchise system ensures that solid waste collection services are universally available for a clearly defined and publicly set price while maintaining an incentive to provide service cost effectively. It provides the City and our community opportunities to continue advancing goals to promote recovery and recycling of valuable materials and reduce the environmental and safety impacts of collection.

Through the establishment of service areas and terms of service, it promotes efficient collection and use of city roadways by heavy duty trucks. To accomplish these benefits, the franchise system grants exclusive rights for residential collection service. The franchise review is one of the opportunities available to the City to identify ways to continue to improve how the system delivers on environmental, community, and equity values.

BPS staff created numerous community engagement opportunities through the franchise review process and used that feedback to propose changes to the franchise agreement, and additional recommendations for proposed changes to the Residential Solid Waste and Recycling Administrative Rules and other programmatic changes, which will begin after the franchise review project is completed. For detail about the community involvement process for this project, see the Franchise Review Report (Attachment A). Community involvement efforts included the following:

Community survey – BPS offered the opportunity for residential customers to provide feedback on their satisfaction with services delivered through a survey distributed in July. Over 5,000 Portland residents responded; most respondents gave high marks for service delivery and cost. Some of the themes within comments included more reliable communication during inclement weather disruptions, weekly garbage collection and adding more materials for recycling.

Hauler engagement – BPS staff facilitated meetings with current residential solid waste collection providers to review the existing franchise agreement with a lens using the franchise review guiding principles approved by Council in March. Improvements to the franchise agreement included areas of equity, employee and customer safety, and customer service improvements.

Public comment period – BPS published notice of the franchise review process with the Oregonian and via Oregon Live and sent notifications to neighborhood associations, business districts and other interested parties about the franchise review process and included documentation on the BPS website with instructions on providing public comment. See website: Residential Waste Collection Review | Portland.gov.

Feedback provided through the public comment period included having more options for frequency of service and size of container and providing recycling opportunities for more materials.

The proposed franchise agreement and associated recommendations resulting from the review will have several outcomes, summarized here and detailed in the franchise review report and the proposed franchise agreement, including but not limited to:

• Continuing use of the franchise system to administer residential garbage and recycling collection.
• Elevating attention to customer service performance.
• Encouraging partnership between the city and haulers to prepare for and implement the Plastic Pollution and Recycling Modernization Act.
• Continuing to reduce emissions from garbage and recycling trucks.
• Encouraging contracts with minority- and women-owned companies in support of collection service.
• Requiring all haulers to participate in planning and preparing for interruptions and disasters.