Councilman Thompson defends trash company ad

GREENSBORO, NC -- Greensboro city council representative at-large Danny Thompson called to talk about yesterday's post "Would-be trash contractor misleads public with propaganda." He wanted to explain the justification for Gate City Waste Service making the claim in their full-page Rhinoceros Times ad that they were the lowest bidder for Greensboro's trash contract—a claim I found contradictory to the record.

As this blogger wrote, the Rhino Times and the independent engineering consultant hired by the City to evaluate the bidders' proposals both said Gate City Waste Service's bid was not the lowest bid, contrary to what Gate City said in their ad:

The Gate City response IS THE LOWEST bid received by the City for their waste. [Emphasis in original.]

Every bid included price components for various amounts and types of trash, allowing each bid to be evaluated under different scenarios. Thompson told me that we need to look at the line item in Gate City's bid that represents the cost for, what he called, "city-owned" waste. Although the term is not found in the independent engineering firm's evaluation of the bids or the City's request for proposal, Thompson defined "city-owned" waste as the minimum trash Greensboro is obligated to collect—the green residential cans, he said. No apartment dumpsters, no businesses. This amount of trash is, according to Thompson, 6,000 tons per month and Gate City's rate for the disposal of municipal solid waste in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 tons per month was the lowest.

 

So what Thompson is saying is that if you look at one of the pricing components of the Gate City bid, it is the lowest among all bidders for that component. But this line item is a single cost component of the entire bid and, when looking at the entire costs, Gate City is not the lowest.

The independent engineer evaluated the proposals by two cost scenarios, the first for disposing of all municipal solid waste (and all construction and demolition debris); the second for just city-collected municipal solid waste (and all construction and demolition debris). Under both of these scenarios, Advanced Disposal had the lowest cost, not Gate City and it was by this evaluation that City Council chose Gate City—although, one may legitimately wonder why the lowest qualified bidder wasn't chosen.