With less than two weeks to go before St. Paul’s new trash-hauling partner begins citywide collection, Mayor Melvin Carter sent a strongly worded letter to the city council on Thursday informing members they had “plunged the city into crisis” by voting to block a garbage truck dispatch center, maintenance facility and compressed natural gas station on Randolph Avenue near West Seventh Street.

Without an operations site to wash and maintain more than 30 trash trucks, convene staff and coordinate dispatching, it’s unclear how the city’s new trash hauler, FCC Environmental, will service some 60,000 residential accounts across St. Paul by April 1, the start date for regular route collection under FCC’s contract with the city. St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw said Friday his department is working with the company to examine a range of options, but “the actions that the council took put that in jeopardy.”

The mayor said he hadn’t ruled out declaring a state of local emergency.

“Beyond the legal obligation we have under state law to provide trash services, breach of contract would expose taxpayers to costly litigation, and interrupt trash hauling service for St. Paul households,” said the mayor. He urged the council to call an emergency meeting.

Council President Rebecca Noecker noted on Wednesday that FCC Environmental, which is based in Spain and Texas, had always planned to begin citywide trash collection on April 1, even without a full build-out of its Randolph Avenue facility in place. The company began collecting recycling from multi-unit buildings on Nov. 1, using a Kwik Trip gas station in South St. Paul to refuel its trucks, and would continue to do so until it receive state permitting to construct a compressed natural gas facility down the line. Dry runs on the garbage routes began March 17.“FCC’s lack of planning is not our emergency,” said Noecker on Friday. “This is a multinational company that does business in cities all over the world. They have a site plan they have to get approved before they can even begin construction. They have state permits they need. It seems they’re wildly behind schedule. I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s not the fault of the city or the city council.

“Just because FCC had a contract with us, that doesn’t give them a free pass on all of our regulatory functions,” she added. “To say the only vote we could have taken on Wednesday was in support of this thing, that just doesn’t pass muster. They’ve had months and months to buy the site and go through this process. It’s not the responsibility of the city council to make sure they give themselves enough time.”

City official: Trash collection in peril

Kershaw held a 40-minute interview with the city attorney’s office and multiple news outlets on Friday to emphasize that citywide trash collection may be in peril.

“You can’t serve 60,000 accounts from a Kwik Trip,” he said. “They need an operational site, and that’s the site they’ve purchased at 560 Randolph Ave.”

He added: “You need a site to park the trucks at night, you need a site to gather staff. You need a site to maintain those vehicles, wash them down. Staff report for the morning muster. There’s the meetings there, there’s the time clocks.”

The company’s recycling trucks are already using the Randolph Avenue location, but the city’s zoning code doesn’t directly address garbage truck operations facilities.

The council on Wednesday voted 5-0 to support an appeal, filed by the West Seventh/Fort Road Federation, that took issue with city zoning administrator and planning commission findings that the FCC Environmental project would largely resemble a public works yard and could move forward under its existing “light industrial” zoning.

Legal obligations on all sides

The mayor said that the location is similar to two other public facilities in St. Paul, including one serving as a solid waste parking, office and dispatch site. FCC Environmental paid $4.65 million for two former tow lots at 560 Randolph Ave. in an off-market sale in August.

“By granting the appeal without a legal basis, the City Council is prohibiting a private company who legally purchased a property from using the site to provide essential garbage services to our city, jeopardizing our ability to provide trash services across the city after March 31 … as legally required under Minnesota state law,” reads Carter’s letter.

Kershaw emphasized that the Randolph Avenue location would not serve as a transfer station or a place to store garbage, and trucks “will leave empty and arrive empty.” Neighborhood residents on Wednesday told the council they predicted otherwise, noting even a supposedly empty trash truck carries maggots and residue before it’s washed down.

Nothing in the FCC contract requires the company to maintain its operations facility within the city limits, though the mayor’s office had urged the hauler last year to find a site within St. Paul, which had proven difficult to do given zoning constraints. Since then, the company has hired workers from the West Seventh area, Kershaw noted.

Since publicly announcing a new seven-year contract with FCC Environmental last June, city staff have been working in close partnership with the FCC team to establish the garbage, yard waste and bulky item collection services that will begin on April 1, the mayor wrote. FCC agreed to invest $25 million in a new St. Paul facility with more than 30 compressed natural gas-fueled collection trucks, fully electric pickup trucks for route managers and an electric box truck for pickups of appliances and bulky items like sofas.

The mayor noted that the council was supposed to serve in a quasi-judicial role on Wednesday as it reviewed the appeal of a planning commission decision to support the zoning administrator’s findings.

“They are akin to a court, bound by legal precedent,” said the mayor, who asked the council to “prioritize working with us to consider every possible option, including calling an emergency meeting of the City Council to remedy the effects of yesterday’s action.”

A call to a St. Paul manager for FCC Environmental was not returned Thursday.

Will garbage be collected April 1?

Asked if residential garbage would be picked up as expected at the beginning of next month, city officials on Friday said they were working with the hauler to ensure that happens, and assessing their options.

“This is really a triage at this point to ensure we can provide trash service on April 1,” said City Attorney Lyndsey Olson. “We’re all very concerned about getting trash picked up on time.”

Kershaw agreed.

“We’re required to provide garbage service to every resident, and there was a path to do that,” he said. “What we have to do is to find a new path to provide those services. It’s an essential service.”