Garbage and Transit Woes Highlight Waste in City Operations

Faster, Better, Cheaper: All are Possible

If the Mayor wants to keep property tax rate increases at 2.5% or less without eroding services, the City will have to look internally and scrutinize its business processes and practices.  It will have to redesign these to be more efficient (cost) and more effective (timeliness and quality) in order to meet client and taxpayer needs and expectations. BOTH are possible. The City will also have to turn to more un-bundling and to user provide/pay models. 

This year Mayor Watson was able to keep his election promise thanks to Federal stimulus money and a large one-time Provincial down-load payment. Next year and beyond, it will be much more challenging if not impossible if the City continues with past rather than with new, more innovative, practices.  

The mindset that seems to prevail within the City and at Council is one wherein service improvement, growth or expansion necessarily requires more staff/contracted services, tax hikes. Conversely, capping revenues requires cuts to services and programs. Reduced transit routes and bi-weekly garbage collection come obviously to mind in light of recent announcements.

Although it might at first seem counter-intuitive, neither needs necessarily be the case.

The Bottom Line (Some Low Hanging Fruit)

Many companies have succeeded in keeping operational and product or service costs down by ‘outsourcing’ work to their customers rather than doing it themselves or contracting it out to others on a fee for service basis. Ottawa should look at doing the same. 

McDonalds’ customers carry their food to their table and clean up after themselves. At many big box stores and grocery chains, shoppers check themselves out: scan, pack and pay. Just a little over a decade ago many grocers had staff on hand to carry grocery bags to the car and pack the trunk. Times have changed. 

Similarly, many of us have become our own ‘tellers’, managing our accounts on-line or at bank machines rather than face-to-face at one of fewer bank branches. The savings can snowball: fewer resources require less space and in turn less real-estate, less maintenance and so on.  The airline industry has done the same: self check-in, printing own boarding passes and bag tags. Movie theatres have also followed suit. On and on it goes.

The City has similar opportunities: For example, in the absence of ‘smart cards’, purchasing transit passes on-line and printing them from the home office shifts these costs to the consumer. Many transit users would gladly migrate to a self-service channel in exchange for the convenience.   

One Size Does Not Fit All

Admittedly offloading activities onto the consumer is not always the best strategy.  Over the last few decades the City has pushed some work onto residents. Triage of garbage/refuse is a good example.  Garbage collection may not be sexy but it is one of the City’s larger expenses and among its most important core services. It deserves careful re-assessment to see if it’s being done in the best possible way. 

Today, residents segregate cardboard and paper products from plastics and metals, and non-recyclables (and do so with varying efficacy, often cross-contaminating recyclables). 

For argument’s sake, let’s call this front-end decentralized triage (illustration below). Maintaining the front end triage model, starting this summer, the City will dispatch, weekly, a truck to collect for its Green Bin program; another truck for its Blue bin/Black bin recycling program, and another truck bi-weekly for general waste. There are 5400 kilometres of road in Ottawa, so getting the logistics right would quickly add up to a lot of savings.  

An alternative approach would be a tail-end centralized triage model, illustrated below (there are likely many variations between these two models). Here the City would dispatch one truck line to collect all refuse which is in turn triaged in a facility designed for that purpose.  (Interestingly, technologies to extract from the earth—such as oil from sand—abound, while little effort goes into cleaning what we put back into it). 

  

Readers are invited to consider the pros and cons of each, with consideration to the environment, capital and operating costs, service and image.  On the face of it, the second approach could well be more beneficial to the City and its residents and less so for the City’s refuse collection contractors. Whether that preliminary view holds up to detailed scrutiny is an open question but given the potential sizeable savings, it deserves a comprehensive review.

Similarly, does the City routinely scrutinize its existing service delivery models and corresponding processes to find efficiencies? One obvious question is whether City Hall has the in-house expertise to undertake a comprehensive operational review of its own practices. If it does not, as is likely, the City should look to contracting objective outside third parties to assess the City’s service delivery models and identify where savings and efficiencies could be found. 

FedEx, UPS and Canada Post use sophisticated computer logistics programs to establish the most efficient/cost effective routes for their vast fleet of vehicles. Do the firms that the city hires for refuse pickup do the same? If not should the City make this a contractual requirement with a view to bringing its contract costs down? Likewise, how are sidewalk and road snow removal routes optimized?    

The principle of un-bundling/downloading of costs/services to users has been tremendously powerful / beneficial in the private sector, yet it remains vastly unexploited in the public sector, in particular at the municipal level. Other process improvement strategies and methodologies are also underutilized.  

Taking it a Step Further

Back to the airline industry example: the most successful companies understand that their fleets only earn money when in the air carrying passengers/cargo rather than sitting on the tarmac or in the hanger. After one airline realized that benchmarking against other airlines would really only get them at par with their competitors, they turned to cross-industry benchmarking, the Indianapolis 500, to improve changeover processes.  It became the envy of, and the benchmark for, its competitors.

Are there similar lessons for public transit? How much time do buses sit idle in garages during operational hours? What percentage of ‘drive time’ or ‘on the road time’ are buses ‘out of service’—not available to passengers? Is downtime measured? If so what is the downtime trend line? 

Other big ticket items on the City’s budget also require much more scrutiny: A very high percentage of police, firefighter, and paramedic work is unrelated to fighting crime, extinguishing fires, or providing emergency aid. These services are much like insurance: we hope never to need them but are reassured by their availability. Like insurance however, we can have more than is really needed, at very high premiums. 

We have all seen resources from each of these services deployed to respond to the aftermath of road collisions. At times some of these resources appear to trip over one another’s responsibilities, while others stand by idle. Could enhancements at 911 call intake and service despatch reduce downstream costs? 

To Beat a Dead Horse

Alliances are a growing trend in business. In the airline industry there are, among others, STAR, Skyteam, and oneworld. They do bulk purchases (e.g. fuel), reciprocal check-in, have joint sales forces, etc. They do not yet do joint aircraft purchases (because of different tech specifications and different life cycles) but may well do it someday when circumstances are right. 

Competitors IBM and Toshiba jointly invested $1.2B in a plant in Virginia to make advanced 64-megabit memory chips. Before merging, Wendy’s and Tim Horton’s had been allies for several years: The Wendy’s/Horton’s combos save about a quarter of the costs, and sell a fifth more than either on their own. That is the purpose of an alliance: to reap the benefits of sharing capital and operating costs while tapping a bigger market than either could achieve alone.

If competitors can shake hands, so too can municipalities. 

Gatineau‘s population is approximately 300,000 and is one of the fastest growing cities in Quebec: It too is experiencing growing pains. Furthermore, its growth impacts Ottawa (e.g. bridge and downtown congestion). A Transportation ‘Master’ Plan that ignores ‘the other side’ amounts to 75% of a plan and solution (note the grey mass on the top of the picture below). 

What cost saving opportunities could an alliance between the two cities offer in terms of increased buying power, shared facilities, integrated public transit, etc.?  Which of our Mayors will be first to extend an invitation to his counterpart across the Ottawa River to explore economies of scale, pooling expertise, cost reduction opportunities, sharing of technology, integration of transit systems?

All Shapes and Sizes

There are many forms of waste, big and small, and there is evidence of these within many City operations: The more public of them form only the tip of the iceberg: those below the waterline are likely obvious to the City’s front line employees.   

Each sign (next to each meter!) reads “Coin Only Metered Parking”. Overkill?

While the big ticket items need comprehensive reviews and potentially fundamental design, all activities require scrutiny: are they client value added, business value added, or of no value at all. There should be a continual cycle of review and incremental improvement. 

The City’s teams will likely find top-to-bottom, end-to-end service delivery model redesigns daunting. They are. But many many organizations, big and small, have walked that path: there is no need to reinvent the wheel. 

More good news: Structured reviews, using the right tools for the job, identify both big and small opportunities. The latter—quick hits—add up quickly, leading to substantial savings. Oftentimes improvement can come from simple tweaks to schedules and better cooperation across departments. Sweeping sidewalks before sweeping streets is not a stretch. 

The cornerstone to continuous (incremental) improvement is creating a culture of continuous improvement. How do team leaders create an environment wherein front line workers can question the status quo, existing business practices and policies, or the work order in hand? Can a front employee stand up and say “hey, this signage is overkill—we’ve all seen parking meters…” without fear of reprisal?  Are they encouraged / incented to do so?

The Top Line (More Low Hanging Fruit)

Ten years ago the City stated interest in diversifying its revenue sources.  A decade later the revenue mix is much the same. Revenue growth, other than a handful of new fees, has relied on the traditional property tax increases. Revenue diversification remains an aspiration collecting virtual dust on Ottawa.ca. 

Advocating for the Devil

In its defence, the City does concede that “property taxes are an ineffective method for continuing to fund the bulk of services municipalities deliver because they:

Do not necessarily reflect residents' ability to pay; 

Are a poor method of funding income redistribution programs, such as Ontario Works and social housing; and 

Hamper the global competitiveness of municipalities”. 

Food for thought (and action).

Not for the Faint at Heart

Again, the principle of un-bundling/downloading of costs/services to users can be tremendously powerful and beneficial. The provision and maintenance of roads and bridges, for example, can be offset through tolls and other forms of user pay to pay for them. While these are never politically popular, they are fair and effective—and used in many jurisdictions in Canada and around the world. Unless the City turns to market mechanism/price-driven incentives there is little hope of successfully meeting the many challenges of growing congestion.

A Moment of Truth: Who Will Chart the Path?

Who is responsible for overall organizational and service delivery quality? Who is responsible for continuously and systematically improving (efficiency and effectiveness) how services are provided? Who is examining how services are provided, rather than micro-managing line items on a budget? Who is blowing the virtual dust off, and blowing life into, published aspiration and vision statements? If the skill-set to drive efficiency does not exists within the organization, where is the HR strategic plan to recruit it, develop and nurture it through reward or promotion? Conversely, who is held accountable when performance targets are not met? What are the performance targets (business, process, service and individual performance)? Are they the right ones? 

The Sine Qua Nons

Who is the change leader/champion? Who is asking these tough questions?