So the public, my name is Fred Flickinger as the chair of the City of Houston's Government Operations Committee.

I call this meeting to order and would like to welcome all council members in attendance.

Councilwoman Peck.

Councilman Joaquin Martinez and Councilwoman Sally Alcorn.

And then we have staff from District B, District C, District F, District J.

And that's it.

So council members and staff, please hold your questions until the end of the presentations.

If there are any members of the public that would like to participate in public comment, there's a sign-in sheet at the front table.

And for our first presentation, we have the director of Houston Public Works, Randy Mackai and Solid Waste Officer Larryus Hassan.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, Council members.

Believe it or not, it really is a pleasure to be here to talk to you about this subject today.

And I I sincerely mean that, and I hope you'll follow that sentiment as we go through the presentation today.

One of the things that we're going to highlight as we talk about this is we've got three major issues we'll discuss.

First of all, we want to talk about where we started and where we're at.

And that's going to include a broad discussion about new key performance indicators and metrics that we'll be using within Solid Waste Management inside Houston Public Works to assess our responsiveness and our accountabilities.

Second, we'll talk about uh strategies on illegal dumping, which is specific to an amendment brought during the budget session about $3 million and how we'll spend that.

And then finally, we'll also talk about investment in recycling, which was the result of another budget amendment from the mayor pro Tem.

Next slide.

And next slide again, please.

So

let's talk just briefly, very briefly about how we got here.

First of all, we knew that going into this current fiscal year uh previous to now, Solid Waste Management stood as its own separate department within the City of Houston.

It was a general fund department.

It had no dedicated fee or fund or source of revenue that came into it beyond things like cart lease fees and other de minimis amounts that could possibly support portions of the operation.

As part of the approval of this budget, thanks thankful to uh each of you council members for that approval, solid waste was integrated into Houston Public Works, and it also established a $5 administrative fee that was effective at the beginning of this fiscal year.

As we've been going through this process, I'll highlight two things.

First of all, the real work didn't actually start on July 1st.

There was a lot of pre-work that had started long before that.

And in fact, Mayor Whitmeyer had asked me and members of our leadership team to assist Solid Waste all the way at the beginning of the year on certain key things where they were lagging behind.

We'll show you some uh metrics that kind of help indicate why we needed to implement that assistance at the time, but we began really towards the beginning of the year in assisting to improve solid waste operations.

However, on July 1st, when the fiscal year began, is when we really dug in our heels to understand exactly what it is that needed to be tackled within solid waste management to improve operations.

Today, we stand as one public works, and this was an important thing to make clear to everybody, not just to public works personnel, not just to solid waste personnel, but to the public as well.

We didn't just drop a department in public works and say we've done our work and gone away.

We have implemented solid waste into the public works way of doing work, and there's been some measurable improvements that have come with that.

Next slide.

Part of that assessment included us taking a look at important things that started with people.

It included evaluating process.

It certainly required us to take a look at performance and how we measured performance to that point.

And it also required us to establish accountabilities.

It's not just enough to count all of the beans on the table.

We need to understand why we're counting the beans, and we also need to understand who was supposed to put the beans there in the first place.

And many measures, and we've seen this throughout all sorts of city operations over the last few years, we've come to recognize that we have not done a very good job on any one of those four categories.

In many instances, we had neglected needs of our personnel.

We had ignored improvements to process, and instead trying to just throw money at problems to make them go away.

We certainly had not been measuring performance in a realistic way that would provide accountability and results, and that meant that there was no accountability on the other side of

it.

When we integrated solid waste into Houston Public Works, we knew that everything needed to focus around our mission, which is simply put to improve to provide and improve quality of life for everyone.

That's something that I believe everyone can understand that if we are not focused on providing and improving quality of life, we have missed the mark.

And of course, if we do that, then we are able to attain that vision, which is to be the premier public works agency in North America.

Many of you have heard me talk and frankly brag on the department.

It is the largest public works agency, not just in Texas, not just in the country.

It is the largest public works single public works agency in the world.

And that encompasses everything that we do.

Sometimes the question is, is it too big?

And it's a fair question.

But we're demonstrating that the size actually has very little to do with the results.

The results depend on the work we put into making sure that we are on task and on mission.

Next slide.

So