The Government Operations Standing Committee of the Richmond City Council met on September 24, 2026, to receive two staff presentations: an overview of the Department of Public Works' solid waste and street cleaning operations, and the Office of Sustainability's annual progress report. The committee approved a motion early in the meeting, confirmed there were no board vacancies to review, and deferred remaining discussion items to be handled offline because the full committee was not present. No agenda or minutes were available; this summary is based solely on the meeting transcript.
Yes. Last year Abu Bakr. Hi. Chair Jerdon. No. That motion has been approved. Thank you. Okay, that takes us to the end of our papers. We don't have board vacancies to review. We do have two presentations. And I regret to those who were here to provide them that you didn't have the full audience that we had earlier because your work's really important and I know we are looking forward to it. So thank you. All right. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and Members of Council. Torrance Robinson, Deputy Director of Public Works for Operations and Maintenance. Thank you for the opportunity to present. Without further ado, though, I would like to present the program managers that are responsible for delivering these important services. And I'll let them come up to speak with Solid Waste with uh Theodore Teller. Good afternoon, Council Members. My name is Theodore Tyler, program manager for the Solid Waste Division for the Department of Public Works. And just to start off, Solid Waste, we are definitely committed to reducing the amount of waste in our general in our generate generated by our community. We strive to provide reliable and efficient uh responses to our services and for our citizens and promote and we promote uh sustainability waste management while improving collection uh throughout our city. In the solid waste division, we average 65,000 households and businesses that we service on an actual uh basis. We service those along with our household uh recycling and providing single screen recycling for about 62,500 residents on a biweekly collection schedule. Public litter and collection, we maintain approximately a thousand seventy-five public litter cans uh throughout the city, including our Sunday through Thursday night collection servicing uh sites uh monthly. Uh bulk and brush, um uh part of our division is available for household as far as receiving trash collections, and we average about 612 tons of bulk and brush material collected per month, and we we run our bulk and brush along with our recycle schedule as well. So when our citizens know the recycle is coming, they know the bulk and brush team is coming on that same day. Also within our city, we have our transfer station that is located at 3506 North Hopkins Road, and that supports our citizens and surrounding areas with yard debris, large amounts of trash, and also large items such as furniture and so on and so forth. Um, we have another facility, actually, East Richmond Road transfer station that we also offer on a smaller scale uh those particular services as well as actually solvents and oils. We actually uh uh collect those there as well, and that's located at 3800 East Richmond Road, just to the east of us. Also, one of the things that we do is we actually partner with our clean city commission, and we partner closely with them to encourage us to encourage them to as volunteers to clean up in our areas, and we support them and it's primarily on the weekend basis. And so we actually want to continue to do that to actually build that type of partnership to actually keep our city clean as well as all the services that we provide. Thank you for your time. And uh next we have street cleaning. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Vassar Sumter. I'm the program and operations manager of the street cleaner division. So today I'd like to tell you a little bit about what we do. The street cleaning division supports a clean, safe, and healthy city by coordinating and responding to unhoused encampments in coordination with uh RPD and Hope Unit Human Services. We also uh support all the special events that go on in the city, graffiti removal, residential street cleaning, bike lane cleaning, and litter pickup at various areas. The uh street cleaning division is uh cleans approximately 8,000 lane miles a year. We collect 5,000 tons of debris annually. Our schedule is posted online and services provided at fixed locations and designated signed off routes, which is our permanent sign-off routes. But all of our routes, the effort is to cover and include uh all of the CSO areas, which are the combined sewer overflow. Bike lane cleaning, which is a new addition to the city, somewhat new in the last few years. We have two dedicated bike lane sweepers, MF Broom, and a new uh piece of equipment called Baby Broom, which is a little smaller than MF Broom. We service over 80 lane miles of bike infrastructure. We're in problem in about two years, we'll be approaching 100 lane miles.