Fort Worth stinks at picking up garbage, city data shows. Can it be fixed?
Fort Worth officials are pledging tweaks to the city’s trash pick-up system as residents and their representatives raise a stink about shoddy collection.
“We have missed trash pick-ups all the time,” District 4 councilmember Charlie Lauersdorf told the Star-Telegram Tuesday. “Sometimes it’s entire streets, entire neighborhoods; sometimes they just get two or three houses in a row. How’s that happen? No idea.”
Constituent complaints about poor pick-up have piled up in Lauersdorf’s inbox and social media DMs since Knight Waste Services, a local trash collection firm, took over retrieval routes across large sections of North Fort Worth in recent years.
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City Council in 2021 agreed to pay national garbage gathering conglomerate Waste Management and its subcontractors — including Knight —close to $479 million over the next 12 years to head up trash and recycling collection across Fort Worth. District 4 residents reported 3,476 missed pick-ups last year, according to MyFW App data compiled by Lauersdorf’s office.
“Our residents are expecting the service that they’re paying for — one of the most basic city services — and they’re not even getting it,” he said.
The frustration compelled Lauersdorf to push city staff to find ways to dump Knight last month. The pressure yielded a presentation from city staff Tuesday laying bare the shortcomings of citywide trash collection.
Knight could not be reached for comment.
Last year, Waste Management and their affiliates attempted an average of around 1.1 million retrievals each month, environmental services director Cody Whittenburg told council members. They missed an average of 1,600 pick-ups, roughly 1.52 botched collections per 1,000 accounts; the benchmark ratio for good service is below 1.
The problem is especially acute for the city’s disabled residents, who often need extra assistance from collectors fetching their waste: city-hired fleets missed an average of 29.17 collections per 1,000 disabled customers.
Based on his conversations with city staff, Lauersdorf says Waste Management trucks routinely clocked in collection ratios below 1; Knight’s ratio, he recalls, hovered around 1.8. The staff presentation Tuesday did not break down collection ratios by firm.
“It’s definitely a systemic issue within the organization of Knight Waste Services,” he said.
Part of the reason Fort Worth leaders at the time elected to extend the city’s contract with Waste Management (instead of switching to an ostensibly cheaper provider) was the firm’s commitment to collaborating with local minority-owned businesses, such as Knight.
Waste Management initially agreed to set aside a quarter of its subcontracts for minority-owned garbage collection firms. A spurt in missed pick-ups, and a lack of minority companies to fill them, led the city to temporarily reduce the fraction, Lauersdorf said.
Doing away with the requirement entirely, he added, may be the only way to replace Knight’s fleet with Waste Management trucks (or those of a more reliable collector).
“With enough time to prepare for a transition, I think that Waste Management can easily take over the entire contract and not sub out any of the work,” he said.
Altering the provisions of the contract would require pushing a revised agreement through city council. Lauersdorf is prepared to take it that far if needed.
“It’s probably gonna take some drastic action,” he said. “But at this point, I don’t care what it takes. I just want our residents’ trash to be picked up.”
Staff writer Harrison Mantas contributed to this report.
