BOE applauds steering of $3.9 million in unused ARPA funds to private trash hauler
There are many ways to spend ARPA money. Here’s one – a no-bid contract that has ballooned over time to nearly $12 million
Above: Mayor Brandon Scott at Wednesday’s virtual Board of Estimates meeting. (CharmTV)
A last-minute shuffle by the Mayor’s Office of Recovery Programs, diverting $3.9 million of ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds to a private trash hauler, was lauded by city officials yesterday.
The reason: so the money is spent by December 31, 2026, the last day before unused funds must be returned to the U.S Treasury.
“Proper fiscal oversight, Mr. Comptroller and Mr. President,” Mayor Brandon Scott asserted at the virtual images of Comptroller Bill Henry and Council President Zeke Cohen. (With City Hall shut down Wednesday due to a steam leak, the Board of Estimates met remotely.)
“Remember,” the mayor continued, “there were folks who thought that we wouldn’t spend any of the money, right? That the money was going to the wrong places – some 640 million dollars. This is about making sure that we don’t have to send the money back.”
“Mr. Mayor, I’m not being critical,” Henry replied. “It sounds like this is exactly what we would want to see happen.” Earlier in the meeting, the city’s advocate and watchdog quipped, “We’re using solid waste to do a clean up of ARPA funds” to an audible groan by Cohen.
The recipient of the ARPA bonanza is Spindler Refuse Service, a Halethorpe company that first ventured into city contracting during the Covid pandemic, sharing a $1.2 million deal to haul away trash with The Goode Companies (then represented by former Mayor Sheila Dixon).
In 2022, the company went out of its own, securing a one-year $465,467 “emergency procurement” agreement from the Department of Public Works to help out the Bureau of Solid Waste, which was short of manpower and vehicles.
In 2023, that contract morphed into something much larger thanks to ARPA money.
Interim DPW Director Richard Luna and Finance Director Michael Moiseyev first jointly declared that Baltimore faced a trash emergency that could imperil public health.
Then they noted that “ARPA funding has been made available to the Department of Public Works,” all of which resulted in a rejiggered contract with Spindler.
The result was a one-year, $3.3 million contract that exceeded the previous contract by seven times.
To the rescue at a price: a Spindler garbage truck. BELOW: A 2023 memo by DPW Interim Director Richard Luna setting up the rationale for a $3,285,000 “emergency authorization request” for Spindler.
Contract Add-Ons
Over the next year, Spindler hiked the number of trash pickup routes it handled, while DPW went through a number of crises, including the August 2, 2024 heat-exhaustion death of sanitation worker Ronald Silver II and the crushing death of Timothy Cartwell three months later.
“They were helping us when we were trying to recover from the pandemic,” Mayor Scott said today, recalling Covid-related supply-chain delays, but avoiding mention of the managerial bungles and poor working conditions documented by Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming.
• SPECIAL SERIES: Unsafe Conditions for City Workers
When the year was up, the Spindler contact was renewed with a fresh slug of ARPA money – $4.2 million, or a 28% increase over the previous agreement – to handle about 25 trash routes.
This contract would have lapsed this year had the Mayor’s Recovery Office not discovered the spare ARPA money from other programs.
“We are doing projections on a monthly, on a weekly basis at this point to see across our portfolio where there may be underspend,” Lauren Jackson, deputy recovery director, told the board.
“We were planning in the spring to end the contract in September,” agreed DPW Deputy Director Alan Robinson, “but given the fact that we were given additional funding to support this, we thought it was a great opportunity to pay them through December and leverage that support to address some of the other customer service needs.”
On June 5, Belair-Edison resident Alvin Blake watches as the trash pile that had sat across from his home for over two years is removed by a local nonprofit. (Theodore Rose)
Bulk Trash Delays
Most noticeably, those needs include catching up with illegal dumping and citizen requests for bulk trash collection.
Robinson said it takes DPW up to three months between the time a citizen registers a complaint and the time “we actually get out there.”
Sometimes the time lapse is much longer.
It now takes up to three months for DPW to haul away illegal trash reported by citizens.
The Brew recently found that residents in northeast Baltimore waited two years to get a smelly pile of trash removed – and not by the city, but by the Living Classrooms Foundation, which had heard of the residents’ plight.
With the latest $3.9 million infusion of ARPA money for continued Spindler pickups- for a grand total of nearly $12 million on the contract – Robinson hopes to better utilize the department’s own solid waste crews to tackle the bulk trash backlog.
“We are now focusing on a game plan,” he told the board, “where we are focusing on all these items before the holiday season, so we can get that backlog down.”