The City often gets its share of abuse in the media, 'Silly Hall' type stories related to its overly political nature, bad choices for art pieces, bridge procurement, etc. However, in this instance it is truly justified.
The City decided to cut some cost and lay off some landfill workers. This led to a bizarre four day schedule rotation at the three main landfills. So on Monday, only one landfill is open. During the busy season (now), there is a massive amount of landfill activity. With the long daylight hours, crews get busy early, landscape crews are doing spring cleanups, and construction has noticeably picked up. All this means the landfill has been total chaos. The worst part is getting out. It can take an hour of idling in line (behind 100 trucks) to get out of the pay and scale area.
The problem here is the landfill is user pay. It costs at least $20+ dollars to even take a tiny load to the dump, a minimum charge. My last load cost $35, it was 300 kg. The City, if it manages the landfill properly, it should make a lot of money on small loads. What it can't do is take an extra hour from the day of working people to make them sit in line. When you are paying $30 to dump a little trash, you don't want to waste your day there, nor should you given how much it costs.
The problem with the landfill is you have to weigh in and weigh out in order to calculate the bill. It is very slow, and only two windows are open. The situation we have now is the two incoming scales will be closed at 5 pm, but the two outgoing scales will have 100 waiting trucks in line. I called the City complaints line and mentioned it took me almost an hour to get out of the landfill, and there was no way I can afford to waste that much time to drop of $35 worth of junk. I wont be back, I have since hired a crew with a larger truck to load and haul my waste (last load was $212, ouch). This is the ever increasing cost of business in Calgary.
To its credit, someone from the City called me back and we discussed what needs to be done. The obvious answer is to use the incoming weight scale to also be used to let users pay and get out. That could double the capacity of the payment system and likely eliminate the problem. Another answer is to just charge smaller loads by the truck rather than make them weigh in, and let those customers out another exit. That could speed up the process by another 10-20%.
These are easy solutions without cost. Can the City act quickly enough to make these changes? This is a good test of City management to see if it can act more like a business and less like a bureaucracy. Given dump rates, it owes the customers a vasty better service standard.
