Rate Reviews

City of Long Beach

Solid Waste Rate Studies

1998, 2002, 2004, and 2005

Client Needs

The City of Long Beach provides automated residential refuse and green waste services to customers and contracts for residential recycling collection.  The City competes with private haulers to provide commercial collection services.  Periodically, the City wanted to determine if the rates charged to each customer type accurately reflected the cost to provide services and are reasonable compared to similar jurisdictions.  In addition, the City wanted to create new rates for new service types and levels.

HF&H Solutions

HF&H reviewed the City’s costs for providing residential and commercial services and allocated those costs to each customer type (i.e., single-family residential solid waste, single-family residential recycling, apartment recycling, commercial solid waste, etc.) based on route statistics, number of customer, and number of containers.  The allocated costs were compared to the actual revenue received by customer type.  Revised rates were calculated based on spreading the allocated costs for each customer type across the current customer base of each customer type.

To determine the reasonableness of the current rate for City-provided commercial solid waste bin collection, HF&H conducted a survey of rates offered by a sample of the City’s private commercial solid waste haulers. 

Results

• Revised rates to accurately reflect the actual cost to provide services based on various types (i.e., residential solid waste, residential recycling, commercial solid waste, etc.) and levels (i.e., size of container and frequency of collection) of services provided by the City;
• Developed a recycling fee for commercial customers;
• Evaluated the impact of converting commercial barrel service to bin or cart service;
• Developed new bin service rates for 3 and 4-cubic yard containers based on the number of bins and frequency of collection.