BY DAN HILDEBRAN
A month before a new contractor is scheduled to take over trash pickups in Clay County, St. John’s County commissioners fired the same company.
On Tuesday, August 20, commissioners in St. Augustine voted unanimously to terminate its $28.2 million contract with FCC Environmental Services.
The Houston, Texas-based multinational, which claims to serve over 5,000 municipalities, began trash pickup for over 100,000 St. Johns County residences on August 1. Since then, county officials said they had received around 10,000 calls about service questions and complaints.
Commissioner Sarah Arnold told company CEO Dan Brazil that she, along with a majority of St. Johns homeowners, had lost trust in his company.
“It appears to me there was a breach of contract from Day 1,” she told Brazil, adding that her pickup was delayed by several days. “And you left us during a hurricane. You have created in our community a public safety and a public health crisis,”
Last week, FCC Environmental managers appeared before Clay County commissioners to address the board after news reports of the company’s problems across the river began to surface.
The company’s vice president of business development, Charles Merkley, blamed the missed pickups in St. Johns County on a failure in technology.
He said that FCC uses cameras and visual technology supplied by 3rd Eye and that as FCC’s service to St. John’s residents began on August 1, the cameras had not been entirely installed or activated on FCC’s trucks.
“We make no excuses for that,” Merkley told Clay commissioners. “We should have been prepared for that, but we weren’t.”
The VP added that all the truck cameras are now operating on its St. Johns trucks and that it is meeting 99% of its collections there.
Commissioner Betsy Condon, representing the Lake Region, asked Merkley for assurances that the debacle across the river would not be repeated in her area.
Merkley admitted that not all the cameras on the Clay County trucks had been activated. He added that 3rd Eye workers have been on the ground in St. Johns County to fix its cameras and technology there. He stressed that both FCC and 3rd Eye are taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to their launch in Clay on October 1.
“We will be on time,” Merkley insisted. “We’re very confident that some of the lessons we’ve learned painfully will not happen here.”
Merkley said FCC hired most Waste Management workers who picked up trash in Clay County under the current contract.
He added that for routes with dirt roads, most of which are in Condon’s district, FCC will utilize smaller, four-wheel-drive trucks to pick up waste.
Mitch Dahlstrom, FCC’s Florida operations director, added that FCC has successfully used the smaller trucks in Lake County.
“I think Lake County is probably only second to Clay County in the number of non-maintained roads, as far as dirt roads,” he said. “You have a lot of sugar sand areas like in the Keystone Heights area. We did some drive-bys in there to scout the routes and see what we needed, and it was very evident that we needed the four-by-four vehicles.”
Condon added that 99% effectiveness is short of what residents expect from the new contractor.
“I believe our residents expect us to be at 100% on Day 1,” she said.
While Merkley emphasized the benefits of truck-mounted cameras and blamed their failure on the company’s problems in St. Johns County, Commissioner Kristin Burke said some of her constituents fretted about the technology infringing on their privacy.
“We have constituents that are worried that you’re going to be watching their house,” she said, “that you’re going to be watching their families. Can you address that?”
Merkley responded that the only purpose of the cameras was to improve customer service and safety.
