Sabha, Tamer
Subject:Pasadena Municipal Services meeting today
From: Robert Summers
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2024 1U:53 AM
To: Sabha, Tamer <[email protected]>; Stevenson, Garrett <[email protected]> Subject: Pasadena Municipal Services meeting today
Good day,
I have requested a Speaker Card to read these comments into the record at the meeting today but wanted to also send these in writing.
My name is Robert Summers and I am a 59 year resident of Pasadena, a product of Pasadena Public Schools, a business owner and I live on the west side of the Rose Bowl Stadium.
I own a deep root irrigation business and run a decent sized home composting operation and therefore would like to comment on 2 topics that may seem unrelated but are not.
The first topic relates to the new business agenda item to set a date for a hearing to increase refuse collection costs and the other relates to the shade trees in our city.
These two issues of concern are definitely related and that is why I am urging the committee NOT to set a hearing for such an action. Instead, I strongly urge the committee to direct Public Works to follow through with the goals of the city's zero waste plan and begin building a local composting infrastructure.
We now know from the work done at the Rose Bowl Stadium that composting technology exists to make good healthy soil.
Yet the city has chosen to make methane, the biofuel used to power the trucks. It is the same greenhouse gas that SB 1383 targets for reduction.
The city is now not only exacerbating solid waste generation, it is increasing its production of a potent greenhouse gas at the expense of making soil and compost that would effectively save our trees that would draw down such greenhouse gases from our atmosphere.
Common sense tells us our current model of trucking our organics away from the city for fuel production instead of soil production is unsustainable in the long run.
The link to shade trees is the soil...good healthy soil. Compost makes for good healthy soil and in turn plants are nourished with all the nutrients it needs. It's a biological process not a chemical one. To make healthy soil, you need food and Greenwaste. If the city doesn't know whether they can process their own food waste locally, then shouldn't the city conduct a study to find out before committing the food resources elsewhere? With that in mind, I again strongly Urge the committee to postpone setting a hearing date for refuse rate increases and instead direct public works to complete a feasibility study conducted by a third party consultant to evaluate whether local processing and composting of the city's organic material is feasible given the need our city has to build healthy soil to save our shade trees.
Looking forward to presenting these thoughts at the meeting today.
Robert Summers
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