On Wednesday, the Houston City Council approved more trucks for the department. City council approved roughly $12.4 million for the purchase. This comes at a time when Solid Waste Management acknowledged delays with recycling pickup.
"We have an opportunity to buy 31 trucks out of New Mexico. Eleven can be here in two days after a signed purchase order. So we're moving forward on the purchase of the trucks," Houston Mayor John Whitmire said.
The additional resources are meant to tackle current pickup delays. For recycling, Solid Waste said it's about three to five days long. Solid Waste told ABC13 that delays are mainly due to a shortage of available vehicles and personnel. The department said nearly half of its fleet is out of service, and that their current trucks are more than seven years old with more than 150,000 miles.
Equipment is one piece of the puzzle. According to Solid Waste Management, personnel is the other. The department said it will post job openings within the week to fill existing vacancies.
Along with that, Mayor Whitmire said the new Solid Waste Management director, Larius Hassen, made adjustments to existing personnel as well.
"The personnel has been managed because he's multitasking his drivers, who were restricted to just backhaul ... backhaul loaders versus sidehaul loaders. Now they're able to drive both, so he sufficiently has his staffing," Whitmire said.
Whitmire said the next thing they're looking at is adding more drop-off areas for Solid Waste Management. Currently, he said the city only has one for all 600 square miles.
"It's a contract that we inherited," Whitmire said. "There's no reason that contract should be in place."
The department told ABC13 that the city currently operates under a contract put in place back in 2018. It designates a single drop-off site for materials collected across Houston.
The department said all recycling trucks must travel to that one location to unload, regardless of where their routes are. Solid Waste said travel to and from the site can take two to three hours per trip, depending on the route.
"We're looking desperately for other opportunities with other vendors," Whitmire said. "How can we drop all our recycling in multiple locations in the city of Houston?"
Another issue Solid Waste Management mentioned was rodents due to a lack of operational truck wash bays. When it comes to protecting the new trucks from rodent damage, the department said it already identified funding for repairs to the wash bays to help maintain the new trucks. Solid Waste Management said it expects the contractor to go before the council soon.
According to 311 call center data, problems with the solid waste department generate the most complaints in the city. Of the more than 53,000 open cases on Wednesday, a vast majority of them are solid waste issues. 311 data showed that missed recycling pickups are the number one call in the past three months, at nearly 15,000 complaints.