How one award-winning Recycling and Solid Waste Department and a band of municipal bureaus work together to maximize both Phase 1 NPDES BMPs and all-around service quality.

By Siobhan Bennett

"In an adversarial relationship, think of all the energy expended that has nothing to do with positive outcomes," muses Joe McMahon III, manager of water resources for the City of Allentown, PA. "Cooperative relationships require lots of upfront work but deliver results [that are] more than worth the investment of energy and time. In my experience, much higher rates of return are experienced in cooperative, proactive relationships versus their adversarial, reactive counterparts. We've got really outstanding levels of cooperation between bureaus that has had a powerful, positive effect on our NPDES [National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System] Phase I Plan." And this cooperation is not limited to the joint execution of the municipality's NPDES Phase I Plan but includes delivery of basic municipal services from solid waste to recycling to water treatment and filtration. "Trust me, as a whole we gain with this proactive, synergetic approach to what our bureaus do."

Superintendent of Streets Denny Wehr, McMahon's counterpart, couldn't agree more. "This cooperation didn't happen in a day. We have our differences‹but this working together has improved everyone's game, increased everyone's overall professionalism. For example, all the other departments help us with snow removal now‹Parks, Recycling and Solid Waste, Building Maintenance, and Water Resources." The city even put plows on its garbage trucks, which earned Allentown's Recycling and Solid Waste Department a recent Waste Age award for truck design in 2003. "As a result, everyone's knowledge of our city's streets increases and we've been able to expand the quality of our snow-removal services even with a head count that has been drastically reduced over the years."

"I came in here 15 years ago," shares Betsy Levin, the city's manager of recycling and solid waste. Under her leadership, there is hardly a national award her department hasn't won. "And when I arrived I fully expected what I would call 'turf-protecting behavior.' What I experienced and what continues to be the reality is completely different. The inherent cooperation we all operate from is outstanding and makes all our jobs easier."

This interdepartmental synergy has enhanced outcomes from NPDES Phase I best management practices (BMPs) even in the face of tight budgets and head count reductions. And it is only one example of the highly collaborative approaches a band of bureau managers has managed to create within the densely populated city of 106,000 just north of Philadelphia. Let's first take a look at how they've been collaborating on those Phase I BMPs.

Phase I Synergetic Interdepartmental BMPs

The city's stormwater management plan was created by Dan Koplish, McMahon's predecessor. "We were the first city in Pennsylvania to have our NPDES Phase I plan accepted," McMahon says. "As a municipality with a population over 100,000, our requirements are identical to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, even though they are exponentially bigger communities than we are. Additionally, we were the first city in Pennsylvania to have inter-municipal agreements with other communities, logically with the contiguous suburbs that we serve. Typically older cities like ours [Allentown was incorporated in 1762] are situated in lower-lying geographies with suburbs growing up around them over time. Those suburbs need to adopt sewer management practices similar to the city they surround where any stormwater flow that contributes to that city's system has to be managed. In our case, Salisbury, South Whitehall, Whitehall, and Hanover Townships are in formal intermunicipal agreements with our city."

McMahon's department, Water Resources, recycles most of its solid waste separately from the Recycling and Solids Waste bureau, about 12,000 tons per year, and in 1988 won a national EPA award for biosolids recycling. "Dan [Koplish] very wisely saw that our department is in the drinking-water and sewage business but not in the solid-waste, engineering, or street-cleaning business. But all those facets had to be built onto our plan to comply. So we went to the other bureaus—Bureau of Streets, Bureau of Recycling and Solid Waste, and Bureau of Water Resources [separate bureaus run by one management group] and Engineering, who do the design and oversight of the pipe installations for Water Resources."

For those not intimate with the inner workings of municipal budgets, McMahon explains, "Mine is an Enterprise Fund bureau, as is Recycling and Solid Waste. Our budget is built on revenue collected for a service outside of or in addition to general city taxes levied and collected. Streets is largely budgeted out of General Fund, from the overall budget of the city." There is a natural dynamic tension between departments and bureaus funded out of a municipality's General Fund‹the managers of these organizations must be advocates for the services they provide while municipal leaders must determine the priority of services as limited by their budget; someone must determine, for example, if police are more important than firefighters or street sweeping or economic development. It's striking that these managers have even leaped over traditional General Fund tensions in some of their work together.

"All the involved bureaus," McMahon continues, "already had BMPs in place, and so we could bring them under one plan and add others as resources became available. A BMP committee was created that met on a regular basis that factored in everyone's input. My department handles all the regulatory requirements of NPDES Phase I, but the critical commitments on who-what-where-when-why details on BMPs to achieve compliance arose very democratically out of this committee. A big benefit is that everyone's BMPs are in the NPDES Phase I plan. These BMPs are no longer optional, but now required of all of us," protecting them from the vagaries of budgets and administration changes.

McMahon highlights the Phase I plan contributions of each bureau. "Our department, Water Resources, does sample collection on storm events and manages all regulatory requirements. Engineering manages the design and oversight of stormwater construction and provides us information on installations and any other changes to the system. The Street bureau collects information on an ongoing basis on pollutants. As they do their street sweeping, cubic yards are measured and a limited content analysis for metals and organic content is performed. Organic chemical analysis we'll send out. Water Distribution [a sub-bureau of Water Resources] will clean the storm-drain inlets for any storm event before spring thaw, mainly to prevent flooding. Recycling and Solid Waste handles litter baskets and collections, plus offers public information to the community. Currently, I'm getting the team together so I can get a report together for June's due date. We've been at this since 1995 and we get everyone together annually."

McMahon's cohort in recycling and solid waste, Levin, graduated with him from Pennsylvania State University's Class of '79, and they admit to a strong passion for both city and environmental issues. "One of our main focuses with Phase I is public information and outreach. We conducted focus groups this year‹people don't realize what happens to what goes into storm drains. Just like trash, they don't realize where it goes. We promote "Don't dump when you're changing your oil'" and other bottom-line, simple, key behavior changes, "and our outreach person reinforces that door-to-door. Our best results overall in public information come from outreach to youth, especially early elementary students‹the environment really resonates with them. Children do the best job of teaching adults. And once the adults start, they usually don't stop."

Benefits of a Synergistic Approach

Cheaper, Proactive, More Efficient
"Without these high-caliber outcomes from our joint BMPs, we'd be forced to process our discharge, spending money on capital improvement for treatment systems, detention ponds," McMahon says. "By stressing proactive, collaborative solutions we avoid more costly and less-efficient treatment solutions. ... And taxpayers get cleaner streets, less litter at the same time because all of us are focused on getting rid of pollutants before they get in the system."

These municipal leaders acknowledge that as a Class 3 city there are definite challenges in meeting the same requirements of cities much larger. "I imagine the population cutoff demarcation of 100,000 was made back when cities were wealthy, before resources went out to the suburbs," remarks McMahon. "Obviously the tables have turned. The wealth is in the suburbs that surround us. But we still have to meet those requirements, and it can be a challenge." The culture of synergy that the department heads have cultivated obviously assists in meeting "more demands with less and less resources," points out Karl Giandomenico, Allentown's assistant superintendent of streets. "Our department used to literally have hundreds of employees. Even though we have a fraction of that manpower now, we still have to get the same work accomplished. How all departments now collaborate in snow removal is a great example of how we are doing much more with much less through these cross-trained collaborative approaches."

A Boost in Quality of Life
Increased street cleaning has been the direct result of Phase I BMPs, and several departments have joined forces to get it done. "Instead of street cleaning starting in April we now start in March. Recycling is working with us in changing the signage that lets motorists know that street-cleaning parking rules are starting a month earlier. The Allentown Parking Authority is focusing on expanding the 'ticketed routes' "‹on which cars are ticketed if parked on cleaning days. "We meet regularly with the parking authority regarding street cleaning ticketing routes to maximize results. It's not like the old days when we had enough manpower to maintain hand crews to pick up litter and debris," observes Giandomenico.

Keeping It In-House
A key benefit of the interdepartmental cooperation was that the city didn't have to hire an outside agency to draft an NPDES Phase I plan, McMahon says. "It was all done in-house with everyone's buy-in, because they were the ones creating the plan. This approach also resulted in all individual departmental BMPs being protected under this NPDES Phase I plan, which ends up having some excellent quality-of-life dimensions that everyone benefits from. The streets are cleaner; there is less trash in the streets because these BMPs are being followed religiously. Also, working together on this plan firmed up relationships between departments. We all feel a mutual obligation to keep all this stuff out of the streams and rivers, which is both our own and our downstream neighbors' drinking supply. And we've been very successful. Fish from our nearby streams, the Jordan and Little Lehigh creeks, were recently tested for mercury by the USGS [US Geological Survey] and [they] had the lowest levels in the section of the Delaware River Basin."

Higher-caliber outcomes
Another big, but harder to quantify, benefit is in the higher caliber of outcomes. "Let's face it," McMahon begins, "EPA doesn't have the manpower to enforce every detail of NPDES Phase I—everything is BMP-driven, and self-policing is the order of the day, people doing what they should. So it's really up to us to maximize results and outcomes. For example, permanent 'Don't Dump' emblems on storm drains weren't originally part of our plan, but we discovered we could write a Pennsylvania Growing Greener grant to purchase them." McMahon enlisted the help of other departments, community groups, and neighboring cities to install them. "Whenever we can up the ante we do," he says.

Creating a Synergistic Municipal Culture

Levin, like her peers, says Neal Kern, the city's director of public works, deserves a great deal of credit for this collaborative atmosphere. "Without his encouragement and full support for this kind of intense cooperation, we couldn't do it," she notes. "Leadership like his makes all the difference."

And it seems that cooperative leadership style itself is a part of the municipal tradition of this corner of the city. "Back in 1989 we used to have four separate departments that dealt with some aspect of water and we merged them under one umbrella," observes McMahon. "The goal was to maximize economy of scale and manage by functional areas versus by bureaus. Bill Engle, our former manager of water resources, saw the need for coordination in the face of the dramatic increase in requirements on the horizon. He really transformed how we did our jobs. Skills and knowledge began being shared along bureaucratic lines. Case in point, we are the only municipality I'm aware of where line workers operate both water-filtration and water-treatment facilities, and our operators are among the most highly licensed in the business. The result of this cross-training and skill spread across departments is if you lost four operators out of Water Filtration in the old days you'd be taking a big hit, 50% of your department out the window versus our current paradigm where a loss of four out of our combined bureaus is much more sustainable."

Giandomenico concurs. "Overall, the emphasis is on continuous training for all of staff in all the departments we collaborate with," he says. "The better trained and certified and licensed we all are, the more we can assist each other. For example, I have a Class B water operation license, Denny has a Class D for Water Distribution and sewer maintenance, and we're both in the Streets Department! Another example is that we offer CDL [commercial driver's license] training for anyone that wants to pursue it and over 100 different certificates are held by our team."

Overcoming Old Culture

"When I became superintendent of the Bureau of Streets," Wehr remembers, "the Street department had always been an entity to itself, not talking much if at all to other departments." Giandomenico remembers, "The first thing Denny did was bring us into the twenty-first century‹that opened everything up; e-mail helped tremendously. We can now work more efficiently. How did we live without it? Sure, some of us were reluctant at first, but now we couldn't do without it. E-mail is a tremendous tool for increasing collaboration both within and outside departments." Giandomenico also developed several databases to track street cleaning, street repair, street paving, street reconstruction, fleet maintenance, and employee tracking, and now these data are available to all departments with instantaneous access. "We meet once month with departments that are affected by what we do and communicate what we are planning, what needs to be done. A lot of what sewer and water do now arises from what Streets has on the drawing board and visa versa. This planning and collaborating approach is fully operational now, but we've been working at this for 10 years."

Everyone's Invited
"I think it's important not to underestimate the power of all of us being invited to the table," acknowledges Giandomenico. "It was a good shot in the arm for our department not only to be conferred with but also for us to realize how well we were doing [relative to NPDES Phase I BMPs]. For example, we had been collecting our street sweeping for analysis already. We didn't change what we did‹but changed how we measured. Working on the [NPDES Phase I] BMP committee made a big difference putting us all on the same page and admittedly having a positive emotional effect on how we felt about the work we were doing. They [BMP committee members] had no clue we had all the information because we had been collecting it for years. All of us committed to a team goal of analyzing the NPDES influent going in and effluent to ensure the effluent was equal to or better than the influent."

Recognition on a National Level

Levin's Recycling and Solid Waste department has an impressive list of services that has been enhanced not only by high levels of coordination with her peers, but also with the community. "The 'what's included' in your trash fee is exceptional in our municipality. Our Recycling and Solid Waste bureau is really a hybrid with levels of services typical of much larger municipalities," says Levin, with awards ranging from SWANA to US Conference of Mayors to National Recycling Coalition to the state's Resources Council. "I don't think people realize how complicated what goes on in government is, the sophistication and intense coordination of what gets done behind the scenes. My counterparts in the bureaus we work closely with have an impressive sense of mission and pride. You almost don't think about it. It's just how we do business."

Levin describes the city's extensive collaborative efforts and the entities involved:

Composting, with Lehigh County and the city's Recycling and Solid Waste: "This began as a collaboration of Water Resources, Streets and the Lehigh County Office of Planning and Economic Development in 1987. Before that leaf pickup wasn't getting composted. But with the no-leaf-waste-in-the-garbage-stream requirements of Act 101, we initiated a composting effort with a grant for a tub grinder and five municipalities cooperating and did that for five years. We turned it over to county two years ago, which now handles operations, and we all benefit."

Christmas tree collection, with Streets and Recycling and Solid Waste: "This collection used to be in the waste contract until we analyzed we could do it at a better price. Between the Streets department and ours we divide the city up."

Snow removal, with Streets, Parks, Building Maintenance, Water Resources, and Recycling and Solid Waste: "Our public works director, Neal Kern, coordinated all departments working together to do the snow removal. Everyone pitches in. Everyone's equipment has a plow."

Recycling Center, with Lehigh County Juvenile Probation and the city Recycling and Solid Waste bureau: "We share the revenue with Lehigh County Juvenile Probation, which helps manage all the sorting at our Recycling Center. That revenue goes to victims of Juvenile Probation. We handle the 2,700 tons a year of recycling beyond curbside that comes into our Recycling Center. This requires a lot of daily cooperation for scheduling seven days a week, and we are too busy not to be there seven days a week."

Parks, with Parks Department and Recycling and Solid Waste Bureau: "When I first came on board we had real problems with illegal dumpsites, which weren't in anybody's bureau descriptions. The Parks department stepped up to the plate, the opposite of 'that's not my job,' and now there are many bureaus involved and this is an area we are working on getting under control."

Graffiti, with the police, District Attorney's Office, and Recycling and Solid Waste Bureau: "We had a huge graffiti problem that was becoming the norm in the 1990s. Now we clean it up immediately, but initially we had a huge backlog. It took four to five employees to undo thousands of tags citywide; now we are down to one employee. This was a very big effort between us and law enforcement. A lot of it is drug and gang marks. The D.A.'s office even bought us our first pressure cleaner. What was once a law-enforcement issue we now treat as a routine public works [task]. The less you talk about it the better; graffiti artists want fame, and we ignore them and immediately eliminate their tags."

Don't Trash Allentown, with Streets, Parking Authority, and Recycling and Solid Waste Bureau: "We've been working very hard on cleaning up Allentown, collaborating with Streets and the Parking Authority to improve street-cleaning outcomes. We added sidewalk cleaning a few years ago and an alleys and small-streets cleaner just recently, and we're also working on getting people to move their vehicles for effective street cleaning, with over 26,000 tickets issued by the Parking Authority using a new card based on our suggestions that is put on the windshields, getting the word out through neighborhoods about when street cleaning is scheduled. Over the years we have adjusted our solid-waste contract to save money. As we broke down costs, we found we could do the specialized components like Christmas tree removal more cheaply in-house."

It should be noted that Allentown's solid-waste contract is the largest single municipal contract of any type in the state. "For example, our litter baskets were originally emptied by the Streets Department in 1992, approximately 179 baskets," Levin says. "Our need for baskets outgrew Streets's ability to keep up with them with current levels of manpower so we added it to the solid-waste contract. But then we found that baskets were always overflowing with our former solid-waste contractor. So we added two crews of our own and now we are up to over 850 litter baskets citywide with bigger baskets and two baskets in commercial or heavy-use locations."

"I'd echo everyone's good remarks about cooperation and add to the list of collaborators our Parks and Police Departments and the Parking Authority. And Neal Kern deserves a lot of credit," Levin says. "Unfortunately, common public perception is that municipal employees aren't passionate, departments are at war with each other for their fair share of tax and other revenue, and everyone is just 'clocking in' until their retirement and pension. Nothing could be farther from the truth here."

McMahon echoes her views. "We have are a group of passionate bureau chiefs who really believe in what they are doing, who don't let the inevitable grind of bureaucratic rules and regulations get them down. These managers believe in what they're doing and are remarkably conscientious. They don't let the inevitable setbacks and bureaucracies wear them down. They stay believers. And that is what makes the hard work of this kind of collaboration possible. That, combined with a leader [Kern] who supports collaboration, produces the outstanding outcomes we've been able to deliver despite ever-decreasing resources."

Author Siobhan Bennett writes about environmental and business issues.

MSW - September/October 2004