Fort Worth drops diversity requirement in its contract for garbage collection
Fort Worth leaders on Tuesday evening did away with diversity requirements in the city’s waste management contract, a step they hope will help improve Fort Worth’s subpar trash collection record.
The amendment, approved by a 9-2 vote, scrapped a clause in the city’s $479 million agreement with garbage gathering giant Waste Management that required the firm to subcontract a quarter of its services to local, minority-owned businesses. The stipulation entangled Waste Management with Knight Waste Services, a Black-owned Fort Worth waste disposal business that was pilloried by residents and some city officials for routinely missing pick-ups.
“At the end of the day, we need to be able to pick up trash when we say we’re going to pick up trash,” councilmember Gyna Bivens said. “My constituents really don’t care who picks up their trash; they just want it picked up.”
Fort Worth inked a 12-year contract extension with Waste Management in 2021, handing the Houston-based corporation the reins to manage the city’s trash and recycling services. Part of the company’s pitch that ultimately won over Fort Worth leaders was its commitment to working with minority-owned enterprises such as Knight.
Some councilmembers felt the city would undermine that commitment by junking the contract’s diversity requirement.
“This conversation, for me, isn’t about Waste Management and Knight Services,” said councilmember Jared Williams, one of two city legislators to vote against the changes. “This is about: Will the city of Fort Worth address a long-standing issue of ensuring that the investments that we make through contracts reflect the beautiful diversity of this community.”
Williams and councilmember Chris Nettles, the other dissenter, feared the tweaks would set an unwelcome example for future contract disputes: If diversity standards are too difficult to meet, just get rid of them.
“This will set a precedent,” Nettles said.
Councilmember Charlie Lauersdorf spearheaded the effort to scrap the requirement. He began urging his peers to find ways to dump Knight in April, after receiving floods of complaints about routine missed pick-ups along retrieval routes assigned to the firm in north Fort Worth (he documented nearly 3,500 botched collections in his district over the last year). Representatives for Knight, present at the Tuesday council meeting, declined to comment after the vote.
During a meeting with councilmembers last week, Fort Worth environmental officials last week laid bare the severity of the city’s shoddy waste disposal: Garbage trucks missed an average of 1.52 pick-ups per 1,000 accounts (the benchmark for good service is 1 missed bin for every 1,000 customers). Lauersdorf blamed Knight’s oversights for driving up the ratio.
City staff, wary of Knight’s shortcomings, had in the past agreed to lower the proportion of pick-ups set aside for minority businesses, allowing Waste Management’s fleet to pick up some of the slack. Given the lack of other minority-run trash disposal companies, staffers and most leaders said, ditching the diversity requirement entirely would likely be the only way to meet service demands.
“There will be some lines of work that you will not find a market among African Americans,” Bivens said. “When you hold out the 25% in this line of work, it does not exist in Texas.”
Knight, she stressed, would still be able to work with the city and Waste Management under the new rules.
Staff writer Harrison Mantas contributed reporting
