City of Santa Barbara to Enter Exclusive Negotiations with MarBorg

The biggest, ripest contract over which City Hall has discretion is who gets to haul the trash. The City of Santa Barbara’s long-term contract with local trash hauler MarBorg is worth about $30 million a year. But with the contract set to expire, its renewal is worth $450 million over a 15-year span. Despite such mouth-watering sums, the City Council has opted not to put that contract out for competitive bids — despite recommendations to the contrary by City Hall’s sustainability czar Alelia Parenteau. Instead, the council voted to enter into sole-source negotiations with MarBorg, which first got the exclusive contract to haul the city’s trash in 2009. 

Parenteau acknowledged MarBorg — both locally owned and politically connected — has provided exceptional service in both trash hauling and recycling. She said she had hoped a competitive bidding process would force the company — which now holds a near-total trash monopoly throughout much of Santa Barbara County — “to sharpen its pencils and look at lessons learned over the past 10 years.”

State law has changed drastically in recent years regarding waste disposal and recycling, she noted, in ways both profound and merely decorative. For example, new state law requires that all trash bins be gray or black, meaning MarBorg’s iconic brown bins will no longer pass legal muster. More to the point, Parenteau is hoping MarBorg will agree to transition from older natural-gas trash trucks to new electric vehicles.