COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA COMMITTEE ON PARKS, RECREATION AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Thursday, April 18, 2024 1:17 p.m. PRESENT: COUNCILMAN ANTHONY PHILLIPS, CHAIR COUNCILMAN CURTIS JONES, JR. COUNCILWOMAN RUE LANDAU
Good afternoon, everyone. I now note that the hour has come. Clerk, will you please call the roll to take attendance. Members who are in attendance, will you please indicate that you are present when your name is called.
Thank you. A quorum of the Committee is present and this hearing is now called to order. This is the public hearing of the Committee on Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs regarding Bill No. 240003. Clerk, will you please read the title of the bill.
Bill No. 15 240003, an ordinance authorizing the Commissioner of Parks & Recreation on behalf of the City of Philadelphia to enter into a multi- year agreement with Bennett Compost, Inc., for food scrap collection and management of a compost facility on City property located at 5650 Rising Sun Avenue, under certain terms and conditions.
Before I call on the Clerk to call the first panel, would any of my colleagues like to make any openings comments? The Chair recognizes Councilmember Thomas.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for your leadership on this issue. I have to leave this session to tend to other Council business and I'd like to be recorded as voting aye on all bills and resolutions before the Committee today.
Thank you, Councilmember Thomas. Excused for the record and voting aye on all bills for today's Committee hearing. Thank you. Clerk, will you please call the first panel or witness we have to testify on Bill No. 240003.
Up first we have Susan Buck, Deputy Commissioner for Operations, Department of Park & Recreations, joined by Natalie Walker, Sustainability Director and Ash Richards, Director of Urban Agricultural. We will also have Tim Bennett, the founder and co-owner of Bennett Compost.
Thank you. Please approach the witness table and good afternoon. (Witnesses approached Witness table.)
Please state your name for the record and proceed with your testimony.
Good afternoon. My name is Susan Buck, Deputy Commissioner of Operations for Parks & Recreation.
Good afternoon, Council. My name is Tim Bennett, founder and co-owner of Bennett Compost.
Thank you. Please proceed with your testimony, Ms. Buck.
Committee Chair Phillips and Committee members, my name is Sue Buck and I serve as the Deputy Commissioner of Operations for the Department of Parks & Recreation. I'm joined today by our Sustainability Director Natalie Walker and our Director of Urban Agricultural Ash Richards. I'm pleased to appear before you today on behalf of Mayor Parker's Administration and the Department in support of City Council Bill No. 240003 introduced by Chair Phillips. The bill 18 authorizes the City of Philadelphia through the Department of Parks & Recreation to enter into a multi-year agreement with Bennett Compost, Inc., for food scrap collection and the management of a compost facility on City property located at 5650 Rising Sun Avenue. The Department of Parks & Recreation is responsible for educating and entertaining our children, stewarding our parklands and natural settings, providing quality jobs in every neighborhood among our other duties. As members of this Committee know well, in municipality government one initiative rarely gets to advance all of our goals. The partnership with Bennett Compost that we are here to consider extending gets awful close to those goals. In exchange for using the former PPR Operations building on Rising Sun Avenue and the ability to sell the resulting compost, Bennett Compost collects organic waste from an increasing number of PPR facilities and events. They return some of the finished compost to PPR partner Urban Gardens without charge and will also be providing education about their operation and organic processes generally to the public. To date, of the 500,000 pounds of organic waste that Bennett has processed at Rising Sun, about 18,000 pounds have been from recreation centers, which by being diverted from landfills have saved the City thousands of dollars in tipping fees and earned free compost to a dozen urban gardens. Philadelphia's carbon footprint has been reduced by the eager participation of children, in particular at the 75 recreation centers where collection has occurred so far. Finally, I want to note that co-owners Jennifer Mastalerz and founder Tim Bennett who is here today are residents of Philadelphia as are 24-plus of their employees. We are glad to see that making Philadelphia a greener, cleaner city can also help expand employment opportunities for the children through this partnership. For all these reasons, we ask you to support extending this exceptional partnership with Bennett Compost by providing a favorable recommendation of Bill 8 No. 240003. And that the rules of Council be suspended to allow first reading at the next session of City Council. Thank you. I would be happy to answer any of your questions you may have.
Thank you. Can you please proceed with your testimony as well?
Yes, Councilmember. Good afternoon, Chair Phillips and members of the Committee. I'm Tim Bennett, founder and co-owner of Bennett Compost. On behalf of my business partner, Jennifer Mastalerz, myself, our employees and thousands of Philadelphia residents, businesses and recreational users, I'm excited to be here today to support 240003 introduced by Chair Phillips. Adoption of this ordinance 8 will allow Parks & Recreation to extend its multi-year agreement with Bennett Compost for both food scrap collection and the management of a composting facility on City property located at 5650 Rising Sun Avenue. I founded Bennett Compost in 2009 because I wanted to make composting of food scraps easy for Philadelphia residents. Over the last 15 years, thousands of residents and businesses all within the City of Philadelphia have joined our effort to contribute to making Philadelphia a cleaner and greener city. Our partnership with PPR over the past four years has been particularly awarding. Starting in 2020 when Bennett Compost won a City RFP to design, build and operate a composting facility on PPR land, we worked with the previous Administration, the Commonwealth and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a mid-scale urban food scrap composting operations permit, the first of which was awarded to Bennett in 2022. Between creating the permitting process, being awarded the RFP, preparing the facility and the pandemic, our partnership with Parks & Recreation have been years in the making. Yet the results have been mutually worthwhile. This partnership provided education on compost to youth and adults in part of the City. Each year since 2021 we have worked with the staff at PPR, the second largest provider of youth meals in Philadelphia, to recruit additional rec centers to divert their food scraps in organic waste to our operations. We are currently operating at 75 rec centers in every Council District in the City. This process includes training for the rec staff and then for the youth at each center. In 2023, 323 PPR staff received training and more than 650 children enrolled in PPR afterschool programs. By starting these kids young, we're working to build environmental leaders in neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia. This partnership has also diverted significant material from landfills, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving the City money on (inaudible). Bennett provides five-gallon buckets to each rec center, business or household that we work with in which food scraps and other organic waste can be deposited. At rec centers, these containers are rotated for clean dry buckets every week but our staff provides no charge collection to the City. Last year our total collection of food waste citywide diverted over 3 million pounds of food from landfills, including over 500,000 pounds that were processed at the Rising Sun facility. These total collections saved the City tens of thousands of dollars in tipping fees, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and resulted in 390,000 of finished compost product that went almost entirely to Philadelphia farms, communities and home gardens. Under Bill No. 240003, our partnership will continue to escalate until all rec centers, adult centers, other PPR facilities and most large departmentally organized events, including the Broad Street Run which I'm very excited to hopefully be working with this year, will be sending their organic waste to Bennett Compost. It will also allow us to escalate both our private investment in the facility and our relationships with neighboring community organizations like the Tacony Frankford Watershed Partnership with whom we've worked with since we moved into this site. We're already operating near capacity at 5650 Rising Sun and been looking for an additional location to accommodate our private and public collections as they continue to grow.
In the meantime, we continue to grow our Philadelphia-founded and Philadelphia-based business hiring Philadelphia City residents with full-time living wage jobs with benefits, hosting Philadelphia School District students and internships, providing high quality nutrient (inaudible) product overwhelmingly to Philadelphia city-based individual residents and organizational customers and doing our part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make Philadelphia cleaner, greener and more prosperous. With all that in mind on behalf of Bennett Compost, I ask for a favorable vote to recommend Bill No. 240003 and extend our agreement with the City. Thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions you have at this time.
Thank you for your testimony. Are there any questions or comments from members of the Committee for this panel?
Thank you. Thank you both so much for being here. A big fan at composting, do it myself at my house. And really love that you're introducing it to young people as early as possible. My son, my family, the kids will look now to see if there's a composting bin near the sink before they think about Plan B garbage disposal, Plan C, if there's none, trash can. But that doesn't make any sense to them and I love that. I'm also very, very interested in expanding this as much as possible. So a couple of questions: So first of all to Sue Buck, out of curiosity as we learn to utilize Philadelphia city-owned property in different ways, what was 5650 Rising Sun before the compost project went there?
I'm hoping for a lot of expansion, if possible, of this. Is this facility large enough if you keep growing and -- yeah, I'll stop there.
The facility that we're working at is permitted to handle 500 tons a year. So it's not large enough if we continue to grow to handle -- it's not large enough right now to handle all the material that we collect and we are actively looking for additional locations, working in conjunction with Parks & Recreation as well to try to expand that so we can continue to process more material.
Okay. How do you choose the rec centers that you're expanding to and is the plan to get to all of them?
We can say the initial recreation centers, there was outreach done to recreation supervisors by our Sustainability Director Natalie Walker and they continue to meet with the program staff to get more sites signed up. As you mentioned, it's a great opportunity to educate folks, young kids today who aren't being taught this at school or at home. So we do outreach through our Sustainability Director.
And how about to commercial businesses? Does your company try to break into them to get them to compost through you?
Yep. So we're currently -- in addition to over 6,000 households that we're picking up, we're picking up close to 100 businesses throughout the City and they kind of range in everything from a neighborhood coffee shop to -- and the smaller end to larger businesses, like Penn hotels, we work with the Phillies, with Ikea. So kind of across the spectrum of different food waste providers, but we're still just scratching the surface of what's out there.
Excellent. What are your barriers to expanding to more commercial spots? There's so many wonderful restaurants. I wish they would all compost.
Yeah. I mean, the barriers kind of fall into a couple of different categories. One which you kind of alluded to earlier is there's a limited amount of infrastructure in the region. If everyone in the Philadelphia region decided they wanted to compost all their food scraps tomorrow and there was money available to handle all of it, it's not possible today, right. So part of what we're trying to do is help to grow the infrastructure, not just our own facilities but in general. And that was really what was I think kind of beneficial with this partnership with Parks & Rec, was not only a partnership to operate a facility, but we work very closely with DEP on the state level to actually develop a brand new permit for Pennsylvania so that other people who want to open facilities, there's kind of a much more clear path on how to do it and is scaled in a way that makes it appropriate for urban composting facilities. So now that Parks & Rec and the City have gone through that process and they were awarded the first facility, other permits can be set up to increase that infrastructure issue.
Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you both so much.
I just had a quick question. Thank you, Councilwoman Rue Landau, for your questions. They were great. But I just have a quick question about the young people. A lot of us in City Council, including myself, are really excited about what we can do for the future of our youth in the City. And we were just curious about -- tell us more about examples of how you've provided education on composting to youth in the City.
Well, so we're doing the program with PPR and we're going to rec centers and educating, but we also at our own facility have hosted tours for schools and community groups to come in and kind of see the operation that we're doing. We're currently hosting two high school students from Lankenau High School. We're doing internships for the school year. We've hosted an additional student from Edison High School in the past. And I think we're kind of -- once we kind of have a sense that we can be in this facility for the long-term, and that's part of the reason why we're here, we can kind of expand that outreach to continue to invite more people in. We're working with Parks & Recreation to kind of do open tours once a month at the facility for both young people but also anyone who's interested in kind of learning about this. And I think once we get our feet planted and we know we're going to be here for the long-term, we can really engage in those kind of longer term commitments with the community and bringing in young people and seeing what kind of opportunities exist.
Also may I add, one of the things I've been able to observe over the years that recycling has become commonplace in the City, not everywhere, but it's pretty common. And I remember the times that recycling was a foreign concept to many people and it took a while for folks to get used to it. Actually it took a few citations, right, for that to happen. And now everyone wants their blue bin. What is it going to take for compost to become popular? And do you have any plans to make compost a popular thing where all of us are just automatically knowing, oh, this is compost, so how do we do that?
Well, I think there's a lot of different parts to that, right. And like you said, recycling was not commonplace at one point and now everyone wants a blue bin, right. And so, I think we have gained initial traction with this kind of fee-for-service model or the people that we're collecting compost from are paying for this service, right, but there are inherently limitations to how far that model can go. And that's why we're kind of excited to be partnering with community groups and we're actually partnering with the New Kensington CDC in Kensington to do some pilot programs in Kensington to explore alternative kinds of models, so alternative ways where people aren't having to pay for the service and how does that work and how do we do the education involved in that to kind of bring awareness and make people kind of understand what it is and remove the barriers to allow them to do that, right. So our kind of idea with this partnership is to test some of those models out, see which ones have gained some traction, which ones don't and then kind of go forward on how do we then expand those models, right, but I don't think our current model has been successful to (inaudible). That model doesn't get the entire City composting. And I don't know whether there's one model that does, but I think that we need to be trying lots of different models and we need to be working with as many partners as we can, whether it's a partnership with Parks & Rec, whether it's a partnership we currently have outside of here with Philadelphia Prisons to process their material onsite, whether there's these partnerships with community groups like the New Kensington CDC, whether it's working with the Streets Department or schools or neighborhood groups and kind of continuing to find these ways forward to make it so that more people are exposed to it. And the more people we have exposed to it, the more I think we get to how do we make this citywide and a program that's available to everyone. I think the work that we've done is incredible and I couldn't be happier with the employees that we have and how much they work and how smart they are and how talented they are and their backgrounds again from all over the City. But the more people we have kind of talking about this and thinking about this and normalizing it, the more likely we are to get to that solution. So I really applaud you guys for asking the questions and being here and kind of starting those conversations. And we are here, we're anxious to have as many conversations with people as we can. Anxious in a good way, excited, right. And I would say that we're going to continue to do what we do, but we also as a City resident and a parent in the City School District, (inaudible) will be 3 in September, we're excited to work with the rec center users and we're excited to figure out how to make these things more all over the place.
Thank you. Are there any questions from the Committee? (No response.)
So seeing that there's no further questions, I just want to quickly just say thank you for your testimony. Thank you for coming to Philadelphia City Council to talk about the importance of composting. There being no further panels to testi -- Clerk, are there any other panels for testimony today?
Okay. Clerk, will you please call the next panel to testify on Bill No. 15 240003.
Up next we have Justin DiBerardinis. He's the Executive Director of Tacony Frankford Watershed Partnership. (Witness approached Witness table.) MR. DiBERARDINIS: Hello, Chairmember or Chairperson Phillips. Hello, Councilperson Landau. I will keep it brief. I want to second what --
Before you go, can you please state your name for the record and you can proceed with your testimony. MR. DiBERARDINIS: Yes, absolutely. My name is Justin DiBerardinis. I'm the Executive Director of TTF Watershed Partnership and I'm here to speak in support of Bill No. 240003. So just want to reiterate and second everything that was said today about Bennett Compost, really tremendous mission, tremendous work. But one thing that I would like to add in here that I've been impressed with Bennett in just my four weeks working up here in the Tacony Creek Park is just how above and beyond they have gone as an organization and with this facility to be a support to our parking community targeted efforts up there. For instance, Parks & Recreation -- and thank you very much, Deputy Commissioner Buck, for setting this up -- has placed a CEO job training crew focused on Tacony Creek Park and those surrounding blocks. They're hitting shortdumping, they're hitting hotspots. They are moving down the litter load for the creek. And we can only do that because Bennett is providing home base for them so that these workers can have a place where they can have access to a clean bathroom, where they can have lunch and shelter from the elements. It's just a piece that we don't have there. And Bennett is not getting paid for that. We didn't have to twist arms. They are just doing that because it's just the right thing to do. So as they look for potentially other spots in the future, I just come here with full confidence that they are going to be a value added neighbor to any community that they come to serve. They are doing their core mission, but they are going above and beyond. And I would just say that's the reason I chose to drive down here today and not just send some testimony in. They're going above and beyond. And so, I just wanted to come down to share with you just how impressed I am of how they approach community and public service. So they're not a selfish user of these limited public facilities we have. They are a generous user. I've got vehicles that were stored there now -- they're bursting at the seams. They're going to need more space. So just put a pin in that. I'm sure they may be coming back to you for more in the future. Just couldn't be happier with that relationship, how they're working with the department. This is how we make great things happen in public spaces. It takes a lot of actors and they're one of them. So just wanted to share that and put that on the record, and I'm very happy that Parks & Rec is supporting their continued presence here.
Thank you so much for your testimony. Are there any other questions or comments from members of the Committee for this panel? (No response.)
All right. Thank you, Justin DiBerardinis, for coming today and thank you for all the work that you're doing with the Tacony Creek Park project and so forth. Thank you. Clerk, will you please call the next panel, if there are any, to testify on Bill No. 240003.
Yes. We have Sarah Claxton. (Witness approached Witness table.)
Thank you. I'm here to speak today in support of Bennett Compost. My family and I reside in East Mt. Airy and for nearly four years we've relied on Bennett Compost to collect and recycle our organic food and yard waste without fail. I appreciate how easy they make the process for their customers and their commitment to this work, especially as a gardner who benefits from the high quality compost they produce. Beyond their essential services, Bennett Compost is also deeply embedded in our community. They actively participate in local events, including providing compost education at the nearby public schools where my child attends. I believe their presence enriches Philadelphia, making them an integral part of our City's unique fabric. I ask that you consider the significance of Bennett Compost's contributions and support the extension of their contract with the City. Thank you.
Thank you for your testimony, Sarah Claxton. Are there any questions or comments from members of the Committee for this panel?
Thank you. Clerk, are there any other panels to testify on Bill No. 6 240003?
Seeing that there's no further questions and no further panels to testify today, I will ask if there's anyone here in the chambers to testify on Bill No. 240003 whose name has not yet been called? If so, please raise your hand. (No response.)
Seeing that no hands have been raised, Clerk can you please -- hold on. This con -- before I go, wait one second. The Chair recognizes, I want to -- this concludes the public hearing on Bill No. 240003. We will now go into a public meeting to consider the action to be taken on these bills. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Rue Landau for a motion on Bill No. 240003.
Thank you, Chair. I move that Bill No. 240003 be reported from the Committee with a favorable recommendation and further move that the rules of Council be suspended to permit first reading of this bill at the next session of Council.
Second. It has been moved -- we're going to recess for a quick second. (Brief recess.)
All right. We are resuming the Committee of Parks & Recreation and Cultural Affairs. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Landau for a motion on Bill No. 240003.
Thank you, Chair. I move that Bill No. 240003 be reported from this Committee with a favorable recommendation and further move that the rules of Council be suspended to permit first reading of this bill at the next session of Council.
And I also just want to note for the record that we have appointed by the Council President Quetcy Lozada here today and also for the record the presence of Councilmember Curtis Jones. It has been moved and properly seconded that Bill No. 23 240003 be reported from this Committee with a favorable recommendation and further move that the rules of Council be suspended to permit the first reading of the bill at the next session of Council. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye. (Aye.)
The ayes have it and the motion carries. Bill No. 240003 will be reported from this Committee with a favorable recommendation and request that the rules of Council be suspended to permit the first reading at the next session of Council. Any other questions from the Committee? (No response.)
There being no further questions from the members of the Committee and no 2 witnesses to testify, this concludes the business before the Committee on Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs today. Thank you all so much for your attendance. (Committee on Parks, Recreation & Cultural Affairs concluded at 1:55 p.m.) C E R T I F I C A T I O N I, hereby certify that the proceedings and evidence noted are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me in the foregoing matter, and that this is a correct transcript of the same. __________________________________ TANEHA CARROLL