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Health & Fitness

Lake Forest Trash Talk. Part 3 - A Flawed Model

In Part 1 we looked at the waste contract. In Part 2 we looked at some facts about waste in Lake Forest. Today I want to look at the issue of recycling, which is one of the main issues facing the city as we move forward.

The consulting company hired by the City to help us prepare an RFP recommended that we have 2 recycling coordinators, actively working for several years, to get our city up to compliance with the anticipated new regulations. The cost was estimated at between $60,000 and $80,000 per year apiece. Do the math and you’ll see that this would be nearly $1,000,000 for the coordinators alone.

Councilman Robinson has been the leader in questioning the need for two pricey coordinators. He asked the consultants to provide a justification, and they did, using data from Tustin and Mission Viejo, which the consultants described as “comparable cities”. Personally, I didn’t understand how Tustin or Mission Viejo were “comparable”, so I did some homework.

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DETERMINATES OF WASTE

To understand if we are “comparable”, from a waste disposal or recycling POV, I did a little research and discovered some of the relevant factors that influence waste disposal. Here’s a list, although bear in mind that as in most areas, there are no absolutes in this field and some of the relationships are complex.

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·  Income – richer people produce more waste

·  Age – older and younger produce less than middle agers

·  Population density – greater density produces less waste

·  Household size – smaller produces more per capita

·  Crime rate – higher crime is associated with more waste

·  Education – more educated produce less waste

These relationships are all more complex that I express here, but more or less, they are relevant factors. If that’s the case, I looked at these variables when looking at Tustin and Mission Viejo trying to see just how comparable we are.

TUSTIN

We do have approximately the same number of people (75,000) as Tustin, but we have significantly more space (18 square miles vs. 11) and hence significantly less density (4,300 vs. 6,800 people per square mile), much higher median income ($86,285 vs. $55,985) and fewer people living below the poverty line (5.3% vs. 8.5%), and a greater percent of whites (70% vs. 53%) and fewer Hispanics (24% vs. 40%). Lake Forest has significantly more people who own their own home (70% vs. 51%). 

Geographically the two cities are very different. Tustin is more square shaped and we are a long rectangle. Tustin has easy access to 3 major freeways (the 5, 55, and 261) and we have one freeway located at the far western end of the City

The two cities are hardly comparable!

MISSION VIEJO

Compared to Lake Forest, Mission Viejo has 20% more people in the same land base, giving a much higher density (5,200 vs. 4,300 people per square mile) than we have. They are even “whiter” than we are (80% vs. 70%), with fewer Hispanics (17% vs. 24%), and they have significantly higher median household income ($96,420 vs. $86,285) and fewer people below the poverty level (4.9% vs., 5.3%). Mission Viejo has significantly more people over 65 years (14.5% vs. 8.6%) and more people live in their own homes (77.6% vs. 70%).

Rather than being comparable, Tustin –> Lake Forest –> Mission Viejo are almost perfect examples of cities than exist on a continuum. Going from Tustin to Mission Viejo, we get increasingly more whites, fewer Hispanics, higher incomes, more older people, and more home owners.

COMMERCIAL WASTE

Of course, residential demographics are only one source of waste generation. So I looked at retail sales, which many studies point to as the largest predictor of waste generation from the commercial sector. Again, the cities are hardly comparable. Tustin generates $20,459,900 in sales tax while here in Lake Forest we anticipate a mere $12,600,000. The big surprise is Mission Viejo, far bigger in population than either LF or Tustin, yet only $14,271,000 in sales tax revenue.

I also looked at restaurants, since my review indicates that restaurants were a major contributor to waste generation in the commercial sector. According to Trip Advisor, MV has 142 restaurants, Lake Forest has 111, and Tustin has an incredible 178. Not very comparable, although you’ll notice the positive relationship between number of restaurants and sales tax generation.

Bottom line - whether we look at the demographics of the 3 cities or compare retail sales and number of restaurants, Tustin and Mission Viejo are not comparable with Lake Forest on a host of relevant dimensions.

ComparABLE OR JUST NOT ABLE?

So here we are on the threshold of a multi-year, multi-million dollar project that is going to impact the lives of people and businesses in Lake Forest, and the data being fed to the Council is patently invalid, at least with respect to two cities chosen to be used to model what should happen in Lake Forest. Why is that significant? Because if the work flow being ascribed to Lake Forest is based on findings in so-called comparable cities, which are not comparable to each other or to us, in virtually every important domain, how can we expect that the projections for what we should spend can be accurate?

Go one step further. If the consultants are wrong about this, what else are they wrong about? If our staff didn’t catch these palpable errors, what other errors haven’t they caught? 

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