Page 58 - MCAG - RWAD - AMB 09 10 19

Jerry Schuber

Monday, September 9, 2019 3:01 PM

Why are you interested in the Regional Waste Authority Director position with Merced County
Association of Governments? Tell me a bit about what you know about the Association.

I have been expanding my career now for the past 20+ years and have been working pretty hard to
expand the knowledgebase within the industry myself, except, I have not reached the level of Director
yet. The City of Fresno does not have a Director position - so it seems logical to move outside of Fresno.
I have worked with Brookes- I know that he worked directly with the Board - and made sure they were
meeting the State mandates for that region, which isn't unlike what I deal with here, except MCAG is a
little smaller. Our landfill is closed - I deal with a landfill outside of our region other than reporting to the
EPA. We serve on the SWANA Board recently. He doesn't know that I'm running for this position. I didn't
want to taint the pool.

Please describe your most recent position and day-to-day responsibilities.

I currently the Assistant Director of Public Utilities for the City of Fresno - we have 179 positions - 65
residential routes running four days a week, we have a homeless task force running 6 days a week. We
have operations that run seven days a week. We do liter controls, operation clean ups with bulky work,
we do special events with our recycling group and I have office as well as field staff that report to me. It's
green waste recycling as well as solid waste. I operate 2 solid waste franchises - as a City we only
collect the residential - the commercial is collected by franchises of which we have two - I also manage
those. I report to the Director. Director of Public Utilities.

Please provide any insights you might have managing solid waste divisions within the public-
sector.

I have 179 employees working, all but 22 are working out in the field. They are collecting municipal solid
waste, collecting recyclables - cleaning up litter, picking up after the homeless, maintaining the alleys.
We have to maintain safety and harness trust with the public. If I was going to give advice, it's know your
people, and know that the most valuable thing that we do is protect the public. I think a safety culture
and the safety of people around them is the most important thing we do. Make sure you maintain your
bottom line - one of the things we have been able to do here - is we have been able to get this division
into a place where we have been able to operate on our rates without an increase. The only way that
happens is if you manage your money very, very carefully. You have to be strategic in the way that you
plan your work so you don't overextend yourself.

Please describe your experience in evaluating technology and operational procedure utilized
in a department and your approach to implementing change, if needed.

I've had wins and losses there - we had a regional implementation where we did new training
techniques - to reproduce some new safety programs along with some video series where we began to
train our people around safe operations and those were wins. We've seen less incidents and accidents
in the field. So much so that I will be speaking with waste con - on the opposite side of that we have
been trying to put together some performance metrics in the trucks to put together data around what we
do each day - to see if we can't tailor our routes a little bit more to streamline the workloads and some of
our equipment has just not done what we ask it to. You really have to be willing to sit down and evaluate
the technology and have some pre-set requirements and if doesn't meet those than just not buying it. If
you're going to spend that kind of money to buy a product you need to make sure it does what you need
it to. Don't be in a rush- if you're going to buy the right piece of equipment.

Please describe a project in which you played a major role in creating pathways for
improvement for those in your community.