The last day of Fiesta Hermosa is the busiest, and no one has to tell Dave Felix. He collects bottles and cans from businesses and recycles them.
He’s been loading up the barrels on his truck for a year now, after beating a brain tumor and changing the direction of his life. And if the pier businesses keep squabbling with the city over trash, Felix might find more work downtown.
“It’s not the most glamorous job in the world, but I’d rather do this than anything,” Felix said while sorting bottles into barrels atop his truck.
Felix graduated from Redondo Union in 1988, married his high school sweetheart and went on to work as a sales representative for a major food service company. He was successful but his life was unbalanced, leading to a brain tumor. After 13 years, he took some time off, had surgery and a month later began recycling.
He designed the award-winning recycling system at his child’s school, Jefferson Elementary in Redondo, which lowered daily trash output from 16 bins at lunch to two. And he works with businesses to do the same: Produce less waste by recycling more, including glass, plastic, cardboard, metals and paper.
Felix also gives a small percentage of the money back to the business, or school, in the case of Jefferson, which has received $500 from Felix since he began the recycling program in October.
Felix said his business, RepoCycle, which includes a partner and second truck, has lowered the trash output of businesses enough that they have requested fewer trash pick-ups.
On Monday, the last day of the fiesta and the busiest, Felix hauled bottles down the stairs from Fat Face Fenner’s Fishack. A woman sitting beneath a popup tent in the parking lot handed Felix a cold bottle of water while he strapped a barrel to a dolly.
“He works hard. I’ve seen him all weekend,” she said later.
Felix is happy for the work, weighing 30 pounds less than when he wore a shirt and tie and slacks for his sales job.
Gary Vincent is glad for Felix’s work, too. Vincent, who owns Fat Face Fenner’s Fishack, said he became motivated to have a new recycling system at his restaurant while the city instituted a trash pilot program for several downtown businesses, including his own. The city’s health department cited businesses last fall for the unsanitary condition of the dumpster enclosures. The pilot program put into place soon after includes a Consolidated Disposal Service employee picking up garbage on the street, Vincent said, and his trash fees have soared from less than $100 to more than $700 a month.
Vincent said the increased trash fees, in combination with an increase in his business license fee this year from $3,000 to $7,000, makes it feel like the city is unfairly targeting downtown business. He said some downtown businesses are refusing to pay the new, higher trash fees.
“Why not use a guy like Dave, who not only takes away your product [but also] recycles it and puts it to good use,” Vincent said. “Now it minimizes the amount of trash that I’m putting on the city, and it really kind of undercuts their position that [the dumpster areas are] dirty and it’s out of control and it’s not being handled the right way.”
Vincent hired Felix two weeks ago, and predicts other businesses will hire Felix, too.
“Most of the businesses are on the same page. We would like to take that entire aspect away from the city and keep control of it. So not only do we recycle, but we’re able to take some of that profit that comes out of recycling and put it toward the education foundation or a charitable organization that can benefit from it.”
Frank Senteno, the city’s public works director, said the dumpster enclosure areas for pier businesses haven’t been properly maintained for years despite the city’s attempt to encourage businesses to keep them clean. The conditions of the dumpsters led to the health code violations last fall and the implementation of the porter pilot service system now in place. Under the current system, a porter picks up a business’s trash, throws it away and maintains the trash area.
“We’ve seen a huge improvement in the cleanliness of the site,” Senteno said.
Senteno said that businesses have seen an increase in their trash fees because for many years they weren’t paying a fair market rate, especially when compared to what other, similar businesses in Torrance and Redondo Beach pay for monthly trash pickup. Some were paying $50 a month for trash pickup when they should have been paying $500, Senteno said.
“I don’t know why there was such an imbalance. It goes back many, many years. And when they were brought up to what they should be paying, there was an outcry. And what we did was roll in that porter service as part of that trash bill,” Senteno said.
“Some of it consists of a market correction, and you’re going to pay more for the porter service because that’s above and beyond your trash service.”
Senteno acknowledged that businesses refusing to pay their trash bill is “a big issue.” The city recently received proposals from companies competing for the new solid waste contract, and Senteno said that whichever company is awarded the contract will work with the system now in place or a modified one.
“I’m hopeful we’ll come to a solution that works for everybody: the community, the downtown area and the businesses,” Senteno said.
After Felix unloaded the bottles from Vincent’s restaurant, he was headed to two establishments in El Segundo before making pickups at businesses in Redondo to finish his day. Felix ended up picking up a total of 3,000 pounds of glass on Monday, about double what RepoCycle normally takes in.
Fiesta Hermosa “kicks off the summer for our town here,” Felix said as he secured the barrels in his truck and prepared to depart downtown Hermosa.
“Oh, man, it’s amazing what one little town can do, and I’ll tell you, I don’t have everybody down here. The goal is to — someday.”
