Let the Trash Wars Begin

For the past seven years, Mario Borgatello and Stephen MacIntosh worked almost hand-in-glove to expand recycling opportunities throughout the South Coast. Now, they’re preparing to go head-to-head in what promises to be a prolonged and bruising battle over monopoly, competition, and garbage franchises.

Over the past 10 years, Borgatello — trash czar for the privately held and locally owned MarBorg Industries — has been spectacularly successful playing the role of David to Allied Waste’s monolithic Goliath. If MarBorg was infinitely smaller, Borgatello proved faster, shrewder, and bolder than Allied’s local executives, successfully prying away half the City of Santa Barbara’s $18-million garbage-hauling franchise. While preaching the gospel of old-fashioned competition, Borgatello practiced the nitty-gritty of recycling in ways that left Allied honchos — and their predecessors with BFI — choking on his dust. During much of that time, Borgatello worked closely with Stephen MacIntosh, an upstart city bureaucrat with a frisky entrepreneurial spirit who made his City Hall superiors more than a little nervous. A true believer when it came to recycling, MacIntosh pushed and prodded for a successful food-scrap program that not everyone in City Hall wanted to see happen. Likewise, MacIntosh pushed Santa Barbara’s dueling waste haulers to get more aggressive about commercial recycling.

This past spring, corporate executives with Allied’s $8.2-billion parent company — Republic Services — recognized that if they didn’t take immediate action, Borgatello would successfully run them out of town. In what Allied had complacently thought was an information-only Goleta City Council meeting in March to hammer out details of a competitive bidding process, Borgatello walked away with an exclusive franchise agreement worth an estimated $4.2 million. Only after the gavel came down did Allied grasp what had just happened.