Mayor Kevin Johnson announced Tuesday at his weekly press conference that an agreement reached with BLT In-Region, the city’s solid waste disposal company, will shrink Sacramento’s carbon footprint.

The agreement moves the solid waste dumping location from the Lockwood Landfill site in Nevada to Kiefer’s Landfill in Sloughhouse, Calif. This saves the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station (SRTS) vehicles more than 200 miles in travel time. The site in Nevada is 308 miles round-trip, while the new site is 28 miles round-trip.

“How crazy is it that we use diesel trucks to take our waste across the border to some other landfill when the answer was much easier?” Johnson said.

“It’s taken us two years, but we are finally working out a reciprocal relationship with the county in terms of taking advantage of our landfill and their landfill and swapping and making sure that we can do the haul of our waste locally.”

According to Johnson, this contract is smart because it will ensure preferred tipping rates from the county and decrease Sacramento’s carbon footprint.

“It makes good sense for us,” he said.

He added that even in a long-term contract, if new innovative technologies are found, the City of Sacramento will maintain the flexibility to alter what it’s doing, to make sure that it can take advantage of technologies that are on the horizon in the next three to five years.

Johnson also announced that the City Council will vote tonight on plan to right the wrongs responsible for the 38 permit violations charged against the City of Sacramento by FEMA last February. Kathleen Haley will write a story on the results.

In terms of a new downtown arena, the task force will reconvene Thursday as reported by Suzanne Hurt of The Sacramento Press.

Johnson also called for submissions for arena proposals – new proposals and previously submitted ones. He suggested that older submissions be tweaked so the concerns that came up in the first review process be addressed.

The Task Force will be accepting and reviewing proposals for the next month or so, according to Johnson.