Civil Municipal Magazine - Dec 2023

152 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 12 With more than 360 employees, MDRR serves nearly 300,000 residents and thousands of businesses throughout Contra Costa and Solano Counties. Since its beginnings as a garbage company in the 1930s, MDRR has grown into a trusted, proven, and essential provider of trash, recycling, and organics collection and processing services. A long- standing business partner with the City of Pittsburg, MDRR has fulfilled the community’s waste removal needs since the 1970s. Key aspects of the company’s operations – including its cutting-edge recycling facility, innovative reuse program, and a high-performing customer service center – are also located within the city limits. “Part of what makes MDRR unique is that we divert 90 percent of the material we collect away from the landfill,” says Director of External Affairs Sal Evola. “We know the City of Pittsburg shares our commitment to protecting the environment and we work hard every day to help keep this community pristine.” MDRR offers additional services, such as debris box rentals and construction and demolition processing. Residents can also take advantage of one-stop-shopping when they offload bulky and hard-to-recycle items while sourcing products like compost and bark at MDRR’s recycling center at 1300 Loveridge Road. For more information, visit: https://mdrr.com/ Honored to Be Part of the Pittsburg Community PI T TSBURG , CAL I FORNIA Pittsburg was originally settled in 1839 when a land grant of almost 10,000 acres was issued to Jose Antonio Mesa and his brother Jose Miguel by the Governor of Mexican California, before the territory became a U.S. state. The area was known as Rancho Los Medanos, which translates as “inland sand dunes,” a reference to the topography that characterized its location between the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta, and the foothills of Mt. Diablo. In 1849, during the California Gold Rush, a former New Yorker, Colonel Jonathan D. Stevenson, bought the ranch and laid out a town he called New York of the Pacific. It soon became a stopping point for schooners traveling from San Francisco to the gold county further inland. In 1859, coal was discovered in the nearby town of Nortonville, and with the building of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Railroad, New York became a port for the transportation of this new commodity. Steam-powered coal cars offloaded their bounty onto awaiting ships at the waterfront. By the late 1860s, the town began to be known as Black Diamond. The coal boom ended by the early 1880s, but by that time, commercial fishing had already become a prominent industry in Black Diamond due largely to the talents of immigrant families from the Italian region of Sicily. The town boasted a network of fishermen, canneries, and boat builders that dominated the waterfront for the next 80 years, only ending in 1957, when the State of California banned commercial fishing in the Sacramento Delta. Pittsburg is a vibrant and growing community of approximately 77,000 that is, once again, facing a period of profound change.