Will GFL build Peoria's needed landfill?

The man who owns the company that the City of Peoria and Peoria County have said has dragged its feet on building Landfill #3 isn’t playing the Blame Game, reportedly telling officials that they’ll fulfill the deal.

Patrick Govigi, 45 years old this month, didn’t play games at the Civic Center Arena either, despite being a goaltender for New Orleans when that team and the Rivermen were in the same league. Soon after that near-miss, he left hockey, saying he felt others were in control of his future.

His future was – is – in trash.

Growing up in Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, with a backyard rink his dad built, and Chicago Blackhawks legends Phil and Tony Esposito his cousins, Dovigi playing hockey was natural, he said.

“In Sault Sinte Marie, playing hockey is like drinking water,” he told Canadian Business in 2022.

Eventually, Dovigi would play hockey for 15 years, including 156 games in the minor leagues between 1995- 1999.

After hockey and jobs in finance (See Timeline below), Dovigi founded GFL (Green For Life) Environmental in 2007. Based in metro Toronto GFL now serves millions of households through hundreds of municipal contracts in Canada and the United States, plus thousands of industrial and commercial customers.

From its modest beginning, Dovigi saw opportunities.

“What I noticed about the industry was that most people working in it didn’t question how they could improve it, because they had grown up in it,” he told the Toronto Star last year, “— meanwhile, they were upholding processes from the ’90s.”

He started bundling different environmental services under one company. Now, GFL is a one-stop shop with more than 20,000 employees, offering various services such as collection, hauling, sorting, transfer and disposal of non-hazardous solid waste; identification, collection, transporting, processing, recycling and disposal of some hazardous and non-hazardous liquid wastes; and infrastructure services, including site excavation, demolition, shoring and foundations, soil retention and remediation, it’s said.

Besides the umbrella approach handling most steps in managing waste, GFL’s business model has revolved around aggressive growth. For example, the corporation in 2020 spent $835 million to buy 86 waste-collection assets in 10 U.S. states – landfills, garbage collection operations, and transfer stations. The next year its 31 takeovers included PDC in Peoria, where its fleet of 5-ton, lime-green trucks seem to be everywhere. Less visible is the commitment GFL acquired in in the purchase – to build Landfill #3.

GFL didn’t respond to a call requesting comments.

Most mergers and acquisitions are funded by loans, and GFL owes a lot of money. Some value GFL at about $19 billion, although its net income hasn’t grown along with its revenues. That surprises some people.

“We completely normalized this concept of no profit,” said Wall Street Journal reporter Elliot Brown, co-author of The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.

“Investors are so taken with the prospect of technological evolution that private backers are stretching the limits of reasonable investments and valuations,” Brown told the Globe and Mail in 2021, “– a mindset that’s also bleeding into public markets,”

Persevering – prospering – with sizable debt might compare to hockey. Compiling debt by buying companies but showing little profit while continuing to grow is like a goalie making dramatic stops at the net for a losing team that still draws crowds.

But the model has worked for him personally. Dovigi’s a financial success, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. One of Canada’s highest-paid CEOs, his compensation last year reportedly totaled $49.7 million in U.S. dollars, up some $10 million from 2020.

Dovigi’s also a philanthropist and an employer praised for paying a living wage, according to the Niagara Poverty Reduction Network in Ontario. He helped create a sports medicine clinic and has served on foundation boards working on environmental research and a hospital, and has helped Habitat for Humanity and the National Ballet of Canada. He bought naming rights to a sports/entertainment venue in Toronto, and has had homes there, Aspen, Miami, and even a small island in Ontario. He’s owned jets and yachts.

In fact, last November and December, during debates about the local control and costs of private vs. public residential trash collection, the head of Winnipeg’s Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local addressed city committees and blasted granting hefty contracts to private companies when public services could do the work.

"I think that Winnipeggers would prefer to see their money stay there within the economy, not buying a $350 million yacht," said Gord Delbridge, holding aloft a photo of Dovigi’s yacht, which is longer than a football field, has a crew of 26 to help up to 14 guests experience its garden, pool, small cinema, etc.

Delbridge added, “The ability to be able to evolve and adapt [quickly is] tough for us to do when we are 100% controlled by … the private collection business that is often profit-driven,” according to CBC News.

However, Dovigi doesn’t seem any more fazed by controversies than a confident goalie guarding against a power-play attack.

Dovigi’s faced criticism from shareholder opposition to his compensation; Moody’s Investors Service downgrading GFL and rating its debt as junk; Canada’s Competition Bureau objecting to GFL’s proposed consolidation of waste-management services in Western Canada; and a New York hedge fund’s 2020 report that criticized GFL’s “extremely aggressive and opaque business model,” remarking that its stock was “worthless.”

Dovigi dismissed the report as flawed and self-serving.

“It’s just crazy stuff you read online,” he told the Toronto Star last year. “Canada can be a weird place — we don’t celebrate success as much as we should; we try to knock the guy on top. But in my time as a goalie, I developed the habit of not reading the paper during the highs, or the lows … play the game and block the noise.”

Another Wall Street firm, Simply Wall St, notes that GFL’s annual revenues increased yearly since 2020 and predicts this could be the year GFL turns a profit. But the investor analysts temper that enthusiasm. Commenting about GFL’s “debt-to-equity ratio of 118%,” Simply Wall St added, “Generally, the rule of thumb is debt shouldn’t exceed 40% of you equity, and the company has considerably exceeded this. Interest payments are not well covered by earnings.

“A higher debt obligation increases the risk around investing in the loss-making company.”

Meanwhile, the risk of Peoria’s needed landfill expansion not being ready is real, according to local officials.

A new permit application was filed with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, which has 90 days to act, but if Landfill #3 started this fall, it wouldn’t open before the spring of 2026, long past when existing landfills reach capacity. And despite GFL assurances, the original construction bid hasn’t been updated.

“A promise isn’t progress,” one local official commented. “They say they’ll build it, but they don’t want to.”

In fact, in a GFL report at June 19's meeting of the Peoria Landfill Commission, the corporation proposed delaying construction of Landfill #3 for another 15 years.

 

Timeline for GFL & its CEO

1979

Patrick Dovigi was born that July 2 and grew up in Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, where his Italian-immigrant parents were teachers. He became active in hockey, and by the age of 14 moved to Waterloo and lived with a host family while playing for the Elmira Sugar Kings of the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League.

1996-98

After two seasons for the minor-league Eric Otters, Dovigi was drafted by the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers as a goaltender in the 41^st round, and he was on the 1997-98 roster of the New Orleans Brass in the East Coast Hockey League.

2000

Following two more seasons in the Ontario Hockey League, he quit hockey and enrolled at Ryerson University in a business program.

2001-04

Dovigi’s jobs included a construction-equipment and auto leasing company, then he was hired by Brovi Investments, working in corporate finance. There, he helped a venture with KISS’s Gene Simmons called NGTV, but it went out of business. Dovigi also became familiar with the waste management business, called to deal with a sour investment – a mismanaged firm that required years of cleaning up.

2007

Dovigi left Brovi, and launched Green For Life Environmental with seed money of about $250,000 and fewer than a dozen employees. Specializing in buying smaller waste-management companies, GFL’s business and revenues – and debt – grew, becoming one of North America’s biggest waste-management companies.

2018-20

Dovigi started, then postponed, Initial Public Offerings to take GFL public, completing the change in 2020.

2021

In one year, GFL acquired 31 waste-management companies, including PDC in Peoria, where one of its responsibilities is the planned Landfill #3.

Since

Peoria’s landfill complex outside Edwards is owned by the City of Peoria and Peoria County. Its Landfill #1 section was full by 1998, and Landfill #2 (operated by Waste Management, Inc.) is expected to reach capacity this year. Landfill #3 was anticipated to be in operation by this year, but it’s not even started after years of delays.

In April, Peoria County served GFL a breach-of-contract notice, but weeks later at a meeting of local officials and GFL representatives, including Dovigi, GFL reportedly said it honors its contracts.