Norris residents face higher costs, decreased services for trash pickup
Chris Godoy, left, and Hunter Taylor empty recyclables into a Waste Connections truck in Norris on Tuesday morning. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Back-door pickup is going away for most customers, recycling pickups will be reduced to every other week instead of weekly, and the price of the service will be rising about $3.95 a month.
The City Council last week authorized City Manager Adam Ledford to finalize contract negotiations with the preferred bidder, Waste Connections, Inc., and come back to the council in its May meeting to get the new contract approved.
Waste Connections has the contract now, but it will expire June 30, and the company does not want to continue to provide back-door pickup, which Norris residents have been accustomed to for decades.
Only three refuse-collection services bid on the new contract, and none offered to provide the back-door service.
But Ledford said there will still be a few – out of the nearly 700 residential customers – who will get back-door pickups, because their properties are in areas where there is no way for them to put trash cans out to the curb on pickup days.
“There would be about 25 to 35 customers that have no other option,” he said.
“I expect to see a lot of frustration over this,” Ledford said. “There have been no changes to trash pickup in 20 or 25 years in Norris. But we’ve held this off as long as we possibly could.”
Under the current proposal, trash collection would rise to $22.05 per month for each residential customer, up from $18.10 now, Ledford said.
Mayor Chris Mitchell said earlier that the bid submitted by Waste Connections, which has held the contract for several years, would mean that residents “would be paying more for less.”
The council decided in January that it would rather seek bids on a new contract, after receiving a proposal from Waste Connections that would have raised the city’s monthly cost by $2,000, or about $4.29 per residential customer.
“We asked for bids to provide 100% back-door service, but none of the bidders offered that,” Ledford said.
That’s primarily because the new service will use trucks with automated pickup arms, which means no one will be walking along physically dumping trash containers into the backs of the trucks, he said.
To that end, everyone will be getting a new 96-gallon plastic trash can that is compatible with the truck’s robot arm, Ledford said.
Each resident will get one of those cans for garbage, at no charge. But if anyone needs an extra one, there would be a charge for that.
For recyclables, residents will be getting a different 96-gallon can, also compatible with automated pickup.
Although recyclables will be picked up only every other week, the new cans will hold a lot more than what residents are using now, Ledford said.
Residents will see the increased trash-collection fee beginning with the utility bills they receive in August, he said.
There is no provision for residents to decline the service to prevent having to pay for it, he added.
