Council resists changes to recycling, garbage pickup


City Council members showed no interest Thursday night in a proposal to change everything about Henderson’s handling of home garbage.

Public Works Director James Morgan brought the planned revamp to the council as part of his budget request for the fiscal year that starts July 1. His department, which includes the city garage, Elmwood Cemetery maintenance and street maintenance in addition to sanitation, took up most of the third night of budget presentations to the council.

All council members except Harriette Butler attended Morgan’s presentation. Not one spoke in favor of his garbage plan, although a couple at least held off criticism because this week’s series of departmental budget talks are about gathering information, not setting policy.

But Morgan’s budget depends on the sanitation policy, and the ideas he presented in his budget have been shot down in the past.

First, Morgan wants to eliminate the curbside recycling program. People would have to take their recyclable goods to one of Vance County’s manned convenience sites or throw them away in the trash.

Second, Morgan wants to end backyard pickup of garbage and cut garbage collection to once a week.

In an interview Thursday afternoon, Morgan said he was prepared for attacks on his plans: “Some folks are going to be angry. … I’m going to hear a lot of complaints.”

Thursday night, it was hard to tell which idea council members liked less.

“His strategy is to create such a controversy … he can slip that truck in unnoticed,” joked City Manager Eric Williams, referring to Morgan’s request to purchase a $100,000 garbage truck in the coming year.

Morgan explained his reasoning for the service overhaul in sanitation.

In recycling, the argument is basically the same as it was three years ago when the city floated the idea of eliminating home pickup of glass, aluminum, plastic and newspaper.

The city’s recycling contract with Waste Industries cost $140,113.32 this year, and that company wants to raise the price to $142,915.59 in the next fiscal year. For that price, each of the roughly 5,300 homes in the city gets recycling picked up once every two weeks — if the residents drag the green recycling bin from the house to the roadside.

Morgan said only 42 percent to 43 percent of city residents participate in the curbside recycling program at least once a month. “We’re paying Waste Industries to ride down the street and not pick anything up.”

The public works director said he believes that those recyclers would be willing to drive a few miles to bring their goods to one of three county manned convenience sites close to the city: on Brodie Road, on Warrenton Road and at the old county landfill on N.C. 39.

“If anyone wants to recycle, they’ve got a place to do it,” Morgan said in the interview. “The people that’s going to recycle, they’ll do that. The ones who aren’t wouldn’t recycle if I parked a truck right in front of their house.”

“We talked about doing away with recycling, and they descended on us like a bomb,” council member Ranger Wilkerson said, referring to a budget proposal three years ago to eliminate the curbside program.

“All 14 or 15 of them,” council member John Wester said. That vocal group included Lynn Harper, who became chairwoman of the Clean Up Henderson Committee a year later, and Elissa Yount, who was elected to the City Council the next year.

With Harper in attendance Thursday night, Yount barely waited until Morgan had the proposal out of his mouth before she launched an attack on the idea as the death of recycling in Henderson.

“What are we going to do when the landfills are full?” Yount asked. “We’ve got to look to the future.”

She said she couldn’t see any savings in eliminating curbside recycling. First, she said, the city would wind up having to pay to put far more garbage in the landfill. Second, she said, the city would have to cut $2 off the monthly sanitation fee because that money was added specifically to cover the cost of the recycling contract.

That fee brings in about $127,000 a year, so eliminating the fee and curbside recycling would be produce only a small benefit to the bottom line. If Henderson ended the recycling program but kept at least part of the fee, the move would improve the city’s cash flow.

Yount said any such savings would be consumed by higher garbage costs and would be wrong anyway. She said that instead of using the low participation rate as a reason to kill the program, the city should work to educate the public on the importance of recycling, financially and morally, and should mandate participation, perhaps after a one-year grace period of enhanced education.

Council member Lonnie Davis asked whether he would face a ticket if he failed to bring the blue bin to the curb. Yount said people would get tickets if recyclable goods were found in their garbage. How anyone would know the content of the garbage was not discussed.

“I see the day in the near future when we’ll be required to recycle, so I can’t see backpedaling now,” she said. “This is a progressive idea. Anybody looking at Henderson would consider this both progressive, both ethical, both moral, both cost-efficient. Everything about this is good. Take it away, I can’t see a good point.”

Morgan noted that he did not include the recycling expense in his $1,022,100 sanitation budget for fiscal 2006. That’s little changed from the $1,009,270 Morgan expects to spend in the current fiscal year and is less than the $1,025,711 the City Council authorized this year.

Williams said curbside recycling seems to be threatened in many cities.

“Fuel costs are going to kill recycling,” Wester said.

“You can pay now or pay later,” Yount replied. “When that landfill is full, what are we going to do? I asked that, and no one can answer it. The only way to keep landfill from filling up is recycling.”

The departmental budgets covered spending rather than revenue, so Morgan did not address the issue of the $2 monthly recycling fee in his written proposal. Thursday night, however, he said he would like to keep the fee for a year help pay for $90 rolling garbage cans for everyone in the city.

That $450,000 expense would be necessary for the more controversial second half of Morgan’s sanitation double whammy: He wants to end Henderson’s cherished twice-a-week back-door garbage collection.

Instead of putting their garbage in backyard containers, where sanitation workers collect it in rolling bins of their own to get the garbage to the trucks, each household would have its own rolling bin. Residents would be responsible for wheeling the bins down to the roadside, and sanitation workers would push the bins the few feet to the end of the garbage truck.

The trucks have been set up for such a system for five or six years, Morgan said. He said most families won’t fill a 90-gallon container in a week, so twice-a-week pickup wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

Morgan said the change would save his workers from tromping through people’s back yards and would avoid any confusion over whether bags left in the back are garbage. The change also would be safer for employees, Morgan said, because they would not have to handle the garbage bags and would be exposed to less danger from traffic.

The change would be an expense in the first year because of the investment in garbage containers. Over time, Morgan said, the change would produce significant savings because he would need fewer garbage trucks and fewer employees, “which only makes sense to me.”

In the interview, Morgan said other cities have cut their garbage crews by a third or even in half after making the change he envisions for Henderson. He said he thinks he could cover the city with four trucks instead of six; cutting two crews would eliminate the need for six people.

Morgan proposes cutting those positions by attrition. He has plenty of work on streets and cleanup to keep those workers beneficially busy until the staff shrinks.

Once the transition is complete and the staff is reduced, Morgan said, the city could cut $10 to $12 per month off the sanitation charge.

If cost is the main consideration, Wester said, Henderson should eliminate the sanitation division and contract out for garbage collection. That would save the city from buying the $100,000 garbage truck Morgan is requesting.

But Wester doesn’t expect privatization of garbage pickup, and he doesn’t want the shift to curbside collection. “As dirty as our town is now … we’re going to have the biggest backyard messes this community has ever seen if we require curbside pickup.”

Cleaning up additional trashed lots would consume much of the savings from having fewer garbage crews, Wester said.

Council member Mike Rainey’s biggest concern, shared by Wilkerson, is the hardship curbside pickup would create. “You’ve got a bunch of senior citizens who can’t hardly walk to their car,” let alone push a big garbage container to the curb, Rainey said.

Morgan said his department would make special arrangements for people who couldn’t get the bins to the roadside. He noted that of the 5,300 homes in the city, only 19 have made special arrangements because the residents can’t get their blue recycling bins to the street.

Yount worried that 90-gallon containers lining both sides of the streets once a week would make some roads impassable to the garbage trucks.

“The bins aren’t that big,” council member Bernard Alston said.

“They’re pretty big,” Yount said.

Morgan said he doesn’t foresee a problem. Unless council members are more open to the proposal than they showed Thursday night, Henderson won’t ever see whether he’s right.