Curbside garbage pickup is unlikely to get rolling in the coming fiscal year, based on City Council members’ response to City Manger Eric Williams proposed 2005-06 budget Tuesday night.
Council members Mary Emma Evans and Mike Rainey nearly jumped out of their seats in their rush to reject the proposed shift from twice-a-week, backyard garbage pickup to once-a-week curbside collection.
That was one of “two proposals I expect to generate quite a bit of discussion,” Williams said in presenting his budget. The other, also a sanitation matter, is the manager’s suggestion that the city eliminate its curbside recycling program.
But there was hardly time to discuss the recycling proposal Tuesday; the garbage plan sparked enough talk.
Williams based both proposals on Pubic Works Director James Morgan’s suggestions in his budget submission in March. Both proposals received nothing but council criticism during earlier Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee meetings, so council members seemed surprised that Williams adopted the ideas in his budget.
The city manager said Henderson can’t afford to provide the highest possible level of garbage collection. He cited North Carolina League of Municipalities statistics that 78.8 percent of North Carolina cities collect garbage at the curb and that 77.9 percent collect garbage only once per week.
He said those number provide a clear benchmark for what Henderson should be doing. Council members, particularly Elissa Yount, have talked repeatedly this spring about the need to benchmark Henderson against other cities in North Carolina.
“It’s so costly to do what we do,” Williams said. “It’s simply an extremely high level of service that over time will only increase in cost.”
He said the proposed change in garbage service would reduce the need for sanitation workers, a staff cut that would occur through attrition, and would slash workers’ compensation costs. From a nonfinancial perspective, he said, the change would eliminate the need to have city workers traipse through people’s yards and would allow better coordination of sanitation services.
It’s an issue that has to be addressed, Williams said, although he acknowledged that this might not be the year.
Using a lease-payment plan in arrears, the city would buy $450,000 worth of rollout 90-gallon garbage bins to provide one to each of the roughly 5,800 residential sanitation customers. The capital expense would be put off until the next fiscal year.
Williams counted on saving $107,000 on personnel and $12,000 on fuel by making the garbage-collection switch. That means the City Council will have to come up with $119,000 in cuts elsewhere in the budget or add 2 more cents to Williams’ proposed 5-cent property tax rate increase to maintain backyard pickup.
The continuation of backyard pickup is clearly the direction the council is headed.
In a discussion that included seven of the eight council members (John Wester was absent), only Harriette Butler had anything positive to say about curbside garbage collection. She said the type of system Williams proposed is in place in a subdivision she owns outside the city, and her tenants have no problems or complaints about rolling the garbage to the curb once a week.
That argument didn’t sway anyone.
Evans was particularly vocal in her opposition to curbside garbage collection. “That would be a total disaster as far as I’m concerned.”
Evans said the city must take care of the elderly and physically limited residents who would have a tough time getting their garbage to the curb. Williams said the city would make arrangements for such people, but Evans was unmoved, reflecting the response she received from constituents when Morgan raised the idea.
“I don’t know which is going to cause more of an uproar,” Evans said, “the tax increase or the curbside garbage.”
Rainey won support for a compromise of sorts: backyard garbage collection once a week instead of twice. He asked the city staff to prepare figures on how that change would affect the bottom line.
Morgan in the past has said that cutting backyard pickup to once a week wouldn’t produce any savings because his crews would need almost twice as much time to haul double the amount of garbage to the trucks each time they came through.
“I disagree, because you only make one ride down that street instead of two,” Rainey said.
Evans said she fully agrees with Rainey’s proposal on cutting in half the frequency of backyard pickup.
Morgan will appear before the FAIR Committee on Thursday night to discuss his budget.