Public Works Director James Morgan left a City Council committee meeting Thursday night with one guaranteed vote in favor of curbside garbage collection and one equally certain vote against. “That’s 1-1 so far,” Morgan said. “That’s better than in the past.”
The Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee did not take a vote on the proposal to replace twice-a-week backdoor garbage pickup with weekly curbside collection but spent more than an hour listening to Morgan’s reasoning. The council members also heard from Morgan and City Manager Eric Williams about a plan to eliminate curbside recycling.
Both changes to the sanitation program are part of Williams’ proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1. For the council to maintain the status quo — recycling collected at the curb once every two weeks and garbage picked up at the back door twice per week — it will have to find roughly $180,000 in increased revenue or reduced spending to keep the budget balanced.
Thursday’s meeting did not delve into financial details for the coming fiscal year, however, as much as it examined the long-term implications of the garbage change. Even that full hearing was an improvement from Morgan’s standpoint: When he presented his proposed departmental budget to the FAIR Committee in April, he spent most of his time listening to council criticism.
This time, Morgan did the talking.
He said curbside garbage collection would be safer for his staffers, four of whom suffered injuries just last week on the job; cleaner, largely because less garbage would escape the 90-gallon rolling bins the city would buy for all houses; and cheaper, because garbage collection would require far fewer people and would wear out $100,000 trucks far less often.
Morgan said all he wants to do is shift Henderson to the level of service that is the municipal standard. Williams’ budget cites North Carolina League of Municipalities statistics from 2003 showing that roughly four-fifths of the state’s cities collect garbage at the curb, and a similar number collect garbage only once a week.
People who move to Henderson are always surprised to learn about the garbage collection system, Morgan said, and many choose to bring their garbage to the street rather than have sanitation workers go into their back yards.
He said at least 25 of the city’s 5,800 sanitation customers bought their own rollout bins to take the garbage to the street. FAIR Chairman Bernard Alston said he’s one of them.
Under Morgan’s plan, the city would spend $450,000 to buy such wheeled garbage containers for all sanitation customers. Williams proposes to use a lease-purchase plan that would spread out and delay the expense. He advised the council that maintaining the current garbage system would add $119,000 to the Public Works Department budget.
Morgan said it could take a year for the savings from curbside collection to kick in. He wants to cut the sanitation staff gradually through attrition rather than fire workers to adjust to the reduced labor requirements of curbside pickup.
Council member Mary Emma Evans wondered what those extra workers would do during the period of attrition. Morgan said there’s always work to do in cleaning up the city, and he has continual staff turnover. At the moment, he has one frozen position and two vacancies in sanitation, and three of his workers are temps from Staffmark.
The lower sanitation costs should allow the city to cut the monthly sanitation fee included in city water bills. That fee is now $25, including $2 for the recycling program.
“That will make the majority of the people of Henderson happier,” said council member Harriette Butler, who said the water bill, including the sanitation fee, is the biggest complaint people have when they visit the Municipal Building.
To round out the discussion, Council member John Wester raised the question of privatizing the sanitation operation.
Morgan said that every time he has looked into the possibility, he has found that a contractor would cost the city more than keeping the operation in house.
Morgan said he, like many Vance residents outside the city, pays Waste Industries to collect his garbage at the curb once a week. The cost is about $20 per month.
That’s less than the $23 the city charges for garbage collection, but the city provides a much higher level of service.
As for council member Mike Rainey’s idea of keeping backdoor garbage collection but cutting its frequency to once a week, Morgan said that would be “a step back” and would save nothing.
He said his crews would have to put in double the effort to haul a week’s worth of household garbage from the back yard to the garbage truck. Some homes would require two trips to the back door to clear all of the garbage. As a result, Morgan said, his crews couldn’t complete their routes in a day.
Rainey and council member Mary Emma Evans seemed skeptical that cutting the number of pickups in half wouldn’t save anything. Rainey asked why it would be different to pick up once a week on the street than once a week in the back.
Morgan explained that once-a-week collection from the back door could take five minutes, while curbside pickup, which involves positioning the rolling bin to be dumped into the garbage truck, would take about five seconds.
Asked by Evans what his staff thinks about the proposal, Morgan said: “The would love to go to the curb. We’ve been talking about it for five years.”
He said his collection workers face a variety of hazards in people’s back yards. Some have been bitten by dogs. Others have been cut by pieces of glass or needles hidden inside the garbage bags they handle. At least two have suffered serious knee injuries from stepping into holes. One of those two never could return to work and wound up taking a workers’ compensation settlement. The elimination of those dangers should reduce workers’ comp costs.
Butler said the move to the curb would protect sanitation workers and earn them the respect they deserve. She said one of the council’s primary duties is to look after the city employees.
Evans said the sanitation workers have a dangerous job and should be better paid because of that fact, but her primary responsibility is to represent her constituents. And she said they have overwhelmed her with opposition to curbside garbage collection.
Rainey said people on the street have stopped him to complain about the proposal and to threaten to bring 2,000 people to the Municipal Building to protest.
Evans said she will vote against curbside collection. Butler said she will vote for it. None of the other four council members at the meeting made such a commitment. Elissa Yount and Ranger Wilkerson were absent.
None of the council members committed to vote a particular way on the proposed elimination of curbside recycling collection.
Henderson’s month-to-month recycling contract with Waste Industries will cost more than $145,000 in the coming year if the city continues its program as is. The $2-per-month recycling fee brings in about $132,000 per year.
For that money, Waste Industries empties plastic bins left by the road across the entire city once every two weeks.
But a program that initially drew 95 percent participation now gets 44 percent, Morgan said. He argued that those 44 percent are committed recyclers and will carry their glass, plastic, aluminum and newspaper to the county’s manned convenience sites to continue recycling if the curbside program ends.
Morgan said the city is providing a redundant service because the county has three dropoff sites for recycling within a mile of the city limits. He also estimated that the recycling program cuts only two compacted truckloads of garbage out of the city’s landfill shipments each month.
Butler asked whether an insert could be included in the water bills to notify people about those manned convenience sties and their hours. The Clean Up Henderson Committee sent out that information in 2003, and Morgan said it would be easy to do it again.
As he had with garbage, Rainey suggested cutting the frequency of the service, rather than eliminating the service, to save money on recycling. He said that if the city asked Waste Industries to collect recycling only once a month, the cost of the contract should drop by tens of thousands of dollars.
Morgan said he’ll ask, but he doubts Waste Industries will cut the price much. When he studied the issue in the past, the current frequency of service was the best financial deal.
As he and Williams explained the situation, Waste Industries allocates a certain portion of its staff and its capital costs to the Henderson contract. Those costs aren’t flexible, so the contractor won’t necessarily see a reduced frequency of pickups as producing any savings.
Williams is bracing for criticism of the recycling plan at Monday’s public hearing on the budget, although he dismissed any characterization of the response at a recycling public hearing three years ago as great public outcry. He said 12 people spoke, including multiple members of one family.
The city manager said that response was not overwhelming. He did not say how many speakers would constitute any overwhelming response. As a reference point, it took only about a dozen speakers from auto repair facilities in the city and the Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction this spring to slam the brakes on the proposal to force grandfathered auto shops and junkyards to conform to zoning rules.
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