The Shadow
Bruce McWilliams
Bath Chairman
Bruce McWilliams
Bath Chairman
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By Bruce McWilliams
Chairman, Bath County
Board of Supervisors
In a few months, a 10-year contract the County of Bath has had with Allied Waste Services will end.
As a board, we have been reviewing the services offered by Allied and the costs attendant to that service in anticipation of considering either a new contract with Allied or with another company.
This is the process we follow whenever making budgetary decisions on behalf of the county.
As taxpayers, you have a right to expect that we will choose to spend your money wisely and carefully when it comes to the services we provide.
This is why we have been engaging in many public conversations about the trash services we can expect to receive going forward and the costs involved with those services.
In reviewing this issue, we find the more we know, the more we need to know. We clearly do not have a good understanding of the true costs for servicing our communities’ solid waste needs.
So, what do we know? We know we generate approximately 5,000 tons of trash per year.
At the present time we budget $976,252 for trash services, or 9 percent of our total budget.
Or another way to look at it is for the 4,700 people we have in the county, we are paying $207.71 per person for trash service annually.
So, for a family of five, we pay $1,035, or $195.25 per ton. That’s a lot of money for trash.
Allied Waste Services provides the county with two trash compactors, roll-off container and recycling services, and transfers our trash from both the green boxes and the transfer station to the Old Dominion landfill in Richmond.
Jack’s Waste Services of Hot Springs currently operates the county’s Green Box Convenience Centers and hauls the waste from each center to the transfer station.
Allied hauls the waste to Richmond and disposes of the waste under its current waste services contract with the county. Fuel costs to drive the trash to Richmond are included in Allied’s haul and disposal service agreement.
With the cost of fuel today, this is a very expensive drive.
Over the years we have had a kind of band aid approach to this issue. The biggest band aid has been repairs to the transfer station. Small fixes have not solved design issues and the building will now require an estimated one-half million dollars to repair. The transfer station provides the community with a convenient location to dispose of white goods etc., but it is no longer safe to use. So, what do we do?
We have met with lots of people. We retained CHA Consulting Inc., a Blacks-burg-based engineering firm which prepared a municipal solid waste study to help us understand our revenues and expenses, including options for disposal of our trash as well as maintenance and repair costs to upgrade and repair our existing transfer station.
We have talked to our sister communities Covington and Lexington to see if we could transfer our trash to their landfills and at what cost?
We know we would save on fuel because the distance to these cities is much closer than Richmond, but we need to understand the disposal costs as well.
If we change companies, we will either need the new company to provide us with green boxes and compactors, or purchase them ourselves. And, we still have the projected half-million dollar repair costs to the transfer station to consider.
We know that whatever decision we make we want the transition to be seamless. You as the consumer will remain unaffected. You will not be billed for trash.
From your perspective it will be business as usual — except, that we expect to save the county several hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispose of its solid waste.
What are the next steps? We are currently developing an RFP (request for proposal) which will be sent out to companies that specialize in disposal of solid waste and recycling for counties and municipalities.
We are going to ask the companies that respond to the RFP to provide us with not only costs but recommendations about how to solve some of the issues we are considering.
The RFP should be ready soon. We hope by sometime in early November to have vendor response(s) to the RFP that address our concerns.
We will then begin the work of reviewing the recommendations and we will make some decisions based on what we learn. We hope to receive RFPs from current providers and new ones. The process is open to all bidders.
Our goals are simple. First, we strive to save money for the county while retaining a high level of service and convenience for our citizens.
We hope to improve accountability for services rendered and received. We would like to see some improved recycling capabilities.
Based on suggestions we might get from the RFP responses we receive, we may realize many more benefits. Time will tell.
We know for sure, the decisions will not be easy but the benefits will be enormous.
As always we welcome your input. Please feel free to contact any of the supervisors or Ashton Harrison, our new county administrator, for more information or to discuss your ideas or concerns.
