Waste contract sent on to full council

PINE BLUFF — A new waste contract reviewed with the City Council’s Public Health and Welfare Committee has been referred to the full council for consideration.

If it passes muster with the City Council, the contract will give Waste Management of Arkansas another five years providing services to Pine Bluff residents and businesses.

Louise Sullivan, assistant to Mayor Shirley Washington, was given the task of reviewing the contract with Waste Management and reporting her findings, a process she told committee members Ivan Whitfield and Joni Alexander has been underway for a little over three months. Sullivan said an area of contention that was looked at closely was customer service and complaints that the company has not been responsive to customers in the past.

“We really started thinking about it way before then, but covid hit us and we couldn’t get really far into it,” she said. “But since July we’ve been actively working on it. The main thing I want you to be aware of is that customer service has been one of the key things that has been critical in all the phone calls we’ve been getting in the mayor’s office.”

Sullivan said she had received assurances from the company that the local Waste Management office would continue to take customer service calls and that the Franklin, Tenn., office would act as a backup.

“One of the key things we’ve had problems with has been responsiveness,” Sullivan told Whitfield and Alexander. “It’s just a long wait time before people can get in contact to talk to anyone, so they have committed to us response time is going be like nanoseconds going forward, or at least a couple of minutes, which is a major improvement.”

Another complaint the city has received dealt with is customer attainment of additional waste carts when needed.

“Now homeowners will be able to get additional carts,” Sullivan said, “and those additional carts will only be another $5 a month.”

She said at the current residential rate of $15.69 per month for waste pickup, the additional amount would take the bill to just over $20 a month.

“That hopefully will get rid of all these excessive bags that have been outside the garbage containers,” Sullivan said. “They’ve been concerned that if there are more than three extra bags in addition to a full container, that perhaps the resident should ask for an additional cart. That prevents the driver from having to get out and pick trash, or, when they use the lift, they won’t tear up the bags and scatter garbage all over the place.”

Debris pickup was another contract item Sullivan said was addressed in the new contract. She said the company agreed to have its boom truck accompany the trash truck on its daily routes.

“For instance, my pickup day is Wednesday,” she said. “So they’ll have the boom truck going through my neighborhood on Wednesday picking up debris.”

Sullivan added that for excessive debris removal, residents can call 48 hours ahead of their garbage pickup time and arrange to have the debris removed along with their garbage pickup.

Whitfield and Alexander agreed to send the contract to the full council for review at the next meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Monday at the Convention Center.

Whitfield, who chairs the Public Health and Welfare Committee, asked Sullivan to appear before the council that evening to give a five- minute presentation on the contract. He said all council members would receive a copy of the contract but asked that Sullivan be available to help walk everyone through it.

“I think if you take five minutes to do that it’s going to help us,” he said.

Alexander floated a proposal that the city give employees in City Hall the day of Nov. 3 off so as to allow a cleaning crew to sanitize the building of any potential coronavirus contamination.

By doing so on Election Day, Alexander said, employees could be encouraged to sign up as poll workers, thus helping to alleviate a shortage at Jefferson County’s 39 voting sites.

“By giving city employees a paid day off, they could be encouraged to sign up as poll workers and make, what is it, an extra $150 that day?” Alexander said. “We do need more poll workers, City Hall needs to be sanitized, and those two could go hand in hand. When I talked to Council Member Whitfield, he felt the same.”

Sullivan pointed out that most city employees are operating under a shared workday program as a way of cutting payroll expenses during the covid-19 crisis, with those days off coming at varying points during the week.

“This would be just a oneday event, coming on a Tuesday,” Whitfield said. “That would be the day of reckoning I think she’s talking about.”

“I’m proposing it now so that maybe we can have something in by tomorrow,” Alexander said. “I think it would promote voter turnout and volunteerism because they do need more poll workers. If we could get at least 20 people to sign up and volunteer, I think that speaks volumes.”

Alexander said she would speak with the city attorney’s office to determine the legality of such a measure and if it passed legal muster, she and Whitfield agreed to pose the question before the council Monday night.