Strickland calls for overhaul of trash services
Waste Pro will take over after contract canceled
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said Friday he’ll ask the City Council to spend millions of dollars to overhaul trash services.
He said the city plans to pay the company Waste Pro to fill out the canceled contract of Inland Services. He also said the city plans to hire more sanitation employees and acquire new trash vehicles.
And he proposes moving the city’s solid waste operations into a separate division within city government. Solid waste operations are currently part of a larger department, and the mayor said making them an independent division – a return to an old system – would likely improve managers’ ability to focus on trash pickup and improve service.
Strickland’s statements followed news on Thursday that he was ending Inland Services’ contract early due to poor performance. People had complained for months about trash sitting on curbs uncollected.
Inland Services serves about onefifth of the city’s 174,000 solid waste customers, or about 35,000 in all, mostly in Cordova and Hickory Hill. City government sanitation crews serve the rest of the city.
Strickland said the hiring and other proposed changes will improve services for residents, especially when it comes to pickup of yard waste and similar waste that doesn’t fit in regular containers.
Strickland told reporters at City Hall that the plan will cost between $6 million and $15 million. He proposes taking the money out of city reserves and said he’ll present the plan to City Council members on Tuesday and ask their approval.
Much of the money will go toward hiring Waste Pro to serve out the re-
maining months on the canceled contract of Inland Waste, said Patrice Thomas, the city’s deputy chief operating officer. The city anticipates putting additional money into the contract because Waste Pro’s service cost is expected to be significantly higher than that of Inland Waste, she said.
Inland Services is expected to serve for a few more weeks until Waste Pro takes over.
“Inland is contractually obligated to provide services in the next 30 days, but there will be hiccups in the transition of this service over the next few weeks from Inland to Waste Pro,” the mayor said.
After that, Waste Pro will serve out the remaining months on Inland Services’ contract, until June of next year.
“And this fall, we’ll be putting the long-term contract out for bid,” Strickland said.
The mayor said many current problems have to do with yard waste that doesn’t fit in a trash bin. Under current rules, residents are asked to call 311 to schedule pickup of such waste, and the city has up to 21 days to come get it.
But the mayor said many people don’t know they have to call 311, and that even when they do so, the city sometimes misses pickups. He said the proposed changes, including the extra staff and additional equipment, should allow the government to speed up pickup of this trash by this fall.
“Once all this comes together – likely by October – we’ll have the necessary people and equipment to pick up garbage outside the cart every other week,” the mayor said. “And without calling 311.”
The city’s solid waste management unit is currently a part of the city’s larger Public Works Division, which also handles items including streets, sanitary sewers, storm drains, bridges and flood control.
Strickland argues that making solid waste its own division within city government would allow for better focus on improving trash service.
The city has no current plans to increase trash fees, but might do that down the road, he said.
City Council member Martavius Jones said he and the other council members hear more complaints about slow trash pickups than almost any other problem. If the city could control trash pickup problems, satisfaction with government services would increase greatly, he said.
He said the deputy chief operating officer had called him on Thursday to discuss the mayor’s plan.
“One thing that I mentioned to her, I think that Memphians can be a bit nostalgic from the standpoint a lot of us recall when Memphis was named the cleanest, the most beautiful city,” he said.
(The city won the national “cleanest city” distinction more than once, beginning in 1948.)
“We want to get back to that,” Jones said. “I would say that everybody would agree that we are far from having that distinction right now. And I think that it’s something that’s important to most of the folks that we serve.”
He said he looks forward to learning more about the mayor’s plan on Tuesday.
Efforts to reach representatives of Inland Waste and of AFSCME Local 1733, the union that represents city sanitation workers, weren’t successful on Friday afternoon.