Recycling center gets new owner
NEW MILFORD — The recent management change of New Milford’s recycling center to a private company caused a stir in Brookfield, which was caught by surprise, according to its first selectman.
“Brookfield will no longer be recycling with the New Milford Recycling Center following the outsourcing of the site to a private vendor,” an Oct. 1 post read on the town’s website. “Brookfield was not notified that this change was going to happen and we only learned of it in the local newspaper.”
In a moneysaving effort, New Milford had been on the lookout this summer for a company that would manage the recycling center, and later made a deal with Three Veterans LLC to assume responsibility for its operations.
Sherman first selectman Don Lowe said his town did receive notice of the change in a letter dated Sept. 21 from the new operator, Three Veterans LLC. But Brookfield first selectman Steve Dunn has been miffed, saying he first read about it in a Sept. 22 News-Times story
New Milford “could’ve been much more transparent in all this.” Brookfield first selectman Steve Dunn
and thought New Milford “could’ve been much more transparent in all this.”
“We didn’t get anything,” Dunn said.
New Milford Mayor Pete Bass, however, disagreed that the process wasn’t transparent.
“We did talk about it at our council meetings, I know [Housatonic Resource Recovery Authority] was aware of our intentions to look at moving recycling to a private partnership, public-private partnership, and maybe they were surprised that, y’know, that we were able to do this and execute this during the summer,” Bass said. “But I believe it was fully transparent.”
When New Milford agreed to sign on with Three Veterans LLC, that meant business decisions would be under the company’s discretion. Three Veterans LLC member Bob Hanna, Dunn and other officials met on Thursday, Sept. 24 to discuss Brookfield’s financial arrangement with the center moving forward. Dunn previously expressed in a letter to Bass from February that he wanted Brookfield to pay less to the center, given that they represented “5% of your total volume in number of trips to the recycling center.”
And while Dunn and Hanna said they intended for the discussions to continue after the Sept. 24 meeting — provided that both sides provided financial information, and Dunn passed along the letter he wrote to Bass — they didn’t go much further. A letter dated Sept. 26 from Hanna to Dunn seemingly ended the business between Brookfield and the recycling center.
“Unfortunately, it appears that we cannot do business because we are so far apart,” the letter read. “Effective immediately, Brookfield residents may no longer use the New Milford Recycling Center.”
Hanna said he sent the letter because “none of the information had been exchanged,” and he was set to start as a private operation a few days later. Dunn wrote in an email to the News-Times that the town had been “putting [the information] together when I received his email denying Brookfield residents access to the Center.”
That letter sparked a series of email exchanges on Sept. 28 between the two of them in which they said they exchanged further information. Ultimately, Dunn reached out to Oak Ridge Waste & Recycling in Danbury to pursue a relationship with them “[b]etween Monday afternoon and Wednesday when we finally reached an agreement,” Dunn wrote.
Hanna said in an interview it was a “very unfortunate situation.”
“I would like people to know that I ran their recycling center for two years as a manager prior to my leaving the town for personal reasons, health reasons,” he said. “And I developed a lot of relationships with a lot of good people in Brookfield that I am truly going to miss. A whole lot of good customers that I had from there.”