No increase seen in city residential garbage rates

The five-year schedule for solid waste rates brought before the Hot Springs Board of Directors Tuesday night will not increase residential sanitation fees.

The $19 a month fee for weekly collection of 96-gallon residential carts will remain in place under the schedule the board considered Tuesday. At presstime, city directors had yet to act on the five-year rate plan that would take effect in January.

Solid Waste Director Randy Atkinson said the city services more than 13,000 residential carts, including the more than 900 accounts in the newly annexed areas of Twin Points Road and Lakeland Drive the city began servicing this year. The city said the additional revenue from those accounts allowed it to extend the 2014-2019 rate schedule into this year. The rate schedule considered Tuesday night sets rates through 2025.

“The five-year rate schedule provides for customers to know and be able to forecast what their cost will be for solid waste disposal,” Deputy City Manager Lance Spicer told the board last week.

Commercial dumpster rates will increase 2%

a year under the 2021-25 schedule, and hauling fees for roll-off containers will increase $10 every other year. The city said the increases will help offset the cost of the recycling center.

An annual state recycling grant awarded to the Southwest Central Regional Solid Waste District funded the Runyon Street facility, but the district’s board voted in late 2018 to allocate the grant to district members on a population basis. District representatives from Clark and Hot Spring counties told the board they wanted to use the grant to establish their own recycling programs, noting the cost of transporting their recyclables to Hot Springs had become cost-prohibitive.

Grant funding ran out in June 2019, requiring the city’s solid waste fund to absorb the recycling center’s more than $240,000 in annual operating expenses.

“We pay for everything now,” Atkinson said. “It’s coming out of the city revenue instead of the district revenue. Recycling will never pay for itself. It’s market-driven, and the market right now is down big time. The revenue we collect off of the commodities we collect and we bale and we sell doesn’t cover the cost of the operation of the center.”

The city said the commercial rate increase will also help offset increased tipping fees charged under the waste disposal agreement the city entered into with BFI systems of Arkansas, a subsidiary of the Saline County Regional Solid Waste Landfill’s owner, Arizona-based Republic Services Inc. The city began sending its household, or degradable, waste to the Bauxite facility last October.

The city pays tipping fees of

$19.25 per ton, an increase from the

$17.49 it paid when it sent garbage to the Twin Pines Landfill in North Little Rock. The Garland County Landfill isn’t permitted to receive household waste. Its Class 4 rating limits it to bulky items, such as appliances, and construction and demolition debris.

The city’s transfer station on Scott Street receives garbage collected by city sanitation trucks, and transport trucks take the waste to the Class 1 landfill in Saline County. Atkinson said using a landfill closer to the transfer station has saved time and fuel.

“We did see an increase in tipping fees, but we’re seeing a decrease in our fuel costs,” he said.