Collierville official says sanitation fee won’t rise

Sanitation fees for Collierville residents will stay level at $22 per month in the next fiscal year, the director of the town’s Public Services Department, William J. Kilp, said during a budget meeting with town board members Thursday.

Kilp said the department’s prices for everything from truck tires to disposal fees are going up, but he stopped short of calling for an increase in the fee.

The $22 fee covers curbside garbage and recycling pickup, plus yard waste and appliance pickup, Kilp said.

And in a discussion that may foreshadow debates later this budget season, Alderman Billy Patton called Thursday for the town to add $500,000 to its budget for road repaving.

He said the town is having trouble keeping up with routine road repairs as it adds new roads. “We’re getting further behind,” he said.

The road repaving budget is $1.5 million, which includes $1 million from the state and $500,000 from the town’s operating budget, Kilp said.

Not including state roads, the town has 690 lane miles of road, said Kilp, who explained that a wide road could have several lane miles side by side.

It costs about $50,000 per lane mile to repave roads, which means the town can handle 30 lane miles per year, Kilp said. At that rate, it takes the town about 23 years to repave all of its roads. Patton says adding more money would help shorten the repair cycle.

Thursday’s discussion ended with the paving issue unresolved, but Patton says he’ll raise it again. The Board of Mayor and Aldermen is holding a series of discussions as it reviews the annual budget. Final votes on the budget typically take place in the summer.

Kilp also mentioned a project that many Collierville residents may see in coming years: a big multimillion-dollar effort to replace a water line going down a 2-mile stretch of Poplar Avenue, from Market Boulevard east to Collierville-Arlington Road. That project would likely start in the spring of 2018 and involve digging up the asphalt on the busy road. “It’s going to be a logistics challenge,” he said.