Price hikes are on the horizon for one of Winter Springs’ smelliest subjects: solid waste disposal. John Culbertson of MSW consultants analyzed the city’s upcoming garbage and recycling numbers and presented to the city Monday a dire outlook for rates.
“There is a high likelihood that you will be having to jump your costs up when you hire a new trash hauler,” he said. “Folks … have been getting really good service at a frankly below-market price for a few years.”
He showed a graph of the gradual increase built into the city’s garbage collection fees over time, then overlaid it against the actual cost increases, with factors such as slowdowns in production of equipment, such as garbage trucks, combined with inflation and other issues, that are much higher.
That led him to show three different scenarios for how the city could handle building in higher cost increases in the coming years, including one he referred to as “a rate shock option” where residents’ trash collection fees would jump 56% overnight, but then would immediately return to a more gradual fee increase schedule, though still at a higher rate of increases than in the past.
See the presentation by MSW consultants about Winter Springs’ potential solid waste future here.
That led city commissioners to wade into a breakdown of how garbage and recycling are collected and how to make things cheaper to reduce the rate increases over time.
Culbertson’s firm, MSW, consults with garbage and recycling collection companies including Waste Pro, which handles waste collection for all but one of the municipalities in the county. Altamonte Springs handles its own garbage collection. In talking with Waste Pro, Culbertson said he’d already researched some options to possibly save money.
When Commissioner Rob Elliott asked whether trash collection, which in all but two of the county’s cities is twice per week, could be selected by customers to be either one or two days per week, Culbertson said it was an unlikely fix.
“The cost to drive a truck down a residential street is not too different whether you stop at every house or whether you stop at two or one or three houses,” he said. The homogeneity of Seminole County’s collections, almost all falling under one company and with nearly the same collection frequency, contrasts with other areas, such as suburban Atlanta, where residents can choose different garbage collection companies individually, leading to different garbage trucks driving down the same street several times per week.
The likely scenario to save money, Culbertson said, would be to move to a once-a-week collection with larger garbage bins that can be picked up with a claw hoist attached to the garbage truck. Oviedo and Lake Mary already have once-a-week collections. But that comes with a major caveat, he said.
“In Florida, it’s very hot,” he said. “We put out food waste. We put things that don’t smell very good out in the trash … we like twice a week because we want the smelly stuff to go away.”
The discussion pushed any action to a future meeting after staff analysis, but Mayor Kevin McCann said that changes will have to come.
“The county’s prices have gone up and they will continue to go up dramatically and we are talking about what appears to be at a higher rate than what we’re asking residents to pay as an increase,” McCann said. “We’re going to have to do something to offset this reality and the cost of inflation.”
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