North Adams Public Services Panel Eyeing Waste Fee Hike
 Administrative Officer Michael Canales runs through transfer station numbers at Tuesday's Public Services meeting. |
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Public Services Committee plans to recommend changes in user fees for the transfer station at its next meeting.
The city has been considering going to a straightforward pay-as-you-throw system based on a calculation of the cost to dispose of waste, environmental fees and overhead.
At issue is whether it should stop also taking in commercial waste, a discussion that's been ongoing for more than a year but which has become more pertinent with the anticipated opening of a major waste-transfer facility in Pownal, Vt.
The committee at Tuesday night's meeting leaned toward changing fees to reflect actual costs but holding off on eliminating commercial waste at least until next year. While the fees require an ordinance change, the hours of operation and manpower could be made at the administration's discretion.
"My question is should be we voting on the numbers based on commercial staying or would it be smart to let it play out for a month?" asked Chairman Joshua Moran. "For one year, we would have a slightly inflated bag cost which then could be adjusted next year ... based on our actual tonnage.
"So if anything, we give ourselves a little bit of breathing room. Instead of depending on Pownal and letting them dictate to us, we continue to move forward with what we're doing."
Administrative Officer Michael Canales said he would plug in the numbers based on this year's costs for disposal rates and bag fees (expected to be about $2.19 for large bags) and have them ready for the next meeting.
Committee member Keith Bona thought it was important to have an ordinance in front of them even if it meant having a meeting to "cross the Ts and dot the Is" before recommending to the full City Council.
Rates have been stagnant at $80 a ton for years; a rate of $84 was approved by the council in 2008 but never implemented, apparently because haulers were heading toward better rates at the larger Pittsfield facility. The opening of the Pownal plant by TAM Waste Management Inc. of Shaftsbury, Vt., which runs several waste transfer, recycling and composting operations, is expected to have more competitive rates than North Adams.
The transfer station, once a money maker, is now running a deficit of about $370,000. Canales said the costs to dispose of the 12,000 tons of annual waste is pushing the $80 a ton being charged for commercial dropoff and takes up 85 percent of the transfer station's budget; meanwhile, city residents are subsidizing the other costs of operation for trash coming from Williamstown, Adams and beyond.
Canales had calculated previously that to cover operations, the city should be charging about $110 a ton.
A study done last year posited up to $2 million to bring the entire facility up to snuff.
Eliminating commercial haulers would allow the transfer station to go to three days a week, Thursday through Saturday, from 7 to 3, and reduce staffing by at least one full-time person. The other days, the employees would work with the Department of Public Works, giving the city some flexibility in staffing.
Based on an estimated 5,000 tons and overhead, tonnage charges would be $98.34 and residents would pay $2 for a large bag (up 25 cents) and 96 cents for a small one (up from 90 cents) but sticker fees would be reduced. (Prices quoted in an earlier article were incorrect.) The transfer station would collect $491,697 a year to break even.
The committee, however, was hesitant to simply cut off commercial haulers. Even if large loads were stopped, members were still willing to allow smaller haulers — using pickup trucks and small trailers — to continue to use the facility.
John Barrett, former longtime mayor and city councilor, was against moving to purely residential, saying it would have an unknown impact on business. Fuel prices, for instance, could affect the haulers who would pass it on to customers, he said.
"Don't rush this thing. Wait for Jan. 1 if you have to," he said. "This is all speculation, even the assumptions you're making. ... This community is not in favor of this."
Barrett did not think haulers would go to Pownal and believed the costs would be higher, which would affect smaller businesses and tenants whose landlords took care of trash pickup. "You don't know the impact."
Public Services Commissioner Timothy Lescarbeau, however, was confident that commercial haulers would find better deals north and south then they could in North Adams. The city had first seen a drop off in beginning in 2006 and then the private plant in Pittsfield began undercutting the city's price by $20.
"Now we have another entity comes in that pretty much told us that ... they're going to be lower than we are," he said. "Now we're not going to compete with a commercial plant."
"Our facility at the end of the day, regardless of what happened before, what homework we do now, is going to be residential only. We could close it and the residents here would be out of luck and we don't want that to happen. We want to provide services, we want to do all this ... but it's not going to be with commercial hauling."
Bona agreed, saying "we know 75 percent of the city are using commercial haulers ... so Pownal and Pittsfield are going to dictate the price to the commercial haulers."
Council President Lisa Blackmer, who attended along with Councilors Wayne Wilkinson, Kate Merrigan, Nancy Bullett and Brian Lamb, reminded the committee that an ordinance process takes time.
"The other issue is if we're going to do this we need to give the public enough time to make the adjustment," she said, especially if hours of operation were going to be changed. And, if the committee did decide to recommend elimination of commercial hauling, it was better to get it into the budget sooner than later.
Moran recommended changing just the fees at this point.
"If the commercial haulers leave, we don't lose out from that, we don't have to supply X amount of tonnage," he said. "So if they do walk out, what we're left with is extra hours of operation ... [Let's] move forward with the fees."
Tags: transfer station,
