Update on Garbage Collection from Village President John Neitzel

================================================

There are many important things going on in our village and this is intended to give you a brief update on one of those activities, Garbage Collection.

First, I’ll address some of the reasons that we are pursuing a course of action to sole source the collection of garbage, recycling, yard waste, etc within the Village from both residential locations and from businesses.  Then I’ll talk about the process and what impact it will have on all of us.

We have over 30 miles of roads within the Village.  Most of these are not designed to take the weight of heavy trucks.  Our Village engineers have advised us that fully-loaded garbage trucks do the most damage to our roads.  Most fully-loaded garbage trucks do about 15,000 times the damage as a family sedan - and we have seven garbage trucks driving over the Village roads every week.  Most family sedan trips travel a half-mile on Village streets to a heavy-duty road such as Route 173 or Route 76, so the impact by our residents is minimal. 

By reducing the number of trucks to one or two per week, we believe we can:

            o eliminate an estimated $1,000,000 of road damage over the next decade. 

            o reduce expense for garbage collection.

            o expand services to include yard wastes.

            o simplify the scheduling of road maintenance by having collection on only one day.

            o eliminate the presence of garbage cans on our streets almost every day.

            o and utilize high quality containers to reduce blow-overs and the spreading of garbage

The process we have been following involves a community-based committee to review what other communities have done, document requirements and issues, develop a plan to hold multiple public hearings, solicit public input, issue a formal request for proposal from current and potential companies, conduct a thorough evaluation of all proposals, and review our assessments of these proposals with the public.  Finally, with the assumption that the proposals are attractive, we will select one company and then work out a contract and an implementation plan with that company.  Once this is done, we will notify you of how the process will work.

Current garbage collection costs for residential customers vary from $42 per quarter to over $75 per quarter.  Our expectations are for lower costs for most, if not all residents and businesses.  We also hope to improve services while making our community look more attractive.

Thanks for listening and please come to the first public hearing on Monday, Jan 30 at 6:30pm, in the Village Hall.